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Finally, things got underway. I'll just cut to the chase. All I have to say is, welcome to Earth, Pixar. Please stay. Walking out of the theater I felt like Pixar had reached inside my chest and touched my soul. (Ouuuuch.) Not just touched, but tickled, strangled and cuddled. I don't keep track of how quickly a film makes me cry, because, you know, that would be weird. But if I did have a habit as bizarre as cataloging the minutes of my emotions, Pixar would have set new record.

In the weeks since then, I have been grappling with the reality of Pixar's extended display of genius. Really, how is one to make sense of it all? The thing that I keep coming back to is that filmmaking, to an extent, is a game of chance. It's not about talent and money. The summer movie season proves that on a weekly basis. What makes a good film is often the result of intangibles. There's no concrete formula. True, Hollywood would probably just ignore it if there was. They'd stick with their formulaic-genre-film-formula - but that's beside the point. To make a great film, there are so many elements that have to blend in just the right way. Sometimes they do and you get The Lord of the Rings and sometimes they don't and you get King Kong. For the most part, it's out of your control - unless you cast Mark Wahlberg, and that's your own darned fault.

So given this, how is it possible that one company gets everything so right, every time? These movies aren't just good, they're grrrrrrreat! Trying to put this run into context and doing my best to come up with an answer that didn't involve extraterrestrials, I thought back through the roughly 125 year history of cinema for other examples of prolonged mastery. But what I found did nothing to refute my suspicions that Pixar is of another world. Quite the opposite.

Let's geek out and go through some of them shall we?

You have Buster Keaton, who made seven undisputedly great, and still hilarious, silent comedies from 1923-1928. If you've been apprehensive of silent films in the past, Keaton is a perfect place to start. Don't let the absence of words scare you. Buster doesn't need them. But the probability of Buster being an alien is strong. What he puts himself through in his movies looks way more than any human could endure. Perhaps he was a scout they sent to get the lay of the land before the rest arrived.

Another example is writer director Preston Sturges, who batted 1.000 from 1941-1944 when he made five classic screwball comedies that, like Keaton, hold up remarkably well. But curiously, the rest of his work doesn't quite meet the same standard. Maybe they did one of those Men in Black switcharoo things where the alien wears the person's skin like a suit. Excuse me, has anyone seen my cat?

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