Pixar Animations Studio President Ed Catmull has announced that the studio is going to cut back on their recent trend towards sequels, focusing instead on more original content.

Citing ‘artistic reasons’ the studio boss laid out Pixar’s plans to make a film based on an original concept every year, but only make one sequel every two year.

Toy Story, Cars, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo have all spawned franchises in recent years, particularly since the studio merged with Disney. The announcement seems designed to combat recent criticism that Pixar was perhaps in danger of sacrificing creativity in favour of lucrative ‘sure thing’ sequels.

Disney has never been shy about capitalizing on its finest work through unnecessary sequels, prequels and spin offs. Typically these have been unforgivably lazy efforts, guilty of declining animation standards motivated by impatient greed. It will be a relief for fans to see Pixar take a deliberate and very public step away from that worrying trend.