Box office: ‘Finding Dory’ and the evolution of Pixar

We here at Movies Now don’t like raining on anyone’s parade. So we won’t point out that Cleveland made its historic comeback against a Warriors team that was probably a little banged up and was at least occasionally getting a raw deal from officials.

And we won’t note that, despite the headlines to the contrary, “Finding Dory” did not actually beat the record for biggest animated opening of all time. When it comes to inflation, box-office pundits can be more forgetful than a blue tang, so honors for highest opening still belong to DreamWorks Animation’s 2007 sequel “Shrek the Third,” whose adjusted $141 million when adjusting for inflation comes in ahead of “Dory’s” $136 million this weekend.

But ‎quibbling over dollars‎ is mostly beside the point. The thrust of all these weekend headlines is that “Finding Dory” did well. Like, really well. One tool for viewing sequel box office is how much a movie has grown its fan base from the previous installment. In this regard, “Dory” and its more than 50% increase in adjusted opening-weekend box office is pretty much surpassingly great. Many ordinary animated sequels increase their opening-weekend audience by far less than that. Even “Toy Story 3”— widely seen as the gold standard in animated sequels — grew its audience over “Toy Story 2” by just a hair under 50%.

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Why “Dory” did well, though, is where things get interesting. Solid marketing, a lack of worthy family (and other) competitive fare, a generational bump as millennials with fine childhood memories of “Finding Nemo” augment the traditional kiddie audience — all were factors at the center of “Finding Dory’s” emergence as a rare summer 2016 hit.

So, too, is a more controversial idea: that Pixar, once a juggernaut of original thinking, has become a place of brand revivals, a practitioner of smart but familiar formula.

The argument has gone on for a while now, and it’s come back again with the release of the Ellen DeGeneres comedy. It pits those more quantitative types who like to see results against more purist sorts who look back and see a different, quainter time in animation — who say, in short, that Pixar’s current success is the result of a tradeoff of quality for commerce. Outside of the work of Pete Docter (more on him in a moment), the argument goes, the most recent five Pixar films are “Dory,” ”The Good Dinosaur,” “Brave,” “Monsters University” and “Cars 2” — a list with, at most, one great film on it. The five that preceded them? “Ratatouille,” “Wall-E,” “Cars,” “Toy Story 3” and “The Incredibles” — a list with, at worst, one film that isn’t great.

There is an ineffable sense that, at Pixar, what used to be is no longer — that to achieve its success, the company, long a bulwark of charm and originality, has retained the former but largely tossed the latter. What had been a font of beautiful surprise has started to trickle into reliable entertainment — no less well-made, but far less daring.

“Dory” stands at the center at this debate. To those who think Pixar has lost its trailblazing ways, the sequel will not staunch the wound. The movie features not just established characters but well-known beats and themes, as outlined well in this post. We’ve seen stories of endearing misfits and lost familial connections before, and now we’re seeing them all over again. (It’s also worth noting that openings are not the best gauge of a movie, even commercially; the biggest tend to happen with sequels because people know what they are. Totals are a better indicator, and it’s here that “Dory” will fall well short of “Nemo’s” inflation-adjusted $496 million, and the all-time animation top ten.)

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Arguing over Pixar greatness is a little like debating charging fouls in NBA playoff games — you can do it, and you may even have a point, but after a while it becomes tedious.

Yet there has actually been a shift, and it’s significant: The difference between Pixar and other animation companies — the quality gap, as political pundits might call it — has shrunk. The notion of John Lasseter’s singular company and a very pedestrian everyone else is now gone. In its place is a whole pack of interesting if flawed entities, none immune from pandering or duds, but also each capable of invention and greatness. It seems hard to believe, but DreamWorks Animation — often derided for being too franchise-minded and sequel-happy — has now made more original films since 2012 (five) than Pixar (three).

And Disney Animation, long thought of as the merchandise-happy engine of commerce to Pixar’s beacon of purity, has actually been behind some of the most original work of the last few years, some of it quite recently.

Think of your five favorite animated movies from the 2000s. Chances are Pixar films would make up a preponderance of them. If you came up with that list for the 2010s, you’d probably put a Pixar film on it. And you might well also include the likes of “Frozen,” “Mr. Peabody and Sherman,” “Despicable Me” or “The Lego Movie.” Each of those movies came from a different company. Pixar no longer dominates such lists.

You can say Pixar’s rise lifted these competitors, brought out the best in them like a swarming Steve Kerr defense. Or you can say that Pixar’s run of exemplary originals, like a Warriors hot streak, had to end, and it simply had to become a little more like everyone else‎. Whichever way you view it, the world has changed. Animation just isn’t a keeping-up-with-the-Pixar game anymore.

It is worth remembering in all this, however, that Pixar’s success is still of a slightly different breed than other Hollywood firms. The company may be making more sequels than it used to, but they come about in a less conventional way. Rather than falling into the crank-’em-out style of studio sequelizing, “Dory” took root in director Andrew Stanton’s mind back in 2010, coalesced formally in 2012 and even had its release date pushed back to allow more gestation. That’s different from your average superhero sequel, which comes together in about the time it takes you to wait in a Whole Foods line.

And then, of course, there’s Docter. Famously averse to sequels, he has made two of the best animated movies in recent years — indeed, two of the best movies, period — in “Up” and “Inside Out.” Those don’t come cheaply. And if there’s a little bit of a sigh at a “Finding Dory” swimming back to the same lagoons, it should be cut short by the idea that he flourishes at the studio. Movies like “Dory,” after all, make Docter gambles possible.

Pixar may not be what it once was. “Finding Dory” may make money because half its title, and a decent portion of its ideas, have been around before. But even Pixar on a weak day is still better than much of Hollywood. Fortunately, the rest of Hollywood is better than it was too.

@ZeitchikLAT

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