INNOVATION Our house is full of 'product', ranging from an 'Ice Age' Sid with cold, staring eyes, to all manner of plastic tat

I COUNT MYSELF lucky to have been a parent in the Pixar era. The new one, Up, is just the latest in a line of fantastic films that have saved me from six years of a Barbie-induced coma and I bow to no one in my knowledge and appreciation of them.

Up is not great in the way The Incredibles, or Ratatouilleare great, but neither is it Horton Hears A Who crapola either (my definition of Pixar era stretches to Dreamworks and some of the other studios who've been dragged upmarket too). There's still little that beats Toy Story (1 not 2, although 2 is better than most of the other stuff out there). Wall E is extraordinary, but my six year old only laughed once, which is not a good enough hit rate. We haven't even mentioned Shrek 1 and 2 - forget Shrek 3, which is terrible, think Godfather Part 3 - and Cars, which is a boys' thing.

Best in a "not expecting it to be good" sort of way is Ice Age, that has a more believable bunch of characters than most so called real films. But up there on my personal CGI Mount Rushmore is Monsters Inc, which has at its heart the cleverest idea for a kid's film ever. John Goodman and Billy Crystal are basically Butch and Sundanceand Steve Buscemi is an evil, disappearing lizard who does for this generation what the Child Catcher in Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bangdid for mine. (Also on the DVD is a short film called Mike's New Car that has become a family test: anyone who sits through this without crying with laughter doesn't have a heart, and is dead to us.)

There is a flip side to all this love however, for which I've paid a heavy price. Our house is full of "product", ranging from an Ice Age Sid with cold, staring eyes to all manner of plastic tat bearing reference to our cellular heroes. I've come to believe that until you've been to a Disney Store, you don't really get what the film industry is about.

This hunch was confirmed by the numbers: More than 25 million Buzz Lightyears have been sold since Toy Story came out in 1995 and in Britain alone the amount of child related film merchandise sold is the equivalent of £182 for every child in the country. Viewed through this lens the films are no more than 90-minute ads for merchandise.

It's hardly surprising that the toy companies are falling over themselves to get involved and Hasbro and Mattel, have signed up with big Hollywood agents to help sell their brands in to the film industry.

Hasbro has engaged William Morris Endeavor and wants to see its Stretch Armstrong toy range make it on the big screen, along with GI Joe, which is due to screen this summer. Action figures like these are the easy stuff however: William Morris represents Clint Eastwood, Denzel Washington and Quentin Tarantino, so landing a Stretch Armstrong movie shouldn't be too challenging. They have already put him in touch with a well-known screenwriter whose people are talking to Stretch's people.

The bigger test of Hollywood's ingenuity, or craven desire for money, depending on your view, is their ability to turn board games in to movies. Monopoly, directed by Ridley Scott and "re-imagined" by Corpse Bride screenwriter Pamela Pettler, is being worked up and the whodunit game Clue is coming to us via the writer of Pirates of the Caribbean. Each of these films - and there are many more in pre-production - will each run in parallel to a glitzy relaunch of the toys and games.

I was just about able to suspend my cynicism when the sales pitch started when I left the cinema but when a film has no other objective than to flog me a board game a depressing circle is complete. So my advice is this: go and watch Up, Pixar's new film, firstly because it's charming and second because it might the last of its kind. The central character is an irascible old man whose house is lifted away by hundreds of balloons. Audiences have taken the main character, Carl Fredriksen to their hearts, but there's blood on the floor over at Disney Pixar HQ, where the sales bods are complaining that their retail customers aren't stocking up on UP merchandise and so the toy manufacturers are not buying the license. Given their previous films have made more money from merchandise than at the cinema, this could make Up a relative bomb for the film company. But who really cares about that.

Roughly translated, Carl Fredriksen is a hit with the kids, who love him but don't want to buy him. And that's as good a deal as us parents are going to get.