Hello!

Welcome to the first ever edition of A Girl and Her Charts! This week, I am experimenting with bubble plots. Today I have three great charts for you, all fairly simple. Let’s get started!

What’s the Deal with Pixar?

To start, I made a chart showing the rotten tomato scores for every Pixar movie. Here it is!

There are a few interesting things to look at here. First of all, Cars 2 was agreed by critics and the audience to not be a good movie. Those tomatoes sure were rotten. Although bubble size here represents budget size, there was not actually a lot of variation in budgets for these movies, so I will refrain from drawing any conclusions about the relationship between budget and rotten tomato score. Something I thought was interesting was how movies made in the 2010s tended to have the audience score and critic score be closer in agreement compared to the other decades. It doesn’t appear that Pixar movies are getting worse over time, although the 2010s was generally its lowest rated year. Now, I realize there is sorta a lot going on in this chart and it’s hard to see what the deal is with some of the bubbles, so let’s zoom in a bit to see what’s happening in that upper right quadrant.

Yes this is much better. I limited this plot to movies with a critic and audience score above 80%. First, there are multiple instances where there are two movies with the same set of scores: Up and Toy Story 3, and Coco and Toy Story 4. The first two Toy Story movies have a critic score of 100%, which makes sense cause they are wonderful movies. But the darn audience only gave Toy Story 92% and Toy Story 2 87%. Anyway, the most interesting thing to me on this chart is that the highest rated movie, Toy Story, had the smallest budget of any of the Pixar movies. Of course, it was also the first Pixar movie, so it did not have to live up to any expectations. In summary, Pixar is wonderful and everyone should watch all of these movies.

And Now for Disney

So we all know Disney has had its ups and downs. There were 62 movies made by Disney Animation Studios compared to the 28 Pixar movies, so I decided to forego the budget variable. Also, it was difficult to find budgets for any movie made before the 90s. So here is a rather simple plot just comparing critic scores to audience scores.

From this graph, there are a few things to point out. First, there are a lot more movies with lower ratings compared to Pixar movies. Of course, there are over twice as many Disney movies, and they can’t all be hits. Also, I broke this graph up by Disney CEO at the time of the film’s release. The Walt and Roy era gave us 20 movies from Disney Animation Studios, and they are not all highly rated. Of course, Make Mine Music, Melody Time, and Saludos Amigos were all released during World World II which may have played a role in their low ratings. The next three CEO’s only were in charge for a combined total of 13 years, and only 4 Disney Animation Studio movies were released in that time. They all have very mid range ratings, except the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh which had a well deserved critic score of 100% and audience score of 87%. Then came Michael Eisner, and thank goodness for him! During his 21 years as CEO, 22 movies were released by Disney Animation Studios. These movies do make up the majority of movies rated below 60%, but around half of them had either critic or audience scores over 80%, including Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and Aladdin. Next we have Bob Iger, who was CEO for the release of 13 Disney Animation Studios movies. All but one of these had a critic or audience rating above 80%. These great ratings could be because he oversaw the acquisition of Pixar, and he brought in Pixar creator John Lasseter to work on Disney Animation Studio projects. Go Bob! Of course, Bob Chapek came next, but he was CEO for less than 3 years before they brought back Bob Iger. Only three movies were released in his time, two of them rating above 90% for both critic and audience scores. However, I do not feel like credit should go to Chapek here, since these projects started under Bob Iger’s time as CEO.

Well that was a lot! I feel like I’ve said everything I have to say about these charts. Lot’s of interesting things to see! Maybe next time I’ll try a new kind of graph. Who knows!