More Bad News For Pixar

Brad Bird the creator of The Incredibles and Ratatouille has quit working for Pixar and gone over to… You guessed it. Skydance Animation where he will be working for Jon Lasseter again.

Pete Docter brought this one on himself when he said, ‘the guys currently working here won’t be making movies in ten years. It’s the new people that are going to be the ones doing that.’

Mostly they have been producing Woke and unwatchable tone pieces like Soul.

“Pixar has reached the point where self-indulgence is more important than entertaining their audience.   This trend started with Inside Out.  John Lasseter was able to keep the worst of this under control, which I strongly suspect is why he got #METOOed.  But now that he is at Skydance he is happily poaching Pixar’s best talent.  Leaving the drones that got him fired at his old studio.  

Woke Disney will want to keep Woke Pixar in business as long as possible, but their studio is based in the hideously expensive Bay Area.  It’s a five-hour road trip for anyone going up from Disney headquarters in Burbank. Even after Disney gets its bailout check, Bob Cheapek will have ample reason to be looking at closing the studio down and moving it in with the rest of the Disney animation department.  

In the Nineties, Pixar releases were special events because each release showed just how much farther computer animation could be taken.  But at this point, there is no qualitative difference in animation or storytelling.  And frankly, the storytelling has gone noticeably downhill with Lasseter’s departure.   

Pixar will be strictly a software company sometime in the next five years.”

Since Pete Docter seemed hostile to any projects being helmed by anyone over 35, all of Pixar’s best people started jumping ship. Brad Bird is more visible than most. I suspect he was assembling the team of loyalists that would leave with him.

Okay, I’m done here.