The Best Pixar Character Bracket: Round 2
A striking amount of upsets was the story of Round 1. Now can Pixar’s cherished side characters knock off established franchise favorites?The Best Pixar Character Bracket: Round 2
A striking amount of upsets was the story of Round 1. Now can Pixar’s cherished side characters knock off established franchise favorites?
If the first round of The Ringer’s Best Pixar Character Bracket is any indication, there is a hierarchy for the toys, animals, superheroes, and waste-compacting bots that inhabit this film universe. At the top, there are the unassailable favorites; the main characters. Below them? Absolute, unsortable chaos. On Monday, the top 12 overall seeds in the bracket all advanced, most without much trouble. (Only the 2-seed Joy was mildly threatened.) But that’s where the chalkiness of Round 1 stopped: Out of the remaining 20 matchups, nine were upsets. (And it would’ve been 10, but Anton Ego outlasted Ellie Fredricksen by just 58 votes.) Round 2 has more 12-seeds in it than 4-seeds. That has to be the first time that’s ever happened in a Ringer bracket!
The takeaway? It’s clear that Woody is more elite than Pants Dad and that Coco’s Héctor is better than Hopper from A Bug’s Life—but the margin between Ratatouille’s Anton Ego and Up’s Ellie Fredricksen, for example, is much smaller, despite what their seedings indicated. Once you get past the small handful of Pixar blue bloods, anything can happen—just ask the Squeeze Toy Aliens.
Now as the top seeds come face-to-face with some of these animated agents of chaos in Round 2, we’ll find out just how deep Pixar fandom runs. Will voters continue to back the most prominent franchise figures, or will love for Pixar’s side characters continue to prevail?
Let’s get into it.
Voting on the second round is officially open. Remember: You can place votes here, on Twitter, and on Instagram until 6 p.m. ET.
Andy’s Room
Inside Out Is Just Plain Out
Inside Out sent five characters to the dance; of those five, three were top-20 seeds. But after one round, only one of its representatives is still standing. (Think of them like Big Ten basketball: great in the regular season, abysmal when tourney time rolls around.) Of the movie’s prime emotions, only Joy is going to the second round, and even her performance left something to be desired: Finding Nemo’s Gill, a 15-seed, gave her a decent challenge by taking in 41 percent of the vote. And perhaps most surprisingly, Inside Out’s ace in the hole, Bing Bong, is going home after being upset by a 12-seed, Roz of Monsters, Inc.
Inside Out is one of the best Pixar movies ever. It is a critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning film starring major movie stars. But clearly, all of that success is more about the sum of its parts.
The Matchups
42 Wallaby Way
Madness Down Under
This region is the most upset-heavy region in the history of Ringer brackets. Aside from the matchups featuring the three top seeds—Dory, Remy, and Sulley—every matchup was won by a lower seed. (Meanwhile, there wasn’t a single upset over in the Axiom.) The Squeeze Toy Aliens rode a wave of nostalgia to victory over Inside Out’s Sadness (it’s summertime, only Lana Del Rey is celebrating sadness right now); the angsty daughter of The Incredibles defeated Coco’s delightfully devious Ernesto de la Cruz; Finding Nemo’s fish-friendly shark, Bruce, absolutely wallopped Luca Paguro, who has a whole movie named after him.
The astonishing results in this region can mean one of two things going forward: seen one way, the competition is wide open. It’s anyone’s game; if the Squeeze Toy Aliens could defeat Sadness ,they can beat anybody. On the other hand, maybe these lower seeds are just wiping each other out and doing all the hard work for Dory, Remy, and Sulley. There may be double-digit seeds all over the place right now, but 42 Wallaby Way could still be looking chalk by the end of the week.
The Matchups
The Axiom
Watch Out for the Incredibles
If Inside Out is the Pixar stand-in for Big Ten basketball, then The Incredibles is the ACC: slightly under-hyped coming in, but totally reliable once the games begin. The franchise had eight competitors in the first round, and six of those eight are still standing. Dash was the only member of the Parr family to lose, as both Violet and Jack-Jack pulled off big upsets; and Frozone almost made it to the next round, falling short against Cars’ Lightning McQueen by a mere 113 votes. Meanwhile, Mr. Incredible and Edna Mode cruised to easy wins in Round 1: the former took down Russell from Up 69 percent to 31 while Edna Mode made Forky wish that kid had never brought him to life by gluing googly eyes on him.
There’s no reason to think this trend won’t continue—the love for the Incredibles franchise is clearly strong, and in the Axiom specifically, none of the impending matchups seem insurmountable. It’ll be impossible for all six characters to advance to the next round, for reasons we’ll get to in a second, but could The Incredibles make up 25 percent or more of the Sweet 16? (And to get even tastier: Syndrome should definitely be favored in his matchup against Joy after her lackluster first-round performance, right?) These character brackets often clarify how we feel about the movies themselves—early on, voters seem to be proclaiming that The Incredibles is highly underrated.
The Matchups
Pizza Planet
Movie-on-Movie Crime Looming
To confirm a suspicion you might have had about the selection process: Yes, when we were building this bracket, certain first-round matchups were set with potentially fun second-round face-offs in mind. So thank you very much, voters, for unlocking a couple of those in the Pizza Planet region. Not only will Round 2 feature Carl Fredricksen taking on his Up compatriot Dug, but we’ll also see Elastigirl go up against her youngest child, Jack-Jack.
This may just be a bracket featuring fictional animated characters, but I still find these matchups incredibly spicy and dramatic. I can’t wait to see what happens next.