finding dory

We ranked all 24 Pixar movies.

This awesome video collects over 20 years of Pixar Easter eggs.

The people have been making some pretty questionable choices for themselves as of late. Some big politics thing is happening tomorrow, there’s that, and last night marked the 43rd Annual People‘s Choice Awards, the populist awards program that does away with the snooty prestige of the Oscars. The evening delivered some rather eyebrow-raising results in its recognition of the most widely beloved entertainers of the year, and though none quite confounded on a Trumpian level, the night was full of what we’ll diplomatically call “surprises.”

When is a superhero movie like Game of Thrones? When it’s the most pirated movie of the year, of course. On a new list of all the movies downloaded from popular torrenting site BitTorrent, the merc with a mouth tops the chart over Batman v. Superman, Captain America: Civil War, and The Force Awakens.

Our ongoing celebration of the best from the world of film in 2016 continues with our ranking of the finest movie posters of the year. In the gallery above you’ll see our picks for the 25 best. They range from massive hits to to tiny indie releases; we decided not to limit our list just to huge commercial successes. We don’t determine a movie’s quality by its box office totals. Why should we determine a poster’s quality that way?

Since the introduction of the Best Animated Feature Oscar at the 74th Academy Awards in 2002, we’ve seen a steady exponential increase in animated movies over the years. Pixar, and, by extent, Disney, has usually dominated the competition, with eight wins out of ten nominations, followed by DreamWorks and Disney’s animation studio. This year, we have a record 27 movies eligible for the award, and while the Academy can pick only five to nominate, for now it’s anyone’s game.

This past summer's Finding Dory made a big splash at cineplexes (pardon me while I self-immolate), enchanting kid- and adult-aged viewers alike while running up the year's highest domestic gross. On the unfortunate side, however, the de rigueur short runtime of children's programming meant that some bits of the film had to be left on the cutting room floor like so many discarded fish eyeballs. Today, one lost sequence from Pixar's latest smash has been recovered and brought to the viewing public's attention.

Talking animals, man. The kids love ’em. They love ’em.

An audience of children and their parents out for a day of family fun at a movie theater in California were horrified to watch the red-band trailer of Seth Rogen's Sausage Party film before the airing of Finding Dory.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Finding Dory opened at number one at the box office this week and did enormous business, but the folks at Disney and Pixar must be breathing a sigh of relief. After all, last year’s The Good Dinosaur was the first film to come out of the venerable animation studio that could be considered a legitimate box office disappointment, especially since it came in the wake of the massively successful Inside Out. The massive opening weekend for the sequel to Finding Nemo repositions Pixar in its rightful place on the top of the animated movie food chain.

Like every other Pixar release, Finding Dory opens with a short film. This one is called “Piper”; it’s about a little bird learning to hunt for food among the scary ocean waves. It’s a terrific showcase for Pixar’s latest advancements in computer animation, which in recent years has taken on the qualities of great nature photography. The sunlight sparkles against the water, which ripples and flows with uncanny accuracy, and when the little bird kicks a pile of sand in a crab’s face you can practically count the individual grains.

With another new Pixar movie comes the promise of another new Pixar short film, and their latest effort looks as ridiculously adorable and heart-melting as you could possibly hope. It also looks way cuter than Lava — not that it would take much for Pixar to deliver something better than Lava (and good luck getting that song out of your head now). The company has debuted the first image from Piper, the new short film that will probably make your heart grow three sizes when it premieres before Finding Dory.