Let's be fair -- I don't remember
A Bug's Life usually getting mentioned among Pixar's greats, and that was only their second feature. Checking IMDb's rankings for Pixar feature films, ABL, at 7.2 stars, is the lowest-ranked one other than
Cars 2 (6.4), scoring a little below the original
Cars (7.3) and
Brave (7.4), with every other Pixar feature ranking between 8.0 and 8.5. So it's not really accurate to say that Pixar has always been uniformly strong until recently. They've had fluctuations before. Okay, the last two films have gotten their lowest and fourth-lowest rankings, respectively, but the difference between those two is nearly 50% of the total spread, so it hardly proves there's a trend, especially not when the immediately previous film,
Toy Story 3, was tied with
WALL-E for first place.