John Scalzi did it first, so I’m of course going to copy him, because, why not?
1. The Incredibles
2. Toy Story 2
3. Wall-E
4. Finding Nemo
5. Toy Story 3
6. Up
7. Ratatouille
8. Brave
9. Monsters, Inc.
10. Toy Story
11. A Bug’s Life
12. Cars
13. Cars 2
1-5 are my top tier, and pretty much interchangeable. If I were to rank them again next week, they might be in a slightly different order, but those same 5 would be there. Same for 6-10.
The weird thing about A Bug’s Life is that it is a perfectly serviceable movie that is still better than most anything to come out of Dreamworks (except Kung Fu Panda 1&2, which manage to climb up tot he level of second tier Pixar, a feet some exec at Dreamworks is trying hard to prevent form ever happening again).
My personal theory is that Cars 1&2 are tributes to Disney. Tributes in the old sense, that they are offerings of merchandise-driven film Product to a hungry PR machine, made in order to secure the creative freedom to make things like Wall-E and the Toy Story trilogy, which no American movie company would green light or distribute in a million years.
