One of Pixar’s most tried-and-true formulas for a great family film is wondering what “things”—cars, toys, uhhhh fire?—do when we boring humans aren’t around. Eliza Janssen tries to think up new subject matter for the studio to animate. It’s harder than it sounds.
When we were young, it seemed like everything had a special inner life. Pareidolia, the perceptive tendency to see faces in inanimate objects, made anything from electrical outlets to clouds seem like a new friend. During the day we’d wish our toys could come to life, and at night we’d shiver at the imagined monsters under our beds.
It took Pixar and Disney’s peak creative powers to turn these fantasies into cold hard cash, with those latter daydreams in particular even sprouting a few profitable sequels—Toy Story 2 through 4, and Monsters University. Movies about talking dogs, fish and rodents aren’t particularly high concept, sure, but the rich vein of anthropomorphic magic that Pixar constantly mines has gotten way more complex in recent years.
You run into plenty of weird world-building issues when considering whether cars have feelings, namely where are all the humans?, and are headlights boobs? But what if feelings had feelings? What happens if old people had feelings?
Across Pixar’s whole catalogue and in their latest film Elemental, which casts fire, water and air in a rom-com narrative, clever character design and somewhat confusing in-world logic always manages to make us relate to inanimate or abstract heroes. Just how weird could their high-concept anthropo-antics get? Here are our pitches for what Pixar could do next with their much-loved, inanimate-made-animate, animated formula.
Books
Today’s kids would rather go on Facebook than read a book grumblegrumble, so maybe a zippy library-set adventure could encourage young viewers to crack open a classic or two. The licensing of actual novel titles might be a legal nightmare, but Disney has historically clinched the rights to a terrifying amount of iconic literary properties: Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, etc. One issue would be the dull, quadrilateral shape that every character would have to share. Then again, that might make the exhausted animators’ job just a tad easier.
Has it been done already?: In 1994’s The Pagemaster, an animated Macauley Culkin voyaged through the stories contained in the pages of sidekicks Fantasy (Whoopi Goldberg), Adventure (Patrick Stewart) and Horror (Frank Welker). It was very schmaltzy, and indeed pretty confusing if you looked too closely at its whirly canon-traversing logic.
Fruit and Vegetables
In the Christmas movie Elf, one publishing exec desperately pitches a kids book about “a tribe of asparagus children, but they’re self-conscious about the way their pee smells”. It’s obviously meant to be a terrible idea, but they’re onto something, methinks. We already personify produce without even thinking about it: hell, apples alone have their own Succession-esque family drama going on, with names like Pink Lady and Granny Smith, concepts of “going bad” and spoiling the bunch…
Has it been done already?:…the only issue could be VeggieTales, which already used the veggie drawer in your fridge to illuminate Christian parables. Hilariously, the creator of VeggieTales felt too uncomfortable to ever sacrilegiously depict Jesus Christ as a healthy snack, so he never appears physically.
On another side of the supermarket aisle, I’ve hated both the hotdog gross-out comedy Sausage Party and legendary animated flop FoodFight!, but for different reasons. Pixar’s take would be far more wholesome, like a nourishing plate of five-a-day.
Shoes
Tagline: I’m walkin’ here! Forrest Gump’s mama “always said there’s an awful lot you could tell about a person by their shoes”, but we arrogant humans might be overlooking the rich inner lives of footwear itself. They have tongues, souls (okay, soles), and are always seen in twos. Could lead to a stirring extended metaphor about monogamy and friendship, with sneakers, thongs and stilettos bickering amongst their pairs.
Has it been done already?: Who Framed Roger Rabbit sacrificed an adorable cartoon shoe to show us just how terrifying villain Judge Doom is. Non-verbal, all it needs are two big, trembling eyes to convey the existential horror of being Dipped out of existence.
Furniture
Ikea and Disney/Pixar could do a lucrative cross-promotion by scripting a celebration of chairs, tables, lamps: get some Swedish Eurovision winner to do the soundtrack and we’re all g. Alternatively, Carl and Ellie’s distinctive armchairs in Up—hers retro and flamboyant, his plain and as square as his big ol’ melonhead—could get their own spin-off feature. If it’s not too weird to hear them complain about supporting people’s buttcheeks.
Has it been done already?: Disney brought home decor to life in Beauty and the Beast, raising the troubling question of which of the Beast’s servants get to be sassy candelabras and cowardly clocks, and which are consigned to the terrible fate of being faceless, unspeaking cutlery.
Zodiac Signs
For fear of a million Christian Disney adults revolting against this new-age-y concept, Disney would never make a movie starring personifications of astrological signs. But it’s not such a stretch to imagine the drama, the character designs, the countless bits of fan-art that nerds would mock up of their zodiac character. Much like Inside Out, the protagonists of What’s Your Sign (working title) have ready-made characteristics: Leo is the flamboyant main character, Gemini would be a pair of bitchy twins, Pisces be crying, etc.
Has it been done already?: No! I have a feeling it won’t overlap with David Fincher’s Zodiac at all.
Sickness
Too soon or too late? The timing might not be right for Pixar to make physically-devastating diseases all cute, cuddly, and merch-able, but there are probably voice actors out there dying to give us their take on how chlamydia or asthma (or COVID, god forbid) might sound. The concept would be visually and perhaps morally disgusting, but who knows: it could do for the flu what Ratatouille did for rats.
Has it been done already?: In the bizarre Farrelly brothers movie Osmosis Jones, Laurence Fishburne voiced the villainous “Red Death”, a fatal virus that the titular heroic white blood cell had to exterminate. He was still less terrifying than the film’s Kid Rock cameo.
Poop
So here we are. Decades into our future, when Pixar has breathed life into literally every other inanimate, everyday concept, family cinema will go down the toilet—literally—with a movie-length meditation on faeces. Everybody poops, and everybody thinks farts and poop jokes are funny. If anyone can make us cry over the emotional arc of literal pieces of shit, it’s the mad folk at Pixar.
Has it been done already?: Flushed Away is a good precursor in setting and tone, but we’re keen to see the House of Mouse put hundreds of loving hours of lavish CGI creation into animating faeces itself. The concept art’s all ready to go.
