Messed Up Things In Pixar Movies Nobody Talks About

Pixar. From humble beginnings as an animation firm for TV advertisements it's become one of the most famous, successful, and (most amazingly) consistently excellent studios in America. Pixar has a habit of hitting you with the old one-two punch, throwing you off balance with deceptively adorable characters then punching you out with Ellie's miscarriage in Up or Toy Story 3's spiraling inferno full of your favorite childhood toys. But those are the obvious ones, the ones that stare you right in the face.

Considering their apparent love of gut-slapping audiences with emotional trauma, maybe it shouldn't be a surprise that these pixel pushers have crammed more than a few atrocities into their movies — things that come off as background noise at first blush but unfold into horror like a Demogorgon mouth when given a second glance. Let's take a look at a few of the most horrifying details in the Pixar canon.

Here's a thought experiment called Theseus' Paradox: If a guy (let's call him Theseus) has a boat, and one day he replaces the sails, and then a little later, he replaces the mast, then the hull, then eventually every part of it, is that still his boat? It's amusing. It gets less amusing if you imagine that the boat has a conscious mind and that all its component parts remain lucid while they're torn off and repurposed as, say, firewood.

And that's the world of Toy Story.

See, in Toy Story, we're presented with the idea that all the inanimate objects we've given to our children are very much alive. We further see that when Sid, the boyish sociopath from the house next door, rips toys apart and Frankensteins them back together, his patchwork monster mashes present themselves as individuals. So what happened to the consciousnesses of the proverbial toy eggs that Sid broke to make his toy omelette? Are they dead? Do they become a combined mental amalgamation within the new creation? Where does the toy's soul live, and how much of its physical form has to be replaced before a new life is created? Are you going Rosemary Kennedy on your Buzz Lightyear's brain every time you replace his batteries?

Cars, Cars 2, Cars 3, and spin-off Planes are consistently voted as tied for first on the list of movies that make you pause and go "wait, that's the Pixar franchise with the most sequels?" Are they the best? They aren't. Do they have more Larry the Cable Guy than most children's entertainment? They do. Are they secretly taking place in a nightmarish post-apocalypse where man has died and machines rule the wastes? They probably totally are.

It's a widely circulated fan theory that the Cars movies take place in a world where humanity was snuffed out ages ago. It makes sense: The leftovers of our time on Earth are all around, from the Eiffel Tower to the cars themselves. Depressing? Sure. Here's where it gets worse.

The cars in Cars are going to run out of gasoline and sputter into the great beyond in little to no time at all. Consider this: Every car on the planet is now at least idling 24 hours a day. Now think about how, at our current rate of production, it's estimated that humans will run out of petroleum in the next five decades. That means these characters have, at best, 50 years to live, and that's only if they've figured out how to extract and refine oil. If they're just running on the reserves that were left in the Dinoco stations when all the people died off, it's amazing that Lightning McQueen has lasted this long, or else just a few wealthy have sucked up all the gas and left countless others to die early.

The human brain is still very much a mystery. What is it that makes us human? Are we truly in control of our own actions? Are we simply a collection of proteins gifted with illusory self-awareness through a benevolent fluke of molecular physics?

"No," says Pixar. "The truth is so much darker than that."

In the world of Inside Out, a human mind is simply a hub from which unobservable forces play god with our very being. Any feeling that a person has is simply the result of actions carried out by personified totems of the human emotional experience. Working together, these creatures are responsible for every facet of our lives. They form our relationships. They make our choices.

So what does that make us? Either puppets whose strings are tugged with reckless disregard for the very concept of free will, or perhaps more terrifyingly, mental corporations with no more individuality than a publicly traded corporation whose board members literally wrestle for control of the company. We are meat sacks, tossed around by the whims of forces we will never understand.

And you know what's worse? One of them is Lewis Black.

Taking inspiration from nature is a double-edged sword in the family entertainment industry. Yeah, an anthropomorphized animal character is instantly recognizable to your target audience, but an hour on Wikipedia later and those kids are going to be bleaching their eyes trying to unread the fact that Mufasa would've probably eaten Simba at some point.

It only gets weirder when you look at the ocean, where wildlife and night terrors collide. Case in point: the clownfish. These orange and black charmers exhibit a quality called protandrous hermaphroditism, meaning they switch sexes from time to time. Generally, it's out of necessity: social groups of clownfish generally only have one breeding female, and if she dies, the family's breeding male will turn into a lady fish, and the next largest juvenile in the group will grow rapidly and begin mating with the newly re-pronouned den mother.

So for everyone keeping score at home: When Nemo's mom died, Nemo's dad should've gone through some changes and then Nemo should've tried to get her pregnant. Yowza.

Man, this day is not getting any better for robots.

More bad news: Things are probably not getting any better for the machines after Wall-E is over. Despite the presentation of a loving and environmentally sound future during the credits, humans have now regressed to the point of being physically and mentally incapable of caring for themselves. They weigh several times what their average ancestor did, having long since tipped past the point of a scooter cart doing them any good at the grocery store. This means they'll be more reliant on robots than ever before in the harsh, regular-gravity environment of the planet's surface.

We're talking about physical therapy robots. Emergency medical robots. Probably parasol-holding robots for when the tubby dumpers have to walk outside in sunshine that their skin is no longer acclimated to. And here's the closest thing to a bright side: If the robots ever decide they've had enough, humanity will have zero chance of defending themselves from a bloody worker's revolution. Viva la Roomba.

There are many dangers in the ocean. Something about that place breeds monstrosities that would make a scuba diving H.P. Lovecraft propel himself back to the shore on a stream of his own urine. There are 18-inch pill bugs that devour raw meat. There are dinner plate-sized arctic spiders with no lungs and legs full of intestine. And then there's Dory. Dory's on a whole other level.

Dory is a blue tang, a species whose clan ain't nothing to eff with. The blue tang has a number of distinguishing features, from its shifting blue coloring to the series of scalpel-sharp poisonous spines that jut out of their backs, filleting any threat that gets within thrashing distance. It's a frightening prospect, made all the more awful when you remember that Dory has short-term memory problems so severe that she habitually forgets who she's swimming next to.

Basically, Dory is an undersea Wolverine with severe dementia, and it makes every bit of sense that the Little Mermaid would give up anything to get to land.