It seems pretty clear now, looking back over Pixar’s quarter-century of feature filmmaking, just how influential the studio has been in shaping our current media moment. When Pixar started with the first Toy Story (1995), the model was still movies making cash by putting butts in seats (plus selling DVDs and merch afterward), whereas now it’s mainly garnering and keeping “subscribers” for various streamers. Both actual box office revenue (for movies) and ad revenue (for television) seem to matter less and less.

Though Disney and Pixar were a perfect merger when it came to creating a world-dominating entity ruling children’s media — a real match made in hell — it was Pixar that pioneered a kind of turbocharged plotting that left Disney’s quaint old narratives in the dust. And made mandatory the binge model of viewing (and scripting) that subscription-driven streamers like Netflix, HBOMax, and, increasingly, Disney+ rely so heavily upon.

As most people know by now, fast-paced, overstuffed narrative is addictive, kind of like sugar and salt pumped into fast foods. If you want to encourage binge-watching, voracious consumption, and rabid brand loyalty, you can’t do better than to create narratives with an almost overwhelming emotional workout, belly laughs and wrenching sobs and wild chase scenes and nail-biting cliff-hangers presented at such a rapid clip they would’ve astounded even old-time “classic” Hollywood filmmakers, who were pretty good at that game themselves.