Cartoon Central

Everyone loves Pixar and Ratatouille.

Director Brad Bird has emerged as Pixar’s top filmmaker, starting with his pre-Pixar traditional cel animation feature, The Iron Giant (1999), and again with his first Pixar film, one of their best, The Incredibles (2004). Ratatouille only ups his batting average to 100% (okay shaky statistics there, but you get the point). Pixar has had the market cornered on the best animation design quality and effects, notable in even some of their weaker films, like Finding Nemo (2003) or their fairly wretched Cars (2006). But actually, after Cars, I had to wonder if they still had the market cornered on quality versions of traditional Hollywood narrative films.