I'm glad someone else has the sense to see Inside Out for what it was.
But the article just seems to reaffirm the idea that Pixar isn't what it used to be, just pushing the date to when they stopped making a lot of good movies further back.
With the exception of the "Inside Out" hot take, most of the movies OP calls out as bad were commonly viewed as such.
This feels like one guy's random opinions about Pixar movies with no overarching point besides "there were some bad ones in the past" which seems uncontroversial.
Welcome to any blog really, except that Substack, and before that Medium, somehow gained a reputation of being more worthwhile reads than someone's random wordpress blog.
It's about presentation. A random WordPress blog (or blogspot or whatever other blogging engine you prefer) has a very specific visual style that denotes "I'm not a professional, I'm just me with an opinion".
Medium and Substack visually mimic newspaper columns and give the same kind of cachet to their authors, even when it's not necessarily deserved.
I mean it could be the opinion of someone thats been writing and working in film criticism... but no, he's a "marxist" that has a book about how the problem with schools is that they ignore race/IQ "science"
Not a mention of Pixar's shorts, which I frequently like more than the movies! And they are masterpieces that established Pixar at the beginning of CG animation.
The one with Jackalope (sp?) must be one of the most touching shorts I've seen, without resorting to sentimentality or (cheap) effects. It's on YouTube, of course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOLG-BAvjz0
Disney Animation Studios rarely get a mention next to Pixar, but their 3D films are equally as good. Bolt, Tangled, Wreck-it Ralph, Big Hero 6, Zootopia...
I recently read Culture Code, about organizational culture, and it talks about Pixar quite a bit.
It is mentioned that after some failures, Disney purchased Pixar then had Pixar execs, including Ed Catmull, come to Disney to instill a culture similar to the one at Pixar. The story is told as a success, with the films you cite as examples of that.
Before the never ending sequels on the Pixar side, they actually have settled into a complementary relationship.
Pixar does the more adventurous stuff, crazier ideas, totally different kinds of plots and stories/worlds/characters, with a focus on storytelling rather than songs etc.
Whereas Disney Animation (with recent titles like Tangled, and the Frozen movies) is the 3d version of what Disney's Animation Studios always did best, take classic stories, and turn them into quasi-musicals with a modern twist, but do it in a really talented way.
In my 20s, I used to get mad about the idea that Disney just stole story ideas and made it their own, but this was too reductionist. There is immense talent involved in actually taking an old story, modernizing it, adding all the original music, creating that original new world, building scenes, dialog, all that stuff. And I appreciate it and give Disney a lot more credit nowadays. Whether it's Beauty and the Beast or the Lion King, or modern hits like Frozen and Tangled, they really add a lot in their interpretations of these stories, and make it their own.
The fact that the most words that the author can spend on Coco are "it's pretty" says it all for me. With the later rant about Pixar deliberately setting up their beats to make their audience cry, Coco _MUST_ be part of the conversation there and it's conspicuously missing.
Coco is a wonderful film and probably the chief offender of the forced crying thing the author hates. Personally, I can't even think about the damn film without welling up and that's one of the movie's strengths. "Remember Me" is a wonderful, catchy earworm of a song that just refuses to leave my thoughts years later. And it's a fucking musical.
I. HATE. MUSICALS.
But Coco works for me by perfectly contextualizing the songs with the plot of the film. It's not musical numbers for the sake of it.
So yes, for a studio that has put out a masterpiece like that, its lesser efforts should be heavily criticized.
I avoided those movies initially because I thought they would be excruciatingly "singy". As it turned out, both movies were watchable imo, but I would never watch them again. Maybe that has something to do with my general disdain for full-fledged musicals, and how the movie was marketed as that. Even though the movies weren't actually full-fledged musicals, the marketing grossed me out enough that I think I have some sort of PTSD about watching them again.
La La Land is intentionally mirroring traditional musicals with very strong nods to both Hollywood golden age and Demy. Are you sure you don’t actually like musicals?
I tried to watch Tick Tick Boom for example, but it didn't resonate with me.
Additionally to the songs, La La Land has really great cinematography and I also liked that story arc. It's more movie with songs than songs in a movie.
If you are not completely opposed to the idea, you could try Singin’ in the rain or Swing time or even The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Old musicals have some kind of charm which you don’t really find in modern ones. They are such a huge part of cinema history.
No way, I've never seen a public viewing, I just like it because it's subversive against a genre I normally dislike. It's a musical that people who hate musicals can enjoy.
And it's catchy as fuck. Everybody knows the Time Warp even if you never did the silly dance.
The Blues Brothers is one of the greatest movies of all time but it’s not a musical, it’s a movie about musicians. There are no examples of the characters communicating plot elements via lyrics they sing.
As a person who dislikes musicals, I concur that Grease is an amazing movie. The songs were relatable in an innocent way (i.e. finding summer love). The songs I hear in movies today... they aren't innocent. They talk about things like hating the person you love, and other similarly unhealthy concepts. It is a stark departure from the songs of old.
Grease’s songs are not innocent, only Sandy’s songs are, the men’s songs all about what teenage boys want out of teenage girls. Some of the lyrics are even cringeworthy now.
Floyd Collins - about the trapped cave explorer and entrepreneur (cast album is on Spotify)[0]
Sunday in the Park with George - about an artist struggling to connect his artistic vision to the world (show is on YouTube, album on Spotify)[1]
Kiss me Kate - A group of actors put on The Taming of the Shrew - imo this is one of the greatest movie musicals ever made[2]
Musical theatre is a diverse and powerful medium, there's nothing else that has quite the same bandwidth to communicate emotion and ideas simultaneously
OP talks as if it’s a trivially easy cheap cop out to make audience cry and feel good about it enough to go home happy. Dude, if a movie makes me happy cry I don’t give a rats ass what trick they used. They succeeded.
Yeah I don’t get it. I consider the few movies that made me feel a strong emotion to be my favourite ones. I thought that’s what cinema (and art in general) was about, making you feel something rather than indifference or boredom.
And it’s not like there isn’t a shitload of movies that try to make you cry and fail miserably, so I don't think there's a cheap trick.
Yeah, I think the author believes that if he recognizes the trick then it must be the case that pulling-off the trick was easy, and therefore cheap.
I went through a phase like that after discovering the TV Tropes wiki and saw all the patterns of my beloved childhood media laid bare. Then I made peace with it, and started enjoying the craft of casually hiding a Chekov’s gun in plain sight, etc.
I've seen a lot of critics complaining about using direction technique (editing, music, etc) to make audience cry, as if only the story, screenplay and acting is pure enough to be allowed to trigger these emotions.
On the other hand, no problem for triggering laughs. It's actually the reverse: you need good direction and good editing (because rhythm matters a lot) to make a joke impactful.
I've never really understood that. Is it shameful to be emotionally affected by a movie, even if you don't really like all of it?
I've seen that a lot about Spielberg movies, and more recently with J.A. Bayona (in particular with The Impossible and A Monster calls).
I admire the overall craftmanship of Pixar movies, but I don't like their over-polished high-concept approach to storytelling. The characters and story notes are like carefully weighted abstract puzzle pieces that stand perfectly in relation to each other and provide opportunities for beautifully rendered CGI set pieces, but the overall mosaic leaves no lasting impression on me.
Many of their movies seem to contain an embedded short film that stands out from the surrounding balancing exercise, as if the directors themselves had needed an escape hatch from the grinding process that produces these movies.
He seems really angry at some weird idea he has about Pixar fans looking down on stuff that's also simultaneously half their output and that he looks down on.
I'm assuming there's some kind of culture war thing happening in the background I'm not aware of which gives this some kind of warped logic but without that context it's just weird.
Glancing through his work, he suggests that identity politics is anti-collective because it's focused on the individual and not the group. I can't speak more to that, I just was interested in what the underlying politics were from the above comment, because derision towards "liberals" is usually a right wing position, but obviously there are many leftists who have beef with some definition of liberals. They can all agree to hate the Atlantic and the NYT perhaps.
This is a growing sentiment in certain "left" spaces. While I think there is something to be said for silly woke stuff, I strongly dislike this crowd. They're the type throw out slurs for no other reason than to be provocative and subversive. Reminds me a lot of alt right people.
One complicating factor in the vocabulary is how many leftists I've found use "liberals" as a shorthand for "neoliberals" and "neoliberalism" which today are mostly associated with the American right wing. (It's the label for a lot of "free market Capitalism" ideas of the last century or so, generally post-WW2. The "liberal" meaning "free" as in "free market". "Liberal" is partly the shorthand because it does seem silly to label something from WW2 as "neo"/"new".) In that usage of "liberals" it becomes a derision of "liberal Capitalism" in general and the American right wing in specific. (Basically "fiscally liberal" as opposed to something like "socially liberal", which a lot of the left prefers to use terms more like "progressivism", to distinguish. That "fiscally liberal" means basically the same thing today that the right often means by "fiscally conservative", because neoliberalism has been the mostly unchecked status quo since at least the Reagan administration, is its own lovely fractal in why language can be so hard.)
Left/right, liberal/conservative, these axes were often over-simplifying to begin with, and adding in centuries of debates between them doesn't help make the vocabulary any clearer.
> Glancing through his work, he suggests that identity politics is anti-collective because it's focused on the individual and not the group.
Which could explain why it's coming across as confusing: identity politics ignores individuality and defines people in terms of their groups. It's pro-collective, not anti.
I think one reason why Pixars "decline" is more harshly felt is because the Pixar "style" is the only type of flagship animated feature Disney puts out nowadays.
It's not that Pixar has always been good, like any company there's been ups and downs, but because Disney themselves have also gone all in on 3D animated films[0] (and none of those really come close to what Pixar puts out; even the recent flop of Elemental is still a better movie than most 3D Disney movies of the past decade), all those movies get compared to each other in a much more direct manner.
Back in the early 2000s, it was pretty straightforward; Disney did the 2D animation, Pixar the 3D animation. It means that when Pixar or Disney puts out a stinker, its easily covered by the other. A sort of trade if you will.
Disney has kinda now ended up in a bit of a slump for the past decade (likely directly the fault of the Live Action Remakes they keep doing - it feels really uncreative), so the highs and lows of Pixar are that much more apparent.
They'll be doing fine. Elemental sucked, but it doesn't seem like it's a pattern for Pixars movie creation process. Not in the way that Shrek's poop humor ended up dominating DreamWorks for over a decade or how Despicable Mes "marketability" ended up ruining Illumination.
[0]: The last blockbuster 2D animated movie was the Princess and the Frog and according to Disney it didn't make enough money to continue making them.
I wouldn't agree that Disney is in a slump at all -- and it's possibly their lack of slump that makes it easier to level shots at Pixar.
Frozen (2013) just gets in your decade window. Then there's Moana (2016) and Encanto (2021). All three have been hits with great songs, values and storytelling.
The release cycle is still a lot more staggered since Disney just interspices it with a lot more filler content (those Live Action Remakes) that the Pixar releases are somewhat meant to fall back on.
For every Frozen, there's a Tangled that doesn't make the cut in quality and that stands out when they don't have the same consistent release cycle of movies for the animated canon since it's broken up by the mostly mediocre Live Action ones.
Staggered how? They have averaged a movie a year for the last 40 years. The Disney live action movies have almost nothing to do with the release schedule of Disney Animation movies, nor have they impacted how many get made. They are completely different studios.
Their 3D movies in order are Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Tangled, (Pooh), Wreck it Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen II, Raya, Encanto, Strange Worlds. That’s 15 movies in 17 years, and Princess and the Frog makes 16.
Bolt, Tangled, Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana was an excellent run. (Disney acquired Pixar during production of Meet the Robinsons, and about 60% of the movie was remade, every movie since was produced by Pixar descendants.)
And Tangled is better than Frozen, even if it didn’t have the zeitgeist. (Tangled is the highest rated of any movie I listed on Letterboxd, followed by Big Hero 6, Moana, and Zootopia, so I’m not unique in that opinion. Not sure what the Letterboxd community has against Bolt.) Outside of Chicken Little, there’s really not a bad movie on that list (I haven’t seen Strange World yet.)
If anything, acquiring Pixar doubled their animation output. I’ll give you, that if you ignore Ralph Breaks the Internet and Frozen 2 (sequels they put a huge amount of effort into), there appears to be a creative gap from Moana in 2016, till Raya/Encanto in 2021, which happens to overlap the acceleration of live action remakes. They made 5 live action remakes in 2019, with only Frozen II against them.
If any events radically altered the trajectory of Disney Animation output, they are in order: Frozen and Ralph being such big hits that Disney pivoted to sequels, John Lasseter being removed in 2018, and Covid.
Disney Animation Studios (not Pixar) has made three movies in the last ten years that are among the highest grossing movies of all time (Frozen, Zootopia, and Frozen II).
In terms of quality, anecdotally two of my personal favorite Disney movies ever were done by them within that timespan as well (Moana and Encanto).
My impression has been that the gap between Disney Animation Studios and Pixar has drastically narrowed.
Sorry I wasn't super clear. I was replying to "the gap between Disney Animation Studios and Pixar has drastically narrowed", and commenting that the reason this happened is because from 2006 it was Pixar management in charge of Disney animation. Ed Catmull and John Lasseter brought over the lessons and management style that they had learned at Pixar and thus changed how Disney animation was run. So for instance they created a Disney "Story Trust" to provide feedback to directors in the same vein as the Pixar "Brain Trust". They also removed an oversight committee at Disney that was charged with keeping all film projects on budget, but in their view was holding back the film-making. i.e. the two studios are not as distinct and independent as it appears people are suggesting.
If you have any doubt about the 2D productions that Disney is releasing these days, I would implore you to check out their Star Wars "Visions" series.
Aside from animation, I found the new Disney release "American Born Chinese" to be a refreshing change of pace. It was produced by the makers of Shang-Chi, which I'm a huge fan of, and often put on in the background.
Visions was just Disney throwing money at a bunch of anime studios and telling them "make something cool for Star Wars, you don't have to care about canon".
It's pretty good, don't get me wrong, but it's not a Disney animated studios production.
Fair enough. What you describe definitely seems apparent in the show (a variety of anime styles, none of which really have the style a person might associate with Disney), so I'm not surprised to hear that.
The author's criticism of Up is weird to me. I watched Up when it was released. Can't say I remember it too much. But, I don't think it's fair to criticize a movie by saying that a movie is bad if you remove the best scene. One of my favorite books is The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood. 99% of the book is the musings and activities of an old lady, which are not interesting to say the least. It's not until the last page that the whole story is tied together. If you removed the last page, it wouldn't be a great book.
I don’t think it’s the same thing. The initial scene is a masterpiece but if you remove it, it would still be possible to understand the movie. And the tone and message of the first scene is very different from the rest.
I compare (negatively) to “Saving Private Ryan” which also has a masterpiece of a first scene, that also can be removed without much loss to the main plot. The difference is that on SPR the first scene set the tone and message of the movie perfectly. And if you remove it, the rest of the movie is pretty great too. You can’t say those two things about “Up”.
You're right that in plain English, "compare" is a perfectly adequate word in this context. However, the person I replied to wasn't quite satisfied with it: they felt the need to add "(negatively)". I was trying to give them a more idiomatic word / phrasing that would add the extra rhetorical emphasis they were looking for.
As the person that you replied, I confirm your perception. And I liked your suggestion (to be point I decided to explicitly thank you, rather than a simple upvote). If I were to write the same comment now, I would definitely use “contrast that to…”
I meant Up is similar to Saving Private Ryan in its structure (a long and great first scene, which is actually a positive trait of both). But, the Up is worse than SPR.
> 99% of the book is the musings and activities of an old lady, which are not interesting to say the least. It's not until the last page that the whole story is tied together. If you removed the last page, it wouldn't be a great book
I've read books/watched movies like that. They are certainly memorable, but one problem they have is they're not very re-watchable. For lack of better example I'll mention Shawshank redemption. It's a great movie nonetheless, but the reveal scene is so great that the rest of the movie by comparison feels like a slog you have to put up with to get to the big reveal. Because of that I might've watched it only 3 times in my entire life.
You can understand the plot without the first sequence, but remove it and you lose more than just 10 minutes of run time. Even changing a single shot can alter how an audience engages with a movie farther into its runtime.
One example I remember is from Jaws. Spielberg explained that changing the editing of an earlier scare (when they explore the abandoned boat) made the audience much less shocked at the first reveal of the shark later on. The change was literally the timing of a couple of shots; less than a second at most.
The first 10 minutes of Up colours the entire rest of the film.
Although it has had loads of critically acclaimed hits, I don't think Pixar was ever considered as much of a "masterpiece" factory as it was a hit factory. It's only ever a small percentage of people who go to the cinema to see masterpieces. People go to be entertained, and Pixar has been very good at that for a very long time. It also benefitted from riding a steady wave of in-house CG improvements all the way from the Luxo shorts to the point where the verisimilitude has to be dialed down so as to fit the expectations of the Disney/Pixar look.
Like the first Star Wars films, there was a gee-whiz tech factor to their early movies that compensated for some banal or hackneyed beats in their storytelling. And they can't rely on that any longer. If anything, they've ceded the eye candy aspect to the Avatar series and the eye-popping Spider-Man cartoons. I think to the extent that Pixar is in trouble, it's because they need to figure out a way to break out of their self-imposed box without losing their core identity as a studio.
I consider several Pixar movies to be “masterpieces”. The production quality is so high, the cast and voice acting are so good, and the story is able to appeal to adults and young children alike.
High art they are not, but I don’t think that “masterpiece” should be reserved only for high art. The credits in Pixar movies are filled with people who masters at their craft.
In terms of animation, I personally hold Studio Ghibli in higher regard. But they are targeting a different audience with more adult themes. And I wouldn’t hesitate to apply “masterpiece factory” to either studio. Compare either studio to DreamWorks and the difference in quality is noticeable in just about every aspect of the production.
> Studio Ghibli ... are targeting a different audience with more adult themes
Definitely for the "adult" theme part, although I'd word it differently.
While the likes of Mononoke Hime and Grave of the Fireflies should probably be handle with care (resp. violence and very heavy context) most are perfectly watchable by children (of course being mindful of what may shock or otherwise create psychological harm).
I'd argue that many of these "adult" themes are perfectly graspable by children and it's our own prejudice that we project, and that these films present them in an accessible way for children, enabling deep parent-child discussions that would help understand and structure a child and prepare them for their life to come.
I'd rather have my children watch Ghibli stuff than Disney.
To clarify, by “adult themes” I didn’t mean that they aren’t suitable for children. Just they didn’t really hold my kids’ interest.
I watched a bunch of Studio Ghibli movies with my kids when they were age 4 - 6 or so. Spirited Away, Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, and Nausicaa. The pacing is quite a bit slower, and the action more subdued than in Pixar movies and other animation targeted at kids.
My kids tended to gravitate toward Pokemon, Crayon Shin-chan, Doraemon, and other animation aimed at kids - which I don’t really have any problem with. Also Demon Slayer and One Piece - which we probably shouldn’t let them watch - but they seemed to handle it ok. And finally YouTube, which is mostly trash, but we tolerate in moderation. I would definitely be happy if they showed more interest in Ghibli movies - but it’s hard to compete with endorphin rush of YouTube.
Ghibli movies I've found are more like entering a state of mind or emotion than following a plot. I'm not sure if that's a Ghibli thing or a Japanese thing (I haven't watched much other Japanese content). We introduced Totoro when my kid was 3.5 and it was too soon (she'd cry at the end because the cat bus was going away), but that movie along with Kiki's Delivery Service, The Secret World of Arrietty, and Ponyo have since become staples in our home.
As a parent to a daughter, I do really like the strong female leads that most of their movies have.
My children have found most of the Studio Ghibli films unsettling and slightly scary. They watched them I guess when they were in the 6-10 age range and saw My Neighbour Totoro, Spirited Away, Ponyo, Howl's Moving Castle etc. They refuse to watch Studio Ghibli films these days! I'd much rather watch them than Disney but they somehow couldn't cope with them.
Lately I’ve just been looking out for movies that have a decent beginning, middle and end. Just some solid fundamentals. Never mind if they are masterpieces. Pixar is definitely consistent in that regard. Entertaining movies. Some are stellar. Almost all are competent. Only Cars 2 really irks me.
I find any definition of "masterpiece" that requires that a work be largely inaccessible to the public is rooted primarily in classism and gatekeeping.
I wouldn't say that classic 20th century drama films typically termed masterpieces are not that; however, I think that just like any other medium of art, one primary purpose of film as an art form is to entertain, and to dismiss entertainment value as plebeian or vulgar when determining what deserves the title of "masterpiece" smacks of a desire to be not merely exclusive, but exclusionary.
I hear you, and point taken. But I'm not (at least not consciously) equating excellence with elitism. I would say "The Incredibles" was both popular and a masterpiece. The "Fast" series is popular but not a masterpiece. And "Sorry to Bother You" was a masterpiece, but not popular (nor is it in my opinion inaccessible in the way that "Drive My Car" or Ursula Meier's "Home" might be, if by inaccessible you mean thematically unengaging to mainstream American audiences.) Personally, I like 'em all.
Movies like Wall-E, Finding Nemo have strong ESG themes and were acclaimed successes.
You seem more obsessed with finding any excuse to be anti-ESG rather than having a specific issue with recent Pixar films which have issues unrelated to specific themes.
The average CEO last 5years. You've listed a 15 and 20 year old movie. You don't see a difference in the quality of the storytelling in Pixar movies? You don't see Disney movies checking boxes rather than telling stories?
Simply saying ESG makes you obsessed, ...telling. People are talked down to all day at their corporate fake work job. They want a break from the HR speak in their entertainment. Its really not hard to figure out.
Personally, watch what every you want. But every criticism of Disney the last 5 years is meet with ism's. Disney has been making bad movies for 5 years. Bad stories, bad special effects, their treatment of talent and bad leadership.
I think the problem is not that putting """woke""" messages in movies ruins them, I don't think that's remotely the case, nor that people who care about the stuff people term """woke""" inherently can't write good stories, I think it's that when the people making movies don't have any good ideas, any vision, anything they feel confident the movie can stand on its own merit with, they slap such messages on the front and hope that'll make it above criticism and/or meaningful in some way.
Maybe I don’t know what you mean by ESG messaging I’d assume it’s related to some environmental stuff and/or diversity. Strong stories just work - Wall-E was excellent with a back drop of its environmental messaging and non Disney into the spider verse / across the spiderverse are excellent movies with diversity and a great stories.
There are plenty of series and movies that use more-contemporary cultural values to mask bad-storytelling. I really don't see how Pixar is at fault for this, however. How is this relevant to the failures of The Good Dinosaur and Elemental, for example?
I was surprised to see Cars listed as one of the ones that people generally hate. I’m a little biased because my son absolutely adored that movie, and I have fond memories of him taking his Lightning McQueen toy around with him everywhere. But over many repeated watchings both my wife and I agreed it was a quality production.
It has a good cast with Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt, Paul Newman, and even Larry the Cable Guy puts in a pretty decent performance. The minor characters are charming, too (including George Carlin and Cheech Marin).
The story is fairly timeless and reminiscent of Doc Hollywood. I don’t know how they manage to make it work so well with anthropomorphic cars, but somehow they do. The main character has a good arc, and there’s a good amount of nostalgia. I don’t think I ever cried, but I definitely felt something - which is more than I can say for the Cars sequels.
Would I go and watch it now without kids? No. But Pixar put out a movie that entertained kids and adults alike. Earned $462 million at the box office. Made an absolute killing in merchandise sales (and I thought the toys were pretty high quality, especially the die cast Tomica cars here in Japan). I have a lot of respect for what they were able to do with Cars. Not so much for the sequels, though.
They also call Monsters University a mediocre sequel, but I tend to prefer it over Monsters Inc. Pretty much for the same reasons as Cars - good cast, timeless story reminiscent of Revenge of the Nerds, and my kids loved it.
Never watched Monsters Univ. but Monsters Inc. left me somehow speechless. There's a subtle yet relentless crescendo in that screenplay that robbed my brain until the last second.
Give it a watch! I think University is very slightly more enjoyable to watch, possibly because the universe is already established from the first movie so it can move a little faster. But yeah, both are absolutely stellar films.
I'm astonished by this opinion, I think Monsters Inc. is a wildly better movie. University is fine but frankly nothing special - although the plot points involving Mike realizing he's just not scary, and the ultimate resolution where he realizes he makes an awesome director/manager for Sulley, is a pretty good moral.
Haha! It's been a while since I've seen either. My recollection is University was just nonstop good jokes, while Inc rolls a bit slower. I certainly wouldn't argue with someone who prefers Inc, though! Both are fantastic :)
In the same way the author says that people would hate Up without the first ten minutes, I think a lot more people would enjoy Cars if the first ten minutes were removed. The opening is really heavy on the advertising and low on the story beats and themes compared to the rest of the movie.
Cars is often hated because kids absolutely adored it, Disney is wringing as much profit out of that IP as possible, and I think the part of that movie that is for adults is not as upfront and center as it is for Pixar's previous work.
The obvious message of the movie "winning isn't everything" seems like childish moral pablum. But like many Pixar films of that era, the principal message is a more adult idea: that satisfaction in life is not attained by traditional metrics of success. Competition has its place but the rich experiences in life are not necessarily where the spotlight is. Maybe that too seems like a "well duh" lesson for kids but man there's a lot of adults who don't get that out there.
yes i was consfused as well as i read more and more of that endless rant.
but it turns out for me the subject itself was interesting food for thought. not the article
Sure, they have not been a masterpiece factory for almost two decades now. However they were certainly a masterpiece factory at one point, that point being the first decade of the studio's life.
During that time they were certainly a masterpiece factory. From 1995 with their first film Toy Story, to 2004 with the release of The Incredibles, that resulted in consistently great films for 9 years. Their record held for 11 years until Cars was released in 2006.
I believe no other studio has had similar performance. I remember around early 2000's news of Hollywood studios in panic because investors started asking other studios why it was considered business as usual, a given, that for every successful film a studio released there would be flops too. So like VC investing, the pay off for the eventual success had to be enough to offset those films that flopped and lost money.
But then came Pixar and suddenly a studio proved you didn't have to have flops, every film they made in their first decade was a resounding success. They blew the conventional logic of Hollywood economics out of the window.
So I guess I disagree with the title, Pixar was most certainly a masterpiece factory in its first decade.
Reading deBoer's article I can't say I agree or disagree about the recent state of Pixar, I grew up with Pixar films and their first decade coincided with my childhood and early teenage years, so when I think to myself "yeah Pixar's recent work doesn't touch that early magic" I can't really tell is that my bias coming through?
Do they? They are from Japan, not Hollywood. Very different business culture. And while they are successful and beloved, compared to Pixar they only made small money. They only have one movie who made comparable money to a Pixar movies, which was Spirited Away in 2002/2003, and it "only" made as much as Toy Story in 1995, and a bit more than "A Bug's Life" in 1998.
So even if investors in Hollywood knew about Ghibli around that time, they probably didn't consider it as a relevant investment.
It was a masterpieces factory until they sold to Disney and the people in charge of the masterpieces moved to revitalise the animation part of Disney. Everyone knows it but you won’t read it in an American newspaper because of the fall from grace of said talents.
Edit: While I enjoy the usual downvotes, I find it hilarious to read all these articles about Pixar not mentioning Lasseter and Bird despite them clearly being a huge part of Pixar initial success with Lasseter being part of why Pixar mostly produced good movies. Disney Animation started making good movies again (Zootopia, Frozen) once he moved there. It's clear that the quality control suffered once he started splitting his time more and Disney had more influence.
I loved Cars 1 (theme: It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice) and Cars 3 (a time comes when you need to step aside, make peace with it, use it). I don't understand what went wrong with Cars 2 (theme: Idk, some short story expanded by chatGPT ;) to a long story) but I find it a very bad movie, really unwatchable almost.
Cars 1 was a cute fish out of water movie where a self-centered braggart is humbled and finds true friendship and how to be a better person. Cars 2 is a kids movie full of gunplay and violence that opens with a torture scene, progresses towards murder, and finishes with the protagonists escape a death trap to prevent mass murder for profit. I mean, I don't know what anyone was thinking with this one.
Yeah man that torture scene, really, wtf. Since it happens off-screen my kids probably didn't really get it, but it's just... crazy. Imagine this conversation:
- What's happening dad?
* Oh, they are forcing this car to keep driving until, until ... yeah until he confesses something.
- Why?
* Well, if they make that car uncomfortable enough, like, when he almost dies, he will confess to anything.
- So it's useless?
* Yeah torture is useless, barbaric, something I hope you will just never come across in any shape or form in your life. It's a thing done by genuinely evil or very mislead people.
- Jeez, that's quite something dad.
* Yup, enjoy the rest of the movie matey. Let's hope they won't rape Sally next.
My son loved Cars, so we ended up getting him Cars 2. When he (probably about 4 at the time) saw cars being tortured in Cars 2, he got so upset that he started screaming and punching the TV screen. We turned it off immediately because it was just too intense for him (found out later that he had autism). He didn't end up watching Cars 2 until he was about 10.
He still often watches the first and third movie, but rarely the second.
I have a complicated relationship with Cars 2. I'm southern, so Mater as a character represents a lot of stereotypes for better and for worse. They went over-the-top with his "stupid" moments so that he could have an internal character reckoning about tactfulness, while also being the hero of the movie. If they had just made him more normal, he wouldn't have had to be so shamed, and it's the shame aspect that made me feel weird. I just feel like the weakest part of the plot was the fake gasoline conspiracy. I haven't seen Cars 3 yet but my friends have told me "it's the sequel Cars deserved," and I'm hoping they're right.
Cars 1 was good. Cars 2 was absolutely terrible. Cars 3 was very good. Cars 2 suffered when Paul Neumann died, since the relationship between him and Owen Wilson was the heart of what Cars was about. But Cars 3 made it about his passing, and what he left behind, in a really moving way.
After 2006 they were still knocking out an extremely high rate of absolutely impressive films:
Wall-E -- if you don't love this film you are possibly dead inside. It's not only absolutely beautiful and emotionally communicative, it's a deeply clever pastiche.
Up, as observed below.
Toy Story 3 came out after Up. And it is a work of acutely well-observed cinema. A staggeringly good film that should have won the Best Picture Oscar. [0]
Brave (2012) is critically neglected, too -- that is a beautiful, subtle, yes quite elusive film, despite what the article says.
And then there are films I have not seen yet but I am told are clever, inventive and beautiful -- Coco, Inside Out, Soul.
They are by any measure still a masterpiece factory. This article is lazy, toxic and cynical.
[0] edit: when I say this, I say it in the sense that surely everyone knows now that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial should have won Best Picture, not Gandhi. Even Richard Attenborough thought this.
That’s a movie where the message really did change my life. I used to think a good life was one without sadness, and now I know it’s part of life, and you have to learn to cope with it. A simple insight, maybe I had always known it, but the movie reinforced it. No happiness without sadness!
I was visiting with a therapist at the time and they were encouraging everyone to watch it if they could. It touched on a number of intrinsic but commonly overlooked things that most people never think about, but also went pretty deep into our current understanding of the mind in some parts.
I cringed at Inside Out. Movies where they have to explain and explain and explain all the rules of a made up world are not my thing. It’s all so contrived and that creates a distance emotionally for me. I would much rather have preferred an actual movie about teenage emotions without all the exposition necessitated by the contrived world.
Soul isn't on the same level of Coco. Coco is a clear and heartfelt message with a (mostly) beautiful backdrop. Soul is a consistently ugly meandering story with all sorts of strange crypto Gnostic and pro life themes that just confuses.
I don't know why is this downvoted, I thought that the general consensus was that Soul is not even close to Coco? Coco is one of the best cartoon in this millennia[0], while Soul is not.
[0] see for example the IMBD toplist : https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?num_votes=200000,&genres=... Coco is 12-15, on 8.4, while Soul is 29-33 on 8.0. (Okay, I tweaked the number of votes value, until the ranking matched my personal toplist. Lower numbers cause a lot of not that good shows to occupy the top, and higher numbers filter out a lot of really good shows.)
Though if you watch Coco I think you should also watch Book of Life. Book of Life got somewhat ignored in the box office because it wasn't Pixar, but of the two had far more Mexican/Mexican-American creative talent involved behind the scenes (not that I'm accusing Pixar of appropriation, but there are some questions to be had there if you are feeling cynical), tells the more complete cultural story, and I think is very much the better movie.
I never really got the love for Toy Story 3, especially from parents. The first time we saw it, we thought it was unnecessarily dark and also designed to cause children to have separation anxiety from disposing of old toys.
It is surely not a lightweight film with the same kind of peril as the first movie -- it's perhaps like a later book a series might be aimed at a slightly older reader. Not sure I'd show it to the youngest kids.
IMO, Toy Story 3 was a perfect movie for the people who saw Toy Story 1 as a child and were now young adults, having recently left home and moved away. The heart of that movie is in the parents having to let Andy go. They tell the story through the Toys, but flip it over to the parents in a few small scenes.
I've never been so compelled to call my parents than after watching Toy Story 3.
I saw Toy Story 3 with a group of longtime friends when it came out in the summer between high school and college. Definitely some wet eyes in the group during those final scenes. I don't think I could have chosen a more appropriate time for that movie if I tried.
I went to see it with my mom. I had just recently returned from living out of the country for a couple years and I was only home for a month before leaving again to school in another state. Definitely an emotional ending for us both.
Dark? Separation anxiety? What age are we talking here?
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
Look at all the "adult" men today, especially in America for some reason, whose desks are littered with action figures and whose offices contain a shrine to comic book superheros and Star Wars/Trek that would put the Sistine Chapel to shame. (Or women who seem to live in some alternate universe about their biological clocks, indulging infantile behaviors and attitudes, perhaps only to realize sometime in middle age the consequences, if not the cause, of their predicament.)
These are people who do not take their lives seriously. Someone clearly never told them that they're not 10 years old anymore.
One of the most valuable lessons you can teach a child is the ability to suffer. All who live suffer, and developing the correct attitude and orientation toward suffering is important lest you become soft and weak. Those who don't learn, those who flee from the suffering that the pursuit of the good often entails, suffer all the more and become depressed, miserable, and mediocre. A story in which the main character loses his toys can be a very mild, age-appropriate, narrative way of presenting the subject matter of sacrifice or loss. Growing up means parting ways with childish ways for the sake of something greater: adulthood. We do the same thing with pets. The death of a pet fish is a way of introducing a child to the reality of death in a way that's appropriate for the child's level of maturity. Maturation can be unpleasant, even painful, as the childhood attitudes and attachments and their familiarity are loosened. Film can also be cathartic in this respect.
(This is not an endorsement of Pixar or Toy Story, btw, only a general response to an apparent presupposition. Call it a rant, if you want. I vaguely remember watching the first Toy Story on TV, but I do not recall the ending and have only a vague recollection of the plot. For all I know, Toy Story may enable unhealthy dispositions.)
You know what's so great about adulthood? You can live it as you wish if you are not harming others, you might not have unlimited freedom due to all responsibilities you are now under but for the most part, it's your choice, it's your path. If one wants to have action figures, or read comics, or whatever their heart's desire: you may, it's your life, it's your adulthood.
Trying to paint adulthood as some kind of suffering we have to endure, we have to be serious, we have to be whatever you think one needs to be as an adult is... Just sad.
Life is best lived when you can have fun, love, and a sense of accomplishment, some people have that by doing research and pursuing great new discoveries, some by starting businesses and products they envision, and some others find other ways to fulfill the yearning for living.
Don't be a sad, serious adult, trying to tell other adults how to live their lives. It's a waste of your life, go be fulfilled without having to project your insecurities unto others.
Disclaimer: I own no action figures and have no interest in comics, so no direct offense taken, just feel that this seriousness is exactly the pressure that harms so many people who don't feel they fit the mold you are trying to put everyone in.
Life without action figures and comic books isn't supposed to be suffering, it's supposed to be a realization that such things are childish for a reason. Adults deal with responsibility, and have their own joys that children can't share.
> Life without action figures and comic books isn't supposed to be suffering, it's supposed to be a realization that such things are childish for a reason.
And the reason is that you personally want to be superior to others, and the best you can come up with is insulting their hobbies and taste.
It exists because you want to feel good by looking down to others, and this is the best you can come up with. I don't know where does it came from. The church, probably? Does it matter, tho?
edit: you are bullying people for their hobbies and taste, it is bad, please stop.
Yes, and the audience mainly consisted of young adults. Now that this is settled, I think you should stop insulting people because of their hobbies and taste.
If you'd explain why such things are childish we can have a conversation about it, just calling things names to evoke certain aversion based on some black-and-white worldview that categorises them in "correct" and "wrong" is anti-intellectual, and so certainly childish.
I can try and explain it. The definition is not going to rely on any kind of hard values or studies, because it is a soft cultural term used for name calling.
Passions that are seen as childish usually tend to lack any sort of practical utility. Action figures and games are ultimately just timewasters. Kids learning to build stuff with woodworking tools would seem less childish because that is a useful skill compared to building things out of legos. Often, a skill that would otherwise be practical becomes childish when it is simplified to be impractical, and thus, easier for kids to learn.
Even in the world of fiction and literature, which can easily be argued to be a timewaster regardless of quality, the stuff that is childish is also generally seen as overly simplified. Explicitly this is done by ratings boards that don't let certain content be present in kid's movies and books. Implicitly, writers and directors can and do simplify and dumb down their work when creating something made for children. It is possible for someone making a work for children not to rely so much on simplification, but the reality is that this happens far less often then proponents of the "Young Adult" genre would suggest. Just go look at the shit you find in a bookstore if you think I'm wrong.
I wouldn't call being anti-intellectual childish by this definition, though, because there is a practical value in realizing that intellectuals can say incorrect things at any time.
> Action figures and games are ultimately just timewasters. Kids learning to build stuff with woodworking tools would seem less childish because that is a useful skill compared to building things out of legos.
As a grown-ass adult, I'm both into building things out of wood and of building plastic model kits.
Either is, on paper, a foolish uneconomic conceit. I can spend hours turning a wooden bowl, making a small table, or making shop furniture; but I can buy the items for cheaper than what I could sell my time for.
Doing a good job of building and painting the plastic figure can be as difficult as turning the bowl. And if someone is particularly adept at either making the action figures or turning the wooden bowls, they can eke out a comfortable living from that alone.
For me, either activity is restful and produces objects that I like having around.
I have a different reading of GP. It’s not that being an adult involves pain, but that growing up almost certainly involves pain; changes, uncertainty, giving up stuff, all of this causes pain.
And I certainly agree that people seem to be afraid of growing up. Last time I met with my friends from college for a trip, I enjoyed the first few days, yet I became unnerved by the idea that they seem frozen in time. And I don’t think I’m being judgmental of they having a good time, because they didn’t seemed to be having a good time. Most of the talks were about them having problems to keep doing the same things as 15 years ago, dealing with the consequence of trying to do the same things and overall misery about the fact that they are not in their 20s anymore. I mean and don’t say that they need to grow up, have kids and “act like adults” but they definitely seemed to just refuse change. If this is what people mean when they talk about the infantilism in current generation, I agree with them and also find it worrisome.
> Look at all the "adult" men today, especially in America for some reason, whose desks are littered with action figures and whose offices contain a shrine to comic book superheros and Star Wars/Trek that would put the Sistine Chapel to shame. ...
> These are people who do not take their lives seriously. Someone clearly never told them that they're not 10 years old anymore.
Growing up / moving / progressing / changing is important. But a fear of being childish is not the same thing-- indeed it's something more that was a feature of my childhood than my adulthood.
When important stuff is going down, I'll buckle up. Even in other times, I'll face big issues and think and consider. I will mentally temper myself into someone who understands more things and is a broader person. I will have adult conversations. I will-- reluctantly-- confront the ephemerality of so many things in life.
And I will still come back and play with toys and enjoy video games.
I have absolutely no idea why you were downvoted for this, unless it was just too on the nose. It might be a pointed remark but it's not an unusual one.
Adults have always quite enjoyed childish things in moderation; there's no harm in enjoying something for the sheer childlike joy of it. And there's value in retaining feel for a childlike approach to thinking; naïvete is a useful filter.
But it is impossible to ignore the recent mass infantilisation of media generally, and the amount of self-justification that goes into it. The MCU is just one example of it. Grown men arguing vociferously that childhoods are betrayed when the Little Mermaid is not a white girl is another consequence of it.
I think you're reading their intent WAY too kindly, especially when you see them in essence say "stop having fun, life is suffering, & also women should be making babies instead of having fun." (see their part on bio-clock and maybe look at how they switch wording from childish for men, to infantile for women...).
They're attacking people for trying to find a little joy in their short lives on this rock.
And maybe there's more a percentage of "childish things" enjoyed now.
But when you can't do the things you were told you'd be able to as an adult (get a good paying job, go on holidays, own a home, settle down with some stability), is it any wonder there's some regression?
No. You can enjoy yourself, god knows we have the good life compared to 200 years ago. But joy doesn’t actually satisfy you on a deep level, and it is a childish thing to pursue.
Doing really hard and responsible stuff doesn’t make you happy. I have two children, trust me, it would be way easier and happier to lie on a beach and drink cocktails all day, and I could actually do it from past successes.
Is that really worthwhile though? Does that add meaning to my life? How many happy moments will I ultimately have from these, and will I look back and be happy I spent my life drinking cocktails? And it’s not just cocktails, it’s all the infantile pleasured that we can indulge in, from Star Wars collectibles to activist politics.
These things just won’t fill you up ultimately. And so few people “get this” these days. It’s delusional and it’s childish, and it’s reinforced by the current capitalism and leadership. It’s the wrong path. And 30-40 years from now many many people will realise and will have extremely depressed retirements.
If we’re talking about things that make life worth living versus empty calories, then might as well dump all movies, shows, paintings, books, and music alongside those cocktails.
Otherwise, consider that maybe op just doesn’t understand comic books and animation as mediums, and has some weird hangups about them. (Their loss?)
> And maybe there's more a percentage of "childish things" enjoyed now
At some point we have to adjust the scales and say that since so many adults are enjoying "childish" activities and media that those things are just for adults now, and maybe always have been if there wasn't so much shame around it. Adults enjoy Bluey more than their kids do. Craig of The Creek and Gumball are some of my friend's favorites. Ted Lasso took all the formulas from children's media but put them in adult situations and it won like every award. Marvel is now more a hit with adults than kids.
If I see someone with a little shrine to kids movies, I think, "I have different tastes than this person." If I see someone write a comment like this, extrapolating that to some sort of general societal ill wherein children don't adequately suffer, I think, "this person might be very difficult to get along with."
C. S. Lewis: “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
> Look at all the "adult" men today, especially in America for some reason, whose desks are littered with action figures and whose offices contain a shrine to comic book superheros and Star Wars/Trek that would put the Sistine Chapel to shame.
Eh. I've adulted plenty, sir. I've started companies, I'm the father of 3 boys, and now I run a program at a nonprofit and I'm responsible for the safety and well-being of a lot of youth.
But I still like watching Mobile Suit Gundam, building plastic models, and playing SNES games on my MiSTer. And that's OK: maybe you don't find meaning in it and maybe you view it as childish. But I find enjoyment in these simple things and don't need to eviscerate them to prove how grown up I am.
(And now and then, my boys catch enthusiasm for these things, and we can experience them together which is really awesome, too).
In my interpretation they cure the separation anxiety by making sure the toys go to a good home at the end. It's a lot easier to get rid of something when you directly know and can see someone enjoying it. It means a lot to me when I see my friend wearing my old clothes for example.
Pixar is a blockbuster churning powerhouse with a very specific style. Granted the last 5 years the pandemic, writers’ strike, and the PC movements affect the process and the outcome. Also the tricky balance at executive level to try to appeal to a broader audience and be more inclusive and take fewer risks etc etc etc…
Whenever I think of Pixar, honestly, I think HQ graphics, storytelling which is imaginative and new — Finding Nemo, Monster’s Inc, Wall-E, Cars, Toy Story 2, Inside Out, Incredibles, and Soul… all these my favorites and I love Partyssaurus Rex!!
I think it's just as easy to see it as evidence that Pixar is too large -- trying to focus on too many things.
But the reality is that most creative endeavours peter out a bit, because all long-lived creative endeavours exist in the context of nostalgia for their halcyon days. It's impossible for everyone to unsee what went before.
And all creative endeavours eventually stray somewhat from self-reflection towards navel-gazing. (Like the Vision Pro, which is so completely a product of the totality of Apple culture that it is basically white cider, when what everyone is really keen to see is a very good scrumpy.)
Cars was pre-Disney and one of John Lasseter's pet projects (some say being the original idea before Toy Story even).
John Lasseter in general is an interesting thread to pull there at that point because there are many competing narratives. When Disney bought Pixar Lasseter moved in charge of all of Disney animation. So there are the narratives that Pixar didn't see a noticeable change because the boss was still the boss and the boss was still reporting directly to the C-Suite, even if the C-Suite changed dramatically. There are also the narratives that because Lasseter originated at Disney Feature Animation and may have felt that Pixar was always the "mistress" and DFA the "wife" that Lasseter "sabotaged" some of Pixar's efforts in favor of the marquee brand, the historic brand, DFA.
(There's some evidence for the "sabotage" narrative: after the expense of The Princess and the Frog failed to impress the C-Suite and DFA turned to primarily 3D animation DFA was encouraged to compete with Pixar, built a very different renderer and something of a different tech stack in general. It seems easy to argue that DFA's tech quickly got superior to Pixar's. There are environment and crowd shots in Wreck-It-Ralph and Big Hero 6 that Pixar still seems to struggle to match years later. Personally, I thought it most noticeable in Soul where most of the wide establishing shots consist of "empty clouds" and its version of New Orleans feels both empty and claustrophobic. At nearly the same time Soul released to Disney+ DFA released a lovely short of a digital New Orleans with gorgeous establishing shots and crowd work and it felt almost a direct flex on Soul and exactly what Soul was lacking in its characterization of New Orleans. [This was Us Again, which was theatrically attached to Raya, as much as theatrical attachment of shorts mattered in that strange year.])
It's probably one of those cases where both narratives are "true" in their ways. Pixar never really saw a different boss and seemed to continue down a lot of the same path, including two Cars sequels because Lasseter loved Cars. Lasseter likely did see the competition with DFA as a part of Pixar's success pre-buyout, so continued it hoping it would keep Pixar hungry and innovating. Lasseter seemed to try to genuinely juggle obligations to both DFA and Pixar
(The "mistress" versus "wife" analogy being an especially cruel one, but seemingly quite appropriate, for me to pick because the end of the thread was that Lasseter was eventually fired from Disney for being a sex pest; though don't feel too bad about how "canceled" Disney tried to make him because he still heads an animation company. Ironically one again with weird Apple connections because Apple TV+ has been buying most of their streaming rights. [The goofy Luck was the first notable one from that company.])
(Further aside: I also don't think A Bug's Life has aged as well as some think it has. It had great quality compared to its competition at the time, but outside of that context, it's "fine" and hasn't aged well. I think that is also evidence that maybe Pixar was "never" a masterpiece factory, not even pre-Disney buyout.)
> But then came Pixar and suddenly a studio proved you didn't have to have flops, every film they made in their first decade was a resounding success. They blew the conventional logic of Hollywood economics out of the window.
I think this is the key point that a lot of people nowadays are forgetting.
Part of why Star Wars was such a phenomenon is that there were three films in a row that were all good. This was so rare (even into the early 90s) that there was even the "movie trilogies as bar charts meme" [0].
Then Pixar came along and it was hit after hit after hit. Even for movies that WEREN'T sequels and it kind of blew everyone's minds.
I would argue Marvel went one better and put out 10+ movies in a row that were also, at a minimum, fun and good movies. I remember saying to someone in the early 2010s "what a cool time for movie making that there are just strings of great movies". What's even more amazing to me is that Kevin Feige took over Marvel studios when he was 34!
Which in turn leads me to believe that maybe the "small studio, dedicated people, mostly young but fanatical about the material" is how you kick off the series and then try as hard as you can to keep the big corporate interests run by older folks away.
Was nodding along until you brought up Marvel, I’ll never understand how so many people like them. I can’t get past how incredibly cheesy and overly dramatic they are.
The first few are quite enjoyable flicks. I watched few randomly but it quickly became boring. They quickly became copy and paste with bit of a different paint movies.
Was Logan Marvel Studios, though, or Fox? (I know I could easily look this up, I'm just making conversation).
In the 00s I really liked the Marvel movies. Then came Marvel Studios to ruin everything. But even in the beginning, the first couple of films were really good: Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. But once they started to expand the "MCU" I quickly lost interest in the films. I like character driven stories that focus on the person behind the power. Batman is interesting because of Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is interesting because of Peter Parker etc. When you start doing these big mash-ups and team stories, like Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers, you lose focus on the individuals and it becomes lots of long, drawn-out & boring action sequences.
But if I remember correctly, Fox held the film rights to the X-Men property. So when Marvel Studios got off the ground, they did everything but X-Men. I don't know if that ever changed.
In any case, I agree. Logan was really good. And it was really good, in my opinion, because it was character-driven and not just 13 hours of drawn out, boring as hell, CGI "porn" action sequences. And I figure it was like that because it wasn't made by Marvel Studio.
To the best of my knowledge the X-Men films made before Disney acquired the X-Men rights in 2019 (along with the rest of Fox) were made in partnership with Marvel Entertainment (the publishing and licensing company) and not Marvel Studios (the Disney "cinematic universe" subsidiary).
> But if I remember correctly, Fox held the film rights to the X-Men property. So when Marvel Studios got off the ground, they did everything but X-Men. I don't know if that ever changed.
Early on they were planning to adapt Inhumans as their replacement for Mutants, but it flopped badly when they finally got around to making something focused exclusively on them (as opposed to when they were just a part of the Agents of SHIELD plots).
It's a ton of action, high quality CGI, good acting, and a host of "source material" which means the MCU movies/series don't have to invest valuable time to boring worldbuilding - the material is the world.
In my opinion a lot of comic book worlds are quite ludicrous and lazy.
A man with the power of... ants. Spider man. A man that wears tight underwear on the outside of his pants... A man that pretends he is a bat.
Compare this with backstories from Japanese manga which clearly some are targeted at more adult levels of intelligence I'm flabbergasted a hollywood exec would decide to pour millions of dollars into some backstory aimed at children from the 1940s.
I'm fairly certain the reason is Marvel is Disney and they are pandering to a wide audience that includes children, because it's much more profitable to take the whole family for their tickets than just the adults.
Marvel was aimed at teenagers and twentysomethings of the '60s, actually, facing fairly complex moral challenges. Their practical motto was "superheroes with superproblems". And most of the cinematic material actually leverages storyarcs published in the '80s, when the industry chased grown-ups (at that time Batman gets called a "fascist" and actually kills the Joker, SpiderMan is involved in dark assassinations and then gets married, Ant-Man abuses his wife, etc etc).
> Compare this with backstories from Japanese manga which clearly some are targeted at more adult levels of intelligence I'm flabbergasted a hollywood exec would decide to pour millions of dollars into some backstory aimed at children from the 1940s.
They know their audience of wannabe eternal children, and so they invest for the only reason they ever do: a fat return on that investment.
I'd also point out that a HUGE amount of anime, manga and ln content is beyond cheesy, it's just cheesy in a different way.
There are a ton of good Marvel movies. It’s suffered from the fate all franchises do where they run out of ideas and the original writers are replaced by hacks, so it goes to shit. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was good, but it will probably be the exception.
Also Harry Potter—8 movies in a row that were, at their worst, merely good. I was amazed they pulled that off, given as you point out, how many series are utterly terribly by the 3rd title (anybody see Jurassic Park 3?).
It also helps that Harry Potter is really a single story divided into 7 books/8 movies. Jurassic Park was a story told in a single book that was later expanded because it was profitable.
Didn’t cars end up making the most money despite the poor ratings? They were able to cash in on merchandise sales too. I think once they did cars they realized (their definition of) quality didn’t matter as much as broad market appeal.
I wonder what I would have thought if I watched it at 4.
I saw Cars in the least favorable way possible, so my hatred for that movie should be entirely understandable, but it is still a fun story to tell: It was the height of "Wii Mania" and my brother desperately wanted a Wii. (We were both in college at the time, for age context.) Being a good older sibling I agreed to help line stand in the local Wal-Mart's crazy rule-filled queue to buy one as soon as the truck pulled up with fresh stock the next morning.
It's one of those worst kinds of "sleepover" situations where you are trapped inside a Wal-Mart with underpaid retail workers who obviously don't want to be there that late/early either so they give you a lot of rules and restrictions and marching orders in part as much to keep themselves entertained as to keep things "orderly". That's part of why we needed two of us to keep a single spot in line, because they were trying to exhaust people and hope they leave.
One of the other most exhausting things about it, and I still mostly think it was intentionally a torture decision, was that near the place where the line spent most of its hours over night there in that Wal-Mart was a TV with the volume on. That TV was left in an endless loop of the movie Cars. Every time it ended it went right back to the beginning of the movie.
(When the fresh members of Wal-Mart's morning shift finally arrived we eventually did convince one of them to change movies on that TV and turn the volume down, to cheers among us. I still believe it mostly proved it was always possible, the late shift just hated us.)
Cars will always be associated for me with late night exhaustion and torture. I feel for all the parents that got versions of that from well-meaning kids rather than spiteful retail employees retaliating at crazy customers.
Right, I meant to suggest there might be some "culture" bleed. Another commenter suggested it had more to do with key Pixar figures leaving for Disney, at which point Disney's own offerings improved and Pixar's suffered.
I'm not very good at articulating "feelings" so bear with me: Early Pixar movies (to me) are timeless, positive, almost fairy-tale like. They're centrist, middle-of-the-road films that don't offend or validate anyone, just faithfully follow the Hero's Journey as they try to resolve some issue in the ideal world where we're all in this together. Toy Story is the best example-- literally every single toy could not be more different, but the entire point of the movie is about all of them finding ways to leverage their differences to advance the journey for all of them, not exploiting their shortcomings to hold everyone else back. Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, all are the same pattern. Pixar's money printer used to be endless asset-swaps of "Diversity: The Movie" (the secret to Sesame Street as well), and it was a beautiful thing before the concept was perverted by the same children who grew up watching these movies.
I don't have kids' show equivalents to name from AppleTV, but I do get the same feeling ("Diversity: The Show") from their regular shows. Ted Lasso is the obvious frontrunner. For All Mankind, Invasion, Foundation (caveat: I was really high when I watched this one). All of these beautifully weave together the themes of diversity and unity into a shared journey.
At some point in the 2000s Pixar shifted from making movies for everyone to making movies for certain demographics, or people with certain issues in their life. Moving, strained relationship with parent, a purpose in life etc. Not every movie resonates with everyone, but almost every movie has its defenders. Maybe Brave doesn’t work for you if you and your mom don’t have trouble. Maybe Soul doesn’t work for you if aren’t a bit down.
They are also perfectly ok making simpler movies like Luca, that aren’t trying to be some sort of epic treaties.
What Freddie is getting wrong here is projecting his ranking onto everyone else, even when he is calling out the critics as being the wrong audience for the movies. A lot of the movies aren’t made for critics, but because the director or storyteller has something really personal to say to a subset of society.
Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur (which I’m not sure I’ve even ever finished) are their only real true misfires. A lot of their whelming movies (Onward, Lightyear) feel that way because they feel like a waste of premise and opportunity more than actually bringing bad.
This comment hits the head on my biggest criticism of this article, where because a given movie doesn't resonate with him, it's therefore terrible. For me, Onward is one of Pixar's best and made me rethink how I was interacting with my brother now that we're both adults.
I think this quote from the author sums this up:
> It’s also great because it affirms my own views on human life, as all great art does.
The movies don't fit his worldview and doesn't resonate with his past struggles and are therefore terrible.
A similar example, not from Pixar, would be I watched Big Fish with an ex and she couldn't finish it do to her complicated past with her dad, which I didn't have with my own dad. Good movies need not appeal to everyone and I think it would be a loss if we don't support Pixar in making movies that don't.
I agree several of their movies ARE masterpieces. I think the problem is when they tried to get too preachy and sacrificed the "soul" of the plot to the message you're supposed to get out of the movie. Wall-E was a good movie, but it feels preachy. Incredible 2 was a nightmare because all it did was preach. I haven't seen most of the newer ones. Ratatouille came out post-Cars, and I feel like Ratatouille does one of the best jobs balancing the message with the plot, and giving you an aesthetic experience you will not forget: perceiving the world from the point of view of a rodent. Ratatouille genuinely changed my life. And yeah even if you grew up with Pixar, you can watch those movies again and they're still solid, soulful film.
As someone that doesn't have the bias and nostalgia for Pixar movies that someone growing up with them does, I would say that your assessment is fairly accurate.
Masterpiece factory is clickbait hyperbole. Pixar has made at best, 2 masterpieces, and I'd argue 0[1], but that's a matter of preference frankly. What isn't subjective, is regardless of my or your feelings on the movies, that first 10 years period you mentioned? Yeah. Pixar fucking killed it. They were box office darlings for sure that could do no wrong for a while there.
[1]: The intro to up, as a standalone: Masterpiece. The rest? Good movie but it wouldn't have been near as memorable//enjoyable if not for those first few minutes.
I'll just come out and say it. I absolutely loved Toy Story 4.
I watched TS1 and 2 as a kid, and I remeber loving it and rewatching dozens of time. Then TS3 came out, with Andy going to college, around the same time I was going to college.
Toy Story 4 was an absolutely stunning movie, both in terms of photography, and underlying message. In my opinion, it is about growing up, finding out who you are, and letting go. They ended the franchise in the best way possible.
I think there’s a bit to this and also a bit where he gets it wrong. What’s right:
1. A Bug’s life was underwhelming after Toy Story. I grew to like it more after having entered the workforce.
2. Luca is understated.
3. Kids love Cars way more than adults.
4. Coco is a real diamond in a whole lot of (relative) rough.
5. The second half of Wall-E is quite good.
6. People aren’t unkind enough regarding Toy Story 4. Not amount of unkindness will be enough enough.
There’s lots more wrong but I want to zero in on one thing, Up.
De Boer says that without the first 10 minutes the movie is awful… but that’s the point of the movie. It’s about a miserable grieving man… the scene sets up the rest of the movie. Of course the movie sucks without it. It tells the story on the basis that you have just watched that scene.
Imo it’s not just that Up sucks without the first 10 min, it’s that the last 90% of the movie is aimless, emotionless, and feels unnecessary. Like the first 10 min should have been a pre-film short that they drew out because it was too depressing to just end like that.
Carl is old and he builds new memories and shared his life with a child and a dog. Carl hates his companions.
The child he must suffer is simple and naive. The dog is plainly an idiot. But Russell is trying to improve himself and Dug is pure of heart.
The adventure and how these two creatures display virtue and improve his life in spite of being unable to compare to his late wife nor the more sophisticated and accomplished Muntz reveals to him that life is still worth living and that connections are still to be made.
It makes sense and I intellectually understand the premise, but emotionally it fell flat for me. This could be due to a number of reasons, e.g. the writing, the animation, the voice acting, my headspace at the time of watching… I had to pause the movie to stop bawling after that first 10 minutes, so it’s possible that the bar for emotional connection was simply set too high after that.
So many thinkpieces have come out about Pixar and... I disagree with all of them. Pixar has put out a lot of masterpieces. They've put out a lot of movies that, while not masterpieces, are still really great. They've put out a few mediocre movies, and they've put out one or two real stinkers (Cars 2, The Good Dinosaur).
They can put out some mediocre movies, or some merely very good movies, without having lost their way. Look at their release schedule! 2 movies a year some years! You can't release movies that quickly and have every one be a masterpiece. And that's okay.
I respect what the author is getting at -- Pixar movies sometimes favor adult expectations instead of being kids movies and get stuck somewhere between. I can agree to an extent, I felt Soul was really guilty of this.
But the author is a victim of the same mistake. If kids like the movie it's a kids movie. I think Soul is barely for kids at all but if kids like it, it's a kids movie. Letting an adult decide what a kids movie truly is is just ignoring kids in a different way.
They also seem to think producing a handful of some of the most influential movies of all time makes Pixar not a masterpiece factory, as if their weak efforts somehow make their better efforts less valuable. And finally I won't hear Coco disrespected like that, Inside Out is overrated sure, but Coco is the same caliber of film as Ratatouille.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadBut the article just seems to reaffirm the idea that Pixar isn't what it used to be, just pushing the date to when they stopped making a lot of good movies further back.
This feels like one guy's random opinions about Pixar movies with no overarching point besides "there were some bad ones in the past" which seems uncontroversial.
Welcome to substack
Medium and Substack visually mimic newspaper columns and give the same kind of cachet to their authors, even when it's not necessarily deserved.
https://www.pixar.com/theatrical-shorts
It is mentioned that after some failures, Disney purchased Pixar then had Pixar execs, including Ed Catmull, come to Disney to instill a culture similar to the one at Pixar. The story is told as a success, with the films you cite as examples of that.
Pixar does the more adventurous stuff, crazier ideas, totally different kinds of plots and stories/worlds/characters, with a focus on storytelling rather than songs etc.
Whereas Disney Animation (with recent titles like Tangled, and the Frozen movies) is the 3d version of what Disney's Animation Studios always did best, take classic stories, and turn them into quasi-musicals with a modern twist, but do it in a really talented way.
In my 20s, I used to get mad about the idea that Disney just stole story ideas and made it their own, but this was too reductionist. There is immense talent involved in actually taking an old story, modernizing it, adding all the original music, creating that original new world, building scenes, dialog, all that stuff. And I appreciate it and give Disney a lot more credit nowadays. Whether it's Beauty and the Beast or the Lion King, or modern hits like Frozen and Tangled, they really add a lot in their interpretations of these stories, and make it their own.
Coco is a wonderful film and probably the chief offender of the forced crying thing the author hates. Personally, I can't even think about the damn film without welling up and that's one of the movie's strengths. "Remember Me" is a wonderful, catchy earworm of a song that just refuses to leave my thoughts years later. And it's a fucking musical.
I. HATE. MUSICALS.
But Coco works for me by perfectly contextualizing the songs with the plot of the film. It's not musical numbers for the sake of it.
So yes, for a studio that has put out a masterpiece like that, its lesser efforts should be heavily criticized.
Have you seen Sing, and/or Sing 2?
- Grease (1978) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0077631/
- Hair (1979) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0079261/
- Little Shop of Horrors (1986) https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0091419/
Additionally to the songs, La La Land has really great cinematography and I also liked that story arc. It's more movie with songs than songs in a movie.
And it's catchy as fuck. Everybody knows the Time Warp even if you never did the silly dance.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0097858/
And IMO also the James Brown scene in the church where they see the light?
And that Ray Charles demos the instruments in his store is the plot, but that the whole street is dancing along makes it a musical.
Note: I absolutely love Grease!
Is that any different to what teenage girls want out of teenage boys? ;)
Also, in captain obvious mode, the concept of "reputation" moves in opposite directions between the two sexes. At least in the 70s.
In the year 2023? I'm not so sure.
Floyd Collins - about the trapped cave explorer and entrepreneur (cast album is on Spotify)[0]
Sunday in the Park with George - about an artist struggling to connect his artistic vision to the world (show is on YouTube, album on Spotify)[1]
Kiss me Kate - A group of actors put on The Taming of the Shrew - imo this is one of the greatest movie musicals ever made[2]
Musical theatre is a diverse and powerful medium, there's nothing else that has quite the same bandwidth to communicate emotion and ideas simultaneously
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floyd_Collins_(musical)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunday_in_the_Park_with_George
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiss_Me,_Kate
And it’s not like there isn’t a shitload of movies that try to make you cry and fail miserably, so I don't think there's a cheap trick.
I went through a phase like that after discovering the TV Tropes wiki and saw all the patterns of my beloved childhood media laid bare. Then I made peace with it, and started enjoying the craft of casually hiding a Chekov’s gun in plain sight, etc.
On the other hand, no problem for triggering laughs. It's actually the reverse: you need good direction and good editing (because rhythm matters a lot) to make a joke impactful.
I've never really understood that. Is it shameful to be emotionally affected by a movie, even if you don't really like all of it?
I've seen that a lot about Spielberg movies, and more recently with J.A. Bayona (in particular with The Impossible and A Monster calls).
Many of their movies seem to contain an embedded short film that stands out from the surrounding balancing exercise, as if the directors themselves had needed an escape hatch from the grinding process that produces these movies.
I'm assuming there's some kind of culture war thing happening in the background I'm not aware of which gives this some kind of warped logic but without that context it's just weird.
I don't know what this is supposed to mean. Aren't the identity politics afficionados the far left themselves?
No centrist liberals preaches identity politics, almost by definition alone.
Left/right, liberal/conservative, these axes were often over-simplifying to begin with, and adding in centuries of debates between them doesn't help make the vocabulary any clearer.
Which could explain why it's coming across as confusing: identity politics ignores individuality and defines people in terms of their groups. It's pro-collective, not anti.
It's not that Pixar has always been good, like any company there's been ups and downs, but because Disney themselves have also gone all in on 3D animated films[0] (and none of those really come close to what Pixar puts out; even the recent flop of Elemental is still a better movie than most 3D Disney movies of the past decade), all those movies get compared to each other in a much more direct manner.
Back in the early 2000s, it was pretty straightforward; Disney did the 2D animation, Pixar the 3D animation. It means that when Pixar or Disney puts out a stinker, its easily covered by the other. A sort of trade if you will.
Disney has kinda now ended up in a bit of a slump for the past decade (likely directly the fault of the Live Action Remakes they keep doing - it feels really uncreative), so the highs and lows of Pixar are that much more apparent.
They'll be doing fine. Elemental sucked, but it doesn't seem like it's a pattern for Pixars movie creation process. Not in the way that Shrek's poop humor ended up dominating DreamWorks for over a decade or how Despicable Mes "marketability" ended up ruining Illumination.
[0]: The last blockbuster 2D animated movie was the Princess and the Frog and according to Disney it didn't make enough money to continue making them.
Frozen (2013) just gets in your decade window. Then there's Moana (2016) and Encanto (2021). All three have been hits with great songs, values and storytelling.
For every Frozen, there's a Tangled that doesn't make the cut in quality and that stands out when they don't have the same consistent release cycle of movies for the animated canon since it's broken up by the mostly mediocre Live Action ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Animation_...
Their 3D movies in order are Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Tangled, (Pooh), Wreck it Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen II, Raya, Encanto, Strange Worlds. That’s 15 movies in 17 years, and Princess and the Frog makes 16.
Bolt, Tangled, Ralph, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, Moana was an excellent run. (Disney acquired Pixar during production of Meet the Robinsons, and about 60% of the movie was remade, every movie since was produced by Pixar descendants.)
And Tangled is better than Frozen, even if it didn’t have the zeitgeist. (Tangled is the highest rated of any movie I listed on Letterboxd, followed by Big Hero 6, Moana, and Zootopia, so I’m not unique in that opinion. Not sure what the Letterboxd community has against Bolt.) Outside of Chicken Little, there’s really not a bad movie on that list (I haven’t seen Strange World yet.)
If anything, acquiring Pixar doubled their animation output. I’ll give you, that if you ignore Ralph Breaks the Internet and Frozen 2 (sequels they put a huge amount of effort into), there appears to be a creative gap from Moana in 2016, till Raya/Encanto in 2021, which happens to overlap the acceleration of live action remakes. They made 5 live action remakes in 2019, with only Frozen II against them.
If any events radically altered the trajectory of Disney Animation output, they are in order: Frozen and Ralph being such big hits that Disney pivoted to sequels, John Lasseter being removed in 2018, and Covid.
Disney Animation Studios (not Pixar) has made three movies in the last ten years that are among the highest grossing movies of all time (Frozen, Zootopia, and Frozen II).
In terms of quality, anecdotally two of my personal favorite Disney movies ever were done by them within that timespan as well (Moana and Encanto).
My impression has been that the gap between Disney Animation Studios and Pixar has drastically narrowed.
Aside from animation, I found the new Disney release "American Born Chinese" to be a refreshing change of pace. It was produced by the makers of Shang-Chi, which I'm a huge fan of, and often put on in the background.
It's pretty good, don't get me wrong, but it's not a Disney animated studios production.
I compare (negatively) to “Saving Private Ryan” which also has a masterpiece of a first scene, that also can be removed without much loss to the main plot. The difference is that on SPR the first scene set the tone and message of the movie perfectly. And if you remove it, the rest of the movie is pretty great too. You can’t say those two things about “Up”.
I think the word you want here is "contrast"; i.e., "Contrast this to Saving Private Ryan, which..."
I've read books/watched movies like that. They are certainly memorable, but one problem they have is they're not very re-watchable. For lack of better example I'll mention Shawshank redemption. It's a great movie nonetheless, but the reveal scene is so great that the rest of the movie by comparison feels like a slog you have to put up with to get to the big reveal. Because of that I might've watched it only 3 times in my entire life.
One example I remember is from Jaws. Spielberg explained that changing the editing of an earlier scare (when they explore the abandoned boat) made the audience much less shocked at the first reveal of the shark later on. The change was literally the timing of a couple of shots; less than a second at most.
The first 10 minutes of Up colours the entire rest of the film.
That is, the Golden Age is whenever the person writing the piece was 12 years old. Arguments will be marshaled to support.
Like the first Star Wars films, there was a gee-whiz tech factor to their early movies that compensated for some banal or hackneyed beats in their storytelling. And they can't rely on that any longer. If anything, they've ceded the eye candy aspect to the Avatar series and the eye-popping Spider-Man cartoons. I think to the extent that Pixar is in trouble, it's because they need to figure out a way to break out of their self-imposed box without losing their core identity as a studio.
High art they are not, but I don’t think that “masterpiece” should be reserved only for high art. The credits in Pixar movies are filled with people who masters at their craft.
In terms of animation, I personally hold Studio Ghibli in higher regard. But they are targeting a different audience with more adult themes. And I wouldn’t hesitate to apply “masterpiece factory” to either studio. Compare either studio to DreamWorks and the difference in quality is noticeable in just about every aspect of the production.
Definitely for the "adult" theme part, although I'd word it differently.
While the likes of Mononoke Hime and Grave of the Fireflies should probably be handle with care (resp. violence and very heavy context) most are perfectly watchable by children (of course being mindful of what may shock or otherwise create psychological harm).
I'd argue that many of these "adult" themes are perfectly graspable by children and it's our own prejudice that we project, and that these films present them in an accessible way for children, enabling deep parent-child discussions that would help understand and structure a child and prepare them for their life to come.
I'd rather have my children watch Ghibli stuff than Disney.
I watched a bunch of Studio Ghibli movies with my kids when they were age 4 - 6 or so. Spirited Away, Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky, and Nausicaa. The pacing is quite a bit slower, and the action more subdued than in Pixar movies and other animation targeted at kids.
My kids tended to gravitate toward Pokemon, Crayon Shin-chan, Doraemon, and other animation aimed at kids - which I don’t really have any problem with. Also Demon Slayer and One Piece - which we probably shouldn’t let them watch - but they seemed to handle it ok. And finally YouTube, which is mostly trash, but we tolerate in moderation. I would definitely be happy if they showed more interest in Ghibli movies - but it’s hard to compete with endorphin rush of YouTube.
As a parent to a daughter, I do really like the strong female leads that most of their movies have.
I wouldn't say that classic 20th century drama films typically termed masterpieces are not that; however, I think that just like any other medium of art, one primary purpose of film as an art form is to entertain, and to dismiss entertainment value as plebeian or vulgar when determining what deserves the title of "masterpiece" smacks of a desire to be not merely exclusive, but exclusionary.
You seem more obsessed with finding any excuse to be anti-ESG rather than having a specific issue with recent Pixar films which have issues unrelated to specific themes.
Simply saying ESG makes you obsessed, ...telling. People are talked down to all day at their corporate fake work job. They want a break from the HR speak in their entertainment. Its really not hard to figure out.
Personally, watch what every you want. But every criticism of Disney the last 5 years is meet with ism's. Disney has been making bad movies for 5 years. Bad stories, bad special effects, their treatment of talent and bad leadership.
It has a good cast with Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt, Paul Newman, and even Larry the Cable Guy puts in a pretty decent performance. The minor characters are charming, too (including George Carlin and Cheech Marin).
The story is fairly timeless and reminiscent of Doc Hollywood. I don’t know how they manage to make it work so well with anthropomorphic cars, but somehow they do. The main character has a good arc, and there’s a good amount of nostalgia. I don’t think I ever cried, but I definitely felt something - which is more than I can say for the Cars sequels.
Would I go and watch it now without kids? No. But Pixar put out a movie that entertained kids and adults alike. Earned $462 million at the box office. Made an absolute killing in merchandise sales (and I thought the toys were pretty high quality, especially the die cast Tomica cars here in Japan). I have a lot of respect for what they were able to do with Cars. Not so much for the sequels, though.
They also call Monsters University a mediocre sequel, but I tend to prefer it over Monsters Inc. Pretty much for the same reasons as Cars - good cast, timeless story reminiscent of Revenge of the Nerds, and my kids loved it.
The obvious message of the movie "winning isn't everything" seems like childish moral pablum. But like many Pixar films of that era, the principal message is a more adult idea: that satisfaction in life is not attained by traditional metrics of success. Competition has its place but the rich experiences in life are not necessarily where the spotlight is. Maybe that too seems like a "well duh" lesson for kids but man there's a lot of adults who don't get that out there.
Meanwhile on the second page of HN there are far more interesting articles about tech.
During that time they were certainly a masterpiece factory. From 1995 with their first film Toy Story, to 2004 with the release of The Incredibles, that resulted in consistently great films for 9 years. Their record held for 11 years until Cars was released in 2006.
I believe no other studio has had similar performance. I remember around early 2000's news of Hollywood studios in panic because investors started asking other studios why it was considered business as usual, a given, that for every successful film a studio released there would be flops too. So like VC investing, the pay off for the eventual success had to be enough to offset those films that flopped and lost money.
But then came Pixar and suddenly a studio proved you didn't have to have flops, every film they made in their first decade was a resounding success. They blew the conventional logic of Hollywood economics out of the window.
This article sort of paints a picture of how outstanding their success was at the time: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/nov/12/3
So I guess I disagree with the title, Pixar was most certainly a masterpiece factory in its first decade.
Reading deBoer's article I can't say I agree or disagree about the recent state of Pixar, I grew up with Pixar films and their first decade coincided with my childhood and early teenage years, so when I think to myself "yeah Pixar's recent work doesn't touch that early magic" I can't really tell is that my bias coming through?
Maybe I am overthinking this a bit.
So even if investors in Hollywood knew about Ghibli around that time, they probably didn't consider it as a relevant investment.
Edit: While I enjoy the usual downvotes, I find it hilarious to read all these articles about Pixar not mentioning Lasseter and Bird despite them clearly being a huge part of Pixar initial success with Lasseter being part of why Pixar mostly produced good movies. Disney Animation started making good movies again (Zootopia, Frozen) once he moved there. It's clear that the quality control suffered once he started splitting his time more and Disney had more influence.
And yet Inside Out came out in 2015, Coco in 2017, and Soul in 2020.
It's really hard to get accurate (or recent) data about these things but at one point was 4x Toy Story merchandizing revenue.
https://www.therichest.com/most-popular/10-movies-that-sold-...
Cars 1 was a cute fish out of water movie where a self-centered braggart is humbled and finds true friendship and how to be a better person. Cars 2 is a kids movie full of gunplay and violence that opens with a torture scene, progresses towards murder, and finishes with the protagonists escape a death trap to prevent mass murder for profit. I mean, I don't know what anyone was thinking with this one.
- What's happening dad?
* Oh, they are forcing this car to keep driving until, until ... yeah until he confesses something.
- Why?
* Well, if they make that car uncomfortable enough, like, when he almost dies, he will confess to anything.
- So it's useless?
* Yeah torture is useless, barbaric, something I hope you will just never come across in any shape or form in your life. It's a thing done by genuinely evil or very mislead people.
- Jeez, that's quite something dad.
* Yup, enjoy the rest of the movie matey. Let's hope they won't rape Sally next.
- Wut?
* Never mind bud.
He still often watches the first and third movie, but rarely the second.
Cars 1 was good. Cars 2 was absolutely terrible. Cars 3 was very good. Cars 2 suffered when Paul Neumann died, since the relationship between him and Owen Wilson was the heart of what Cars was about. But Cars 3 made it about his passing, and what he left behind, in a really moving way.
Wall-E -- if you don't love this film you are possibly dead inside. It's not only absolutely beautiful and emotionally communicative, it's a deeply clever pastiche.
Up, as observed below.
Toy Story 3 came out after Up. And it is a work of acutely well-observed cinema. A staggeringly good film that should have won the Best Picture Oscar. [0]
Brave (2012) is critically neglected, too -- that is a beautiful, subtle, yes quite elusive film, despite what the article says.
And then there are films I have not seen yet but I am told are clever, inventive and beautiful -- Coco, Inside Out, Soul.
They are by any measure still a masterpiece factory. This article is lazy, toxic and cynical.
[0] edit: when I say this, I say it in the sense that surely everyone knows now that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial should have won Best Picture, not Gandhi. Even Richard Attenborough thought this.
you should watch both coco and soul.
coco is beautiful. it's a love letter to mexican culture.
soul is not only quite beautiful but the soundtrack... oh! i mean it's trent reznor, atticus ross and jon batiste. it won both a grammy and an oscar!
[0] see for example the IMBD toplist : https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?num_votes=200000,&genres=... Coco is 12-15, on 8.4, while Soul is 29-33 on 8.0. (Okay, I tweaked the number of votes value, until the ranking matched my personal toplist. Lower numbers cause a lot of not that good shows to occupy the top, and higher numbers filter out a lot of really good shows.)
But it could be scarier. It could be Coraline.
I've never been so compelled to call my parents than after watching Toy Story 3.
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
Look at all the "adult" men today, especially in America for some reason, whose desks are littered with action figures and whose offices contain a shrine to comic book superheros and Star Wars/Trek that would put the Sistine Chapel to shame. (Or women who seem to live in some alternate universe about their biological clocks, indulging infantile behaviors and attitudes, perhaps only to realize sometime in middle age the consequences, if not the cause, of their predicament.)
These are people who do not take their lives seriously. Someone clearly never told them that they're not 10 years old anymore.
One of the most valuable lessons you can teach a child is the ability to suffer. All who live suffer, and developing the correct attitude and orientation toward suffering is important lest you become soft and weak. Those who don't learn, those who flee from the suffering that the pursuit of the good often entails, suffer all the more and become depressed, miserable, and mediocre. A story in which the main character loses his toys can be a very mild, age-appropriate, narrative way of presenting the subject matter of sacrifice or loss. Growing up means parting ways with childish ways for the sake of something greater: adulthood. We do the same thing with pets. The death of a pet fish is a way of introducing a child to the reality of death in a way that's appropriate for the child's level of maturity. Maturation can be unpleasant, even painful, as the childhood attitudes and attachments and their familiarity are loosened. Film can also be cathartic in this respect.
(This is not an endorsement of Pixar or Toy Story, btw, only a general response to an apparent presupposition. Call it a rant, if you want. I vaguely remember watching the first Toy Story on TV, but I do not recall the ending and have only a vague recollection of the plot. For all I know, Toy Story may enable unhealthy dispositions.)
Trying to paint adulthood as some kind of suffering we have to endure, we have to be serious, we have to be whatever you think one needs to be as an adult is... Just sad.
Life is best lived when you can have fun, love, and a sense of accomplishment, some people have that by doing research and pursuing great new discoveries, some by starting businesses and products they envision, and some others find other ways to fulfill the yearning for living.
Don't be a sad, serious adult, trying to tell other adults how to live their lives. It's a waste of your life, go be fulfilled without having to project your insecurities unto others.
Disclaimer: I own no action figures and have no interest in comics, so no direct offense taken, just feel that this seriousness is exactly the pressure that harms so many people who don't feel they fit the mold you are trying to put everyone in.
And the reason is that you personally want to be superior to others, and the best you can come up with is insulting their hobbies and taste.
edit: you are bullying people for their hobbies and taste, it is bad, please stop.
Passions that are seen as childish usually tend to lack any sort of practical utility. Action figures and games are ultimately just timewasters. Kids learning to build stuff with woodworking tools would seem less childish because that is a useful skill compared to building things out of legos. Often, a skill that would otherwise be practical becomes childish when it is simplified to be impractical, and thus, easier for kids to learn.
Even in the world of fiction and literature, which can easily be argued to be a timewaster regardless of quality, the stuff that is childish is also generally seen as overly simplified. Explicitly this is done by ratings boards that don't let certain content be present in kid's movies and books. Implicitly, writers and directors can and do simplify and dumb down their work when creating something made for children. It is possible for someone making a work for children not to rely so much on simplification, but the reality is that this happens far less often then proponents of the "Young Adult" genre would suggest. Just go look at the shit you find in a bookstore if you think I'm wrong.
I wouldn't call being anti-intellectual childish by this definition, though, because there is a practical value in realizing that intellectuals can say incorrect things at any time.
Please read up on cognitive rest. Doing nothing is important.
As a grown-ass adult, I'm both into building things out of wood and of building plastic model kits.
Either is, on paper, a foolish uneconomic conceit. I can spend hours turning a wooden bowl, making a small table, or making shop furniture; but I can buy the items for cheaper than what I could sell my time for.
Doing a good job of building and painting the plastic figure can be as difficult as turning the bowl. And if someone is particularly adept at either making the action figures or turning the wooden bowls, they can eke out a comfortable living from that alone.
For me, either activity is restful and produces objects that I like having around.
And I certainly agree that people seem to be afraid of growing up. Last time I met with my friends from college for a trip, I enjoyed the first few days, yet I became unnerved by the idea that they seem frozen in time. And I don’t think I’m being judgmental of they having a good time, because they didn’t seemed to be having a good time. Most of the talks were about them having problems to keep doing the same things as 15 years ago, dealing with the consequence of trying to do the same things and overall misery about the fact that they are not in their 20s anymore. I mean and don’t say that they need to grow up, have kids and “act like adults” but they definitely seemed to just refuse change. If this is what people mean when they talk about the infantilism in current generation, I agree with them and also find it worrisome.
> These are people who do not take their lives seriously. Someone clearly never told them that they're not 10 years old anymore.
Growing up / moving / progressing / changing is important. But a fear of being childish is not the same thing-- indeed it's something more that was a feature of my childhood than my adulthood.
When important stuff is going down, I'll buckle up. Even in other times, I'll face big issues and think and consider. I will mentally temper myself into someone who understands more things and is a broader person. I will have adult conversations. I will-- reluctantly-- confront the ephemerality of so many things in life.
And I will still come back and play with toys and enjoy video games.
Adults have always quite enjoyed childish things in moderation; there's no harm in enjoying something for the sheer childlike joy of it. And there's value in retaining feel for a childlike approach to thinking; naïvete is a useful filter.
But it is impossible to ignore the recent mass infantilisation of media generally, and the amount of self-justification that goes into it. The MCU is just one example of it. Grown men arguing vociferously that childhoods are betrayed when the Little Mermaid is not a white girl is another consequence of it.
(edited for clarity)
They're attacking people for trying to find a little joy in their short lives on this rock. And maybe there's more a percentage of "childish things" enjoyed now. But when you can't do the things you were told you'd be able to as an adult (get a good paying job, go on holidays, own a home, settle down with some stability), is it any wonder there's some regression?
Doing really hard and responsible stuff doesn’t make you happy. I have two children, trust me, it would be way easier and happier to lie on a beach and drink cocktails all day, and I could actually do it from past successes.
Is that really worthwhile though? Does that add meaning to my life? How many happy moments will I ultimately have from these, and will I look back and be happy I spent my life drinking cocktails? And it’s not just cocktails, it’s all the infantile pleasured that we can indulge in, from Star Wars collectibles to activist politics.
These things just won’t fill you up ultimately. And so few people “get this” these days. It’s delusional and it’s childish, and it’s reinforced by the current capitalism and leadership. It’s the wrong path. And 30-40 years from now many many people will realise and will have extremely depressed retirements.
Hard disagree with this one. Being engaged with politics is one of the most responsible things one can do for the future of their children.
Otherwise, consider that maybe op just doesn’t understand comic books and animation as mediums, and has some weird hangups about them. (Their loss?)
At some point we have to adjust the scales and say that since so many adults are enjoying "childish" activities and media that those things are just for adults now, and maybe always have been if there wasn't so much shame around it. Adults enjoy Bluey more than their kids do. Craig of The Creek and Gumball are some of my friend's favorites. Ted Lasso took all the formulas from children's media but put them in adult situations and it won like every award. Marvel is now more a hit with adults than kids.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84171-critics-who-treat-adu...
Eh. I've adulted plenty, sir. I've started companies, I'm the father of 3 boys, and now I run a program at a nonprofit and I'm responsible for the safety and well-being of a lot of youth.
But I still like watching Mobile Suit Gundam, building plastic models, and playing SNES games on my MiSTer. And that's OK: maybe you don't find meaning in it and maybe you view it as childish. But I find enjoyment in these simple things and don't need to eviscerate them to prove how grown up I am.
(And now and then, my boys catch enthusiasm for these things, and we can experience them together which is really awesome, too).
Whenever I think of Pixar, honestly, I think HQ graphics, storytelling which is imaginative and new — Finding Nemo, Monster’s Inc, Wall-E, Cars, Toy Story 2, Inside Out, Incredibles, and Soul… all these my favorites and I love Partyssaurus Rex!!
Studio Ghibli?
John Lasseter was a big fan.
Call me biased, but I might see the problem.
But the reality is that most creative endeavours peter out a bit, because all long-lived creative endeavours exist in the context of nostalgia for their halcyon days. It's impossible for everyone to unsee what went before.
And all creative endeavours eventually stray somewhat from self-reflection towards navel-gazing. (Like the Vision Pro, which is so completely a product of the totality of Apple culture that it is basically white cider, when what everyone is really keen to see is a very good scrumpy.)
John Lasseter in general is an interesting thread to pull there at that point because there are many competing narratives. When Disney bought Pixar Lasseter moved in charge of all of Disney animation. So there are the narratives that Pixar didn't see a noticeable change because the boss was still the boss and the boss was still reporting directly to the C-Suite, even if the C-Suite changed dramatically. There are also the narratives that because Lasseter originated at Disney Feature Animation and may have felt that Pixar was always the "mistress" and DFA the "wife" that Lasseter "sabotaged" some of Pixar's efforts in favor of the marquee brand, the historic brand, DFA.
(There's some evidence for the "sabotage" narrative: after the expense of The Princess and the Frog failed to impress the C-Suite and DFA turned to primarily 3D animation DFA was encouraged to compete with Pixar, built a very different renderer and something of a different tech stack in general. It seems easy to argue that DFA's tech quickly got superior to Pixar's. There are environment and crowd shots in Wreck-It-Ralph and Big Hero 6 that Pixar still seems to struggle to match years later. Personally, I thought it most noticeable in Soul where most of the wide establishing shots consist of "empty clouds" and its version of New Orleans feels both empty and claustrophobic. At nearly the same time Soul released to Disney+ DFA released a lovely short of a digital New Orleans with gorgeous establishing shots and crowd work and it felt almost a direct flex on Soul and exactly what Soul was lacking in its characterization of New Orleans. [This was Us Again, which was theatrically attached to Raya, as much as theatrical attachment of shorts mattered in that strange year.])
It's probably one of those cases where both narratives are "true" in their ways. Pixar never really saw a different boss and seemed to continue down a lot of the same path, including two Cars sequels because Lasseter loved Cars. Lasseter likely did see the competition with DFA as a part of Pixar's success pre-buyout, so continued it hoping it would keep Pixar hungry and innovating. Lasseter seemed to try to genuinely juggle obligations to both DFA and Pixar
(The "mistress" versus "wife" analogy being an especially cruel one, but seemingly quite appropriate, for me to pick because the end of the thread was that Lasseter was eventually fired from Disney for being a sex pest; though don't feel too bad about how "canceled" Disney tried to make him because he still heads an animation company. Ironically one again with weird Apple connections because Apple TV+ has been buying most of their streaming rights. [The goofy Luck was the first notable one from that company.])
(Further aside: I also don't think A Bug's Life has aged as well as some think it has. It had great quality compared to its competition at the time, but outside of that context, it's "fine" and hasn't aged well. I think that is also evidence that maybe Pixar was "never" a masterpiece factory, not even pre-Disney buyout.)
I think this is the key point that a lot of people nowadays are forgetting.
Part of why Star Wars was such a phenomenon is that there were three films in a row that were all good. This was so rare (even into the early 90s) that there was even the "movie trilogies as bar charts meme" [0].
Then Pixar came along and it was hit after hit after hit. Even for movies that WEREN'T sequels and it kind of blew everyone's minds.
I would argue Marvel went one better and put out 10+ movies in a row that were also, at a minimum, fun and good movies. I remember saying to someone in the early 2010s "what a cool time for movie making that there are just strings of great movies". What's even more amazing to me is that Kevin Feige took over Marvel studios when he was 34!
Which in turn leads me to believe that maybe the "small studio, dedicated people, mostly young but fanatical about the material" is how you kick off the series and then try as hard as you can to keep the big corporate interests run by older folks away.
0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/entertainment/comments/7y90h/movie_...
I would suggest to watch Logan, its excellent.
In the 00s I really liked the Marvel movies. Then came Marvel Studios to ruin everything. But even in the beginning, the first couple of films were really good: Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. But once they started to expand the "MCU" I quickly lost interest in the films. I like character driven stories that focus on the person behind the power. Batman is interesting because of Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is interesting because of Peter Parker etc. When you start doing these big mash-ups and team stories, like Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers, you lose focus on the individuals and it becomes lots of long, drawn-out & boring action sequences.
But if I remember correctly, Fox held the film rights to the X-Men property. So when Marvel Studios got off the ground, they did everything but X-Men. I don't know if that ever changed.
In any case, I agree. Logan was really good. And it was really good, in my opinion, because it was character-driven and not just 13 hours of drawn out, boring as hell, CGI "porn" action sequences. And I figure it was like that because it wasn't made by Marvel Studio.
To the best of my knowledge the X-Men films made before Disney acquired the X-Men rights in 2019 (along with the rest of Fox) were made in partnership with Marvel Entertainment (the publishing and licensing company) and not Marvel Studios (the Disney "cinematic universe" subsidiary).
Early on they were planning to adapt Inhumans as their replacement for Mutants, but it flopped badly when they finally got around to making something focused exclusively on them (as opposed to when they were just a part of the Agents of SHIELD plots).
A man with the power of... ants. Spider man. A man that wears tight underwear on the outside of his pants... A man that pretends he is a bat.
Compare this with backstories from Japanese manga which clearly some are targeted at more adult levels of intelligence I'm flabbergasted a hollywood exec would decide to pour millions of dollars into some backstory aimed at children from the 1940s.
Which is precisely why they have such a large following. Most people are mentally drained after 40+ hour long work weeks.
Maybe I'm behind on the MCU movies but I don't remember those things happening in the cinematic material!
They know their audience of wannabe eternal children, and so they invest for the only reason they ever do: a fat return on that investment.
I'd also point out that a HUGE amount of anime, manga and ln content is beyond cheesy, it's just cheesy in a different way.
The first Avengers is so perfect that even Marvel had to change their theme after it. What then changed to light-comedy action-led movies.
I'll hold my breath for the TV series...
Jurassic Park had two books, from which they've now made five (or is it six? Jeez who cares by this point) movies.
I wish that were true, but there's too many terrible movies with outstanding source material.
All I’m saying is, critics gonna critique but theres plenty people who absolutely adore Cars. I mean it has 100% refridgerated air!
That's because the critics view of what a 4 year old wants to see doesn't actually matter.
My son put me through hell at that time with almost daily viewings of cars, a merchandised Disney Cars bed, stacks of toys, clothing, hats, etc.
Cars is one helluva good movie if you're in the correct age range. Hell, the first time I watched it I loved it :-)
I saw Cars in the least favorable way possible, so my hatred for that movie should be entirely understandable, but it is still a fun story to tell: It was the height of "Wii Mania" and my brother desperately wanted a Wii. (We were both in college at the time, for age context.) Being a good older sibling I agreed to help line stand in the local Wal-Mart's crazy rule-filled queue to buy one as soon as the truck pulled up with fresh stock the next morning.
It's one of those worst kinds of "sleepover" situations where you are trapped inside a Wal-Mart with underpaid retail workers who obviously don't want to be there that late/early either so they give you a lot of rules and restrictions and marching orders in part as much to keep themselves entertained as to keep things "orderly". That's part of why we needed two of us to keep a single spot in line, because they were trying to exhaust people and hope they leave.
One of the other most exhausting things about it, and I still mostly think it was intentionally a torture decision, was that near the place where the line spent most of its hours over night there in that Wal-Mart was a TV with the volume on. That TV was left in an endless loop of the movie Cars. Every time it ended it went right back to the beginning of the movie.
(When the fresh members of Wal-Mart's morning shift finally arrived we eventually did convince one of them to change movies on that TV and turn the volume down, to cheers among us. I still believe it mostly proved it was always possible, the late shift just hated us.)
Cars will always be associated for me with late night exhaustion and torture. I feel for all the parents that got versions of that from well-meaning kids rather than spiteful retail employees retaliating at crazy customers.
I'm not very good at articulating "feelings" so bear with me: Early Pixar movies (to me) are timeless, positive, almost fairy-tale like. They're centrist, middle-of-the-road films that don't offend or validate anyone, just faithfully follow the Hero's Journey as they try to resolve some issue in the ideal world where we're all in this together. Toy Story is the best example-- literally every single toy could not be more different, but the entire point of the movie is about all of them finding ways to leverage their differences to advance the journey for all of them, not exploiting their shortcomings to hold everyone else back. Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, all are the same pattern. Pixar's money printer used to be endless asset-swaps of "Diversity: The Movie" (the secret to Sesame Street as well), and it was a beautiful thing before the concept was perverted by the same children who grew up watching these movies.
I don't have kids' show equivalents to name from AppleTV, but I do get the same feeling ("Diversity: The Show") from their regular shows. Ted Lasso is the obvious frontrunner. For All Mankind, Invasion, Foundation (caveat: I was really high when I watched this one). All of these beautifully weave together the themes of diversity and unity into a shared journey.
They are also perfectly ok making simpler movies like Luca, that aren’t trying to be some sort of epic treaties.
What Freddie is getting wrong here is projecting his ranking onto everyone else, even when he is calling out the critics as being the wrong audience for the movies. A lot of the movies aren’t made for critics, but because the director or storyteller has something really personal to say to a subset of society.
Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur (which I’m not sure I’ve even ever finished) are their only real true misfires. A lot of their whelming movies (Onward, Lightyear) feel that way because they feel like a waste of premise and opportunity more than actually bringing bad.
I think this quote from the author sums this up:
> It’s also great because it affirms my own views on human life, as all great art does.
The movies don't fit his worldview and doesn't resonate with his past struggles and are therefore terrible.
A similar example, not from Pixar, would be I watched Big Fish with an ex and she couldn't finish it do to her complicated past with her dad, which I didn't have with my own dad. Good movies need not appeal to everyone and I think it would be a loss if we don't support Pixar in making movies that don't.
Masterpiece factory is clickbait hyperbole. Pixar has made at best, 2 masterpieces, and I'd argue 0[1], but that's a matter of preference frankly. What isn't subjective, is regardless of my or your feelings on the movies, that first 10 years period you mentioned? Yeah. Pixar fucking killed it. They were box office darlings for sure that could do no wrong for a while there.
[1]: The intro to up, as a standalone: Masterpiece. The rest? Good movie but it wouldn't have been near as memorable//enjoyable if not for those first few minutes.
I’m not a Disney hater to the extent of some, but any weak film before Up and any strong film after are the exceptions.
I watched TS1 and 2 as a kid, and I remeber loving it and rewatching dozens of time. Then TS3 came out, with Andy going to college, around the same time I was going to college.
Toy Story 4 was an absolutely stunning movie, both in terms of photography, and underlying message. In my opinion, it is about growing up, finding out who you are, and letting go. They ended the franchise in the best way possible.
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2023...
1. A Bug’s life was underwhelming after Toy Story. I grew to like it more after having entered the workforce.
2. Luca is understated.
3. Kids love Cars way more than adults.
4. Coco is a real diamond in a whole lot of (relative) rough.
5. The second half of Wall-E is quite good.
6. People aren’t unkind enough regarding Toy Story 4. Not amount of unkindness will be enough enough.
There’s lots more wrong but I want to zero in on one thing, Up.
De Boer says that without the first 10 minutes the movie is awful… but that’s the point of the movie. It’s about a miserable grieving man… the scene sets up the rest of the movie. Of course the movie sucks without it. It tells the story on the basis that you have just watched that scene.
The child he must suffer is simple and naive. The dog is plainly an idiot. But Russell is trying to improve himself and Dug is pure of heart.
The adventure and how these two creatures display virtue and improve his life in spite of being unable to compare to his late wife nor the more sophisticated and accomplished Muntz reveals to him that life is still worth living and that connections are still to be made.
I think it makes sense.
That would be the one piece of Netflix data I would love to see: when do people pause feature films.
They can put out some mediocre movies, or some merely very good movies, without having lost their way. Look at their release schedule! 2 movies a year some years! You can't release movies that quickly and have every one be a masterpiece. And that's okay.
But the author is a victim of the same mistake. If kids like the movie it's a kids movie. I think Soul is barely for kids at all but if kids like it, it's a kids movie. Letting an adult decide what a kids movie truly is is just ignoring kids in a different way.
They also seem to think producing a handful of some of the most influential movies of all time makes Pixar not a masterpiece factory, as if their weak efforts somehow make their better efforts less valuable. And finally I won't hear Coco disrespected like that, Inside Out is overrated sure, but Coco is the same caliber of film as Ratatouille.