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When you look at the state of the movie and TV industry these days, it’s not hard to see that the people in charge have a thing for reboots. Half the time, it feels like you can’t go five feet without running into a remade version of some older property, usually made by Disney or Pixar. Sometimes, it’s a dark, edgy reboot of a perfectly innocent children’s show, or sometimes, it’s simply a new version of the same movie made with new technology. Still, there’s always a common thread: they’re always reboots of some beloved, nostalgic film or TV show, and it’s never as good as the original.
With that in mind, you can imagine the tired despair that I felt when news broke this morning that Pixar is thinking of rebooting animated classics like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. There’s some debate on whether or not it’s planning on rebooting the movies themselves or the film franchises with new sequels, but the reaction is mostly the same. The news comes on the tail of reboots of The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Mulan, just to name a few, and none of those movies did particularly well. Why, then, do they keep doing this?
Why Do Disney and Pixar Insist on Making Reboots?
It’s actually not hard to tell why Disney and Pixar are fixated on reboots, especially if you look at it from a technical standpoint. Finding Nemo and The Incredibles came out in 2003 and 2004, respectively, and 3D animation has increased by leaps and bounds in the two decades since. If you’ve studied Pixar trivia at all, you might remember hearing how big of a deal Violet Parr’s long hair was at the time, and we’ve had an animated Rapunzel in the years since. On top of that, both movies have devoted fanbases, so the math isn’t hard to do: a beloved old movie plus shiny new technology equals a big profit from the fans, right?
Actually, no. If Pixar had learned anything from both their past reboot attempts and Disney’s, then it would know that a reboot is not always the major cash grab that they want it to be. In fact, sometimes reboots are actively bad and off-putting to fans of the original movie, like with The Lion King and its uncanny, overly realistic CGI lions. Even if it’s easy to understand why Pixar keeps making reboots, it’s also clear that reboots are largely not what fans want. That poses a question of what fans do want, and the answer is simple: we prefer the original movies even if they are a little dated. That’s the point.
Dear Pixar, No Reboots Please, We Don’t Want Perfect Movies
The most important thing to remember when you consider Disney and Pixar fans as a demographic is that both companies are aimed at kids. They make kids movies, and the kids who grow up with their movies tend to develop a really strong attachment, as the films were played in their childhood homes, classrooms, and birthday parties. Personally, I grew up watching Finding Nemo in just about every classroom I’d ever had.
When you watch an animated Pixar movie like Finding Nemo or The Incredibles as a kid, you don’t care about the animation. You don’t care that the fish have weird eyes or the humans look kind of like plastic dolls – you’re a kid whose only concern is that Nemo’s going to be flushed out to sea. By the time you’re older and re-watching your childhood favorites as a teenager or an adult, most people are able to overlook the janky animation for the sake of nostalgia. If you’re not, then the mistakes make it charming, like you’re looking at a child’s macaroni art.
All in all, it’s okay that neither movie is perfectly made. The outdated animation in The Incredibles and Finding Nemo is a wonderful reminder of what once was. It’s a sign of how far Pixar has come in the last twenty years. There’s no point in rebooting either movie; we don’t need to see every scale on Nemo’s body or the pores on Mr. Incredible’s face. If they’re planning on doing sequels, then there’s no point to that either, as most don’t want to see what The Incredibles Generation Two is doing or if Nemo’s swimming with little baby fishes. We just need to keep the heartwarming childhood memories we made with the original movies, and rather than rebooting Finding Nemo or The Incredibles, Pixar should return to its roots and create something brand new.
