Pixar Animation Studios has sort of a funny relationship to its parent company, Disney: in terms of artistic and critical repute, its the company's prestige boutique line, yet it's also one of Disney's greatest cash cows. Last year's WALL-E was the fourth of Pixar's nine animated features to win the Academy Award, an achievement that is even more impressive when you consider that Pixar's first three features were made before the Academy bothered to create a category for Best Animated Feature. But last month, Richard Greenfield of Pali Research came up with an unusual way of celebrating the impending (May 29) release of the tenth Pixar feature, Up: he downgraded the company's stock. As Brooks Barnes reports in The New York Times, this was part of an overall expression of concern from "two important business camps — Wall Street and toy retailers" - about the commercial prospects of Up. The movie, which was directed by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson, and is to be released in 3-D, is about a 78-year-old man (voiced by Ed Asner) who, widowed and threatened with being moved to an assisted living facility, sets out for South America in a flying house powered by balloons, with an eight-year-old stowaway in tow. The naysayers fear that young audiences will find the aged protagonist and the lack of a prominent female character a turn-off. And the businessmen are expressing their lack of faith in the movie in a way that other moviemakers with strong critical reputations, such as Martin Scorsese, don't have to sit up nights worrying about: they're not lining up to produce lines of toys based on the film. "Thinkway Toys, which has churned out thousands of Pixar-related products since 1995’s Toy Story,” Barnes writes, "will not produce a single item."

This sort of talk pisses Pixar off, partly because they've heard it before. A lot of salarymen thought that they'd never heard of anything less commercial than Ratatouille, with its implicit message that the secret to good food is having more vermin in the kitchen - at least until they got a load of WALL-E with its long, dialogue-free opening sequence and apocalyptic take on environmental neglect. “The worries keep coming despite Pixar's track record," Doug Creutz of Cowen and Company says, "because each film it delivers seems to be less commercial than the last.” And in fact, even though Ratatouille and WALL-E were indeed huge hits, their ticket sales showed a marked drop-off from the likes of Finding Nemo. (Meanwhile, Pixar's biggest success in terms of generating toys and other side marketables was Cars, regarded by most observers as the studio's weakest feature in terms of quality.) Pixar has been building support in advance of the opening by showing it to bloggers and other friendly parties. So far, the response has been rapturous, with some fans comparing it to the work of Hayao Miyazaki. No doubt just hearing that makes Richard Greenfield want to take it all back.

Nobody seriously expects Up - which is scheduled to be shown on opening night at the Cannes Film Festival, an unprecedented honor for an animated film, or a 3-D film - to just tank. The real basis for the money men's complaints seem to be that Pixar, as they see it, perversely refuses to go at the target with both guns blazing. Instead of concentrating all their considerable energies on films that can be easily be spun into long-running franchises and tapped into for merchandising lines, they keep coming up with these odd, one-shot ideas and executing them impeccably. The movies are hits, but they could be making mega-super-colossal hits, which were in fact assembly lines for turning out more hits. (It's worth remembering that the one time Pixar tried to play the half-assed ancillary merchandise game, grinding out what was meant to be a direct-to-video sequel to their first film, Toy Story, Disney took one look at the resulting feature and realized that it was too good for the purpose for which it had been made; the studio was obliged to release it to theaters.) When the Pixar people aren't busy making films, they generate quotes for reporters, such as Pete Docter's “We make these films for ourselves. We’re kind of selfish that way,” or Pixar co-founder and Disney's head Imagineer John Lasseter's oft-repeated, "Quality is the best business plan.” Lines like that must strike the marketing guys as if they were intended as knives thrust into their skeevy black hearts. The bottom-line folks in Hollywood have always been good for reminding those in the creativity division that, while movies can be art, making them is also a business. The Pixar complainers may be representative of a mindset that isn't embarrassed to talk openly about how vexing it is to them that some of the people who generate good business have the audacity to also care about their art.

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