Pixar make some of the best film around, animated or otherwise. Over the past two decades they've become synonymous with quality, with movie after movie providing emotive, funny, timeless experiences that span generations. Then why, in the face of such high quality features, are the trailers for these movies so bad? The first teaser for Inside Out featured a family dinner scene that jumped inside the heads of protagonist Riley and her parents as things gradually got out of hand. Anger got Angry, Dad put down the foot and Mum fantasied about a Brazilian helicopter pilot. It was... alright. The jokes all felt pretty obvious and the pacing of the conversation, both in terms of the humans and their internal emotions, was incredibly stilted. Now I didn't (and never did) expect the film to suck, but it was a rather tepid tease for an otherwise highly anticipated movie. Inside Out is, of course, nothing shy of a masterpiece - one of the studio's all time best - and that dinner scene is one of the funniest moments. But it only really works inside the narrative, requiring a set-up of both the idyllic family dynamic and Riley's anxious head-space. This scene is the first time she's had to interact with her parents without Joy and Sadness at the controls, which is essential to both finding the fumbling attempts of Disgust or Fear to imitate their leader funny and in appreciating the emotional implications of the confrontation. That it doesn't work in isolation isn't a problem in the movie, but it is when it's chopped up to hide story beats and shoved out as a trailer. In a different, but no less irritating case, the trailer for Pixar's next film, The Good Dinosaur, dropped last week, and it was even worse. Ignoring the common complaint about the animation style (I actually like the cartoony characters inhabiting pretty realistic backdrops), it's just a terribly generic tease - once you get past the whole "dinosaurs aren't extinct" idea there's nothing but manipulative music trying to artificially create a "feel good" tone. Again, I have no doubt the film will be great, but that's less to do with what's on show here than the simple presence of the Pixar name; despite the major misfire of Cars 2, I'll trust just anything the studio turns out sight unseen. And that may be the problem. Pixar have my patronage (and probably yours if you're reading this) by default. They can show a trailer for a new Pete Doctor project that is just Mater (an insufferable creation) doing a raspberry into the camera for two-and-a-half minutes and I'd still be first in line on release day, so they really don't need to invest time advertising the films to me or you at all. And this leads to marketing unlike what we're used to. Whereas the trailers for superhero films and other nostalgic properties with serious geek cred are aimed very much at the online film community, chock full of little teases for us to to pour over, these awful, pretty un-Pixar trailers are aimed wider, painting a broad ideal of what the general public generally thinks of animated films. Let's not forget that outside of animation fans, nobody really knows the difference between Disney, Pixar, Dreamworks, Blue Sky and Illumination - to many the former two are one and the same, while most would imagine the Minions sit alongside Shrek in terms of branding. The purpose of a trailer, then, is to try and sort out that confusion and, failing that, simply making clear that this movie isn't another Home (or... shudder... Minions). It's something Pixar has perfected in recent years. The first teaser for a new film sells the unique pitch in the simplest possible way, while also putting a lot of stock in the studio's legacy. Then, along comes a subsequent trailer that details the plot pretty clearly all the way up to the third act (something The Good Dinosaur hasn't done yet, but no doubt will with the next tease), while also offering up inconsequential comedy and clearly signposted emotional beats. Does the film fit this structure? Are there enough one-shot jokes? Are the themes distillable to a short, two minute narrative assessment? Most of the time the answer to these questions is no, but it's done anyway because that's the only option. It doesn't hurt the film's hype in the same way it does Terminator Genisys or Jurassic World when they go pandering for the essential general public dollar, but it's jarring given the sheer quality of the feature output. So, in reality, the true advert for the next Pixar film is the previous one - you go see The Good Dinosaur because Inside Out was incredible. And there's no better trailer than that. Inside Out is in cinemas now. The Good Dinosaur is out on 25th November in the US and 27th November in the UK
