My Top 5 Pixar Movies

Friends,

There are many types of movies, and I love most of them. Chick flicks, sci-fi, mysterious spy movies starring Matt Damon, baseball movies... I like almost every movie. One genre I've never really loved is documentaries (though I always appreciate a good mockumentary), mainly because they're slow-paced and about real stuff. But one pretty awesome documentary was The Pixar Story, mainly because it was about the inception of a brand-new movie genre-- CGI-animated features. [For the record, I actually meant the plain old usage of 'inception', not some crazy animation within an animation within an animation.]

Pixar has cranked out some amazing movies in its 17 year run at feature films. In fact, narrowing this list down to five was extremely difficult, and I had to leave off a movie that had me literally crying in the first 20 minutes.



Pixar-ception
If I made this a list within a list within a list, I wonder if you'd agree

5. Monsters, Inc. (2001)
I've always loved this movie. Maybe it's because I'm a man, and thus used to be a boy, and boys love monsters. Maybe it's because Billy Crystal's voice takes me back to a simpler time when I was 5-10 years old watching movies I was too young to understand. Maybe it's because of the uncanny resemblance my friend Hannah and I bear to Sully and Boo.


I'm the big one.

4. Finding Nemo (2003)
This, along with the next movie on this list, is one of those movies that, if you explained the plot without my actually watching it, I would roll my eyes and make fun of it. An overprotective fish loses his gimpy fish son and travels across an ocean, aided by a fish with no long-term memory, to find him. I'm rolling my eyes just reading that. But kudos to Pixar for adding in enough delightful sharks, sea turtles, and birds to make this a funny, touching, epic adventure.

3. Ratatouille (2007)
Once again, just a ludicrous premise: a rat who loves to cook finds a way to do it by hiding in an incompetent human chef's hat and controlling him via his hair. Typing that, I feel like I'm playing Beyond Balderdash and inventing a plot synopsis for something like Mmm, Tastes Like Cheese! or Who Let the Rat Out of the Hat? But this movie actually works really well, probably because of the relatability of how one's dreams can seem so far out of reach.

2. The Incredibles (2004)
Two words: super heroes. Sixty-one more words: like the awesome WB->CW classic Smallville, the appeal of this movie to me is the examination of what it might actually be like to be super. How would a family function if its parents were super heroes and its children were developing powers? And of course, there's plenty of action when awesomely lame (or lamely awesome?) villain Syndrome hits the scene.

1. Toy Story 1 & 3 (1995, 2010; I never saw the second one)
I wanted to put this somewhere else on the list because it's 'the obvious choice.' Isn't it funny how we want to do that? We want to say the best Weezer album is Maladroit or that Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday. There's something about being original or rogue that appeals to us so much that we would ignore the facts right in front of us. Woody. Buzz. That awesome race car. These characters are classics, and when the sequels are only made every 5 years, they don't get old.

Honorable mention: Up (2009) [Awesome movie. Just couldn't find room for it on the list.]

Dishonorable mention: WALL-E (2008) [Worst Pixar movie ever. The middle 40 minutes of the film almost put me to sleep several times. Maybe I'm too picky, but I like my movies to have words. Spoken words that form dialogue between characters. Most fans of the movie like to point out that the robot is really cute. Sure. That's somehow not enough.]

Your turn!
Given my obsession with your participation, I may need to develop comment-ception

Where have I gone horribly wrong?
What's your top Pixar movie(s)?

Jon