Pixar's Pete Docter tacitly admits live-action remakes of cartoons kind of suck
"It sort of bothers me," the Inside Out director admitted about the trend. "I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves."
Disney has now been earnestly engaged in its “let’s make live-action remakes of classic animated films” project for nearly a decade at this point, displaying a typically bulldozer-like determination to render the brightly colored past into greyish CGI goo that’s now encompassed huge swathes of the company’s near-century of cartoon output. One place it’s never touched, though is Pixar—and now we’ve gotten a hint that there might be a reason for that, i.e., Pixar knows most of those live-action remakes are, if not actively awful, then at least kind of creatively bankrupt, by design.
We take this from a recent interview with the company’s Chief Creative Officer, Pete Docter, who’s currently stumping for the studio’s latest, Inside Out 2. (A sequel to his own 2015 hit.) Asked a semi-jokey question about Champions star Josh O’Connor—who’s talked about his love of the studio’s Ratatouille, and his comedic desire to star in a live-action remake of the famous rat/pasta adventure. When that prompts Time to ask whether Pixar has ever considered going the live-action remake route, though, Docter shoots the whole thing down pretty bluntly without even stopping for a Raccacoonie reference: “No, and this might bite me in the butt for saying it, but it sort of bothers me. I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves. To remake it, it’s not very interesting to me personally.”
To be clear, Docter isn’t espousing a hard line of creative purity or anything here—he’s promoting a sequel, on which Pixar has become increasingly dependent. “Part of our strategy is to try to balance our output with more sequels,” Docter admits. “It’s hard. Everybody says, ‘Why don’t they do more original stuff?’ And then when we do, people don’t see it because they’re not familiar with it. With sequels, people think, ‘Oh, I’ve seen that. I know that I like it.’ Sequels are very valuable that way.” But even for a guy who’s embraced that mindset, making a live-action version of Toy Story or Monsters Inc., or, god help us, Cars, is apparently beyond the pale.
Oh, he also talked a little shit about Lightyear, which, speaking as part of the very small number of people who saw Lightyear, always feels validating: “We took a long moment of self scrutiny after that didn’t deliver. I think we overestimated the audience’s nerd level of being like, “Oh, that kid in the first Toy Story bought a toy, and it was based on a movie. And this is that movie.” That’s probably a few layers too deep.” (It was also very boring, and none of the jokes worked. Just saying.)