In Up, Carl Fredricksen is an embittered widower who never managed to go on the globe-trotting adventures that he and his wife always planned and he, too, is landed with a small child to look after.Īnd in The Incredibles, Mr Incredible is forced to abandon his crime-fighting exploits and get an office job. In Monsters, Inc., Sulley and Mike are regular Joes who clock into work in a factory every morning, while the child in the film, Boo, is a problem they have to deal with. Finding Nemo is built on the anxieties of Nemo’s father, a widower packing his son off to school.
The theme is at its most poignant in Toy Story and its two heart-wrenching sequels, but it crops up elsewhere in the company’s canon. The genius of John Lasseter, the director of Toy Story and the chief creative officer of Pixar, is to enchant millions of children with films about how difficult and unrewarding their mums’ and dads’ lives are. The main characters, the toys, are essentially his parents: harried adults who want nothing more than to please him, even while knowing that he will soon grow up and leave them behind. We barely see Andy, the owner of Buzz and the others, and when we do he looks like a monstrous giant alien.
There are adults in these films, too, but the likes of Jiminy Cricket and Baloo the Bear are sidekicks and teachers the protagonists are the youngsters they cherish. Fairy-tale princesses aside, the central characters in the most beloved Disney cartoons were and are pre-teens: Pinocchio, Dumbo, Bambi, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Mowgli in The Jungle Book, Simba in The Lion King (which came out the year before Toy Story). It’s an amazingly mature message for a live-action film, let alone an animated one, but Toy Story set the Pixar trend for cartoons about adults, not children.