I admire the overall craftmanship of Pixar movies, but I don't like their over-polished high-concept approach to storytelling. The characters and story notes ar

I admire the overall craftmanship of Pixar movies, but I don't like their over-polished high-concept approach to storytelling. The characters and story notes are like carefully weighted abstract puzzle pieces that stand perfectly in relation to each other and provide opportunities for beautifully rendered CGI set pieces, but the overall mosaic leaves no lasting impression on me. Many of their movies seem to contain an embedded short film that stands out from the surrounding balancing exercise, as if the directors themselves had needed an escape hatch from the grinding process that produces these movies.