How to Watch Every Pixar Movie in Order (If You're Streaming In The U.K.)
Pixar Animation Studios is the production company famous for titles like Finding Nemo, Up and Inside Out, among many others family favorites. The company, which was originally called The Graphics Group and was part of the Lucasfilm computer division, was founded in 1979 by Edwin Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith. In 1981, that clunky name was changed to Pixar and, in 1986, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs became the majority shareholder. Disney then acquired Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 billion.
To date, Pixar’s movies have grossed over $15 billion at the worldwide box office and eleven of its films have won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, including The Incredibles, Coco and WALL-E. The commercially and critically acclaimed studio has in fact won a total of 23 Academy Awards, 10 Golden Globe Awards and 11 Grammy Awards, making it one of the most celebrated studios in the history of animation.
Additionally, at the Venice Film Festival in 2009, John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich, the original creative minds behind Pixar Animation Studios, were awarded the Golden Lion award for Lifetime Achievement. In the following list, which we’ve arranged by order of release, you’ll find a complete guide to every Pixar Animation Studios feature film—read on to discover more, and use the guide below to find out where to stream them on services like Disney+, AppleTV, Prime Video and elsewhere.
In 1995, Pixar not only released the world’s first fully computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, they somehow managed to do so with one of the greatest family movies of all time. Directed by John Lasseter, the former chief creative officer of Pixar, the movie proved to be the ideal showcase for Pixar, offering a blend of goofy humour and more subtle jokes for older viewers that would quickly become the studio’s calling card.
The film made $394.4 million at the global box office, making 13 times its budget and putting Pixar on the map. Remarkable, 30 years on, it hasn’t aged a day—and if you like the idea of a family film that makes jokes about cubism and references Tod Browning’s Freaks, you’re in for a treat.
Three years after Toy Story’s remarkable success, Lasseter and Pixar returned with A Bug’s Life, a movie that gave audiences an ant’s-eye view of a world in which Grasshoppers ruled. Inspired by The Ant and the Grasshopper, the story centers on Flik, an inventor who dreams of saving his colony from a group of grasshoppers who continually steal their food.
Famously, the movie came to cinemas just four months after Dreamworks had released their own buggy animation, Antz—so if you liked that movie but fancy a little less Woody Allen in your life, this might be the one for you.
In 1999, Lasseter and Pixar completed a trilogy of early successes with Toy Story 2, the studio’s first sequel and a movie that somehow managed to do the impossible by improving on its predecessor. Introducing a batch of new characters from Woody’s old TV show, as well as a new villain voiced by Wayne Knight, the movie found a level of emotional depth that really hadn’t been seen in a Hollywood animation before.
Not that that stopped Toy Story 2 from being an action-packed and wildly entertaining blast—and if you liked the first one, or appreciate a little-known movie called The Empire Strikes Back, you’re probably gonna love it.
Monsters Inc. was the first Pixar movie not to have Lasseter as director, but it seamlessly slotted into the studio’s early run of flawless family movies. The ingenious idea this time was to tell a story about children and bedtime monsters from the perspective of the monsters who do the scaring—who, as it turns out, are actually more afraid of the children than they’d like to admit.
Like Toy Story, Monster’s Inc. also works great as a classic buddy comedy and, just like Woody and Buzz, Mike and Sully (voiced by Billy Crystal and John Goodman respectively), have pretty much become household names—and if you liked Toy Story but also appreciate the actor’s earlier movies, like When Harry Met Sally and The Big Lebowski, you’re probably gonna love this.
Two years later, Pixar moved from the bedroom to the ocean with Finding Nemo, a thrilling adventure story about an overprotective clownfish who loses his son and, with the help of a forgetful fish named Dory, sets out to find him.
Eight years on from Toy Story, Finding Nemo saw the studio reach whole new levels of technical achievement and expansive storytelling—and if you’re a fan of Pixar in general but are also partial to David Attenborough’s documentaries, like Blue Planet or Planet Earth, this is probably the one for you.
In 2004, the studio capped off a decade of exceptional work with The Incredibles, the studio’s first Superhero story and the movie that put director Brad Bird on the map—and if you liked Bird’s early animation, The Iron Giant, and his live action work on Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, this movie offers the best of both worlds.
Drawing on mid-Century comic book stories like The Fantastic Four, Bird used a retro-futurist backdrop to tell a story of a typical family: a teenage girl who wants to disappear, a hyperactive young boy, a mother who has to be everywhere at once, and a father’s whose physical strength can only mask his vulnerability for so long.
As I think most fans who grew up with Pixar to this point agreed at the time, Cars was probably the studio’s first movie that was only just ok. That said, ten years on from Toy Story, Lasseter can be forgiven for wanting to once again appeal to a younger audience again.
Whatever the case, almost twenty years later it’s safe to say, Lasseter’s movie, and the characters of Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) have more than stood the test of time—and if you like the idea of seeing a Pixar animation set in the world of Nascar (think movies like Talladega Nights and Logan Lucky), you will feel right at home with this one.
Whatever anyone’s misgivings about Cars, they were soon forgotten as, just one year later, the studio suddenly entered its second golden age. This began with Brad Bird’s Ratatouille, the story of a rodent who moves to Paris and becomes the head chef of a swanky boulangerie—that is, with a little help from his friends.
With its eye-wateringly beautiful depictions of the famous capitol, this is a Pixar movie for lovers of all things French, but in Peter O’Toole’s Anton Ego, it also boasts the greatest villain in the studio’s history—and if you liked O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, trust me when I say that his performance here is not as far behind that classic as you might think. Just wait till you hear him say, “They have rocked me to my core.” Shivers.
For many people, myself included, the first half of WALL-E marks the studio’s creative peak. This near wordless dystopian vision, in which a plucky cleaning robot attempts to compact the entirety of the human race’s trash all by himself, is so note perfect, so full of sight gags and ideas, it almost comes as a disappointment that the second half of the movie—set on a luxury ship in outer space—is merely great.
Whatever the case, if you’re a fan of Pixar and also appreciate movies like Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey, I really can’t recommend this one enough.
If the first half an hour of WALL-E boasted some of the studio’s most creative moments, then the first 20 minutes of Up boasts its most heartbreaking. This movie-within-a-movie shows the decades long romance of Carl and Ellie, from their first meeting as children, to their wedding, to tragically being torn apart—I’m getting goosebumps just thinking about it.
Similar to WALL-E however, this phenomenal opening is followed by a movie that is only great—a fun adventure in a flying house held up by balloons. What can we say, if you like the air-bound animation of movies like James and the Giant Peach and Howl’s Moving Castle, this is one you really should seek out. Just make sure to stock up on Kleenex.
