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There are lots of things that Pixar, as a studio, is rather good at, with one of the biggest and most noticeable being ending things well. There are more Pixar movies with great endings than any other sort of ending, and especially for the first 15-ish years of the studio’s history, you could pretty much be guaranteed things would conclude nicely and – more often than not – emotionally.
Part of that came from Pixar staying away from sequels for a while, outside the Toy Story series, but then Cars 2 came along and kind of ruined the studio’s hot streak (it also started and played out poorly, so it’s not like it “just” had a bad ending, for whatever that’s worth). But there are a couple of great Pixar endings from the post-Cars 2 era, so it’s not a total wasteland or anything. Anyway, those especially perfect endings found in Pixar movies are outlined below, starting with the great and ending with the greatest.
10
‘Toy Story’ (1995)
It’s good, when talking about endings, to start at the beginning of Pixar’s history of releasing feature-length films. Confused? Sorry. But it’s Toy Story (1995), which is the beginning of feature-length computer-animated movies more generally, being the first to do it from start to finish and all, even if it’s admittedly on the shorter end of things feature-length-wise. But Toy Story really does pack a lot of story into just 81 minutes.
It’s about a cowboy toy having to make friends with a spaceman toy after the latter threatens to replace the former as the favorite toy of their owner, Andy. It’s all very screenwriter 101, with their dynamic changing and the pair realizing their similarities before eventually becoming friends, but it’s executed so well, and you do feel like your heart’s been sufficiently warmed by the end of it all. Emotionally, though, the Toy Story series gets even more impactful with its various endings later on (more on at least two of its sequels in a bit).
9
‘The Incredibles’ (2004)
The Incredibles is a family drama of sorts, and a kid-friendly movie where the main character has a midlife crisis, but then it’s also very funny, not to mention action-packed as a superhero film. It’s got a lot going on all at once, and everything’s juggled well, with most of the main characters being at odds in one way or another but then coming together and being a fully-functioning unit by the time the climax comes around.
And then the very last scene might feel like a cliffhanger at first (and Incredibles 2 needlessly provided closure for it), but it’s really just there to emphasize that, yes, the members of the Parr family are a full-on team now, and that’s obviously great to see. It satisfies for pretty much the same reasons that the ending to the first Toy Story movie satisfies, in all honesty.
8
‘Inside Out’ (2015)
The message of Inside Out is rather simple, if you’re watching it as an adult, but how it goes about delivering that message is still impactful, even if it’s not eye-opening. It’s probably eye-opening if you’re younger and watching it, learning that sadness is a necessary part of life, and that, as SOPHIE once sang, it’s okay to cry.
Narratively, Inside Out is about emotions, as in they exist inside a young girl’s head and generally have to cooperate, which gets harder as she grows older and faces further challenges in her life. It’s like a kid-friendly psychological dramedy, and then also, the setting is mostly inside a child’s mind, so you’ve got a fantasy/adventure aspect to it genre-wise, too. It does end with the catharsis and sense of resolution you’d expect, but as is the case with many great Pixar endings, all that stuff is extremely well-earned.
7
‘Toy Story 2’ (1999)
Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4 (yes, sorry, the latter is being mentioned here because it’s not going to be featured later on in this ranking) kind of fall short as sequels because they don’t find much that’s substantial for the characters to learn or do following what came before. Incredibles 2, there’s a lot of forgetting on the part of many main characters, and with Toy Story 4, there’s a sense of re-learning things that have already been learned.
But Toy Story 2 doesn’t face such an issue, mostly because it finds an even deeper moral dilemma for Woody to ponder (what’s effectively immortality versus a shorter but more well-lived life), and it gives new characters (Jessie, mainly) things to grapple with. Everyone has to go through a lot, and they’re rewarded for it with an uplifting ending that does acknowledge things will change eventually, but for the time being, they’re willing to enjoy the good times. And they’ve earned it. Then 2010 came around, for a third movie, and… well, there, things change. But more on that a little later.
6
‘Monsters, Inc.’ (2001)
Pixar would go even more high-concept with premises in 2007, with a certain movie about a rat wanting to be a cook, but in 2001, Monsters, Inc. was about as wild as the studio’s ideas got. And, since it followed on from two movies about sentient toys who hide their sentience from the human world, and one movie that was kind of Seven Samurai but with bugs, that’s saying quite a lot.
Monsters, Inc. is about a world populated by monsters, and the monsters get their energy by traveling to the human world through doors that work as portals, making kids scream, and then using those screams as an energy source. By the film’s end, it turns out laughter is more efficient than screams, and there’s also an emotional reunion at the very end, but of course it’s all good, because it’s a golden era Pixar movie that doesn’t involve talking cars. It’s a banger overall, and so too does the ending itself bang.
5
‘Finding Nemo’ (2003)
The start of Finding Nemo is probably its most moving sequence, and it’s honestly pretty brutally sad by family movie standards. Well, then again, it did come out decades after Bambi and almost a decade after The Lion King, but also, Finding Nemo has the death of a parent and countless unborn eggs at the start of the film, with only one egg – containing the titular Nemo – not being destroyed after a barracuda attack.
Of course, it all ends well, because Finding Nemo isn’t going to be so ruthless that you don’t get a happy resolution, but it really makes the characters work for it.
It’s quite efficient in establishing stakes, and setting up why Nemo’s dad, Marlin, is so overprotective, and then determined to rescue/find Nemo when he’s taken by divers. Of course, it all ends well, because Finding Nemo isn’t going to be so ruthless that you don’t get a happy resolution, but it really makes the characters work for it, and there’s a very small tinge of sadness to Marlin having to accept Nemo will grow older and independent of him (but acceptance of that, too, so it’s the healthy, cathartic sort of mild sadness).
4
‘Ratatouille’ (2007)
Ratatouille is about a rat who wants, more than anything else, to be a cook, and though rats can talk to each other in this world, it’s still a world where rats are treated, by humans, like they’re treated in our world. So, to become a chef, he has to effectively pilot a young man who can’t cook, which makes it like a weird spin on the mecha genre, or maybe Cyrano de Bergerac, but with a rat instead of a poet with a big nose (Cyrano de Bergerat?)
There’s an overcoming of ordeals by both the rat and human main characters, and people largely get what they want and deserve by the film’s end, so it’s typically cathartic. It’s also a little hard to further explain why the ending is so satisfying (it really just is), but that’s in line with Ratatouille overall being kind of hard to sell, and so much better, generally speaking, than you might expect based on only hearing the premise.
3
‘Coco’ (2017)
Some of the usual suspects storytelling-wise were rounded up for Coco, which is about a child having to navigate an unusual world unlike their own, learning to mature while dealing with heavy things for the first time. Pixar has done it before, and then the studio’s also done it a bit since Coco, but the execution here is immaculate, and it might well be the best post-2010 Pixar film (the most golden of all the films made after the studio’s golden age was over).
Coco is all about a young boy traversing the Land of the Dead after accidentally being sent there, learning about his family’s history along the way and then bringing emotional closure to his great-grandmother, the titular Coco, once he returns to the land of the living. That’s a simple way of laying it out, but it’s like all the other examples here in that it’s not so much what happens, but how movingly it happens.
2
‘WALL·E’ (2008)
While The Incredibles and maybe Monsters, Inc. (to a very limited extent, regarding the latter) had some sci-fi elements, WALL·E was Pixar’s first full-on science fiction movie, and it remains the studio’s best (the recent Hoppers was pretty fun, at least). It’s about a robot who’s been tasked with cleaning up a planet overrun with trash, but Earth has also been abandoned for centuries, and there’s little indication that things will ever go back to the way they were.
Then the titular character meets another robot, and she realizes he’s discovered evidence of life recovering on Earth, and then they both set off on an adventure through space to get the last remaining humans back to their original planet. And along the way, the robots fall in love. And it all works and feels absolutely wonderful, with the ending quite literally seeing the planet saved. What’s not to love?
1
‘Toy Story 3’ (2010)
It would feel a little hard to justify putting any other movie in the #1 spot here, besides Toy Story 3. This wraps up what felt like a very nice trilogy of Toy Story movies, with Toy Story 4 partly undoing things, but also, you don’t have to pay attention to that one (nor the upcoming Toy Story 5) if you don’t want to. And even if you do feel compelled to acknowledge they exist, the narrative regarding Andy and his toys is wrapped up here.
Pixar has made so many sequels at this point, but you’d have to hope the studio wouldn’t ever try to bring back Andy after the farewell here was so poignant. Also, if you want to stretch your definition of the word “ending” a little, Toy Story 3 also has that very impactful scene near the film’s end where all the toys accept they’re probably about to die, and it’s like, that scene followed by Andy passing on his toys… that one-two-punch will never be topped, within this series. Pixar’s welcome to try, but it feels like an impossibility at this stage.
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Jeremy Urquhart
Almontather Rassoul
