“Elemental” Is a Tearful Metaphor for Pixar’s Decline
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
If someone has information that he was more of a figurehead, I'd welcome it. But this seems like a pretty big omission.
But as a consequence of this caution, we're also seeing that Disney and Pixar and other firms are just dissipating their brand capital by putting out safe, corporative-approved and committee-driven works. Within the next 5 years we'll probably see the first movies released where most of the writing was done via LLMs. I'm going to guess that it won't end well, unless the LLMs get much better...
https://movieweb.com/why-the-wga-strike-hopes-to-cause-monum...
The individual in question went on to found Skydance Animation, hardly an ended career.
The relative quality of Skydance’s single film, “Luck”, to pre/post Lasseter Pixar films is needed to know if he’s the culprit.
But who has Apple TV+?
I've never understood the love given to "Up". Everybody remembers the fantastic opening sequence but seems to forget that it ends with dogs flying airplanes.
As great as Toy Story 3 is, I would've put Pixar's peak at Ratatouille and Wall-E.
The flying house with balloons wasn't too unrealistic? ;)
Up tugs on a lot of heartstrings. It's front-loaded with tremendous loss, but that emotional punch isn't lost as it transforms throughout the film into Carl opening up to protect someone new.
The film is cute and full of emotion. And despite the fantasy, it's well written. It's my favorite Pixar flick by a wide margin. Ratatouille and WALL-E are fantastic, though.
but it feels like they buried that potentially great story under a bunch of efforts to make sure it came off as sufficiently "kid friendly" (e.g., dug constantly shouting squirrel, that other dog with the high pitched voice). the magic of the best pixar movies has been telling stories that kids like without having to pander to them.
They’ve always “pandered”, it’s in the job description. They do make movies for children after all. They just used to make movies with enough depth that adults could enjoy them too.
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>… Pixar's peak at Ratatouille…
The latter is a movie about a rat that drives a human around like a mech, what’s the issue with dogs flying airplanes?
I used to have a high opinion of Up, having originally seen it when it came out in theaters. It was only on a re-watch that I was shocked by how much of that opinion was based on what is essentially only 15 minutes of the total runtime. Ratatouille is fundamentally about a ratty artist overcoming his background and prejudices. Up wants to be about an old man managing to move past his grief, but the climax (and most of the movie) involves a stupid bird and a stupid kid that only detract from the experience.
The stories they tell though are massively different, and they have quite different takes on what the land of the dead is like. For the most part the similarities are mostly what naturally comes from focusing on the same holiday.
Except for one. Both of them feature a boy who wants to be a musician but grows up in a family that has a traditional family business and strongly disapproves of their kids becoming musicians.
I'm wondering if that was just a coincidence, or if "kids wants to be musician, family disapproves" is a theme from Mexican folklore or something like that that both films happened to use.
I think a really strong premise and first half can overshadow some weaknesses, including an even a bad ending.
That’s not the end of the story - that’s the start of the third act.
It actually ends grounded in reality - a return back to the world they started in, without fantastical creatures, and the boy getting his explorers scout patch back in New York City. It ends with Carl giving him a bottlecap badge which has a sentimental link to his dead wife.
A return back to reality from an unknown/mythical/magical world is basically the fundamental basics of the hero’s journey “mono-myth” (transition from the known to unknown) so purely from a structure perspective I can see why it resonates.
It's like, sure, it's OK if you like dogs flying in airplanes, but the first few minutes of the movie is the only thing that has any staying power. I'm pretty sure most people at this point who haven't watched the movie in a long time don't even remember what the rest of it was about. In contrast, I haven't seen Toy Story in 15+ years, and I can still describe to you roughly what happens act for act. Granted, I watched Toy Story as a young boy, so I'm biased.
As much as I think Wall-E was an excellent film, I consider The Incredibles to be Pixar's peak. It was a great story with a perfect balance of humor, child characters actually in peril, subtle mature themes (infidelity, "you didn't save my life; you ruined my death"), well stylized humanoid character models, a father character who isn't a deadbeat, a theme around having to hide who you are, etc. Lots of great stuff in there. Wall-E might have had a grander message and an artsier vision, but The Incredibles IMO has way more rewatch value.
Monsters Inc. was pretty great, too! For me, Pixar failed to make another film that came even close to Monsters or The Incredibles.
Today, "kids" movies are now one of the premier tentpoles of the film industry and Pixar has tried to corner the market on... abstract stories about emotions?
And if you go over to the anime community, the kids are explicitly liking it because of the random emotional tangents (I'm looking at you Demon Slayer).
And a lot of the reason why people liked Puss in Boots: the last wish, was because of the existential crisis the protagonist faces upon confronting his last life.
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I don't think a movie like Elemental would hit very hard after Zootopia locked down the concept near perfectly. It seems ill-timed, we need a few more years to forget Zootopia before giving another rural vs urban different people's city romance with subtle nods to racism story.
Wall-E, although clearly and one sidedly in favor of environmentalist or conservationist causes, still describes the problem and the solution in fantastic terms. The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels. The message you can take away from Wall-E is not a literal solution (planting plants to rejuvenate things ignores the complexity of real life ecosystems - just consider invasive species!). Instead, the message must be more abstract - something like "Care more about the environment."
The political situation in Elemental, by contrast, is barely abstract at all. There is a city, there are immigrants, and the elemental toothpaste commercial aesthetic is a thin veneer over real life racial and ethnic tensions. So any solution the movie suggests would be something that maps very closely to the real world.
Think about it. In real life, skin color doesn’t do… anything. It’s just a stupid way humans distinguish between each other.
Elemental - the two “races” can literally annihilate each other on contact. It would be like if we had humans made from matter and antimatter. “Racism” in such a world is completely justified and a matter of survival - what message does that send if you are meant to read it as a racial allegory? It makes no sense.
> The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels.
They lived on the back of a creature that was dying as a result of an infection and they had unknowingly been using the result of the infection as their power source. It's exactly the same kind of parallel and solution in fantastic terms. Stripped down these movies have a very similar storyline and message (things are broken, we can't just fix it without transforming ourselves, and some force or people will oppose that transformation).
Now, I prefer Wall-E. I think the cinematics are better. The emptiness and stillness of Earth, the serenity of space, the scene where the spacecraft docks with the Aurora and is cleaned. Films of that era and before gave you some breathing space with the spectacle without so much shit going on constantly. That said, I think if Strange World came out at the time Wall-E did instead of it then it would have been better received, I personally feel like I'm pretty tired of the style.
I do not think overt messaging was the main reason Strange World flopped (although it probably was the case for Turning Red), but rather, the general gross-ness of the character designs, along with the dull premise.
What overt messaging was in Turning Red? In any event, the reason that one flopped in theaters was that it also released simultaneously on Disney+, where AFAIK it has been very popular.
I am not sure I would take popularity on the streaming service as a sign of financial success, given something like Encanto was big in both the box offices and after the fact streaming, but who knows what the balance sheet really looks like with these big companies these days.
I think you'd have to work kinda hard to justify that reading—and while believe you that you can, I do wonder why you'd want to work so hard to make such a reading?
> Concerned parents will probably also find it strange that a Pixar movie made for small children casually throws around words like 'degenerate' and 'stoner' and talks explicitly about pads for minutes on end.
Concerned parents from the 1950s, you mean?
> but who knows what the balance sheet really looks like with these big companies these days
Agreed.
Even later on, the movie concludes with this confident thirteen year old girl declaring that she has a right to twerk, all while she hopes to end up backstage with her friends at the local boy band concert. What typically happens to underage girls backstage at concerts? I wonder.
I did very little reading into the events the story presents to get to this conclusion. Turning Red is not very subtle at all. It shouts in your face about pads and how twerking is the bomb.
>Concerned parents from the 1950s, you mean?
To the extent that any parents today care about what their kids watch, instead of shrugging while letting their toddlers gormlessly stare at a youtube video pipeline of strangely pornographic spiderman and elsa videos, they typically care about explicit violence, references to sex, and references to drugs. Turning Red has very clear cut examples of two of these things. I cannot imagine most parents being comfortable about discussing pads with their five or six year old daughters, nor thinking that the world is a better place when those daughters decide they want to start twerking as well because they saw it in the movie.
A. This “it was always political” is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to defend the placement of politics you agree with,
B. Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie. One fart joke is not a fart jokes movie.
C. The politics were never so explicitly partisan but just general themes such as the stupidity of being racist or being against teamwork - not jokes about widely-controversial modern issues.
No, though, falsely claiming something is political in a way (other than the specific political viewpoint) other things are not is a common intellectually dishonest crutch to attack politics you disagree with while avoiding the meat of the disagreement.
> Some politics and light theming is very different than making it the core of the movie.
True, but irrelevant. Politics as the core is not any more common on any consistent-but-not-viewpoint-biased definition of “politics”. The common issue in complaints is status-quo bias.
> The politics were never so explicitly partisan
That’s somewhat true, in that for a long time (from the 1930s to the 1990s) the US was in an abnormally long political realignment, where the most highly salient political issues were not as clearly partisan
On the other hand there is a majority consensus that littering and waste is bad and we have a responsibility to protect the Earth from it. This is different from climate change which is another issue with little majority consensus.
It's not about presentation, but the underlying issues themselves.
How different it is today with movies which are not much more than thinly disguised moral lessons where the audience is lectured on issued of race, gender, "climate", environment, migration and more. The issues - whether real or imagined - are being portrayed as "current", "systemic" and "catastrophic", the "good" vs. "bad" divider goes straight through society where the "good" side is characterised by being "norm-critical" and in opposition to mainstream culture. Those who do not follow are portrayed as "bad" and labelled with a number of -isms and -phobias. Where earlier movies mostly portrayed "the other" - the "reds", the "filthy rich", the "criminals" - as being bad current "political" movies portray "us" as being ignorant, oppressive, wasteful, conservative "white" or "white-adjacent" bumpkins who really need to "be educated".
Yes, there are some parents for whom the issue of "the existence of gay people" is very concerning.
All of Christianity that came later (introduced by Paul) watered down this hardcore power politics story into an abstract “spiritual” story. But the reality stands for itself if you just peek beneath the surface.
Really? I thought it was thoroughly decent. Solid performances from Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Larry the Cable Guy, and Cheech. Original story, tasteful comedy, interesting plot twists, actual character development, timeless look&feel. What more is there to want?
Aka disappeared up their own bum. Lost the un-self-conscious being-in-itself, and went from "Pixar making movies" to "people trying to make Pixar movies"
So less involvement from the people in Emeryville?
Now I go to the movie for the "experience". Next on my list, Indiana Jones which I guess will be the last with Harrison Ford.
The non-AI Harrison Ford anyway.
I thought it was middle of the pack for Pixar, not their worst, far from their best though.
Even worse than the quality of the movie was how they advertised it. The preview seemed so recycled - the story seemed unoriginal the characters so similar to what we've already seen before with Inside Out and Soul. We just went on a whim because its nice to have the excuse to go to the theater
"The sheepish alienation of sitting through “Inside Out” amid the static of my fellow-theatregoers’ sniffles and nose honks must have been what Data from “Star Trek” felt like all the time."
They will also struggle to ever top the original toy story, though. Even though their are little shades of it here and there; mike and sully, finding Nemo, coco, and lightning McQueen's horror at his body failing; they are still not pulling it fully together. I would like one at that level again, but that's a rare thing.
Now I have no idea what is happening.
And ofc Pixar is held to a high standard. A "bad movie" for Pixar ia a "decent enough" level film if it was DreamWorks.