Pixar in a Box: the art of storytelling
khanacademy.org
khanacademy.org
This course looks lovely. It's great for KA to have this kind of material and not just calculus tutorials (as much as I personally appreciated the calculus).
Except when their stories end up not being very good at all. There's a lot of variability in what they produce, to be honest, so I am not sure if their "process" is a robust as they would like us to believe.
Edit: Added "original"; some of the sequels are not great
It's ironic because The Good Dinosaur would be a good example of them taking a bet on a somewhat unique vision (a dinosaur spaghetti western?) with a more mature outlook, and then getting shit on by reviewers because it wasn't as funny or charming as Inside Out.
Worst for me would be Cars 2 and in the context of general films, it's still okay.
TBH I keep forgetting that movie exists. It was such a weird moment for them.
I also will say I went to watch it without having seen the original Cars, so perhaps I really had no expectations for the film (other than it was a Pixar film)?
The weird thing is that Cars has this emotional center around facades and regret and abandonment and the differences between the journey and the destination and it's this beautiful look into a town that got bypassed. And more to the point it has this emotional weight that was still really accessible to a young me that a lot of other kids studios didn't really trust kids with (except for like Miyazaki films and stuff).
And then Cars 2 was a mistaken-identity spy movie a la Johnny English or Get Smart. I don't doubt it was an entertaining movie or something, but it felt so outside the Pixar brand, like something Disney or Dreamworks or any other studio would make.
It was also the first sequel outside of the Toy Story series, from a studio that somewhat famously refused to do sequels if the world didn't have more story to tell.
Like I said, it was just such a weird departure to do seemingly do a sequel just because the world was popular enough.
Maybe that's why they wanted to do it, to try something different?
I have always found the Pixar Shorts to be some of their best story telling. They don't have a lot of time, and don't seem to be afraid of trying new ways to tell a story, or a different type of story.
They lack a singular vision in their films, there are no auteurs at Pixar: just art by committee. This isn’t to say that their stories are bad, though they are sometimes lukewarm. Except for the Pixar level of excellence in the visuals and animation, which to be clear are admirable on their own, I feel that their movies lack identity. I wouldn’t want their model to become adopted by everyone.
They love and study Miyazaki but don’t seem to trust any one person to direct a film. Everything must be put through a committee.
I would very much prefer a CG animation course by them. Or a full overview of their pipeline, asset management, USD implementation. Their technical chops are probably best in the world.
Maybe they could do something like release a public version of Presto. Or help out with animation and rigging code with the blender foundation.
Most of the other nodes are more technical in nature. Might be closer to what you were hoping to find.
Up's primary theme was the importance of letting go of the past to focus on the future. Soul was that you don't have a divinely foretold purpose in life other than living your best life. Inside out was about recognizing the importance of negative emotions- and that while joy is good, sadness is not bad. A lot of these are heavier and more mature than you'll find in a randomly chosen piece of fiction intended for adults, but I wouldn't say they're sad so much as thought provoking.
Some of it is really bleak. I mean, a fair bit of soul is a guy realizing he wasted his life, and then died right before doing the thing he thought would give his life meaning. But like... Grappling with that feels like a really meaningful conversation to have.
edit: although I don't feel as strongly for their sequels. To some extent I find they phone some of them in...
- some sort of "buddy" movie
- some sort of "we only have x amount of time to solve our crisis we got into"
- the two buddies have some sort of big fight
- the two buddies make up
- stronger than ever, they overcome this crisis right just before the buzzer.
Maybe its because they don't do it in their shorts (or its because they can explore ideas more), but I think their shorts they have are really some of their best story telling.
Buddies fight and, having acknowledged their primary character fault, reconcile, is one that is everywhere in children's fiction. I also find it boring.
These tropes aren’t new inventions, they go back into thousand year old myths, so it does seem like they really do appeal to the human brain, ie the Campbell monomyth/hero’s journey.
Letting go is a unifying theme in Up but my problem with the movie isn’t that it’s bad but that you had a table of all the guys at Pixar spitballing scene ideas and then glueing them all together. The result just feels episodic, in a bad way, and commercially manufactured. Up is a really good movie but I don’t want every CG film to have the Pixar preproduction process. (And I still think they are a bit overrated and that the technical side of their creative teams are doing most of the heavy lifting.)
That's the impact that I recognize with Pixar, a movie a like Soul and an Auteur like Pete Doctor.
I feel e.g. Cars franchise has limited vision. They're "allright", but not spectacular. I'm OK never seeing any of them again, even the first one.
On the other hand, I find Monsters Inc. a unique movie with a unique premise, and I can rewatch it regularly - with or without the kids 0:-). I also don't find it particularly sad. Inside out does indeed have a large dose of melancholy, but again I feel is a unique idea taken quite far without dilution.
(there are absolutely movies that are way more avant garde or quirky or surreal or even "creative" inasmuch as that can be objectively compared - but Pixar has two distinct audiences to cater to and they HAVE to be entertaining and attention-occupying to children; while inserting content that also keeps adults interested and even thoughtful - that's a specific set of constraints that e.g. "Love Death + Robots" does not have)
And if we look at their entire portfolio, the Pixar Shorts again have some absolutely brilliant, touching, "single idea executed to perfection" entries.
Before they sold to Disney, they were going to start making more mature films alongside their children’s entertainment. I was very curious about Ray Gunn. I think if Disney wanted it then Pixar could definitely make an incredibly compelling animated movie with mature themes. I mostly find myself disappointed with them these days.
(I find whenever I bring this up online quite a few people come at me with this idea that they are making mature films, and that the line between children’s entertainment and adult is imaginary, as though most kids could sit through something like The Rules of the Game or Tokyo Story.)
But to be clear, I’m still mostly a fan of their work but mostly for their technical mastery.
You can write a lot of good stories that way, but you’ll never produce, say, Aguirre.
A heavily structural approach is also better suited to teaching in a video series. Much easier to teach craft than vision.
The original pitch might have been absolutely groundbreaking, but for what ever reason one of the producers didn't like a character, and pushed for it to change.
All movies are a collaboration. there is no such thing a single "author" on a movie, its always team work. Sometimes that team is aligned to the same vision, other times not, and a compromise has to be hashed out.
> Their technical chops are probably best in the world.
They were ground breaking, but up until recently they insisted on making their own version of everything. This was fine in the early 90s when there was no other option. But now there are better tools out there. Thats not to say that all their tools suck, far from it.
me too. the incredibles was pixar's high point of storytelling imho. of the first six films, i liked the toy stories the least. a bug's life, monsters, inc., finding nemo to the incredibles was like a crescendo of animation, reaching a satisfying zenith of art. cars, which came next, was ok (but unoriginal for storytelling, the characters were mostly great!), but then ratatouille through inside out were all groping for relevance while nakedly harvesting their reputation. of the last 8 movies, only coco has been worth watching so far (i haven't seen the good dinosaur or soul yet). so perhaps a quarter of their 23 films have been good enough to watch again for me; contrast that with the studio ghibli collection, nearly all of which are imminently re-watchable (spirited away is an absolute masterpiece).
And thus doesn't that mean that the stories are merely vehicles, like mechanical means to transport.
There's a good video on YT about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhXJe8ANws8
Having the ability to be in a situation or see something that is just okay and go, "Okay well it's not perfect but that is okay. Can I make it a little better?" is really helpful. It also makes life a lot less frustrating.
(e.g. "Oh BooBoo, how did you get on the shelf you silly cat?")
If an actor instead said "No, the cat wasn't on the shelf, the cat wasn't even in the room" the skit ends awkwardly.
“Let’s change everything” - depending on context - can be a no to the premise. It’s the same as the Pixar idea - improv is about making your scene partners look good by supporting their choices, and building on them in turn.
I've got a book i ended up getting in a free box of books. It's some fantasy novel.
It's probably the worst book i've ever seen in print. Everything from the description on the back to the font choices, sometimes four or five in different sizes on one page, to the actual writing reads like something a child would write.
Curious about how such a thing could exist, i looked into it more. Turns out it was a self published book edited by the author's wife.
Now this next part is speculation...
But you can almost picture his wife trying to edit this thing and the author just being like, nope we'll keep it my way.
Like, basic spelling and grammar mistakes, terribly worded sentences, a story that made absolutely no sense.
The thing is, getting past it all, there were some good ideas in there and likely, in the hands of a good editor and publisher, it could maybe have been turned into an alright, if still not that great of a book rather than, i'm not actually exaggerating here, literally the worst book i've ever seen.
Another example that just kind of popped into my head while writing this, the original drafts of star wars.
https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWarsCantina/comments/afvlzk/lin...
I've read some of them and honestly, they were pretty bad, like scyfy movie bad. Without the team of screenwriters and editors that worked through those drafts, we'd probably have no idea what 'Star Killers' was other than some weird cult scifi b-movie with a dedicated fan base of a few hundred people that get together once a year, get drunk, dress up as their favourite characters and complain about how nobody understands just how great George Lucas and Star Killers is.
And then Spaceballs would never have been made and that just woulda sucked a whole lot.
>Yes. Pixar has a template:
>Once upon a time there was ___.
>Every day, ___.
>One day ___.
>Because of that, ___.
>Because of that, ___.
>Until finally ___.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20408283 edit: it may have been another comment from here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The character needn't be a hero either, if you consider Dan Harmons story circle technique (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Harmon#"Story_Circle"_tech...):
1. A character is in a zone of comfort or familiarity.
2. They desire something.
3. They enter an unfamiliar situation.
4. They adapt to that situation.
5. They get that which they wanted.
6. They pay a heavy price for it.
7. They return to their familiar situation.
8. They have changed as a result of the journey.
They always return back to their original situation unchanged... many times having caused a lot of problems in the world along the way.
Which adds to the humor and myth of the charachters being jerks.
(The twitter account of a then-Pixar story artist).
My main grief is that surprise is only obtained with a combination of visual effects, fast rhythm and loud sounds, and no more with the story. Relationships between characters is déjà-vu, so many times a conflicting parent/children relationship, where the parent is reflective but wrong and the child impulsive but right and they end up reconciling and admitting they were both partly right in the end. In "Soul" they play a bit with this pattern although I would hardly call this creativity.
And finally many animation movies are also shameless green washing (here thinking of Wolfwalkers). Remember the critical tone of Wall-E?
"Let it Go" is like an ode to everything I dislike about American culture. It's so very American.
Best animated movie I've seen in the past decade was probably Moana, but I can't say I've seen many.
"Let it go" as a song needs to be considered along with it's reprise:
Elsa: "I'm such a fool, I can't be free. I can't escape from the storm inside of me... I can't control the curse! Oh I'm afraid I'll only make it worse. There's so much fear - you're not safe here, i.... i.... can't...."
It's the same underlying moral story as the Lion King - Simba runs away and starts living the easy life, only for the community he left behind to suffer, and he has to become brave and face his responsibilities. The song "Let it go" is basically just "Hakuna Matata" from a story perspective. Is Hakuna Matata an ode to everything you dislike about American culture too? (Also the underlying story of Frozen is actually Danish)
You can feel the film's heritage, in which Elsa really was supposed to be the villain. It didn't evolve that way, setting up a genuine shock at the big reveal. Let It Go ends up mashing the I Wish song and the Villain Song, and (with Menzel's breathtaking voice) comes out doubly exciting. It makes the film feel a little uncoordinated, in a way that I like because it doesn't just follow the tropes.
But I think they didn't even understand that success themselves, and the sequel was rather poor. It dismissed the fact that the first film turned out to be about sisterhood, in a genuinely touching way, and thus lost its heart.
They knew it was a snowy movie, knew they wanted something to rhyme with the traditional “Let it snow”, and vaguely had the idea that an angsty girl would be singing the song. As a result, the lyrics are incredibly generic and hardly seem to fit her specific situation.
But it was still very early in the process and it was the first song to be written that actually made it into the movie. The extended soundtrack includes quite a few of the early songs that didn’t make it into the movie where they were still trying to work out what the style of music was going to be and who the characters are, so the music and story were definitely co-developed together.
Reading Frozen as teaching that is like reading Veerhoeven’s Starship Troopers (which, sure, is abysmal on all sorts of other grounds) as an endorsement of Fascism.
Yea, those things occur in the movie, but the movie is quite specifically about it producing bad outcomes that must be dealt with by people doing exactly the opposite.
You watch it in first grade through maybe through eighth grade, but probably at that point, you're too embarrassed to go to a little children's movie.
As much as I understand the more nuanced messages which could be taken out by a more sophisticated audience, much more so, I see the impact the movie has on actual real-world little kids.
I both read and watched Starship Troopers as an adult.
“read” as in “to understand and give a particular meaning to written information, a statement, a situation, etc.”
> You watch it in first grade through maybe through eighth grade, but probably at that point, you're too embarrassed to go to a little children's movie.
Well, I mean I was a lot older when I watched it, but when my then-four year old watched it his commentary indicated that he saw the problems stemming from the behavior problem it highlighted pretty well. Not sure my almost-three-year-old got it, but she hasn't shown any sign of inverting the message as badly as you have.
Compare it to, say, Coco. Or Zootopia. Or Klaus. Or, if we're talking about relationship with parents, Inside Out.
It... really isn't. There's not much depth or unpredictability. It's the regular Disney hero journey: oh, I'm a misunderstood loner, oh, I've found my own path, oh, I've prevailed. Oh, and comic reliefs.
There are "unexpected" twists as in "wow, these sisters don't need a strong man to save them", and that's as much depth as it gets.
Unlike, say, Coco. Which actually:
- "has harshness". There's an actual murder involved. There's the uncomfortable truth of people losing their memory. People facing death etc. What harshness is there in Frozen that we haven't seen 15000 times before? Most Disney musicals from before 2000 have significantly more harshness than anything Frozen has.
- "complex character relationships". The relationship between Miguel and his relatives, especially grandmother. The ever evolving relationship between Miguel and Hector. In Frozen there's next to zero character development except "suddenly we don't talk, suddenly I'm strong, suddenly we're good, suddenly sister powah".
- "appeals both to adults and children". Coco definitely caters to a more grown up children who understand the concept of getting old, and death. Frozen is for the kindergarteners who will hug an Olaf plushie and sing Letitgo on repeat. The scene where Miguel sings to Mama Coco is such a gut punch to anyone who has relatives with memory loss, Frozen couldn't even approach the depth of it in the wildest dreams.
The same goes for all other movies in my list. Frozen is a flashy loud entertainment for kindergarteners. It's definitely not "the only American animated movie that's worth saving in the last 10 years".
> whereas the best kid movies just tell a great myth.
And Frozen fails to tell that myth. It's flashy, loud, with memorable songs. And the first quality animated musical in a long while. That's why it is memorable. But "the only animated movie in the past 10 years that deserves to be preserved"? Hahaha, no.
From what I can see as a father: that's basically sisterhood :D
TBH I hardly remember Coco's story although I watched it entirely. I do not remember it was bad though, rather unremarkable story wise. Frozen may look as a kindergarten movie but there is clearly an attempted murder in it (Hans over Anna) which is only prevented by a magical intervention (Olaf). I would say, although I may use too big words here, Disney is closer to naturalism, whereas recent Pixar movies are more transparent and explanatory. You would have guessed I prefer naturalism (in literature at least, I don't know if it actually extends to cinematography ;)
I'd classify Kubo And The Two Strings, and Inside Out as must-watch films. Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse set new boundaries for what's possible with animation.
Moana, Zootopia, Big Hero 6, Wreck-it Ralph, The Incredibles 2 and Finding Dory are all pretty good films, and definitely tick all the boxes you listed.
I'm not even looking at Anomalisa, Isle of Dogs, and other such more adult-oriented animated films.
It would be interesting to see a Pixar take on Stalker, a famously slow film, discussed just recently [0]
Sounds like I'll have to watch it ... someday. With young kids you are pretty much limited in terms of what can be watched. Maybe one of the reason I am so angry about american animation I find so shallow ;)
("Up", which you cited as the last Pixar movie that was 'worth it', is in fact largely a conflicted parent/child relationship)
It reads as if what causes you 'grief' is actually the intended format of the content you are consuming. Yes, it's nice that Wall-E had a layer of critique of rampant consumerism (among other things), but it also had a joke about an unkillable roach too.
My hunch is that the -primary- intended audience for these films spends a lot of time dealing with "conflicted parent/child relationships", and that you are simply not the intended audience.
I don't mean to be overly critical of you here, I think if you take two steps back what you're saying is "the majority of these kids movies don't speak to me."
A movie being "worth it" is pretty different from a movie "speaking to me", which is so subjective that it is hard extract actionable insights from. It's a hop, skip, and a jump from saying "I don't know why you like this flavor of ice cream, because I don't like it."
I didn't see Onward, but between that, Coco, Soul, and Inside Out, those are four moves that grapple pretty heavily with mortality, death, the afterlife, depression, which I'm assuming sails over the head of most kids.
And even their earlier ones like Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and Up have pretty serious things to say about childhood illness/"deformity", the role of the critic, and tragedy that similarly seem to be aimed -just- over the heads of kids.
I think I'd need a definition of what a "great" childhood story is, but I'm pretty sure that neither Disney nor Pixar has "controversial" as part of their DNA. Much to the relief of parents everywhere, that's simply not what they're trying to do, so to judge them for not doing that is confusing.
Perhaps you're looking for something more along the lines of A24 (Moonlight, The Florida Project, The Witch) from... Disney?
Japanese anime also talks about difficult subjects and IMO does it much better. Thinking of "Okko's Inn": much less predictable, some funny and tense scenes, and yet not shocking for children and quite emotional for parents (OK maybe our smallest daughter woke up and came in her parents bed the following night but she has not been traumatized for life :)
Since I am engaged in a reckless defense of Frozen in other posts: I think this movie is multi-layered. It talks of women and power, femicide, love vs friendship, sisterhood, although it is packaged in a story suitable for the smallest children as its success showed. The story is definitely not predictable from the start and has the power of myths. Of course Disney is well known for its ability to adapt old myths and tales.
As for older Pixar: The Incredibles was fun and multi-layered, Ratatouille was fun, Wall-E was great ...
A quite strange Japanese anime I recently watched with my kids was "Ginga-tetsudô no yoru" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089206/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1). I warn you: it is really slow and dreamlike, and is about death. One daughter slept during the movie while the younger one watched till the end. The morning after we were discussing about the movie during breakfast. I love that! Never happened with a Pixar movie: they are just too obvious. The analysis is made for you. And for the more recent ones they are not even fun. Of course they are beautiful and polished but too slick for me.
Art and technique aren't mutually exclusive - and the process of storytelling is both an art and requires you to fit the bounds of storytelling, just as a painting class might teach you line drawing techniques but still counts as art.
The other thing to note is that you are listening to the same story over and over. This is the concept of the Joseph Campbell monomyth. All modern screenwriting is mostly based on the Campbell Hero's Journey, which argues that all great stories and myths are, at their core, the same. You generally follow a protagonist who moves from a place of comfort and is thrust into a new situation, where they need to overcome some sort of challenge which involves the protagonist needing to change as a person to overcome (i.e. metamorphosis). There are exceptions to this structure, like sometimes there isn't even a protagonist, but this is the general structure across the ages.
Storytelling is usually seen as playing within the structure, rather than inventing a new structure. Usually writers who don't embrace structure end up naturally writing in the same structure inadvertently anyway, because the theory is that this reaches the core of what a story is.
It goes into the history of Pixar and some of the detail of how they work with actual stories from the movies they've made. One of my favorite anecdotes from the book is how they nearly almost lost all the work they did on Toy Story 2 and almost went under.
One caveat is that the book doesn't cover the news about John Lasseter's misconduct, so it's not all roses, of course.
from at least five years ago
here's some other discussion: