Pixar was never a masterpiece factory
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freddiedeboer.substack.com
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.
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.
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
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They liked Up on Poppy Hill and Marnie Was Here more than I did.
We aren’t watching Grave until they’re 21. Which is probably more for by sake than theirs at this point. I watched it 10 years ago and once is really enough.
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...
I'm baffled by the claim that Ratatouille is intentionally hard to love. I think it's a telling statement. de Boer's schtick is, of course, contrarianism for its own sake (it's why so much of his writing ends up here, despite the fact that his writing beat almost never overlaps HN). It's as if he assumes that anything he likes must be an outsider pick. In the world I inhabit, Ratatouille is universally beloved, with a higher gross box office than the allegedly crowd-pleasing Cars movies or any of the Toy Story films.
The whole paragraph really comes across as a parody of the Rick and Morty copypasta, but I don't think that was deliberate.
But writers and directors aren't perfect. And it is important to note that there will be flops.
The main "problem" is that the tech is so commoditized now, that pretty much every studio has excellent 3d animation tech and basically can do everything Pixar can do. So now it comes down to artists, writers, and the director to make the substance, and basically Pixar is just another company now... no longer are they groundbreaking.
IMO this is fine. It just sneaks up on you, subtly, and then before you know it Pixar is just another company making animated movies of reasonably decent quality.
Edit: To be honest, I think all of Pixar's movies (except maybe Cars) were above average in terms of quality.
pixar was formed by hard working, interested and enthusiastic people. they understood people, kids, and the art of storytelling
which gained them a fanbase
as the fanbase idolizes them, many people look to join their ranks. too many want it, so only the most fanatic ones have the dedication to get in.
at this point, the fanatics are what causes the downfall. they are the kid in the chocolate factory who grew up eating the candy and refuse to stop. in fact they made it into the factory for the sake of eating more.
there was no inspiration on the fanatics part to inspire anyone else, or to raise the spirits of children as was done to them. the art they produced was for themselves, not for others.
that's the gist
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.
What's problematic about the second half of WALL-E?
Maybe that's because none of the complaints it is reporting makes real sense?
The article, as I see it, is merely reporting on the controversy. They aren't making their own points, they are repeating the points made by others.
That's what news is supposed to be: report what is happening, not what you think.
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.
That is, the Golden Age is whenever the person writing the piece was 12 years old. Arguments will be marshaled to support.
Meanwhile on the second page of HN there are far more interesting articles about tech.