Andrew Stanton

Andrew Stanton is the Pixar writer who kept handing the studio its most difficult premises and then daring it to make them work. He was a co-writer on the first four Toy Story films and on A Bug's Life, and had some degree of involvement in nearly every Pixar feature, which makes him less a director with a filmography than a house style with a name attached.

As a director his signature is the constraint. Finding Nemo is a road movie about a father who cannot swim well and a son with a damaged fin. WALL-E opens with roughly forty minutes of near silent slapstick set in a garbage field, which is the boldest thing a family blockbuster has attempted this century. Both won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and WALL-E took a Hugo as well, which tells you the science fiction audience took it seriously as science fiction.

He also acts in his own films, playing Crush, the stoned sea turtle in Finding Nemo and Finding Dory, and turning up as Emperor Zurg in the Toy Story sequels. The live action swing, John Carter, is the interesting failure in the story: an expensive adaptation of a foundational pulp text that arrived after decades of films had already borrowed everything from it.

He returned to the fold with Finding Dory and is directing Toy Story 5, along with the live action In the Blink of an Eye.