Still, it made just as much ($238m domestic/$540m worldwide) as the boy-centric Pixar movies of the era. Like too many female-led melodramas of this nature, this one (like the Bad Moms series) offers victims of the patriarchy fighting with each other while letting the men off the hook.
It’s a gorgeous and emotional mother/daughter story, marred only by pacing issues, tone digressions and a plot which demands that you sympathize with a mother who wants to make her daughter partake in an arranged marriage.
It doesn’t quite work, but it has the usual gorgeous animation as well as some exciting and violent action sequences to pass the time.īrenda Chapman was infamously kicked out of her own movie and replaced by Mark Andrews, which was terrible PR for Pixar’s first female-led and female-directed offering and put a severe asterisk on the film’s Oscar win for Best Animated Feature. Fair or not, he loves the franchise and he was very much attempting to make an ode to the 1960’s spy movies of his youth.
Universally derided as Pixar’s worst film, this loose riff on the 1990 cult flop If Looks Could Kill is an oddity in that it is a clear cash-in project (a sequel to their least respected film, set in a global car race in 3D to boost overseas prospects, with a prior film’s supporting character boosted to the leading role) and a less-clear passion project for John Lasseter.