In 1986, Steve Jobs helped a new group of animators break away from Lucasfilm and form their own company called Pixar. Though they started off providing CGI to Disney and other corporations, they would make history in 1995 when Toy Story became the first fully CGI film. In the near three decades since, Pixar has released 26 films, many of which have been financial and critical successes.

Related: Every Pixar Movie Ranked from Worst to Best Pixar films connect with audiences due to the surprising amount of heart and emotion found within. However, not everything can be a winner, and Pixar has also had its fair share of duds.

Mike Wazowski's dream is to attend Monster University's scare program and graduate to become a scarer. However, despite his perfect knowledge of scare theory, he is rejected from the program because his design is not scary enough. To prove her wrong, Mike joins a fraternity alongside fellow drop-out James P. Sullivan in the hopes of winning the Scare Games.

Related: 10 Disney Movies That Should Have Stopped at One Although the film has a strong message about being realistic in your goals, to get to it, you have to slog through every college-movie cliché. These include a stern dean who despises the main characters, a bully frat-house, and a looser frat that proves its quality in a college sporting event. Combined with minor retcons to the original Monsters Inc., it makes you question why Pixar made a prequel instead of a sequel.

Although Dory has been living a good life with Marlin and Nemo, she can't help but feel a longing for her lost family. Following her only memory of her home, she travels with Marlin and Nemo to California, but scientists at the Marine Life Institute capture Dory. She teams up with an octopus, who agrees to help Dory find her parents in exchange for her shipping tag so he won't get released.

While Ellen DeGeneres is still funny as Dory, the film feels like an unnecessary sequel to a complete story. Due to her memory loss, Dory is not a character who can benefit from character growth, which is why she was such a good side character. Because she remains static, the film is just Dory floating from one event to the next until they all come to a head in the climax.

When an inventor ant named Flick accidentally loses all the food his colony gathered for a gang of grasshoppers, their leader, Hopper, demands twice the amount of food before the end of autumn. Flick proposes that they leave the island to look for bigger bugs to fight the grasshoppers, which the ants agree to, so they can get rid of him. Unfortunately, the only bugs he can find are some out-of-work circus bugs.

A Bugs Life is in no way a bad movie: it has memorable side characters and a pretty intimidating villain with Hopper, played by Kevin Spacey. What spelled its doom was that it came out between the first two Toy Story movies and the same year as DreamWorks' Antz. As such, it has developed a reputation as the sophomore slump of Pixar.

Lightning McQueen is set to be the youngest race car to win the coveted piston cup. On his way to the champion race, he falls out of his trailer and accidentally destroys a stretch of road leading to a town in the middle of nowhere. Now he is forced to repay his debt to the town and learn there is more to life than glory.

Related: ‘Cars on the Road’: Trailer, Release Date, Cast, and Everything We Know So Far Along with its confusing world-building, Cars suffers because its story does little to deviate from previous examples of the arrogant protagonist who needs to learn humility. It's worse because Disney had released The Emperor's New Groove five years earlier, and Cars lacks that film's humor. However, the film's climax does a fantastic job of showing its theme.

Princess Merida prefers the life of an adventurer to a princess, but her mother insists that she live up to her responsibilities. After upstaging the sons of three rival clans, Merida heads into the woods, where a will-o-the-wisp leads her to a witch. There, Merida purchases a spell that will allow her to change her fate.

Even though it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Brave is not considered one of Pixar's best films. While it has a good soundtrack and, for the time, impressive animation for Merida's wild hair, its story is pulled in too many directions. It also doesn't help that the trailer promised a completely different film where the mythology would have more focus than the mother-daughter troubles.

Thirteen-year-old Mei Lee finds herself torn between pleasing her mother and indulging in her hobbies, which include the pop-band 4*Town. To make things worse, Mei wakes up to find she has become a giant red panda thanks to a family curse. While her mother prepares to separate the panda from Mei, she and her friends decide to use this new gift to raise money for concert tickets.

Turning Red almost works: it touches on generational trauma and has a lot of fun depicting its pre-teen girls in all their awkward eccentricities. Unfortunately, the film is tonally inconsistent, shifting from cartoonish over-exaggeration to serious family melodrama. Then there is the climax, which combines twerking and a kaiju battle.

In a world where dinosaurs never went extinct, Arlo the apatosaurus lives and works on his family farm but struggles with cowardice. After he refuses to kill a feral cave boy, Arlo's father leads him to track it down and then dies in a flash flood that washes Arlo from home. He teams up with the cave boy, who he names Spot, and tries to get home and conquer his fears.

The world-building and a weak story set The Good Dinosaur as Pixar's first box office bomb. It promises a look at a society of sentient dinosaurs. Still, it sets it in a paleolithic era, with no technology and only a handful of species living apart from one another. The story is every boy and his dog story you've seen before, just with a human in the place of the dog.

As a new generation of race cars begins to appear, Lightning McQueen suffers a crash that puts his career in jeopardy. Not wanting to end up like his mentor, McQueen decides to try again using a training course and personal trainer provided by his new sponsors. However, if McQueen doesn't win this next race, his sponsor will force him to retire.

Cars 3 offers an interesting commentary on how the new generation slowly fades out the old, which mirrors how Pixar themselves helped faze out 2D animation with their 3D films. However, the story goes all over the place, especially in the second act, which involves a demolition derby. It also suffers from some of Pixar's weakest villains to date.

Lightning McQueen joins a world grand Prix to promote a new eco-friendly fuel source. His best friend, Mater, accompanies him but bumps into a due of British Secret Agents. They mistake Mater for an American spy and recruit his help to stop an evil organization from sabotaging the race.

Related: Why Pixar Will Never Make a Movie as Bad as ‘Cars 2’ Ever Again You know a sequel is bad when the third film in a trilogy pretends it never happened. After the first film's mature themes about humility, it's quite the tonal whiplash to go into a vehicular parody of Get Smart with a heavy-handed environmental message. There's also a surprising amount of deaths in the film, which have to involve explosions and crushing since the first film established cars can survive nasty crashes.

While exploring a hostile planet, Buzz Lightyear accidentally crashes a colony ship, damaging its light-speed crystal and stranding the occupants. Buzz volunteers to test a new one, but he jumps forward in time each time he does. By the time he gets it right, everyone he knows is dead, and new threats have appeared to stop him from completing his mission.

Lightyear may be the most pointless Pixar film to date. It claims to be the movie that inspired Andy to get his own Buzz Lightyear toy, but it lacks any fun space adventures hinted at in Toy Story and even retcons others. For a better Buzz Lightyear film, watch 2000's Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins.

Next: 10 Best Pixar Movie Sidekicks of All Time

List Writer for Collider from Ontario, Canada. Lifelong lover of Disney, Dreamworks, animation in general, Star Wars, and fantasy stories. Obsessed with older movies and tv shows. Expect lots of highlights on voice actors

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