Pixar is a well-known and loved movie corporation, famous for its animated movies that kids adore. Among these famous movies are Incredibles 2 (2018), Finding Dory (2016), and Toy Story 4 (2019), with each movie amassing at least a whopping 1.05 billion dollars worldwide. With such a high number of viewers, it’s more than likely that some fans have constructed theories about the Pixar Universe and its movies, and one such theory is called the Pixar Theory.

The Pixar Theory is the suggestion that all Pixar films from Toy Story and A Bug’s Life up to Incredibles 2 and Toy Story 4 and other future movies are all connected on one singular alternate timeline that begins with The Good Dinosaur.

The Cretaceous Period and the Middle Ages

The Good Dinosaur kicks off the Pixar Theory as the asteroid that was supposed to hit the Earth misses, which means the dinosaurs don’t go extinct and go on to rule the land. Oddly enough, humans still exist and eventually cause the collapse of dinosaurs.

Human history advances in the same way up until the Middle Ages (Brave), where a girl named Merida finds the Witch of the Woods, by following little balls of magic called Wisps. In the Witch’s home, she can manipulate cutlery to her bidding using the magic Wisps. In the movie, the Witch also apparently disappears every time she uses a door, leading us to believe that she isn’t a part of the timeline, but an entity surrounding it. We will come back to Brave, but we have to move on to…

The 1950s to the 1990s

The Wisps from the Middle Ages influenced large amounts of magic to be inflicted onto humans, giving rise to a special type of humans, supers. The Incredibles depicts the start of the decline of supers and the rise of one large corporation, Buy-n-Large, abbreviated BnL. How?

Syndrome, Mr. Incredible’s nemesis, created multiple versions of a killer robot, the Omnidroid, a nearly independent “killbot” that learns every move that the supers can use and adapts to said attacks to become virtually unstoppable. Eventually, though, the A.I. killbot becomes smart enough to the point where it starts attacking humans with no direct orders to.

Enter Toy Story, where toys in households are sentient and can be discarded by humans with no care about how the toys feel. But how are the toys alive? Syndrome uses Zero Point Energy, the “electromagnetic energy that exists in a vacuum.” The wavelengths, too powerful for us to detect, is a plausible energy source for toys to use to become sentient.

Throughout the Toy Story sequels, the toys’ opinions on humans drastically shift from “They still love us,” to “Humans are killing toys and killing the planet.” And by the time the events of Toy Story occur, it has been about 40 years since the events of The Incredibles, giving the A.I. enough time to form BnL.

2003 – 2007

From the defeat of the Omnidroid, BnL is formed. Supers are pretty much gone by this point, and toys want to rise against their human oppressors. Humans are extremely vulnerable at this point. But the fall of humans isn’t through genocide or a radical overthrow. 

This entire time, we haven’t mentioned animals. More specifically, aquatic and marine life. Due to the pollution from BnL, mutations in fish DNA gave way to more advanced species. These fish have schools with dedicated teachers, an entire highway system to quickly transport fish from one spot to another, and, in Dory’s case, the ability to read and understand human writing.

BnL is also expanding its reach across the world. In Up, Carl is forced to give up his house due to the growing corporation. We can even see a toolbox branded by the BnL logo in the construction area. So, machines are expanding their reach across the world which is leading to pollution, which in turn is angering the animals to the point of revolution.

We also know that machines help humans when the animals revolt, because after the war, there are almost no animals left. And with the pollution levels skyrocketing and machines holding most of the world’s governments, the balance between animals, machines, and humans is thrown out of whack. Earth becomes unsustainable for human life, and the remaining humans board the spaceship Axiom. So what’s left?

2110 – 2805

By the time Axiom has left Earth, machines have taken over, including WALL-E, a single cleanup robot dedicated to clean up the one last city BnL missed before leaving Earth. But there are also cars, living cars that have taken use to all the things the humans left before leaving. A racing stadium, most likely the Indy 500 stadium, can be seen in Cars. Machines have become so advanced to the point where they are nearly human. 

But just like the toys, the cars use humans as a primary energy source, and now with the humans gone, there is a new energy crisis (Cars 2). Oil, pumped by the Allinol company, is the only way for society to keep moving forward, despite its deadly dangers. Allinol is using a sort of “green energy” as a catalyst to help them in the fuel wars and to turn cars away from alternative sources of energy, which could have wiped out many cars very quickly with one foul swipe. Another thing: the phrase “all in all” (Allinol) means the same thing as the phrase “by and large” (Buy-n-Large).

Which now brings us back to WALL-E. The film takes place about 700 years after humans have left Earth. After WALL-E liberates the humans from Axiom and brings them back to Earth, he and Eve plant a lone tree from an old boot, which, curiously, looks quite similar to the tree from the opening sequence of A Bug’s Life.

2898

In WALL-E, we see that some bugs were still alive even through the Cars period, and built their own smaller versions of human society. Complex enough to have bars, advertisements, road networks, know what a bloody mary is, and have a traveling circus. Bugs, now with most humans gone and pollution starting to drop, they can develop and mutate, mimicking human societies. One of Flik’s older members in the colony says that he “feels 90 again” and another member states that something “happens every year.” Ants only live for just 3 months, but with such heavily mutated genes, their lifespans could have greatly increased.

Another movie was in production to be released in 2012 but was replaced by Brave. This movie was going to be called Newt, and the premise was, “What happens when the last blue-footed newts of their kind, a male and a female who hate each other, have to come together to save their species?” This ties into the post-apocalyptic world where pollution levels decimate the blue-footed newt population.

Now with a new balance between humans, machines, and animals, what happens next?

3100 – 5201

A new superspecies emerges through years and years of mutations: Monsters. In Monsters University, the school was founded in the year 1313. If this is in the future, then the events on MU has to take place 1400 years or more after the events of A Bug’s Life, suggesting that the monsters reset society and start back at a new Year 0.

After Monsters University, we go into Monsters, Inc. It shows us even more evidence that “humans = batteries” because the monsters use children’s screams to power their society until they find that laughter (green energy) is a better source. The doors that the monsters go through are suggested to be portals to other dimensions, but they are time travel devices that take monsters back to the 80s and 90s when humans were still the dominant species on Earth.

Which leads us to Boo.

Boo’s Universe

Boo wanted to see Sully so much, that she dedicated her entire life to see Sully again. She studied the properties of time travel and entering doors that lead you to another dimension. She studied the traces of magic and she became…

A WITCH! Yes, Boo is the Witch of the Woods in Brave. This explains why she can go through wooden doors and seemingly disappear out of existence. Boo isn’t tied to one spot of the timeline, but she is the product of the timeline. In the Witch of the Woods’ shack, you can see a wooden carving of Sully as well as a Pizza Planet truck.

Boo’s love for Sully is the crux of the entire universe. This explains why bugs from A Bug’s Life can be found in Toy Story. Boo undershot her destination and ended up in the post-Wall-E era where there were not many trees around. She found the tree in A Bug’s Life and made a door out of it, taking some of the bugs back with her. 

Does Boo ever find Sully? We might never know. Surely Sully visits Boo at least one more time after the events of Monsters, Inc. but he had to stop visiting.

Thus concludes the Pixar Theory.