I wish I could find the specific article about it, but it’s like a decade+ old and google isn’t cooperating. If I recall right though, Brave was the first film idea that Pixar put out which had entirely been conceived without the original core team at Pixar’s input. All the other stuff, even if it hadn’t come out when those people left yet, had been brainstormed by that group and their lack of involvement is why from that point on it all feels so much lesser than Pixar’s golden age.
From my PoV a lot of more recent Pixar work feels very safe. I recognize they are now Disney-owned (rather than Disney being the distributor), but even then Pixar films don’t really feel any different from films produced and created by Disney Animation.
Moana, for example, is a Disney Animation work you could easily convince me as something recent Pixar did.
If you tried to convince me current/recent Pixar is just another Disney Animation studio by another name, I would 100% believe you, because it really does feel that way.
I think that was close to inevitable when they got bought out, though it is a huge shame. Even with an incredibly strong internal cutlure, they are under Disney’s corporate leadership and the fact they aren’t completely independent in terms of leadership, picking projects, and internal promotions means they’d tend to converge and be absorbed for all intents and purposes.
The brain trust was a thing before and after Brave, Coco was the last film that Lasseter worked on but there’s still a lot of the original team at Pixar
I think the point was more that Brave was the first move the original brain trust hadn’t been involved in developing the concept for. There’s still continuity, so it still had that Pixar “feel” (though even that is kind of fading as we get more removed from that group) but the lightning in a bottle spark of their early stuff wasn’t there any more.
I wish I could find the specific article about it, but it’s like a decade+ old and google isn’t cooperating. If I recall right though, Brave was the first film idea that Pixar put out which had entirely been conceived without the original core team at Pixar’s input. All the other stuff, even if it hadn’t come out when those people left yet, had been brainstormed by that group and their lack of involvement is why from that point on it all feels so much lesser than Pixar’s golden age.
From my PoV a lot of more recent Pixar work feels very safe. I recognize they are now Disney-owned (rather than Disney being the distributor), but even then Pixar films don’t really feel any different from films produced and created by Disney Animation.
Moana, for example, is a Disney Animation work you could easily convince me as something recent Pixar did.
If you tried to convince me current/recent Pixar is just another Disney Animation studio by another name, I would 100% believe you, because it really does feel that way.
I think that was close to inevitable when they got bought out, though it is a huge shame. Even with an incredibly strong internal cutlure, they are under Disney’s corporate leadership and the fact they aren’t completely independent in terms of leadership, picking projects, and internal promotions means they’d tend to converge and be absorbed for all intents and purposes.
The brain trust was a thing before and after Brave, Coco was the last film that Lasseter worked on but there’s still a lot of the original team at Pixar
I think the point was more that Brave was the first move the original brain trust hadn’t been involved in developing the concept for. There’s still continuity, so it still had that Pixar “feel” (though even that is kind of fading as we get more removed from that group) but the lightning in a bottle spark of their early stuff wasn’t there any more.