1. Because They Capture Moments In Time
So longpartner. Pixar has been a part of my life since I was five years old, when Toy Story first hit theaters. Maybe that makes me a punk kid, maybe it makes me an old man. Thats all relative. In all honesty, I dont remember a time in my life when Pixar wasnt a visible, important part of the viewing diet. With other pop culture phenomena, theres a before and after. There were books before Harry Potter and films before The Lord of the Rings, as omnipresent as those are to my generations pop culture diet. But Woody, Buzz and that weird lamp are as intertwined with my life as the earliest memories, the ones so faint that theyre more like recollections of someone elses dreams. So it was kind of a stressful thing to watch those characters come thisclose to being burned to death. Kind of a stressful thing. And more devastating than just the threat of incineration (though again: stressful) was the moment before, when the toys realized that they couldnt escape, and instead chose to spend their final moments embracing the people they love, an awful tragedy transformed into a moment of peace. That moment was fifteen years in the making, and it stings just as much now, typing it out, as it did sitting in the movie theater for the first time. That, ultimately, is what Pixar is able to do better than anyone. They are able to take these little ones and zeroes on a computer monitor, and through some combination of mind-numbing work and instinct, transform those blips of data into living, breathing creations that perfectly capture these moments in emotional time. Because thats what a Pixar movie is. It is an emotion, frozen in amber, ready to be reborn with the slightest bit of provocation. Theres a purity to it, a clarity of visions, that transcends a decade-plus of age and change and returns us to that first moment in the dark when the images began to play. I dont need home movies to remember what it was like to have a little sister running around the house. Monster's Inc. nailed it. I dont need to read old journal entries to remember being a kid infuriated at my parents. Finding Nemo nailed it. Falling in love, fighting with siblings, getting older, moving onall those are there, right there for the viewing, right there to be experienced again. Let em sequelize and prequelize whatever it is they please. It cant take those moments away. It cant un-perfect perfection. The things that mattered, the way they made you feel, all that is still there, ready to be watched. Still.