Pixar’s decline, in a scientific-ish graph

One knock on Pixar you hear a lot is that they aren’t the same company that gave us Wall E, Finding Nemo, Up and The Incredibles. I somewhat have to plead ignorance because I still haven’t seen Monsters University or Brave, but the general consensus seems to be that they weren’t up to the same standard. Is that because Pixar hasn’t been Pixar since Disney bought it, or is it just the way of all things, to start out young and supple like a ripe peach and eventually end up old and saggy like your mom?

We don’t have the answers to those questions, but we do have this sciencish charge from The Atlantic that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that Pixar is in decline. Okay, maybe “proves” a bit strong, but it does kinda depict it graphically, from a certain perspective.

A movie’s rating from the review-aggregation site RottenTomatoes.com is hardly a dispositive indicator of quality, but it can serve as a useful proxy.

Wow, that’s a lot of big words for an article about people liking cartoons less. Can someone translate what the hell that means?

To date, only four of Pixar’s 14 feature films have failed to score better than 90 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. And three of those four were… the last three in a row.

The last three in a row being three out of the four least-positively reviewed is fairly damning. It looks bad comparing Pixar’s recent movies to their classics, but let’s not forget: the other animation studios are still making films about a snail who wants to become a racecar driver, and… uh… whatever the hell Epic was about.

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