The Pixar Theory, Explained: How to Watch the Movies in Order

You know how there are a ton of Easter eggs from one Pixar movie littered throughout other Pixar movies? For example, there are toys of Jessie, Nemo, and the Luxo ball in Boo’s bedroom at the end of Monster’s Inc.; a child is seen carrying Buzz Lightyear at the dentist’s office in Finding Nemo; and Dinoco, the gas station in Toy Story, is a corporation sponsoring racecars in Cars. 

They’re all part of what Jon Negroni calls The Pixar Theory, a working theory that explains how all Pixar movies exist in a shared universe tied into one cohesive timeline. Negroni got inspiration for the Pixar Theory after watching a video on Cracked in 2012 introducing him to the same idea that all the Pixar characters and their worlds are all connected. 

The Pixar Theory isn’t officially confirmed by its namesake animation studio, but many fans have come to accept it as gospel… to some extent. Here are the Pixar movies in chronological order and how they fit into the theory. You can also jump to the Pixar movies in order of release for the standard movie timeline.

The Pixar Movies in Order, According to The Pixar Theory

1. The Good Dinosaur (2015)

The Good Dinosaur is set in an alternative prehistoric time where the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago in the real world changed course and allowed them to live alongside humans. Some few million years later, Arlo, a young and timid Apatosaurus, befriends a cave boy he names Spot to help him find his way back home after being washed downriver during a rainstorm.

According to the Pixar Theory, because the meteor didn’t cause the extinction of the dinosaurs, they evolved much further than expected, becoming highly intelligent and thus kicking off the Pixar universe. A stuffed Apatosaurus, likely resembling Arlo, can be seen in a child’s bedroom in Monster’s University. Forrest Woodbush makes a cameo appearance in Riley’s memory as a statue she visited in Inside Out.

Read our review of The Good Dinosaur.

2. Brave (2012)

Flash forward to the Middle Ages in the Scottish Highlands, Merida defies the age-old tradition of marrying the son of one of her father’s allies, causing strife between her and her mother, Queen Elinor. After a heated argument, Merida seeks help from a witch, who gives her a cake that turns Elinor into a bear, and now she has to undo the curse before it’s too late.

The witch is the bearer of the magical entity Merida discovers early in the movie called the will-of-the-wisps. The Pixar Theory states that the witch uses magic to turn animals and inanimate objects into sentient beings with human-like behavior, turn humans into animals (as she did to Elinor with the cake Merida offers her as an apology), and travel back in time by conjuring portals via wooden doors, which explains is why she disappears every time Merida comes to her for aid.

Read our review of Brave.

3. Luca (2021)

In the Italian Riviera in 1959, Luca is a sea monster that can turn into a human on land who becomes best friends with a human boy, Alberto, who is also a sea monster. They spend the entire summer running around Portorosso with Giulia — eating pasta, riding Vespas, and competing in the triathlon — as humans ensuring no one finds out their secret if they get wet.

Luca is littered with Easter eggs not only frm other Pixar films, but Disney films as well. The Luxo is spotted on a roof, and a boat that sails past Luca at the beginning of the film is named Elena, a reference to Miguel’s grandmother in Coco. Giulia owns a stuffed Donald Duck, and she reads the book “Le Avventure di Pinocchio” by Carol Collodi, which served as an inspiration for the 1940 Disney classic, Pinocchio.

Read our review of Luca.

4. The Incredibles (2004)

In one of the best superhero movies ever made, Mr. Incredible and Elastigirl (aka Bob and Helen Parr) are forbidden by law to use their superpowers in public, forcing them into hiding and assuming mundane lives as regular people following a string of lawsuits against superheroes claiming their powers have caused more harm to society than good. Fifteen years later, Bob gets a chance to relive his glory days as Mr. Incredible, but when he lands in trouble with the supervillain who wanted to be his sidekick as a boy, Elastigirl and their superpowered children, Violet and Dash, jump into the action to save him.

Though the film takes place in 1962, superheroes maintained order in the world. However, the Pixar Theory states that Syndrome, Mr. Incredible’s former fan, created two things to render supers irrelevant: AI robots like the Omnidroid high-tech Zero Point Energy, electromagnetic energy that travels in wavelengths. The theory points out that toys and other inanimate objects absorbed residual Zero Point Energy after the Omnidroid was destroyed, thus becoming animated.

Read our review of The Incredibles.

5. The Incredibles 2 (2018)

After The Incredibles defeat the Underminer, the battle that started just after the first movie ended, the government cuts the superfamily off from assistance they’ve given them through the Superhero Relocation Program for causing damage to the city. This leads them to work for a wealthy magnate named Winston Deavor, who works to regain the public’s trust in the supers using Elastigirl, who takes the leading role while Bob transitions to his new role of the stay-at-home parent.

According to the Pixar Theory, the public’s distrust of superheroes leads to their extinction. The sequel not only focused on the consequences of society’s unfavorable views of super-powered humans, but also the rise of supercorporations, such as Deavor’s telecommunications company DevTech and Buy n Large (BnL).

Read our review of The Incredibles 2.

6. Lightyear (2022)

Lightyear is a sci-fi movie within the Toy Story universe that centers on the legendary space ranger the Andy’s Buzz Lightyear action figure is based on. Buzz and his Star Command troops are marooned on a planet 4.2 million light-years from Earth, and he takes several test flights to achieve hyperspeed over several years (which hasn’t aged him a day due to time dilation). After several failures and the deaths of his friends, he recruits Izzy, Mo, Darby, and robot cat Sox to defeat Emperor Zurg and utilize time travel to find a way back home.

Because Lightyear is a movie within a movie, the film likely made Andy want to get the Buzz Lightyear action figure — that’s how marketing works. Because of this, Lightyear is slotted before the events of Toy Story despite it taking place in the extremely distant future.

Read our review of Lightyear.

7. Toy Story (1995)

Toy Story is the first movie that explored whether inanimate objects, let alone toys, had emotions. The titular toys come alive and act on their emotions while their human owners are away — something children think about when they go to school. Woody goes through a rollercoaster of emotions when Buzz Lightyear overshadows him as Andy’s new favorite toy.

The movie is set in 1995, the same year it was released in theaters, and over 30 years after the events of The Incredibles. Per the Pixar Theory, BnL created toys to harvest the power of human emotions, which the toys thrive on when humans are not in the room.  

8. Toy Story 2 (1999)

Set in 1999, Toy Story 2 deals with Woody’s fear of mortality (or obsolescence) when Andy tears his arm by accident and abandons him when he goes to summer camp. When Woody gets kidnapped by an avid toy collector, who just so happens to be the owner of Al’s Toy Barn, he meets with toys from Woody’s Roundup Gang.

According to the Pixar Theory, the toys begin questioning their purpose in life and resent the humans who abandon them. Jessie resents her previous owner Emily for outgrowing and abandoning her, causing Woody to do the same with Andy briefly out of fear that he’ll abandon him, too. Toys not only experience resentment towards humans but animals as well.

9. Turning Red (2022)

Set in Toronto, Ontario in 2002, Chinese-Canadian Meilin “Mei” Lee lives the life of an ordinary 13-year-old girl until she wakes up as a giant red panda. This transformation occurs when she gets excited, stressed, upset, or experiences other strong emotions due to a family curse. Only when she keeps her emotions in check does she revert to a human, maintaining all her human qualities save for the red hair.

Although Turning Red is considered an allegory for puberty in girls, magic runs rampant as Ming, Mei’s strict and overprotective mother, and the other women in her family attempt to seal her red panda in a talisman during a ritual on the night of a lunar eclipse. The ritual transports Mei to an astral plane, the same plane of existence seen in Soul, which the Pixar Theory connects to Merida’s encounter with the will-of-the-wisps in Brave.

Read our review of Turning Red.

10. Finding Nemo (2003)

Taking place after the events of the first two Toy Story films, Nemo gets captured by a scuba diver and is placed in an aquarium at a dentist’s office in Australia. Marlin, Nemo’s overbearing and overprotective father, enlists Dory to help him venture out to the wider Pacific Ocean to find him.

Per the Pixar Theory, animals resent humans for polluting the environment, poaching them, placing them in cages, and experimenting on them. In Finding Nemo, marine animals have gotten so intelligent they’ve adopted elements of human society, such as schools, shops, and freeways.

11. Finding Dory (2016)

Shortly after the first film ended, Dory enlists the help of Marlin and Nemo to help find her parents, whom she got separated from as a baby regal blue tang. Those plans are cut short when Dory gets kidnapped and taken to the Marine Life Institute in California, and the clownfish set out to find her.

The Pixar Theory suggests that Dory is highly intelligent despite her short-term memory loss. Because she was born and raised in captivity and living near humans, as the sequel revealed, she can read and understand other languages, like whale. This suggests that the closer animals are to humans, the smarter they become.

Read our review of Finding Dory.

12. Ratatouille (2007)

Remy the rat aspires to become a chef like his human idol, Chef Gusteau, who died shortly after a negative review caused his namesake restaurant in Paris to lose one of its five stars. He forms an unlikely alliance with Linguini, controlling his movements through his hair to cook up great food, saving the restaurant’s reputation in the process.

Ratatouille carries the aspect of the Pixar Theory about animals becoming just as intelligent as humans the closer they are to them. Remy reading Gusteau’s cookbook and applying the knowledge he learned from it to his work says as much. The movie also takes place in 2007, despite Gusteau’s will being written in 2004.

Read our review of Ratatouille.

13. Toy Story 3 (2010)

As Andy gears up for college, Woody, Buzz, and the rest of the remaining toys are donated to Sunnyside, where they deal with physical and emotional abuse from the little kids that attend there. Lotso the Huggin’ Bear put all the whole group except Woody through the abuse because he was discarded and replaced by his previous owner.

The Pixar Theory implies that the toys standing up against abuse from humans (not that Andy was abusive because he wasn’t) is a sign of inanimate objects beginning to take over. Toy Story 3 also drops hints that the Pixar universe is bigger than other films suggest, such as Andy knowing Carl and Ellie from Up based on the postcard he received from them; the BnL batteries powering Buzz; and a glimpse of a slightly older Boo from Monsters Inc.

Read our review of Toy Story 3.

14. Toy Story 4 (2019)

After Woody and the gang settle into their new life with Bonnie, whom Andy gives his toys to at the end of Toy Story 3, a new toy created by Bonnie named Forky joins the fray. After getting lost during a road trip, Forky questions his purpose in life, and Woody goes after him, leading them to a small-town carnival where they meet up with Bo, who has changed a lot since Toy Story 2.

Toy Story 4 not only supports the Pixar Theory’s claims on how toys come to life, whether they’re made by a child’s hands or designed by a corporation, but it answers questions regarding how sentient the toys are. Woody gained a higher level of sentience from spending a long time with Andy, forming memories surrounding his relationship with him and gaining a conscious inner voice. At the same time, Forky, born from the scraps of trash found in Bonnie’s kindergarten classroom, has only achieved a low level of sentience, asking many questions about life just as a human child would.

Read our review of Toy Story 4.

15. Up (2009)

After his wife Ellie passes away, Carl pursues her childhood dream of going to Paradise Falls, a small oasis somewhere in South America, by tying a million colorful balloons to his house. However, he accidentally takes a Boy Scout named Russell with him, as he was sitting on a porch waiting to help him to earn his elderly assistance merit badge. They encounter dogs who can talk with special collars and a giant exotic bird named Kevin, whom Carl’s childhood hero Charles Muntz is hunting down to dispel accusations of showing a fake skeleton of the same bird several decades earlier.

According to the Pixar Theory, Carl refuses to surrender his home to BnL, who is building skyscrapers around him, polluting the city. This marks the beginning of the megacorporation’s expansions across the world. Meanwhile, animals have grown intelligent and rebelled against humans, even after Muntz built an army of talking dogs.

Read our review of Up.

16. Inside Out (2015)

In Pixar’s cerebral take on Osmosis Jones, Joy is one of the five emotions of 11-year-old Riley filling her brain with primarily happy memories. After moving from her small town in Minnesota to San Francisco, California due to her father’s new job, she struggles to cope with the big change after Sadness creates a sad core memory of Riley’s first day at her new school and knocked her other core memories loose during a struggle with Joy, disabling her personality islands in the process). The two emotions get sucked out of Headquarters and transported to long-term memory and are forced to figure out a way back home, leaving the other emotions — Anger, Disgust, and Fear — in charge of controlling the tween’s mental state with disastrous results.

The Pixar Theory suggests that emotions and memories are people’s primary energy sources, driving everything they say and do. Memories, however, are just as powerful as emotions in that they help keep things alive to a certain extent. Bing Bong, Riley’s childhood imaginary friend, demonstrates this by sacrificing himself to the Memory Dump, where forgotten memories go, to allow Joy and Sadness to escape, thereby fading away. The theory also claims that Bing Bong is Riley’s long-lost memory of her monster sent to harvest her happiness for Monsters Inc. after the film’s events.

Read our review of Inside Out.

17. Coco (2017)

Set during Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in the small Mexican town of Santa Cecilia, 12-year-old aspiring musician Miguel is accidentally spirited away to the vibrant Land of the Dead after stealing the guitar from the grave of a famous musician, whom he believes to be his great-great-grandfather, to work around his family’s generations-long ban on music. While in the spirit world, Miguel finds his long-lost relative to help him return to the land of the living and lift the Footloose-style music ban.

Coco supports the Pixar Theory’s take on the immense power of memory as seen in Inside Out. The souls of the deceased can continue to exist in the Land of the Dead as long as their loved ones remember them. If they’re forgotten, their souls disappear, just like Bing Bong — a tragic process that Hector calls “the final death.”

Read our review of Coco.

18. Soul (2020)

Joe Gardner, a New York City middle school band teacher and pianist, falls into a coma after falling down a sewer before his big break with a jazz quartet, waking up as a disembodied soul set to enter the afterlife. Refusing to die, Joe goes to the Great Before, where he meets a pre-born soul named 22 and helps her open her mind about life on Earth as they try to complete her Earth badge in the hopes that he can use it to return to his body.

The Pixar Theory points out that, souls don’t necessarily have to enter human bodies, they can enter animal bodies as well, hence the soul of a cat preparing to enter the Great Beyond alongside the souls of its human family, and Joe entering the body of his therapy cat. This explains how Dug in Up, Remy in Ratatouille, Flik in A Bug’s Life, and other animals in Pixar movies possess human intellect and emotion.

Read our review of Soul.

19. Cars (2006)

In a world where cars can not only drive themselves but also talk, arrogant racecar Lightning McQueen gets stranded in Radiator Springs, a rundown town along Route 66 on his way to California for the Piston Cup. While there, he befriends the town’s resident cars, including Mater the Tow Truck, Sally Carrera, and Doc Hudson, and learns that winning isn’t everything.

Cars takes place 100 years from now, where there are no humans left on Earth but their influence on the planet remains, however polluted it may be. The Pixar Theory states that machines, cars included, won the war against humans, whom BnL sent to space on the starship Axiom, leaving the sentient machines to run things. There are two theories on how the cars operate on their own: They’re either powered by BnL and the AI technology developed by Syndrome in The Incredibles or are run by the memories of their relationships with their owners.

20. Cars 2 (2011)

After winning his fourth Piston Cup, Lightning and Mater go to Japan and Europe to compete in the World Grand Prix. However, the race gets complicated when Mater gets caught up in international espionage and uncovers a conspiracy led by a criminal mastermind named Professor Zundapp and his gang to destroy the races, forcing Lightning and his tow truck best friend to fight them.

Cars 2 reveals that the World Grand Prix was a cover-up for the energy war to turn the world away from the green energy used by the corporation Allinol and other forms of alternative sources of energy. According to the Pixar Theory, Allinol was run by BnL, who abandoned Earth after polluting it with too much oil, which is the only energy source used by cars. Without fuel and a connection to humans, the cars could die.

Read our review of Cars 2.

21. Cars 3 (2017)

Five years after competing in the World Grand Prix, an aging Lightning gets traumatically wiped out in a violent crash during the latest Piston Cup tournament, where he was competing against a new generation of racecars that use the latest technology to improve their performance. After his recovery, he gets trained by — and later trains — a young female racecar named Cruz Ramirez, who teaches him some new tricks to prove he’s still in his prime.

Cars 3 proves that cars don’t last forever, even if they find more fuel to sustain themselves. However, even though the world lacks humans, Cruz reveals signs of organic life, racing circles around a crab at the beach.

Read our review of Cars 3.

22. Wall-E (2008)

In the year 2805, WALL-E is the only robot left on Earth to clean up the litter left behind by humans and collect trinkets on the side. One day, he falls in love with EVE, a sleek, white robot sent to Earth to find any remaining signs of life. Of course, the only signs of life are WALL-E’s cockroach friend Hal and a seedling, the latter of which EVE takes for the Axiom, the starship where the humans have been cruising through space. However, they devolved into obesity due to laziness and microgravity, leaving the robots aboard the ship catering to their every whim.

WALL-E is a key component to the Pixar Theory, as the seedling in a boot he finds is the only source of life on an otherwise uninhabitable Earth. At the movie’s end, the humans return to Earth to plant the seedling and the boot, which eventually grows into the giant tree seen in A Bug’s Life.

Read our review of Wall-E.

23. A Bug’s Life (1998)

Over 90 years later, a misfit ant named Flik seeks out warrior bugs to protect his colony from a gang of bullying grasshoppers, led by Hopper, after accidentally knocking over the food offering meant for the grasshoppers with one of his inventions, the grain harvester. Flik happens upon a troupe of newly unemployed circus bugs, whom he mistakes for skilled warriors, and brings them back to Ant Island on the condition they play along with the ruse of being actual warriors.

The Pixar Theory states that ants had a life expectancy of up to three months prior to the events of WALL-E. However, in A Bug’s Life, one of the ants said he felt 90 again, alluding to the increased lifespan of the ants, as well as other insects, and the species being around for quite some time. Another ant tells Flik not to leave Ant Island because of “snakes, birds, and bigger bugs,” but doesn’t mention humans, as not many of them survived their own pollution after returning to Earth in WALL-E, so they don’t pose much of a threat to ants anyhow. The extended lifespan of insects and other animals allowed them to evolve into the dominant species within a few millennia.

24. Onward (2020)

In a modern suburban fantasy world, teenage elf brothers Barley and Ian Lightfoot try to spend one more day with their late father Wilden, who died shortly before the latter brother was born and was halfway resurrected thanks to a spell he cast with a staff he received on his 16th birthday. To complete the spell, the boys embark on a quest to find another Phoenix gem required to bring back their father in one piece, but they encounter cryptic maps, impossible obstacles, and unimaginable discoveries throughout their journey.

Because Onward was set in a world of fairy tale fantasy mixed with modern-day elements, some Pixar fans think the movie is not related to the other films. However, the Pixar Theory states the elves and other anthropomorphic creatures serve as a missing link between the sparsely populated Earth and the monsters in Monsters Inc. Negroni explained two ways that would happen. The first is that elves evolved from the humans who returned to Earth after WALL-E and used emotions as magic, but went extinct after losing the magic, leading other species to evolve into monsters. The second is very simple: Humans evolved into elves and then into monsters.

Read our review of Onward.

25. Monsters University (2013)

In the prequel to Monsters Inc., Mike Wazowski attends the titular university in hopes of becoming a scarer and working at Monsters Inc. to harvest screams from children to power Monstropolis. There, he meets Sully, who started off as Mike’s bitter rival but slowly becomes his best friend by working together alongside misfit fraternity Oozma Kappa to win the Scare Games in order to return to the scare program.

By the time Monsters University starts, the radiation from BnL caused animals to evolve into monsters, who evolved at such an accelerated rate that they accidentally brought about the extinction of humankind, according to the Pixar Theory. The monsters were falsely taught by the school that humans were toxic and that anything or anyone they brought back from the human world was considered a contaminant.

Read our review of Monsters University.

26. Monsters Inc. (2001)

Mike and Sully, now a dynamic duo of scare assistant and scarer at Monsters Inc., have been traveling to the bedrooms of every human child using doors to collect their screams to keep the lights on everywhere throughout Monstropolis. Then they meet Boo, a little girl who makes the whole town panic with her mere presence and inadvertently teaches Mike and Sully that laughter is 10 times more powerful than screams by causing blackouts and powering the doors at the scare factory during the treacherous process of finding her door and getting her back to her world.

The Pixar Theory states that the doors leading to the human world are portals that travel to different places in different time periods throughout human history. The theory put two and two together and deduced that Boo grows up to be the witch from Brave. At the end of Monsters Inc., after Sulley leaves her behind, Boo opens the door to find her empty closet wanting to get back to Sulley not knowing that he’s from the future. Boo then gets obsessed with finding out what happened to Sulley and why the animals in her time period were not as smart as the creatures in Monstropolis. Eventually, she figures out that doors were the key to how she found Sulley to begin with, and uses the magic of the will-of-the-wisps to create the doors to travel back and forth in time. That’s how we can see the tribal drawing of Sully and a wooden carving of the Pizza Planet truck in the witch’s cottage. The doors are also a reason Merida couldn’t find the witch during Brave’s climax.

How Does Elemental Fit Into the Pixar Theory?

The latest Pixar film is still in theaters, but fans are already trying to place it somewhere in the theoretical timeline. There is one easter egg that connects the movie to the Pixar Theory — a Pizza Planet truck. This would suggest that Elemental fits somewhere on the timeline, but not where it does exactly.

There are two theories for how Elemental fits into the shared Pixar universe. The first would sugggest that it’s at the end of the timeline, taking place thousands of years after Monsters, Inc. The second theory is that it takes place at the beginning of the timeline before organic life has formed on earth and only the elements ruled.

Read our review of Elemental.

The Pixar Movies by Release Date

1. Toy Story (1995)
2. A Bug’s Life (1998)
3. Toy Story 2 (1999)
4. Monsters, Inc. (2001)
5. Finding Nemo (2003)
6. The Incredibles (2004)
7. Cars (2006)
8. Ratatouille (2007)
9. WALL-E (2008)
10. Up (2009)
11. Toy Story 3 (2010)
12. Cars 2 (2011)
13. Brave (2012)
14. Monsters University (2013)
15. Inside Out (2015)
16. The Good Dinosaur (2015)
17. Finding Dory (2016)
18. Cars 3 (2017)
19. Coco (2017)
20. Incredibles 2 (2018)
21. Toy Story 4 (2019)
22. Onward (2020)
23. Soul (2020)
24. Luca (2021)
25. Turning Red (2022)
26. Lightyear (2022)
27. Elemental (2023)
28. Elio (2024)