Pixar (to the) Power (of zero)

Anyone with any degree of animated movie savvy has to love Pixar. What’s not to love? The stories are unique, the characters wonderfully creative and emotive, and the films are action packed with the occasional pull on your heartstrings. That’s all a fan could ask for. Looking at that description, though, surely that’s what we all want in a video game too? And surely, animated characters would translate easily into a video game, as realism is hardly the focus. So why is it that this multi-blockbuster company can produce hit after hit in the cinema, and flop after flop in the disc drive?

The answer, in my book, has to be repetition. Any movie worth its salt has to keep on moving forward. It’s not accepted practice, nor should it be, to have five or six sections of the same thing in a movie. That’s not what you paid your money to see. It should be constantly progressing. Games, on the other hand, are built on a good idea rerun ten times. Bungie talked about the development of Halo, saying that to build the perfect game you must create a great thirty second experience and then repeat. Games require us to learn skills and then perfect them as the game progresses. If a movie used the same philosophy we’d be screaming bloody murder as the characters gradually get new weapons, and learn extra abilities. It’s the same reason that games movies tend to flop. At the end of the day, the mediums may be coming closer with all star casts and better written scripts but we’ve still got a long way to go. Whilst Pixar can create a movie packed with pace and character subtleties, this just can’t be portrayed in the gaming world. I love Pixar movies, but even the idea of the games just leaves me cold.

A quick look at Metacritic could not make things clearer: Ratatouille: the movie 96/100, the game 65/100. Toy Story 3: the movie 92/100, the game 76/100. WALL-E: the movie 94/100, the game 50/100. It really is shocking, but the facts are plain to see. Pixar may be the kings and queens of the animated movie (at least in the western world), but when it comes to games they should give it a rest. I’m thoroughly looking forward to Cars 2 at the cinema, but yet again, I’ll definitely pass on the game. This trend to milk every movie into a game has to stop. They have to learn to pick and choose. I have never purchased an animated movie game, but I look forward to a future where a Pixar game could capture half of the magic they give us on the big screen and deliver it to my console.