When Pixar started, they were not about selling cuteness but were instead a company built on creating some of the best stories in animated film history. They succeeded on a high level from the start with the Toy Story movies, and while there was a rare bump along the way (A Bug’s Life), they ended up creating a long line of critically acclaimed films that matched up well with anything in theaters.
However, along the way, they also created some of the cutest characters – often in situations where the cuteness contrasted with tragedy or sadness. That is the brilliance of Pixar – taking something and turning it on its head. With that in mind, here is a look at the 10 cutest Pixar characters over the last 24 years they have been making movies.
10. SADNESS
As mentioned, sometimes Pixar takes cuteness and adds mounds of sorrow to help tell their story. In their 2015 film Inside Out, Pixar did the impossible and told a story that took place inside the brain of a little girl. Riley is a girl who lived a happy life until her parents decided to move her across the country.
While she tried to keep a happy face, she was dying inside. This distress played out through characters portraying her emotions. While Joy (Amy Poehler) was the main character in Riley’s head, it was Sadness (Phyllis Smith) that pushed the story forward. She was adorable, her melancholy personality only making her even cuter.
9. LITTLE CARL (UP)
In 2009, Pixar took a chance on making an animated movie with a senior citizen and a chubby cub scout as the leads. What resulted was one of the company’s best films in Up, but what most people remember is the opening. This movie had the most depressing intro of any movie in history.
Carl was a young boy who loved aviation and met a little girl who was slightly wild and brought out the best in him. They fell in love, married, had heartbreaks and joys, grew old together, and then she died. It was immensely heartbreaking. However, while Carl became a grumpy old man, as a child, he was just so cute you could scream.
8. LITTLE GREEN MEN
Toy Story had three movies that tracked the life of a young boy who grew into his college years and told the story through the lives of his loyal toys. By the end, the toys moved on as Andy went to college, and it was a perfect conclusion to their story. While a fourth movie is coming, those first three remain arguably the best-animated trilogy in history.
Most of the toys are familiar, with slinky-dog and Mr. Potato Head easily recognizable. However, the cutest toys in this series are easily the Little Green Men. The scene when the Little Green Men in the grabber machine at the pizza place remains a highlight to this day.
7. SQUIRT (NEMO)
Finding Nemo is another movie that opened with a heartbreaking moment as Martin and Coral had a group of eggs, but when a barracuda attacked, everyone was dead other than Martin and one baby – Nemo. This tragedy led to Martin becoming overprotective of Nemo until one day Nemo wondered off and disappeared.
The movie then followed Martin as he tried to find Nemo and little Nemo as he tried to escape and find his way back home. Along the way, Martin met a group of sea turtles and found help from Crush, a turtle with a surfer attitude. By Crush’s side was his son Squirt, who was just so cute you could die.
6. ALEC (PRESTO)
Pixar makes short films and shows them before their feature presentations. One of the best of these was Presto, which screened before Wall-E. The short was about a magician named Presto DiGiotagione who used a rabbit in his stage act. The problem is that the rabbit doesn’t want to play one night.
The show starts, and Presto is unable to feed Alec ahead of time. In this short, the magic hat really is magic and things that go into the hat in the dressing room come out of the hat on the stage. Alec, in a move of defiance, keeps sending the wrong things through the hat. Thankfully, Alec is incredibly cute and gets away with it by the end.
5. WALL-E
As mentioned, Pixar likes to take chances in their movies that other studios would not dare take. In the case of the 2008 movie Wall-E, they made an animated movie that had almost no dialogue at all and just one character for much of the film.
Wall-E is a movie about Earth in the future, abandoned when environmental neglect left it uninhabitable. While what remains of the human race is on a spacecraft getting fat, Wall-E is one of the last remaining robotic trash collectors on Earth, trying to clean up the planet. He loves musicals, with an affinity for Hello, Dolly!, and is incredibly cute for a rust bucket.
4. DUG
The second character on this list from Up is the dog, Dug. By the time we meet Dug, Carl is now an elderly and grumpy man who uses a ton of balloons to move his house from where it sits and heads off to South America to explore. Sadly, a cub scout accidentally hitches a ride, and the two ended up lost together.
While in South America, they meet a Golden Retriever with a voice module on his collar that allows his thoughts to speak through it. While he is helpful, he is also easily distracted, usually when he yells Squirrel and gives chase on a moment’s notice. Dug’s first words were “I have just met you, and I love you,” and audiences felt the same.
3. TRIPLETS FROM BRAVE
Released in 2012, Brave is a Pixar movie that did not receive a lot of love when it came out because many Pixar fans saw it as more of a Disney movie thanks to Merida being a Princess. However, with that said, it was as different from Disney as you can get because Merida was strong and could fight on her own and needed no one’s help to survive.
However, for the cutest characters in this movie, take a look at her brothers. They are triplets – Harris, Hubert, and Hamish. They are little cut red-haired trouble-makers who seem to communicate without saying a word and just run around raising hell, giggling the entire time.
2. JACK JACK
The Incredibles was a shocking movie when it came out – an animated superhero movie that some call the best Fantastic Four ever movie despite it not being about the Fantastic Four. Like those Marvel comic book characters, The Incredibles was about a family of superheroes who have to learn to trust each other and work together to survive.
The only member of the family without powers in that first movie was the baby Jack-Jack, who made cute faces and funny sounds. However, by the end of that movie, his powers revealed themselves, and in the second movie, he proved to not only be the cutest character in the franchise but the most powerful.
1. BOO
One of the most beloved Pixar movies of all-time was Monsters, Inc. The film told the story of a land where monsters lived, and the only way to keep their kingdom powered was through the screams of children. This problem is why the monsters visit our world – to scare kids to keep their world running.
However, when the best scare monster in the land, Sulley, accidentally lets in a human child named Boo, he and his friend Mike decide to save her before the monsters in charge sacrifice her to protect their world. Boo is a two-year-old little girl loves the big cuddly Sully, and he couldn’t help but fall for the cute little girl as well.
