Toy Story is suffused with nostalgia, for the era of wholesome postwar entertainment that the likes of Woody and Bo-Peep represent. Pixar understands this theme so well because the birth of the company itself signified a moment of pop-culture obsolescence, of the old pre-90s analogue world, in order to give way to the new digital age of infinite play.
Or another oubliette: the Memory Dump in Inside Out, where Riley’s childhood imaginary friend Bing Bong must be jettisoned in order to allow her to grow up. It’s also there in Wall-E’s vision of planetary landfill, a pile-up of defunct human objects and history. This fear of obsolescence – of being cast into shadowlands unlit by the imagination – is as much a part of Pixar’s identity as the cute anglepoise lamp. In toy terms, this is death – haunted by the prospect of dispatch to the refuse heap or, in the fourth film, the junk shop decrepit, sad afterlives that are the opposite of being alive in the hands of a child. The driving motor of the Toy Story films is Woody’s fear, and struggle to accept, that he may become redundant as his owners Andy and Bonnie grow older. It was a stunningly sombre opening to a kid’s adventure romp. Docter’s second film, Up, was roundly praised for its initial 10-minute sequence: a wordless prelude charting the years of lead character Carl’s marriage to Ellie, their inability to have children and her eventual passing. Photograph: AF archive/Alamy Stock Photoĭeath, though, has always lurked in Pixar’s filmography in the sense of the creeping passage of time. Profoundly moving … Ellie and Carl, from Up. Its teenage elf brothers try to complete a “visitation spell” that will bring back their dad – a story inspired by Scanlon’s own life, as his father was killed in a car accident when he was one. His film – set in a kind of Dungeons & Dragons-flavoured suburbia filled with centaur cops and a manticore restaurant manager – is the one that deals most directly with death in the form of loss. Onward’s director Dan Scanlon is only 44 but definitely, to use a golfing metaphor, moving on to the back nine. Lee Unkrich – director of Coco, set in the Mexican “Land of the Dead” – is 53, though last year, in a very mid-life decision, quit Pixar to spend more time with his family. Perhaps it is a natural consequence of where Pixar’s top personnel are in life: Docter is 52, entering the decade where, as parents die and ageing really kicks in, death starts to become more than theoretical party-poop. Perhaps the injection of morbidity is how Docter – also Pixar’s chief creative officer since 2018 – has planned to startle the studio out of its corporate lull, reconnect it with weighty themes and get its mojo back. But under Disney’s management, a weariness set in: too many sequels, and originals that didn’t have the conceptual snap of that brilliant first spree. A run of almost uniformly dazzling films culminated in 2010’s Toy Story 3. Photograph: Disney/Pixarīut the company has been showing its age lately. Soul … with a strong nod to A Matter of Life and Death. Visually drawing on Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death, broaching the dark subject for children with life-affirming insouciance, and – featuring the company’s first black lead character – a big diversity coup, it’s a typically slick, four-quadrant-pleasing, stock price-boosting entertainment package. This is the realm where nascent souls must find their spark – their animating passion in life – and are then dispatched to Earth. Soul, directed by Pete Docter, is a classy offering with smart colouring-book metaphysics in the vein of his 2015 film Inside Out, as Joe attempts to escape the “Great Beyond” and return to his body, via the “Great Before”. Is this fixation the Californian animation giant’s midlife crisis in multimillion-dollar CGI form? After 2017’s Coco and this year’s Onward, this is Pixar’s third film about death in as many years. In Pixar’s latest film, Soul, mortality springs itself with supreme bad timing on protagonist Joe Gardner, a New York jazzman about to play the gig of his life when he falls down a manhole.
The guy in the cloak with the retro lawn equipment can’t be ignored any longer: Death. T here comes a time in the life of a writer, director and, perhaps, a company when the days shorten, the shadows lengthen and contemplating the inevitable must begin.