I thought I would have to be the one here to extoll the virtues of WALL-E, but it looks like I have company!
WALL-E is one of the greatest love stories ever made…and the main characters barely have any dialogue and when they do speak it’s with the vocal range of a Pokemon
The Incredibles, because it’s the best. Period.
Inside Out, because it was so pretty.
Aladdin, because I would’ve voted for it on the Disney list.
Toy Story 2. because it had the saddest song & sequence.
AFAICT no, Meredith is a derivative of Welsh Meredydd or Maredudd, originally a masculine name apparently meaning “great chief”.
Not related to the “pearl” family of names such as Maighread, Margarita, Margaret, Gretchen, Rita, Merida, etc., all ultimately from Greek μαργαρίτης “pearl”, probably in turn from an Indo-Iranian loanword meaning “pearl”.
I found Cars 3 to just be a remake of Cars 1, but from Hudson’s point of view. I chose Cars 2 because it was different to both and was fun. Though I like all three of them, I really don’t know why people get hung up on plot similarities to a largely forgotten Michael J Fox movie or that a world full of anthropomorphic cars is weird. Living toys and talking fish are weird too but nobody gets picky about that.
*Ratatouille * is my favourite. I love food, and this movie is one of the best about the love of food I’ve ever seen. The only downbeat, for me, is the use of the “short man = villain” trope (but then, so does seeming fan favourite The Incredibles - twice!)
It might have been The Incredibles, which has a lot going for it, if it wasn’t such a paean to Ayn Rand, despite Bird’s protestations to the contrary.
Fish are at least animals with a society. And toys are mostly toy people for which the point is to model human interaction. One or two talking cars would be tolerable. But a whole world of nothing but was too weird.
They were both continuously employed for decades, during an era where working-class dudes were supporting five- or six-person families on single incomes as a matter of routine. It actually doesn’t make any story sense for them to have been that poor. Particularly as they actively started saving for the trip right after Ellie found out she couldn’t have kids.
For me, Up and Wall-E are absolute masterpieces that bring tears to my eyes.
Toy Story is the rare perfect trilogy that keeps moving forward with every part being its own complete story, and manages to do so without any weak points.
I loved The Incredibles, but it didn’t hit me on an emotional level as strongly as it obviously did for others here.
Ratatouille gets me, if only for the scene of Ego being transported back to his childhood with one taste and suddenly having to reassess his life.
I immensely enjoyed Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc/U, and Brave. Against nearly any other movies, they’d come out on top, but here they end up as relative also-rans.
I think Cars was a lot more fun than many give it credit for. The story was solid and the characters outshone the actors voicing them. Cars 2, OTOH, slipped into mediocrity. While it was good compared to most animated films geared toward kids, and a lot better than most animated sequels, those aren’t excuses that a Pixar film should have to make.
I haven’t seen the others yet. I’d really like to see Inside Out.
The way I’ve seen the problem with the society of Cars summed up is, where do they come from? The talking fish hatch out of eggs laid by other talking fish. The toys are made in toy factories and distributed in toy stores. The robots were made by people. The extradimensional monsters… Well, it’s never made explicit, but they appear to be biological, and there are female monsters that the male monsters are attracted to, so we can probably assume that it’s more or less the same as for us. But the cars? They’re not biological, so it’s hard to see how they could be mating. There are no humans around to be making them. And even though there don’t seem to be any humans in their world, they do seem to have a lot of concessions to humans, like the door handles. Why? Were there humans once who all died off somehow? Do the older vehicles like Mater (at least, he sure seems like he’s older) remember them?
A few other problems with Cars:
(1) It’s fundamentally not as funny as the great Pixar movies. Have precisely the same plot, precisely the same world-makes-no-sense issues and give it three times as many laugh-out-loud jokes, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation
(2) I found the “small old highways good, fast interstates bad” message to be hackneyed. Yeah, faster highways caused bad economic times for small towns that they bypassed. And cars put buggywhip-makers out of business. Faster highways also allow people to get place faster and cheaper which means, for instance, that grandparents get to visit their distant grandchildren more often. It’s a weirdly specific cause to champion, and then it champions it in a very obvious and one-sided fashion.
100 The Incredibles
91 Toy Story
75 WALL-E
75 Up
73 Monsters, Inc.
69 Toy Story 2
66 Finding Nemo
60 Toy Story 3
50 Inside Out
48 Ratatouille
30 Aladdin
24 A Bug’s Live
24 Cars
23 Brave
17 Finding Dory
6 Cars 3
7 Monsters University
2 Cars 2
4 The Good Dinosaur
I was going to make this same point, noting that the US Route system laid waste to 50+ years of railroad town development, but felt this too heavy and picayune to lay on such a light-hearted topic.