Every Pixar Movie From The 2010s (Ranked By Metacritic)
Pixar's animated feature films are easily some of the most beloved movies of all time, animated or not, and most people have had some exposure to them at some point or another over the past several decades.
This means that there's no shortage of rankings for the popular movies but how have critics viewed them? Looking at all of the movies that the studio released in the 2010s, as well as the scores from Metacritic for each of those movies, this list should paint a picture of how critics have responded to modern-day Pixar and its movies.
11 Cars 2 (57)
The sequel to the 2006 movie Cars was not as big a hit with audiences or critics as the original and enters into the list as Pixar's lowest-ranking movie of the decade.
Taking a superspy angle to the race-centric story, Cars 2 adds a lot to its fictional world but the plot proved too long and convoluted to keep audiences engaged.
10 Cars 3 (59)
The Third Cars movie fared slightly better with critics and audiences than its predecessor did but not by very much and was the least successful of the series at the box office.
Adding a more topical moral to the story helped the movie somewhat but critics had grown weary of the series in its entirety as it came to represent a lack of creative drive from the studio during that decade in particular.
9 Monsters University (65)
A prequel to their hit 2001 movie Monsters, Inc., Pixar's Monsters University sees the main characters of the original movie meet and develop their friendship in college at the titular institution.
Drawing inspiration from a wealth of college comedies, the movie may not be part of the studio's top-shelf products with critics or fans but delivered a sufficient amount of the heart that the company was known for.
8 The Good Dinosaur (66)
By far one of the more conventional movies that the studio has ever put out, Pixar's The Good Dinosaur draw numerous comparisons to other big animated movies with animal protagonists, particularly Disney's The Lion King, but was nonetheless charming and satisfying in its simplicity for critics and audiences.
Despite all of this, or perhaps partially because of it, the movie generated relatively low interest for a Pixar movie and was one of the company's lowest-grossing movies at the box office to date.
7 Brave (69)
Pixar broke away from the usual for this slower human-centric tale of familial bonds set in Medieval Scotland and it still stands out as one of their most unique movies many years later.
Brave's story still contained magical elements and rousing music but it was, for the most part, a much smaller dramatic movie than either fans or critics expected from the studio.
6 Finding Dory (77)
The sequel to Pixar's 2003 movie Finding Nemo, Finding Dory picked up pretty much where the original movie left its characters and spun a similarly heartfelt rescue adventure story around them.
Though released 13 years after the original movie, the sequel satisfied both fans and critics and ended up as the third highest-grossing movie of that year at the box office.
5 Incredibles 2 (80)
A similarly big hit with both critics and audiences at the box office as Finding Dory was two years prior, Incredibles 2 was released almost 14 years after the original movie and began right at the moment where The Incredibles ended.
Focussing more on Elastigirl as the central hero over Mr. Incredible from the first movie, writer and director Brad Bird spun another crowd-pleasing superhero action movie with his own degree of social commentary beneath the surface.
4 Coco (81)
Released the same year as Cars 3, Coco was a much more original adventure story from the studio but still played a number of the hits that Pixar had become known for.
The musically-themed story sees a young boy journey to the Land of the Dead to discover a number of revelations about his family and the upbeat-but-emotional soundtrack helped the movie to stand out and far surpass both Cars 3 and most other animated movies that year at the box office.
3 Toy Story 4 (84)
The longest-running of the company's movie titles, the Toy Story movies have lost none of the appeal with both critics and audiences over the decades.
The fourth movie saw a number of returning elements for the series of movies but ultimately changed things up in a satisfyingly surprising way.
2 Toy Story 3 (92)
The highest-grossing movie of 2010 and one of the best-reviewed, Toy Story 3 ushered in a very successful year for the company at the box office that was heavily based around sequels to its most popular movies from the previous decade.
Similar to many of the following sequels from Pixar, the story doesn't stray too far from what audiences saw and loved in the previous movie but fans and critics were seemingly even more pleased with the results this time around.
1 Inside Out (94)
Pixar's biggest hit of the decade with critics, according to Metacritic's tallies, is 2015's Inside Out which leads the audience on the typical Pixar adventure of mismatched characters suddenly flung out of their element and stuck together in a race back home and sets the action mostly within the mind of a young girl with the avatar representations of her developing emotions as the main character.
What sounds on paper like an overly-weighty idea turned out as a fairly breezy coming-of-age comedy in the hands of the storytellers at Pixar and critics were overwhelmingly enthusiastic.