Please Stop Putting Larry the Cable Guy in Your Films, Pixar

As I mentioned in last week's post looking ahead to films that might make a play at the 2013 Oscars, Pixar had a rare (their first?) off year in 2011 with Cars 2. The Academy introduced the Best Animated Feature award in 2001, and since then, Pixar has released nine films. Eight of them were nominated for Best Animated Feature. Six of them won Best Animated Feature. Ratatouille, Wall•E, Up and Toy Story 3 gave Pixar a four-year winning streak. Prior to Cars 2, no Pixar film had ever failed to garner a nomination in the Best Animated Feature era, with Monsters Inc. losing to Shrek in 2002 and Cars losing to Happy Feet in 2007. Monsters Inc.'s loss should be looked at as a mistake by the Academy. I'm mixed on Cars' loss, but up until 2011, it was the weakest of the Pixar movies.

Looking over this era of Pixar films, it's pretty clear to see one thing that the studio should avoid at all costs in the future: Larry the Cable Guy.

Before we go any further, let me make it clear that I'm talking about critical reception, not box office results. The DreamWorks of the world are the studios that make profits their main concern. That's why we have fifteen Shrek movies. Pixar is better than that. Pixar is about making movies that they can be proud of, movies that will still mean something decades from now. The ten non-Cars Pixar films average a 97.1 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The two Cars films? They average 56 percent, and Cars 2 was rotten at 38 percent.

Obviously Larry the Cable Guy wasn't the only problem with these movies, but he exemplifies where Pixar went wrong. Pixar has never been a lowest common denominator studio. They don't play in topical humor, fart jokes or aim for the Two and Half Men crowd. Pixar is about telling stories, and often with characters that don't easily lend themselves to merchandising like a rat who likes French food or an elderly man mourning the loss of his wife. Cars 2 didn't just end Pixar's four-year Best Animated Feature winning streak, it also ended Pixar's two-year streak of having its films be nominated for Best Picture. Think about that for a second — Pixar went from putting out films that were in the discussion for best film for the entire year to the return of Larry the Cable Guy. That's sad.

Hopefully Brave, Monsters University and whatever else the creative geniuses at Pixar have planned after that get the studio back on track. The world has more than enough Alvin and the Chipmunks movies. We need something better than that.