And a lot less preachy or ideological. My theory is they knew the intended market wouldn't stand for it. The strong woman was well done, without hitting you over the head like most films do these days.
Yet another victim of the pandemic. Real shame since 6 months ago DreamWorks absolutely demolished the "sub-genre" with Puss n Boots. There's definitely an experience you get in a theater that can't quite be recreated at home with all it's distraxtions.
> a creative spree that peaked with the end-of-the-two-thousands hat trick of “wall-e” (2008), “Up,” and “Toy Story 3.”
I've never understood the love given to "Up". Everybody remembers the fantastic opening sequence but seems to forget that it ends with dogs flying airplanes.
As great as Toy Story 3 is, I would've put Pixar's peak at Ratatouille and Wall-E.
> I've never understood the love given to "Up". Everybody remembers the fantastic opening sequence but seems to forget that it ends with dogs flying airplanes.
The flying house with balloons wasn't too unrealistic? ;)
Up tugs on a lot of heartstrings. It's front-loaded with tremendous loss, but that emotional punch isn't lost as it transforms throughout the film into Carl opening up to protect someone new.
The film is cute and full of emotion. And despite the fantasy, it's well written. It's my favorite Pixar flick by a wide margin. Ratatouille and WALL-E are fantastic, though.
my complaint isn't about the realism. the image of the balloon house was great and the core of the story about moving on is great.
but it feels like they buried that potentially great story under a bunch of efforts to make sure it came off as sufficiently "kid friendly" (e.g., dug constantly shouting squirrel, that other dog with the high pitched voice). the magic of the best pixar movies has been telling stories that kids like without having to pander to them.
I mean, Pixar made it big with Toy Story, literally focusing on kids toys coming to life. I don’t really feel that talking dogs is any more pandering. Especially since it follows the general Pixar formula of taking something a child can relate to (toys, superheroes, monsters under the bed, etc), add in some heavy themes related to that (loss, insecurities, fear), add in some humor/lighter elements, and finish it off with a feel-good ending showing that if you continue to try and work together, you’ll always succeed.
They’ve always “pandered”, it’s in the job description. They do make movies for children after all. They just used to make movies with enough depth that adults could enjoy them too.
The answer is not as simple as the analogy suggests, but the principle of the problem is that the conflict resolved by the rat driving the human around is central to the theme and the characters, while the dog flying the airplane is not.
I used to have a high opinion of Up, having originally seen it when it came out in theaters. It was only on a re-watch that I was shocked by how much of that opinion was based on what is essentially only 15 minutes of the total runtime. Ratatouille is fundamentally about a ratty artist overcoming his background and prejudices. Up wants to be about an old man managing to move past his grief, but the climax (and most of the movie) involves a stupid bird and a stupid kid that only detract from the experience.
The first time I saw "Up" I came across it while channel flipping, and missed everything up to shortly before they encounter the bad guy. I had no idea what I was watching and it didn't even cross my mind that it could be a Pixar movie. My guess was that it was something from one of the studios that mostly does goofy kids TV animation trying their hand at a bigger budget TV movie.
OT: If anyone here is up on Mexican folklore, I've got a question about "Coco" and "The Book of Life". They both are built around the Day of the Dead holiday, so of course are going to have certain similarities.
The stories they tell though are massively different, and they have quite different takes on what the land of the dead is like. For the most part the similarities are mostly what naturally comes from focusing on the same holiday.
Except for one. Both of them feature a boy who wants to be a musician but grows up in a family that has a traditional family business and strongly disapproves of their kids becoming musicians.
I'm wondering if that was just a coincidence, or if "kids wants to be musician, family disapproves" is a theme from Mexican folklore or something like that that both films happened to use.
The movie is strong enough that we all forgot about the dogs. I feel like this is not very uncommon, for example, the second half of Stripes was mediocre but the movie is overall good.
I think a really strong premise and first half can overshadow some weaknesses, including an even a bad ending.
> Everybody remembers the fantastic opening sequence but seems to forget that it ends with dogs flying airplanes.
That’s not the end of the story - that’s the start of the third act.
It actually ends grounded in reality - a return back to the world they started in, without fantastical creatures, and the boy getting his explorers scout patch back in New York City. It ends with Carl giving him a bottlecap badge which has a sentimental link to his dead wife.
A return back to reality from an unknown/mythical/magical world is basically the fundamental basics of the hero’s journey “mono-myth” (transition from the known to unknown) so purely from a structure perspective I can see why it resonates.
Yeah, it kinda blew my mind how people I knew insisted the whole movie was great.
It's like, sure, it's OK if you like dogs flying in airplanes, but the first few minutes of the movie is the only thing that has any staying power. I'm pretty sure most people at this point who haven't watched the movie in a long time don't even remember what the rest of it was about. In contrast, I haven't seen Toy Story in 15+ years, and I can still describe to you roughly what happens act for act. Granted, I watched Toy Story as a young boy, so I'm biased.
As much as I think Wall-E was an excellent film, I consider The Incredibles to be Pixar's peak. It was a great story with a perfect balance of humor, child characters actually in peril, subtle mature themes (infidelity, "you didn't save my life; you ruined my death"), well stylized humanoid character models, a father character who isn't a deadbeat, a theme around having to hide who you are, etc. Lots of great stuff in there. Wall-E might have had a grander message and an artsier vision, but The Incredibles IMO has way more rewatch value.
Monsters Inc. was pretty great, too! For me, Pixar failed to make another film that came even close to Monsters or The Incredibles.
I disagree, Up remains probably my favourite Pixar film. It’s originality is so refreshing. Yes it’s weird, try explaining the story to someone, but the world it constructs is consistent and not weird for the sake of it (kooky). And through that the film carries some age old themes, exploration, friendship, individuality that everyone can relate to. I yearn for more such originality.
Pixar is a victim of it's own success. They blew the works away with kids movies that were actually pretty good and innovative in a world where they had been neither.
Today, "kids" movies are now one of the premier tentpoles of the film industry and Pixar has tried to corner the market on... abstract stories about emotions?
Abstract stories about emotions is good though. Soul was a perfectly good movie.
And if you go over to the anime community, the kids are explicitly liking it because of the random emotional tangents (I'm looking at you Demon Slayer).
And a lot of the reason why people liked Puss in Boots: the last wish, was because of the existential crisis the protagonist faces upon confronting his last life.
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I don't think a movie like Elemental would hit very hard after Zootopia locked down the concept near perfectly. It seems ill-timed, we need a few more years to forget Zootopia before giving another rural vs urban different people's city romance with subtle nods to racism story.
As a stand alone movie, Lightyear fails to deliver an interesting and sound science fiction film for adults, or a competent action filled romp for kids. I could not tell you who it's supposed to be made for besides the producers.
This isn't Pixar's first bad or mediocre movie—Cars 2 was straight up bad, and Monsters University and The Good Dinosaur were both mediocre. Coming up after the release of some really solid titles, I'm not too worried.
They're no longer trying to be subtle at all. Movies have become stuffed with outright political lectures, and always coming from the same view. I just want a movie being itself without politics shoved into it.
Weird as it sounds, I would still describe the political message in Wall-E as more subtle than in Elemental, or even Strange World - another recent flop. Why is that?
Wall-E, although clearly and one sidedly in favor of environmentalist or conservationist causes, still describes the problem and the solution in fantastic terms. The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels. The message you can take away from Wall-E is not a literal solution (planting plants to rejuvenate things ignores the complexity of real life ecosystems - just consider invasive species!). Instead, the message must be more abstract - something like "Care more about the environment."
The political situation in Elemental, by contrast, is barely abstract at all. There is a city, there are immigrants, and the elemental toothpaste commercial aesthetic is a thin veneer over real life racial and ethnic tensions. So any solution the movie suggests would be something that maps very closely to the real world.
Some critics brought this up, but the more overt message of Elemental actually makes things worse.
Think about it. In real life, skin color doesn’t do… anything. It’s just a stupid way humans distinguish between each other.
Elemental - the two “races” can literally annihilate each other on contact. It would be like if we had humans made from matter and antimatter. “Racism” in such a world is completely justified and a matter of survival - what message does that send if you are meant to read it as a racial allegory? It makes no sense.
Zootopia had this same problem. I believe we were supposed to see the “predators” and “prey” as allegories to racial groups and the tensions between them. But predators were literally killing and eating the prey! The prey were right to be afraid! If you were a rabbit I would not counsel you to become best friends with a fox, regardless of the assurances he provides you.
An observation that will make Zootopia much more enjoyable is realizing that the predators and prey don't map onto racial groups and aren't intended to be seen that way.
I don’t know, plenty of film critics as well as political review sites interpreted it that way; and no creative member behind the movie ever said that it was not meant to be somewhat correlated. Which as Vox pointed, is fairly problematic because the lack of an official statement means that not viewing it as a racial allegory is simply a matter of an opinionated interpretation that a true racist could disagree with, without any contradiction.
Without bringing highly opinionated interpretations into it, Nick Wild is voiced by a white man doing a white southern accent. The number of characters voiced by black men is not very high.
That was my frustration with the discourse around Zootopia when it released—people complained that the predator / prey distinction mapped badly onto US racial issues. But that was just people wanting the movie to be a thing which it wasn't, and then complaining that it didn't work.
I don't really see how the story in Wall-E is any more subtle than the one in Strange World by your measure:
> The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels.
They lived on the back of a creature that was dying as a result of an infection and they had unknowingly been using the result of the infection as their power source. It's exactly the same kind of parallel and solution in fantastic terms. Stripped down these movies have a very similar storyline and message (things are broken, we can't just fix it without transforming ourselves, and some force or people will oppose that transformation).
Now, I prefer Wall-E. I think the cinematics are better. The emptiness and stillness of Earth, the serenity of space, the scene where the spacecraft docks with the Aurora and is cleaned. Films of that era and before gave you some breathing space with the spectacle without so much shit going on constantly. That said, I think if Strange World came out at the time Wall-E did instead of it then it would have been better received, I personally feel like I'm pretty tired of the style.
The problem in Strange World is abstract with parallels, but the solution maps more precisely to reality. We do not live on the back of a turtle, but the solution of abandoning the Brussel Sprouts is very similar to the real life message of abandoning fossil fuels.
I do not think overt messaging was the main reason Strange World flopped (although it probably was the case for Turning Red), but rather, the general gross-ness of the character designs, along with the dull premise.
> I do not think overt messaging was the main reason Strange World flopped (although it probably was the case for Turning Red)
What overt messaging was in Turning Red? In any event, the reason that one flopped in theaters was that it also released simultaneously on Disney+, where AFAIK it has been very popular.
The message in Turning Red can be trivially read as a thirteen year old girl learning to prostitute herself against the wishes of her stifling and controlling mother, even if this wasn't the intent of the filmmakers. Concerned parents will probably also find it strange that a Pixar movie made for small children casually throws around words like 'degenerate' and 'stoner' and talks explicitly about pads for minutes on end.
I am not sure I would take popularity on the streaming service as a sign of financial success, given something like Encanto was big in both the box offices and after the fact streaming, but who knows what the balance sheet really looks like with these big companies these days.
> The message in Turning Red can be trivially read as a thirteen year old girl learning to prostitute herself against the wishes of her stifling and controlling mother, even if this wasn't the intent of the filmmakers.
I think you'd have to work kinda hard to justify that reading—and while believe you that you can, I do wonder why you'd want to work so hard to make such a reading?
> Concerned parents will probably also find it strange that a Pixar movie made for small children casually throws around words like 'degenerate' and 'stoner' and talks explicitly about pads for minutes on end.
Concerned parents from the 1950s, you mean?
> but who knows what the balance sheet really looks like with these big companies these days
The trivial reading of Turning Red as prostitution is thus: a thirteen year old girl suddenly struggles with transforming into a red panda, and this is quickly explained in such a way to heavily associate with the physical and mental changes a girl typically experiences with puberty. One of the next plot points is that, to make money, the girl decides to sell pictures of herself as the 'panda' to make money. This being contemporaneous with a popular website designed to make it easy for women to sell pictures for money.
Even later on, the movie concludes with this confident thirteen year old girl declaring that she has a right to twerk, all while she hopes to end up backstage with her friends at the local boy band concert. What typically happens to underage girls backstage at concerts? I wonder.
I did very little reading into the events the story presents to get to this conclusion. Turning Red is not very subtle at all. It shouts in your face about pads and how twerking is the bomb.
>Concerned parents from the 1950s, you mean?
To the extent that any parents today care about what their kids watch, instead of shrugging while letting their toddlers gormlessly stare at a youtube video pipeline of strangely pornographic spiderman and elsa videos, they typically care about explicit violence, references to sex, and references to drugs. Turning Red has very clear cut examples of two of these things. I cannot imagine most parents being comfortable about discussing pads with their five or six year old daughters, nor thinking that the world is a better place when those daughters decide they want to start twerking as well because they saw it in the movie.
A. This “it was always political” is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to defend the placement of politics you agree with,
B. Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie. One fart joke is not a fart jokes movie.
C. The politics were never so explicitly partisan but just general themes such as the stupidity of being racist or being against teamwork - not jokes about widely-controversial modern issues.
Depends on your definition of “racism.” I am referring to the classical definition of overt hatred based on skin color which almost everyone can understand compared to the modern subtle definition.
> This “it was always political” is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to defend the placement of politics you agree with,
No, though, falsely claiming something is political in a way (other than the specific political viewpoint) other things are not is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to attack politics you disagree with while avoiding the meat of the disagreement.
> Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie.
True, but irrelevant. Politics as the core is not any more common on any consistent-but-not-viewpoint-biased definition of “politics”. The common issue in complaints is status-quo bias.
> The politics were never so explicitly partisan
That’s somewhat true, in that for a long time (from the 1930s to the 1990s) the US was in an abnormally long political realignment, where the most highly salient political issues were not as clearly partisan
Sorry but this ignores a lot of history. The plot of the first feature film - Birth of a Nation - is literally the Klu Klux Klan saving the day by driving away the black people run amok during reconstruction. How is that lighthearted and apolitical?
A lot of people feel way more strongly about immigration and race and there is no majority consensus on these issues.
On the other hand there is a majority consensus that littering and waste is bad and we have a responsibility to protect the Earth from it. This is different from climate change which is another issue with little majority consensus.
It's not about presentation, but the underlying issues themselves.
Some movies were political but the politics were far less polarised within the "west" than they are now. Some movies - e.g. "Red Dawn" or "the Hunt for Red October" portrayed a clearly black-and-white division between the "good" west and the "bad" east with the dividing line being formed by the national borders. Outside of academia there was not much support for the "red" side so these movies did not create an internal division, you either liked them or you thought they were mostly over the top but otherwise harmless action flicks. Movies like "The Colour Purple" or "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" were critical of the US but this criticism did not cause division because nearly everyone agreed with it and the movies themselves did not portray the issues as "systemic faults with current society". The few die-hard bigots who might have railed against these movies were ignored as being relics of the past.
How different it is today with movies which are not much more than thinly disguised moral lessons where the audience is lectured on issued of race, gender, "climate", environment, migration and more. The issues - whether real or imagined - are being portrayed as "current", "systemic" and "catastrophic", the "good" vs. "bad" divider goes straight through society where the "good" side is characterised by being "norm-critical" and in opposition to mainstream culture. Those who do not follow are portrayed as "bad" and labelled with a number of -isms and -phobias. Where earlier movies mostly portrayed "the other" - the "reds", the "filthy rich", the "criminals" - as being bad current "political" movies portray "us" as being ignorant, oppressive, wasteful, conservative "white" or "white-adjacent" bumpkins who really need to "be educated".
It's really not that political at all. It has depictions of recent immigrants butting heads with established ethnic groups but you end up liking both sides so I don't know what there is to complain about.
The problem is that, the more divided a society is, the more fundamental elements of society (which are necessarily present in media) feel political, especially when presented in media, where the creator is necessarily making a choice to not avoid them. E.g. my conservative friends are pretty open about their opinion that a gay person merely being in a piece of media counts as "politics" (unless their gayness is an effective comedy element). Some of them will assert that they only feel this way when the character's gayness does not serve the story, but their bar for that distinction is always suspiciously high.
Bingo—like when the recent Buzz Lightyear came out, and there was a side character, non-critical to the story, who happened to be gay. There was outcry in the conservative community about how politics were being "shoved" into entertainment for kids.
It's all BS. This is really religious fundamentalism. The actual complaint is gayness cannot be normalized in any fashion. And just presenting gay characters as normal people crosses the line for these people.
Were they ever? One of their most acclaimed movies featured a scenario about a society that litigated superheroes out of the public eye. Another featured a society powered through fear, and a lie to induce and justify said fear. And I can't even describe Wall-E as a metaphor so much as a blunderbuss shooting straight into it's audience.
If "parents" were the common audience making the critiques, I may agree. But parents don't tend to read much into a 5 second background prop of an NPC plot point, in my experience.
Better not watch Dr. Strangelove, or Full Metal Jacket, or M*A*S*H, or The Birdcage, or Philadelphia, or The Colour Purple, or It's a Wonderful Life, or Erin Brockovich, or Dirty Dancing (yes, you read that right), or...
You mean like Apocalypse Now or Birth of a Nation? Movies have been political lecture since the very first feature length film, and have never been very subtle about it either.
Hell, even the New Testament was vehemently political at the time. Jesus was a political figure executed for political crimes. People like him popped up all the time and were quickly put down. The “Kingdom of Heaven” was not intended to be an abstract place, it was supposed to be a real kingdom to rival the Romans. When Jesus died he said “God why have you forsaken me” because Jesus expected to be the king of this kingdom, not to die naked at the hands of the Romans.
All of Christianity that came later (introduced by Paul) watered down this hardcore power politics story into an abstract “spiritual” story. But the reality stands for itself if you just peek beneath the surface.
"The sheepish alienation of sitting through “Inside Out” amid the static of my fellow-theatregoers’ sniffles and nose honks must have been what Data from “Star Trek” felt like all the time."
The absence of Lasseter has undeniably left a noticeable void. It was imperative for Lasseter to be held accountable (and arguable if that even happened), though, without a shadow of a doubt.
I feel like Pixar is just a classic case of a couple of truly brilliant visionaries and founders creating a truly incredible company, they get rich and leave, and eventually the suits come into control and it's just never the same again. This process also seems to be happening to Google, TBH.
> “Cars” (2006), the only first-wave Pixar original that has no fans above the age of twelve
Really? I thought it was thoroughly decent. Solid performances from Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Larry the Cable Guy, and Cheech. Original story, tasteful comedy, interesting plot twists, actual character development, timeless look&feel. What more is there to want?
The article does not mention the departure of John Lasseter, who was forced out because of sexual improprieties during the Me Too movement. He was the creative force behind the glory days of Pixar.
If someone has information that he was more of a figurehead, I'd welcome it. But this seems like a pretty big omission.
Yeah, obviously one has to be careful about lamenting this stuff, but it seems pretty clear that #MeToo not only ended the careers of many successful senior creative visionaries but it probably provoked a more-cautious stance from many companies towards the mere idea of having powerful visionaries to begin with, especially if they're male. They represent potentially catastrophic single points of failure, after all - and it's not just coming from #MeToo, but having an errant tweet or even an inkling of "problematic" political beliefs could suddenly end one's career and whatever works they have in motion would be ruined.
But as a consequence of this caution, we're also seeing that Disney and Pixar and other firms are just dissipating their brand capital by putting out safe, corporative-approved and committee-driven works. Within the next 5 years we'll probably see the first movies released where most of the writing was done via LLMs. I'm going to guess that it won't end well, unless the LLMs get much better...
Hollywood has been using algorithms to evaluate new movie scripts for decades. Consumer entertainment was never really an outlet mainly for creative expression; creative expression was just instrumental for making the business viable within certain market conditions. Now that indignation has been inculcated in culture by leftist social engineers, the machinations of capitalism are adapting the products
accordingly. But the fundamental character of consumerism remains unchanged: endless variations, on themes that are favourable to incumbent financial interests, and which put the creative, revolutionary spirit into a slumber; elevator music. And LLMs are uniquely suitable, indeed.
A lot more often than not I have seen in my life (60+ years) that wonderful things are born if whole a lot of things fall into their places. I've seen many times when someone with every reason to believe that "it's all about me!" leaves the company/band/whatever to discover that "no, it was about whole team, timing, place, culture etc".
That is one of the key issues behind the current Writers Guild of America strike. Producers want to be able to use LLMs to write script rough drafts and then pay human writers a lower rate to edit those scripts.
This industrialisation of art becomes ripe for disruption. Didn’t Pixar step in originally where the industry had become tired and stale? They capitalised on the novelty of computer generated graphic animation, but it was their stories and characters that really won.
Someone else will step in soon and do the same (hopefully).
Ugh, I really hope the lesson Disney learns isn't more sequels, less original IP.
I thought it was middle of the pack for Pixar, not their worst, far from their best though.
Even worse than the quality of the movie was how they advertised it. The preview seemed so recycled - the story seemed unoriginal the characters so similar to what we've already seen before with Inside Out and Soul. We just went on a whim because its nice to have the excuse to go to the theater
Elemental is good. It's just the marketing was bad. The premise itself is generic and they didn't put the work I to the marketing to make it exciting. Despite that the actual movie is quite enjoyable.
"
In retrospect, it seems clear that “Inside Out” was when Pixar’s Silicon Valley brain trust began to peel off from the universe and float into the metaverse, borne aloft by a kind of totalizing cleverness. "
Aka disappeared up their own bum. Lost the un-self-conscious being-in-itself, and went from "Pixar making movies" to "people trying to make Pixar movies"
Their in a rough patch but they've had successes in the last 5 years. There is a conservatism in their approach, mostly targeting parents and slice of life scenarios. And some huge misfires such as treating the kid as stupid in inside up. They've had nice elements though, like Trent Reznor's music in soul and 1990's anime echos in turning red. And it's obvious that it's pulling from people's memories, so they are sincere. However, they are leaving better ideas like a jazz fantasia or a true sailor moon style fantasy on the table. Some of this restriction is not just Disney's attempts to segment but also Pixar's marketing as a known commodity. This also likely stunts any real attempts, like lightyear, to go beyond the formula, ie saddled with reference to toy story, etc.
They will also struggle to ever top the original toy story, though. Even though their are little shades of it here and there; mike and sully, finding Nemo, coco, and lightning McQueen's horror at his body failing; they are still not pulling it fully together. I would like one at that level again, but that's a rare thing.
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[ 647 ms ] story [ 2464 ms ] threadSo less involvement from the people in Emeryville?
Now I go to the movie for the "experience". Next on my list, Indiana Jones which I guess will be the last with Harrison Ford.
The non-AI Harrison Ford anyway.
I've never understood the love given to "Up". Everybody remembers the fantastic opening sequence but seems to forget that it ends with dogs flying airplanes.
As great as Toy Story 3 is, I would've put Pixar's peak at Ratatouille and Wall-E.
The flying house with balloons wasn't too unrealistic? ;)
Up tugs on a lot of heartstrings. It's front-loaded with tremendous loss, but that emotional punch isn't lost as it transforms throughout the film into Carl opening up to protect someone new.
The film is cute and full of emotion. And despite the fantasy, it's well written. It's my favorite Pixar flick by a wide margin. Ratatouille and WALL-E are fantastic, though.
but it feels like they buried that potentially great story under a bunch of efforts to make sure it came off as sufficiently "kid friendly" (e.g., dug constantly shouting squirrel, that other dog with the high pitched voice). the magic of the best pixar movies has been telling stories that kids like without having to pander to them.
They’ve always “pandered”, it’s in the job description. They do make movies for children after all. They just used to make movies with enough depth that adults could enjoy them too.
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>… Pixar's peak at Ratatouille…
The latter is a movie about a rat that drives a human around like a mech, what’s the issue with dogs flying airplanes?
I used to have a high opinion of Up, having originally seen it when it came out in theaters. It was only on a re-watch that I was shocked by how much of that opinion was based on what is essentially only 15 minutes of the total runtime. Ratatouille is fundamentally about a ratty artist overcoming his background and prejudices. Up wants to be about an old man managing to move past his grief, but the climax (and most of the movie) involves a stupid bird and a stupid kid that only detract from the experience.
The stories they tell though are massively different, and they have quite different takes on what the land of the dead is like. For the most part the similarities are mostly what naturally comes from focusing on the same holiday.
Except for one. Both of them feature a boy who wants to be a musician but grows up in a family that has a traditional family business and strongly disapproves of their kids becoming musicians.
I'm wondering if that was just a coincidence, or if "kids wants to be musician, family disapproves" is a theme from Mexican folklore or something like that that both films happened to use.
I think a really strong premise and first half can overshadow some weaknesses, including an even a bad ending.
That’s not the end of the story - that’s the start of the third act.
It actually ends grounded in reality - a return back to the world they started in, without fantastical creatures, and the boy getting his explorers scout patch back in New York City. It ends with Carl giving him a bottlecap badge which has a sentimental link to his dead wife.
A return back to reality from an unknown/mythical/magical world is basically the fundamental basics of the hero’s journey “mono-myth” (transition from the known to unknown) so purely from a structure perspective I can see why it resonates.
It's like, sure, it's OK if you like dogs flying in airplanes, but the first few minutes of the movie is the only thing that has any staying power. I'm pretty sure most people at this point who haven't watched the movie in a long time don't even remember what the rest of it was about. In contrast, I haven't seen Toy Story in 15+ years, and I can still describe to you roughly what happens act for act. Granted, I watched Toy Story as a young boy, so I'm biased.
As much as I think Wall-E was an excellent film, I consider The Incredibles to be Pixar's peak. It was a great story with a perfect balance of humor, child characters actually in peril, subtle mature themes (infidelity, "you didn't save my life; you ruined my death"), well stylized humanoid character models, a father character who isn't a deadbeat, a theme around having to hide who you are, etc. Lots of great stuff in there. Wall-E might have had a grander message and an artsier vision, but The Incredibles IMO has way more rewatch value.
Monsters Inc. was pretty great, too! For me, Pixar failed to make another film that came even close to Monsters or The Incredibles.
Today, "kids" movies are now one of the premier tentpoles of the film industry and Pixar has tried to corner the market on... abstract stories about emotions?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEQHiJVH79o
And if you go over to the anime community, the kids are explicitly liking it because of the random emotional tangents (I'm looking at you Demon Slayer).
And a lot of the reason why people liked Puss in Boots: the last wish, was because of the existential crisis the protagonist faces upon confronting his last life.
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I don't think a movie like Elemental would hit very hard after Zootopia locked down the concept near perfectly. It seems ill-timed, we need a few more years to forget Zootopia before giving another rural vs urban different people's city romance with subtle nods to racism story.
[0] http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/A/anaphora.htm
And ofc Pixar is held to a high standard. A "bad movie" for Pixar ia a "decent enough" level film if it was DreamWorks.
Wall-E, although clearly and one sidedly in favor of environmentalist or conservationist causes, still describes the problem and the solution in fantastic terms. The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels. The message you can take away from Wall-E is not a literal solution (planting plants to rejuvenate things ignores the complexity of real life ecosystems - just consider invasive species!). Instead, the message must be more abstract - something like "Care more about the environment."
The political situation in Elemental, by contrast, is barely abstract at all. There is a city, there are immigrants, and the elemental toothpaste commercial aesthetic is a thin veneer over real life racial and ethnic tensions. So any solution the movie suggests would be something that maps very closely to the real world.
Think about it. In real life, skin color doesn’t do… anything. It’s just a stupid way humans distinguish between each other.
Elemental - the two “races” can literally annihilate each other on contact. It would be like if we had humans made from matter and antimatter. “Racism” in such a world is completely justified and a matter of survival - what message does that send if you are meant to read it as a racial allegory? It makes no sense.
> The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels.
They lived on the back of a creature that was dying as a result of an infection and they had unknowingly been using the result of the infection as their power source. It's exactly the same kind of parallel and solution in fantastic terms. Stripped down these movies have a very similar storyline and message (things are broken, we can't just fix it without transforming ourselves, and some force or people will oppose that transformation).
Now, I prefer Wall-E. I think the cinematics are better. The emptiness and stillness of Earth, the serenity of space, the scene where the spacecraft docks with the Aurora and is cleaned. Films of that era and before gave you some breathing space with the spectacle without so much shit going on constantly. That said, I think if Strange World came out at the time Wall-E did instead of it then it would have been better received, I personally feel like I'm pretty tired of the style.
I do not think overt messaging was the main reason Strange World flopped (although it probably was the case for Turning Red), but rather, the general gross-ness of the character designs, along with the dull premise.
What overt messaging was in Turning Red? In any event, the reason that one flopped in theaters was that it also released simultaneously on Disney+, where AFAIK it has been very popular.
I am not sure I would take popularity on the streaming service as a sign of financial success, given something like Encanto was big in both the box offices and after the fact streaming, but who knows what the balance sheet really looks like with these big companies these days.
I think you'd have to work kinda hard to justify that reading—and while believe you that you can, I do wonder why you'd want to work so hard to make such a reading?
> Concerned parents will probably also find it strange that a Pixar movie made for small children casually throws around words like 'degenerate' and 'stoner' and talks explicitly about pads for minutes on end.
Concerned parents from the 1950s, you mean?
> but who knows what the balance sheet really looks like with these big companies these days
Agreed.
Even later on, the movie concludes with this confident thirteen year old girl declaring that she has a right to twerk, all while she hopes to end up backstage with her friends at the local boy band concert. What typically happens to underage girls backstage at concerts? I wonder.
I did very little reading into the events the story presents to get to this conclusion. Turning Red is not very subtle at all. It shouts in your face about pads and how twerking is the bomb.
>Concerned parents from the 1950s, you mean?
To the extent that any parents today care about what their kids watch, instead of shrugging while letting their toddlers gormlessly stare at a youtube video pipeline of strangely pornographic spiderman and elsa videos, they typically care about explicit violence, references to sex, and references to drugs. Turning Red has very clear cut examples of two of these things. I cannot imagine most parents being comfortable about discussing pads with their five or six year old daughters, nor thinking that the world is a better place when those daughters decide they want to start twerking as well because they saw it in the movie.
A. This “it was always political” is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to defend the placement of politics you agree with,
B. Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie. One fart joke is not a fart jokes movie.
C. The politics were never so explicitly partisan but just general themes such as the stupidity of being racist or being against teamwork - not jokes about widely-controversial modern issues.
No, though, falsely claiming something is political in a way (other than the specific political viewpoint) other things are not is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to attack politics you disagree with while avoiding the meat of the disagreement.
> Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie.
True, but irrelevant. Politics as the core is not any more common on any consistent-but-not-viewpoint-biased definition of “politics”. The common issue in complaints is status-quo bias.
> The politics were never so explicitly partisan
That’s somewhat true, in that for a long time (from the 1930s to the 1990s) the US was in an abnormally long political realignment, where the most highly salient political issues were not as clearly partisan
On the other hand there is a majority consensus that littering and waste is bad and we have a responsibility to protect the Earth from it. This is different from climate change which is another issue with little majority consensus.
It's not about presentation, but the underlying issues themselves.
How different it is today with movies which are not much more than thinly disguised moral lessons where the audience is lectured on issued of race, gender, "climate", environment, migration and more. The issues - whether real or imagined - are being portrayed as "current", "systemic" and "catastrophic", the "good" vs. "bad" divider goes straight through society where the "good" side is characterised by being "norm-critical" and in opposition to mainstream culture. Those who do not follow are portrayed as "bad" and labelled with a number of -isms and -phobias. Where earlier movies mostly portrayed "the other" - the "reds", the "filthy rich", the "criminals" - as being bad current "political" movies portray "us" as being ignorant, oppressive, wasteful, conservative "white" or "white-adjacent" bumpkins who really need to "be educated".
Yes, there are some parents for whom the issue of "the existence of gay people" is very concerning.
All of Christianity that came later (introduced by Paul) watered down this hardcore power politics story into an abstract “spiritual” story. But the reality stands for itself if you just peek beneath the surface.
"The sheepish alienation of sitting through “Inside Out” amid the static of my fellow-theatregoers’ sniffles and nose honks must have been what Data from “Star Trek” felt like all the time."
Really? I thought it was thoroughly decent. Solid performances from Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Larry the Cable Guy, and Cheech. Original story, tasteful comedy, interesting plot twists, actual character development, timeless look&feel. What more is there to want?
If someone has information that he was more of a figurehead, I'd welcome it. But this seems like a pretty big omission.
But as a consequence of this caution, we're also seeing that Disney and Pixar and other firms are just dissipating their brand capital by putting out safe, corporative-approved and committee-driven works. Within the next 5 years we'll probably see the first movies released where most of the writing was done via LLMs. I'm going to guess that it won't end well, unless the LLMs get much better...
The individual in question went on to found Skydance Animation, hardly an ended career.
The relative quality of Skydance’s single film, “Luck”, to pre/post Lasseter Pixar films is needed to know if he’s the culprit.
But who has Apple TV+?
https://movieweb.com/why-the-wga-strike-hopes-to-cause-monum...
I thought it was middle of the pack for Pixar, not their worst, far from their best though.
Even worse than the quality of the movie was how they advertised it. The preview seemed so recycled - the story seemed unoriginal the characters so similar to what we've already seen before with Inside Out and Soul. We just went on a whim because its nice to have the excuse to go to the theater
Aka disappeared up their own bum. Lost the un-self-conscious being-in-itself, and went from "Pixar making movies" to "people trying to make Pixar movies"
Now I have no idea what is happening.
They will also struggle to ever top the original toy story, though. Even though their are little shades of it here and there; mike and sully, finding Nemo, coco, and lightning McQueen's horror at his body failing; they are still not pulling it fully together. I would like one at that level again, but that's a rare thing.