Pixar never got into my heart

I've tried - I really have - and I truly respect the artistry of the movies and the way they have managed to connect with a mass audience on a very personal and emotional level, but I just never got into the Pixar films.

I was totally the wrong age for them, for starters. I was 19 when Toy Story came out, and I didn't want to see movies about toys that came to life, I wanted to see gangster films and gory horror and arthouse brilliance. 

And there was just something about the aesthetic of the whole thing that turned me off. The closest I ever came to seeing a Pixar at the movies was right back at the start, when A Bug's Life came out, and CG-animated films was still very much a new thing. But I chose to go to Antz instead, because it looked a tiny bit more edgy. 

There are no hard edges in Pixar films, and my favourite animation is always sharp and colourful. The characters were shaded and rounded and too smooth. Even the supersquare jaw of Mr Incredible has a roundness to it, set in jelly more than stone. And while there has been great colour work in recent Pixar films, those early years locked in a very pastel aesthetic.

This did become the default look for 99 percent of animation films and that's how you always tell the great films because they change a whole style - Saving Private Ryan isn't a great movie because of its clumsy script, but because every war movie after it is indebted to it - and everybody wants to look like Pixar these days, so fair play to them. 

For a while, I would watch Pixar films on long haul flights, because there was something about the proximity to a film in high altitude that made me feel a lot more emotional, but I got bored of that too.

But the kids are into them, and while it's not to any obsessive degree, they've watched all the adventures of Buzz and Woody, so I've seen them in bits and pieces, many times over. They seem okay.