ELEMENTAL

At its best, Pixar is unbeatable, making clever, charming, and brightly original films to touch the heart and spark the imagination. And so it’s been dispiriting to see the animation studio behind such emotive triumphs as “Toy Story,” “Ratatouille,” “Up,” and “Inside Out”—among the best films of their respective years, bar none—recently fall short of its past standard of excellence. 

It’s not just that modern-day Pixar has focused on reprising its greatest hits with a parade of sequels (“Toy Story 4,” “Incredibles 2,” “Lightyear”), or that the studio’s slate of recent originals (“Soul,” “Luca,” “Turning Red”) have all, oddly enough, centered on characters transforming into animals (a revealing trope for its prevalence in films about feeling different, whose initially diverse protagonists invariably spend most of the runtime covered in fur or scales). Also absent lately at Pixar, a subsidiary of Disney since 2006, is the mastery of execution that had distinguished the studio, a brilliance for establishing high-concept premises and effortlessly navigating their particulars.