3) Toy Story
Though it was released by Disney, one of the defining features of the Pixar-animated original Toy Story movie is that it specifically sought out ways it could depart from the Disney animation model and change the way popular American animated features could play for movie audiences. Again, I use the term “anti-Disney” liberally, here meant to capture the motivations of writer Andrew Stanton and the people he has talked about at Pixar who wanted to break away from a model they felt had become maybe a little tired and repetitive. There were also apparently some tense negotiations between Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner, heads of the two respective companies, that must have contributed to this first movie’s makeup somewhat.
Stanton would go on to direct A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, and WALL-E, along with another movie whose name escapes me, which gave him the clout to deliver a TED talk back in back in 2012. In the talk he describes this small Pixar team’s set of secret guidelines that outlined their wish to distance themselves from Disney’s animated tradition. These precluded the use of songs, of what they called “I want” moments, any happy village tropes, love stories, or villains. He goes on to describe that these by chanced turned out to be the precise set of rules Disney producers had been following to this point. And it shows in that first Toy Story movie. Subsequent instalments have softened on this relatively anti-Disney approach, but it was this drive to push the field of animated storytelling that got Pixar to where it is today.
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