The world of Pixar is intricately connected, with bushels of in-references to other films and the history of Pixar animators hidden in plain sight throughout the filmography of the Emeryville studio. But Jon Negroni has a different idea about all the interconnectivity in that animated film universe. “The Pixar Theory” attempts to take all the films produced by the studio and fit them together in a chronological progression, forming a patchwork history of a world that transforms over eons to accommodate every story.
Through Negroni’s hyper-close reading of the films, the larger saga takes place in a world with humanoids who systematically destroy their planet through pollution, over-commercialization, and mechanization, then escape into space while advanced evolution of intelligent animals continues in a post-apocalyptic landscape. In this theory, animals evolve at a rapid pace, artificial intelligence makes troubling advancements, and Monsters Inc. is about time-travel instead of opening doors between dimensions.
Pixar has always been known for placing Easter eggs from previous films in new movies—see the Pizza Planet truck everywhere, a Nemo toy in Monsters Inc., and countless other purposefully minute connections catalogued all over the Internet. The idea that John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Doctor, and others sat down in the very beginning and hatched a grand plan to keep their films set in the same world is mind-bogglingly far-fetched, but it’s still fun to read a conspiracy theorist who took the time to weave all the films together in a somehow plausible timeline for the fictional universe.