The Pixar directing quagmire

There are some credits given out rather loosely on a film. For example, a film might have dozens of executive producers, as that tends to be the kind of credit you give to someone when the actual thing they've done for the film is not easy to quantify -- or even sometimes if they just ask for it. It increases their ownership of the film in ways that can be useful. (This was explained to me recently as a reason Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are listed as executive producers on Tron: Ares.)

Directing, you would think, should not be such a credit given out willy nilly. But sometimes it's hard to tell, especially with films where the director is not yelling "Action!" and "Cut!" because there is never any camera rolling. (I know it isn't actually the director who usually yells that. Just go with me here.)

Pixar makes movies like this. For every Toy Story, where John Lasseter is listed as the director and that's that, there is a Brave, where IMDB lists Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman and Steve Purcell all as directors. I believe in some cases, one of them is listed as a co-director, which is just all the more confusing for me. 

I'm not going back to the credits of Brave to see how it's listed, not when I have a recent example from finally watching Elio the other night.

I'll just get this out of the way now, especially after I posted earlier this year that Elio was the first Pixar movie in ages I had intentionally passed on seeing in the theater: I didn't love Elio, but I certainly did not hate it either. In the end, I think I liked it better than I thought I was going to like it. Three stars.

As with most films, especially animated films, there are two phases to the credits: 1) a first section of credits that gives place of pride to individual names or pairs of names, while being designed according to the design details of the film and possibly even featuring additional footage, and 2) the second, longer section where all the remaining names steadily scroll by.

In Elio's first section of credits, the directors are listed as Madeline Shafarian, a name I did not know, and Domee Shi, who directed the most recent Pixar film I've truly loved, Turning Red. However they determine this at Pixar, Shi was the only credited director on Turning Red, and the positive feelings I ended Elio with, I attributed to her.

When the second phase of the credits rolled, I noticed a very odd first one:

                                                            Directed by
                                                          Adrian Molina

Huh?

Not co-directed, not assistant-directed, just directed. As though serving in contrast to Shafarian and Shi, or undermining them.

Now, this was also a name I recognized. Molina got a co-director credit on Coco, the Pixar film I loved most prior to Turning Red. Where, at the time, I wondered what the nature of his contribution was relative to Lee Unkrich, the man with the full directing credit on that film.

I fished around a bit on the internet and got some generic AI slop about directing credits being based on union rules, but then I also found a story that specifically addressed the role of co-director Angus McLane on Finding Dory, which was directed by Pixar regular Andrew Stanton. It is clear from Stanton's quotes in that article that the co-director has a lesser role, sort of a "jack of all trades" role, but that the role is indispensable. Of course that's what a generous collaborator would say.

The thing is, in Elio, there's no co-director credit. There are three distinct directing credits presented in the credits in two different ways.

Because Shafarian and Shi get the splashy credit, it looks like they are the film's "real" directors. However, the placement of Molina's credit, at the very top of the scroll credits, seems to say "Whatever we told you earlier, forget that. This is the guy who really did the job."

Well it turns out I just googled the wrong thing. My second google reveals that Molina was the original director of Elio, but left due to a change in the creative direction of the film. It couldn't have been a very acrimonious departure because it says that Molina is currently working on Coco 2. 

And this is where the union likely comes into play. Because of the work Molina put in on the film, he had to be credited in some way, but co-director was not correct because his directing work was not contemporaneous to that of Shafarian and Shi, nor should it suggest that he worked in any capacity as a helper to them. 

As a film critic, I think I just prefer it when it's some auteur like Martin Scorsese, and I can just assign him credit or blame for everything that works or doesn't work in the film. 

Passing on Pixar

When I saw the trailer for Elio a few weeks ago, I thought "My God, that looks awful."

That hasn't stopped me with Pixar before. I've seen every Pixar movie, eventually. 

With Elio, I know I'll have the chance to see it on Disney+ before my ranking deadline, so that's easy. However, this is a significant moment in my Pixar career, as it is the first time since 2013 that I've passed on an opportunity to see a Pixar movie in the theater.

That was Monsters University, which came out on June 21, 2013, when I did not yet have a child old enough to go watch it with me (my oldest son was only two), and when we had our mind on other things with our impending move to Australia two months hence.

Since then:

- Inside Out, watched at the Jam Factory in South Yarra on June 7th, 2015, at an advanced screening with my now-old-enough son, who showed an incredible comprehension of what was happening for a four-year-old. It ended up being my #1 movie of the year.

- The Good Dinosaur, watched at Village Crown on January 3, 2016, also with my son and maybe not this time with my wife, who probably sniffed out the stink of this movie when I could not.

- Finding Dory, watched at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville on July 6, 2016, by myself at a 9 o'clock show, where I remembered thinking it was strange that I was seeing an animated movie by myself at night, and then ultimately feeling even more foolish because the movie is bad.

- Cars 3, watched again at the Jam Factory in another advanced screening on June 17, 2017, in what was a milestone movie for my younger son, his first movie in the theater at age three-and-a-half. I didn't really like it but I don't think the others had a problem with it.

- Coco, watched again at the Sun with I think just the two boys, on January 6, 2018, on a Saturday afternoon. It wasn't the first time they'd seen their old man cry at a Pixar movie (Inside Out), but it was the first time they both saw their old man cry, though it was dark so maybe they didn't notice.

- Incredibles 2, watched on June 17, 2018, though I am having trouble remembering which cinema it was. I think it was just the three boys again. I thought this movie was pretty good.

- Toy Story 4, watched on June 17, 2019 (Pixar loves this release date range), as the last Pixar movie before COVID. I don't remember who was with me or where we saw this, but it was in the theater, and at least one of my children was there.

- Onward, watched on April 20, 2020, at home. There was no option to watch this in the theater as it was now COVID. My older son was really emotionally affected by this movie and was bawling uncontrollably. It was a little frightening to see. Wonder if it made him think about the possibility of losing me, his dad?

- Soul, watched on January 1, 2021, on our projector at the lodging where we were staying in Mansfield, Victoria, with my sister-in-law and mother-in-law. It was my younger son's seventh birthday and he really remembered this one, as did we all. Still no option to see it in the theater during COVID.

- Luca, watched on June 28, 2021, again on our projector and again at a place we were staying, only this time it was an Air BnB in Nagambie, Victoria, where we got away for a week to change up our circumstances during COVID isolation. Third straight Pixar you could not watch in a cinema.

- Turning Red, watched on March 19, 2022, on our projector for the third straight time, but this time at home in our garage. Fourth straight Pixar it was not possible to watch theatrically. This one made my top five of the year.

- Lightyear, watched on June 19, 2022, at I think Melbourne Central? I can't remember. My older son had aged out by this point but my younger son was with me. I'd say it was a happy return to theatrical viewings of Pixar movies, except this might be my least favorite Pixar movie.

- Elemental, watched on June 21, 2023, back to going solo to the Sun in Yarraville, but at least I believe it was an afternoon showing, unlike Finding Dory. And Pixar is back in the win column after Lightyear. 

- Inside Out 2, watched on July 11, 2024 at the Sun, with my older son returning to the fold for one more movie because he remembered liking the first one. My wife and younger son were also there for our first full family Pixar outing since Cars 3, though I think we were all a little let down by the movie. 

With the number of mildly snide comments I made about the movies there, you can see how a lack of need to see a Pixar movie in the theater is something that has been steadily building in me. Now, with Elio, I'm finally putting it into practice.

Even though Pixar movies are definitely hit and miss with me lately, it seems like a big moment. It ends a streak of 14 straight Pixar movies that I either saw or would have seen in the theater if I'd been able. I am pretty sure that there is no other type of movie with that many examples where it was possible for me to have that sort of streak, and even if there had been, I likely wouldn't have achieved it.

This is not to say I will not see another Pixar movie in the theater. Of course I will. I will probably see the next one there. It's called Hoppers and the description sounds sort of interesting. I could probably even get my younger son to go with me, as he will only just be turned 12 next March and will probably still retain some of his instinct -- especially as the younger one -- to please his old man. If not, maybe I'll just go by myself, as I did twice before during this run of 14.

Then it's -- sigh -- Toy Story 5, which is kind of a given theatrical visit, despite my wariness that this franchise is still going on. (It's actually the sixth movie, not the fifth, if you also include Lightyear.)  

But opting out of Elio does serve as a bit of a nail in the coffin, at least from my perspective, on the idea of a Pixar movie as an event movie, the kind you would not risk missing in the theater. I saw what Elio was offering -- a lot of extreme colors, goofy aliens, and characters who sound like they're being voiced by babies -- and said "No thanks."

Which, really, just puts me back where I was in my thirties, when I missed seeing Cars, Cars 2, Brave and of course Monsters University in the theater, the last three of those being a three-movie streak of their own. 

The Pixar movie you'd pitch as a joke

I finally took my younger son to see The Super Mario Bros. Movie today (ugh) and I saw my first moving images of the next Pixar movie, Elemental.

Which confirmed where Pixar gets its ideas these days: from comedians who make jokes about Pixar.

I don't know any actual comedians who make their livings in humor related to animated movies, but if not a comedian, then some snarky but wise cinema commentator -- maybe even a blogger -- would have made the joke about a Pixar movie where elements all live together in a city, which probably most closely resembles Disney's Zootopia, but it's all under the Disney umbrella.

The actual joke I did see was a listing of all the movies Pixar has made and how each one involves the characters in the movie having feelings, even though you wouldn't expect them to. I believe they were posed as a series of questions: "What would happen if toys had feelings? What would happen if cars had feelings? What would happen if bugs had feelings? What would happen if monsters had feelings? What would happen if souls had feelings? What would happen if feelings had feelings?" (That last one is the best.)

"What would happen if elements had feelings?" feels like the joke there, but now it's real. 

I'm teasing Elemental, but in reality, I probably want to see it just as much as any other new Pixar movie that's coming out these days ... though that level is decreasing a bit from what it once was. Even with Turning Red snagging my #3 spot in 2022, that was offset by Lightyear, which I kind of hated. Their success rate is still very high -- it was only 2020 where both of the films they released that year were in my top ten -- but I no longer consider a Pixar movie a slam dunk. 

And for sure, the animation looks really nice. The character designs of the apparent Romeo & Juliet-style romantic leads -- a fire girl, a water boy -- are good. (And so what if they remind me a bit of characters in Inside Out and Soul ... I think it's inevitable at this point.)

Have all the things that could have feelings had feelings by this point? 

Likely not. They still haven't done ... kitchen appliances. Yeah, kitchen appliances.

You think I'm kidding, but just you wait. Check back here in 2028 and we'll be talking about the movie where the whisk and the vegetable peeler go on an exciting journey through the refrigerator.

It's Pixar, right down to the Ratzenberger

Mild spoilers for Luck to follow.

Apple knows what makes a great Pixar movie, and they're not afraid to use it.

The new movie Luck -- well it's been out for about seven weeks -- has the Pixar formula down to a T. As it was going, I just noticed ever more similarities to the premiere animation studio of our age.

It takes place mostly in a land called Luck, which is populated by all sorts of creatures who are considered to bring luck in the human world: leprechauns, rabbits, pigs, dragons. The characters are defined by how easily everything comes for them, such as blindly stepping off a platform and knowing that there will be a floating vehicle there to catch them, or tossing a whole order of lattes to awaiting co-workers and being certain that each will land in the hand of the recipient, possibly after a circuitous journey, without spilling a drop.

Of course the land of Luck is divided into two parts -- the upper part, which is the home to only good luck, and the lower part, which hosts and creates all the human world's bad luck. (If you aren't getting vibes of Monsters Inc., Inside Out and Soul by now, you should be.) The occupants of bad luck are those that are typically talismans in our world -- you know, trolls and that sort. They aren't evil, they're just really, really unlucky. The black cat you see in that poster is an inhabitant of the Good Luck portion, but [SPOILER] it is ultimately revealed that he's a refuge from Bad Luck -- as one might expect given the color of his coat.

Since we're pretty close to a full synopsis here, I should say that the main character, Sam (Eva Noblezada), is an 18-year-old who has just aged out of an orphanage -- a very nice orphanage in this case. She has always had terrible luck. As just one small example, a slice of toast with jam on it will ALWAYS slip out of her fingers and it will ALWAYS land jam side down. She finds a lucky penny left behind by the cat -- a Scot named Bob, voiced by Simon Pegg -- on its travels into our world, and her luck changes. She hopes to give the lucky penny to a young girl at the orphanage who is still trying to find her "forever home" and has her first weekend visit with a family on the schedule.

The presenting of a complicated infrastructure to explain an everyday aspect of our world is a consummate Pixar trick, and luck makes for an excellent candidate for such treatment. The same sort of thought that Pixar would put into the details has been applied here. For example, at one point, Sam must make her way through a series of rooms devoted to the different sorts of bad luck related to dog poop, such as merely "Stepped In It" all the way to "Tracked It Into the House."

But I probably wouldn't be writing this post if the similarities stopped there. 

Focusing more in on Inside Out, the conclusion of Luck -- I've already given you several SPOILER warnings -- revolves around the realization that good luck and bad luck are necessarily intertwined, and you can't have one without the other. Reminiscent of a little epiphany involving the characters of Joy and Sadness from Inside Out, anyone?

There's even a list of the production babies in the end credits. They may do that in every animated movie now, but I think of it as having originated with Pixar.

But I still probably wouldn't be writing this post if a character did not come along in the second half of the movie who made the resemblance to Pixar absolutely impossible to ignore.

Yes, old Pixar voice collaborator John Ratzenberger -- Cliff from Cheers -- was specifically hired for this movie to remind us of Pixar. He plays a root -- I guess roots are unlucky -- who is a bartender in Bad Luck. 

Ratzenberger has appeared in, by my count, 22 Pixar films, including all three so far mentioned in this post -- which almost makes you wonder what went wrong in the ones where he didn't appear. (Too problematic for him to do an Italian accent in Luca?) However, he's appeared in only three animated films that weren't directly Pixar films, though two of them -- Planes and its sequel -- were both kind of spinoffs of Cars. But the only totally non-Pixar oriented movie I see on his resume on IMDB is something called Pup Star: World Tour, where he voices a character named Grampa Growl. (He has also provided his voice in animated TV shows.)

And now Luck.

Now obviously this is not an era where actors sign exclusivity agreements with studios as they did back in the day, but if there is any one actor who seems to be the "property" of a particular studio nowadays, it's John Ratzenberger with Pixar. If you are poaching him to do a similar thing in your movie, everyone is going to notice. (But if you are, do it quickly -- Ratzenberger is 75 now and won't be around forever.) 

In fact, I suspect the only reason rival studios haven't hired him is that they've said "That's Pixar's thing. We have our pride." Apparently, Apple does not have any such qualms.

The good news for Apple and for Luck? Pixar does things exceptionally well, and the dropoff in quality here is not big at all. Yes, you can tell the animation is not quite as good -- I was especially distracted by this at the start of the film when I noticed that the characters' mouths did not move with quite the grace that a Pixar mouth would move. To be honest, though, as I got more into the story I noticed this less, and it's not a problem at all with the non-human characters.

In short: Imitate Pixar all you want if it's going to give me a delightful little family movie like Luck. 

It'll at least tide us over until Pixar goes back to this well in 2023 with Elemental, a film about the coexistence of land, fire, water and air elements. 

Ratzenberger voices "water" I believe. 

How I knew I might be mistaken about Soul

No film in my top ten of 2020 has taken more of a beating since I anointed it than Soul.

Some films took a beating before then -- like my #1, I'm Thinking of Ending Things -- but only since I closed off my list a month ago have I become fully cognizant of the mixed response to Pixar's latest.

I'll get into the nature of that response later, though you are surely aware of it. Suffice it to say that I read none of the think pieces or heard none of the podcasts devoted to those concerns until after I'd already cemented for all time its place in my personal record books. This is not to suggest a person has to be swayed by think pieces or podcasts, but to disregard opposing viewpoints in one's analysis of a film is also pretty obtuse, and means you aren't really giving a favorite film the chance to weather the storm of reasonable criticism. 

There were signs I should have seen, however, that I might myself have been more mixed on Soul than I thought I was, and definitely not as confident in it as a #4 year-end ranking might suggest. And it has to do with the ways I've written about it.

Specifically, I wrote more than a thousand words on Soul when I reviewed it for ReelGood, and don't feel at any point that I successfully described what I liked about it. 

Any review that starts off this way is in trouble:

"When Disney lost the theatrical release of its 2020 tentpole Mulan to the pandemic, it scrambled to recoup losses by premiering the movie on Disney+ – but for a $30 rental price, even for the streaming service’s current subscribers. Less than three months after Mulan’s 27 March expected theatrical release, Pixar’s latest, Soul, had also been scheduled to debut. Instead of charging an arm and a leg to rent this one, Disney released it for free to subscribers on Christmas Day."

That's not a bad paragraph in and of itself, but it's not really talking about the movie, now is it? 

And then I make matters worse by expending another hundred words (actually, 66) comparing a movie I'm not talking about with the movie I am, for little other reason than I had to continue the review as I'd already started it. 

The change in strategy may have been learning the new pandemic landscape, or it may just have been a gross miscalculation of the respective quality of the two films. Though we’re certainly glad we didn’t have to pay $30 to watch the latest absolute gem from Pixar, it would have been worth $60 when measured against yet another perfunctory live-action remake of the studio’s animated IP.

The fact that I didn't start talking about Soul proper until the third paragraph suggests I was stalling, doesn't it? It may not have seemed that way at the time to me, but if a writer feels hesitantly about the thing they are writing about, it comes through. That's not the same as feeling mixed on it. You can write confidently while both liking and disliking things about a movie. No, I think this kind of dilly-dallying comes from being not sure, at a deeper level, whether the opinion you're about to espouse is actually correct. 

I won't keep excperting from the review, but I will tell you that there's a fair bit of plot synopsis, comments on what you might call "surface elements" (the appearance, the voice acting, the score), and not very much about what the movie is about. I think Soul is about a lot, some of it very good, some of it a bit muddled. But when you don't really talk about those things in a review, it's a problem.

The whole review is here if you want to see for yourself.

I don't look back proudly on every review I write, of course, but I do generally like the reviews I write about movies I love. Great movies almost always inspire me to at least one of elegant turn of phrase, some expression of my enthusiasm that is exactly what I mean to say. That never happened in my Soul review, perhaps because deep down, I was papering over flaws that I did not want to see.

I had another chance to write about Soul in my year-end post, in which I spend about 250 words blurbing on each of my top ten movies. Again I whiffed on Soul. I spent time talking about trivial, statistics-minded observations like this being Pete Docter's second time making my top ten after Inside Out, and Pixar landing two movies in my top ten. In fact, the number of times I've compared Soul to Inside Out should have revealed to me my reservations about it as a unique creative triumph for Pixar.

It's easy to see why my judgment was a bit clouded on Soul. I've mentioned it a couple times before. We watched it on New Year's Day, my son's seventh birthday, projected on the wall of the hotel where we were staying, with both his aunt and his grandmother in attendance. It was a triumphant execution of a perfectly conceived birthday surprise, and my son told me it was his favorite part of the trip. I was in a "good dad glow" as I watched it, and those enthralling surface elements -- like the appearance and the score -- made it easy to maintain that high.

But people have had a lot of legitimate complaints about Soul, and it's not just the racial ones. Though those are probably the most damning. Although the ways Soul is tone deaf are not, I think, as bad as the movie's most strident critics have portrayed them to be, you can't escape the fact there's something a little off about the way the movie's racial politics play. I do see a few of the blackface criticisms in the body swapping plot, and it doesn't matter if you can explain them away with unassailable talking points. (Like the fact that Kemp Powers was brought in to rework the script and gets a co-director credit.) What matters is the feel it has, and I agree, it is not always exactly the right feel.

I won't get deeper into the ways some Black audiences are put off by the movie, because there are plenty of places you can find whole pieces on that. I will say that none of these points sounded off base to me, and they have no doubt contributed to a shift in my perspective on the film.

But then there are more basic issues about the world, its rules, the way the story is structured, the ultimate message, and even the appearance of the film -- the part that shouldn't prompt any complaints from the world's most accomplished purveyor of computer animation -- that have been put out there. I heard one person say the ways the Great Before and the Great Beyond were envisioned were not particularly surprising, outside of the Picasso-like creatures that run the place, whom everyone seems to love. There are questions as to whose story this is, and whether the movie gets taken away from Pixar's first Black protagonist by a white woman (well, the voice of one anyway). Oops, I guess I said I wouldn't delve too much more into the racial stuff.

I think I really started to question by own enthusiasm -- don't forget, I gave the film a near-perfect 9/10, which translates to 4.5 stars out of 5 -- not because of the podcasters or think pieces, but when a friend of mine said: "Even if I saw only ten films this year, Soul wouldn't be in my top ten."

That comment really struck me because this guy is a huge Pixar fan, and fan of animation in general. His comment was a response to my placement of Soul within my top ten, so that was the inspiration for this particular phrasing, but he wouldn't have said it unless he really wanted to indicate how much the movie had failed him. 

What this all means is not that I don't like Soul anymore, or even that I don't love it. I might still love it. And that's where a second viewing will come in.

Not now, maybe not even soon. But sometime, when I'm not being biased by the look of exquisite joy on my son's face, I will need to wrestle with this movie again, given all I know about how other people feel about it.

I guess with Pixar, I get this feeling that if they are really going for something and mostly succeeding, it's a home run. Pixar usually has ambition on its side, and ambitious projects have served the studio well in the past. Even if it's a near miss, a Pixar near miss is another studio's home run. I feel like I'm more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt than I would be for others, because I'm so in the bag for the majority of their work. 

A #4 year-end ranking is elevated enough for a film to warrant consideration among the best of the decade. Fortunately, we're a long ways off from that. I'll have ample time in the next nine years to figure out how good Soul really is. Maybe if I do confirm my initial feelings, at last I'll be able to write something profound about it. 

Animated colors that nauseate me

After all the to-ing and fro-ing about no one in my family wanting to see The Croods: A New Age (including me, I should say, but I would have gone in order to visit the little town theater in Mansfield, where we stayed between Christmas and New Year's), my wife ended up taking both my kids on Monday, the hottest day of the year so far and one of the last before they return to school tomorrow.

They liked it, of course. I'd say perhaps my wife especially, except that the younger one declared it one of the best movies he'd ever seen. The older one, the one more prone to movie-related hyberole (declaring a half-dozen movies the best he'd ever seen in the past year alone), said it was "okay" but then immediately upgraded that to "pretty good," as you could see him thinking he had been uncharitable, and trying to reconcile his disinterest in seeing it with the fact he'd actually liked it.

It got me thinking about my own negative preconceived notions about the movie that prevented me from wanting to see it, and it's put me on to a larger theory of why I do or do not anticipate certain animated movies. It's a phenomenon common to second-banana animated studios like Dreamworks and Sony, and has to do with the color palettes.

Simply put, when was the last time you saw these colors in a Disney or Pixar movie?

Answer: Never, because Disney and Pixar intuitively realize there's something unpleasant about those pinks and purples, especially when mashed up next to each other.

Oh, Pixar used pinks and purples in Soul, but please note the difference in shade:

Those are lighter, friendlier, more digestible pinks and purples. They don't slap you in the face like those colors used in Dreamworks' The Croods: A New Age or Sony's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2, the two images selected above.

I think it was the latter movie, which I really despised after loving the original, that first planted the seed of these pinks and purples nauseating me. My memory of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is that every scene is a gross mishmash of these colors, assaulting my corneas and turning my stomach in a metaphorical if not literal way. 

Sure, it's easy to find these pinks and purples in one shot of The Croods. But is that all you got, Vance?

Nope.

I better stop posting these images or I just might vomit.

Yes, I do find these colors displeasing, but this is not just me hating on pink and purple. You can do pink and purple right. It's the aggressive pink and purple, almost neon in its intensity, that makes me feel assaulted. 

It's a whole aesthetic approach to this and a number of other of what I would consider lesser animated films. These colors are prevalent in the Trolls movies as well, for example. And the thing that really sticks out about them is the extent to which they don't exist in nature. Yes, there are pinks and purples in nature, but not these pinks and purples.

See that sloth in the picture above? That sloth is pink. Have you ever seen a pink sloth in nature?

Now, the evidence of The Croods: A New Age -- as least as far as my family's opinons constitute evidence -- demonstrates that this color scheme is not fatal to the effectiveness of the movie. And my wife usually hates pink, like with a passion. She wasn't bothered by it here, which just goes to show you how caught up she was in the story. She really appreciated the female empowerment message of it.

But it's going to keep people like me away, unable to experience that storytelling for ourselves. And it's not because I'm a boy and I don't like pink. It's because something about that mashup of pink and purple has the effect on me that a strobe light has on an epileptic. 

You're stealing everything else from Disney -- or trying to, anyway -- so take a lesson from them and figure out how to employ a more muted color palette. 

Onward and upward

I had my first moment of 2020 cinematic normalcy in almost a month Sunday afternoon when the family watched a bonafide A-list 2020 movie that had not yet come out in Australia. Onward was scheduled to hit theaters a couple Thursdays ago, but, well, we know what happened.

Of course, had it actually represented normalcy, I would have seen this in the theater. I haven't missed a Pixar movie in the theater the entire time I've been in Australia. Since then I've seen two Pixar movies that I didn't catch when they were in the theater -- Cars 2 and Monsters University -- but any film that was released theatrically after my August 2013 arrival, I saw in the theater. Yes, even The Good Dinosaur.

In fact, I had two chances to see Onward in the theater, both of which I had to pass up. I was invited to a press screening on a Sunday afternoon about a month ago, but we were already scheduled to go to my father-in-law's for lunch that day. (Plus, the screening was a rare admit two, meaning only one other family member could have attended with me. Usually they are admit four.) Then Hoyts was showing advanced screenings of Onward a week before its release, but by then, we had already decided I should stop going to movie theaters, a few days before they properly closed up shop.

But it felt good not to rely only on Netflix for new release content in March and April of 2020, as U.S. iTunes had the movie available to rent only a week after it was supposed to debut here. And now that means I can also review something that isn't just the latest thing Netflix has crapped out. (Actually, the first two Netflix movies I reviewed, The Platform and Uncorked, were not that at all. But Coffee & Kareem changed all that.)

I don't know exactly how many more 2020 movies there are that I care about seeing but haven't already seen, though I suppose pretty soon I'll be able to see marginal candidates like Bad Boys for Life, Sonic the Hedgehog and Call of the Wild. There's some more normalcy for you, maybe an extreme sort of normalcy.

I had heard mixed things about Onward -- two podcasters placed it in the lower half of their Pixar chart -- but I ended up being charmed and moved by it in equal measure. It had maybe a few pacing issues in the middle, but by the climax, my wife and I were both sniffling.

And then something equal parts moving and alarming happened. My nine-year-old son started bawling.

Not sniffling like we were. But crying the way he'd cry if he fell off a skateboard and took all the skin off his palms and knees.

It may just be that my son discovered, for the first time today, what it feels like when a movie makes you really sad.

Without spoiling the movie at all, I don't think Onward is particularly sad for a Pixar movie. As usual, they get the mix about right. And my older son has seen pretty much all those Pixar movies since we moved here with me. He didn't see Finding Dory, but so what.

I'd say its ending is about as emotional as the endings of Inside Out and Coco, which is high praise. He saw those movies, but he never reacted like this.

I suspect the pandemic has something to do with it. We are trying to protect them from the worst of the information about it, and they don't dwell on it much, hiding their fears if they have them at all. But we know they hear figures about deaths and other information that is, shall we say, dismaying. Fortunately, they are lucky enough not to know anyone who is directly affected, as are we.

But the themes of Onward, combined with the pandemic, likely opened the floodgates for the older one. It took us a couple minutes to calm him down.

Twenty minutes after it was over, he was once again bouncing around like a kid who had eaten too much sugar. So no permanent damage done.

But the loss presented in this film, even leavened by a perfect Pixar ending, was just too much for him. I get it.

So I guess it's onward and upward for him as a cinephile. He's had his first good cry at the movies. It only gets better from here.

My wife says she remembers him being similarly concerned by the fate of Bing Bong in Inside Out. But I don't really remember that, and besides, he was only four. As a nine-year-old, you know a lot more about the world, for better or for worse.

And with continued physical distancing and curve-flattening disruptions, maybe it will end up being for the better, and we can limit the catastrophic effect this virus has on the world.

I'd watch my next five Pixar movies on my home TV if we could collectively accomplish that.

TIL: Trent Reznor is scoring a Pixar film

When a person gets his life together, funny things can happen.

Trent Reznor, the primary and sometimes only creative force behind the band Nine Inch Nails, spent many years languishing in addiction and suicidal thoughts. He made only about one album every five years. They were brilliant, but they took him ages because he had so much personal baggage on his plate. (Can you have baggage on a plate? I like mixing metaphors.)

Ten years ago he married another musician, Mariqueen Maandig, and started churning out children, four to date. Instead of sapping his time, fatherhood has made him more productive, as he has made several new Nine Inch Nails album as well as scores to approximately 73 films, working closely with sometimes NIN band member Atticus Ross.

I never thought I would say it, but the man who penned the lyrics “I want to fuck you like an animal” is now scoring a Pixar movie. A Pixar movie about jazz, at that – a genre in which he expects to be working on the score. (And may already have been for the new Watchmen series?)

That movie is called Soul, and it’s coming out next June.

Although I miss the tortured heyday of Nine Inch Nails, it does my heart good that Reznor, at age 54, is feeling so much better now.

The last decade of his career has been a lot more about movie scores than Nine Inch Nails, and there’s almost a perfect line of demarcation with the start of the decade. Two thousand ten was when he submitted his first (and still best) score for The Social Network. He had supervised soundtracks before, such as Lost Highway and Natural Born Killers, but never had he previously scored an entire film. He’s obviously loved it as I can barely count the scores since then, which have included several more Fincher films, Patriots Day, Birdbox, Mid 90s, and so on.

But this latest development of scoring a children’s movie is another watershed moment for him. It feels kind of similar to Ice Cube going from “fuck tha police” to starring in kids movies about long and arduous road trips. But I was also happy for Cube when he entered his “Uncle Ice Cube” phase. It feels like a fair tradeoff in artistic credibility if it means you are also a happier person.

Although I always liked Reznor’s lyrics – they can be fun to scream at full volume, even if you are only pretending you are as anguished as he is – I would never have counted Nine Inch Nails as my favorite band if it weren’t for Reznor’s sonic inventiveness. Granted, many of those sounds were dark and industrial, as you can’t have angry lyrics over music that doesn’t sound angry. But even in the midst of his darkest periods, he wrote songs like “A Warm Place” from The Downward Spiral, which had a lot more optimism embedded in them.

Soul seems like a particularly warm place, even if it involves souls separated from their bodies in a kind of afterlife – think a high concept similar to Inside Out. And clearly he’s not worried what fans who fell for his aggressive despair will think. I mean, if he’s not feeling it, he can’t really make it.

If things hadn’t started going right for him, though, he might not still be here. Again, I’ll take it, and on Thanksgiving, I’ll give thanks for it.

June 17th is Pixar Sequel Day

I knew there had to be a reason I have a Microsoft Word document in which I record a running list of what movies I've seen on each day of the calendar year.

I don't mean just a list of movies watched. I mean a list that starts with January 1, and has next to it the movies I've seen on January 1, dating back to 2002, with the year I saw them in parenthesis afterward. And then goes on from there throughout the rest of the year.

Without that, I would have never noticed that I've seen a Pixar movie on June 17th, three years running. And not just a Pixar movie. A Pixar sequel.

In 2017, it was Cars 3. In 2018, it was Incredibles 2. Now 2019 has rolled along and I am among the first to have seen Toy Story 4.

What makes this especially strange is that you usually only go to the movies on particular days of the week, especially when you go with your kids, which I did for each of these. So if you've seen a kids movie, any kids movie, three years running, one of those days has to be either a Friday or a Monday. Unless you've got a leap year factored in, in which case a Tuesday or a Thursday is also a possibility.

No leap years here. I watched these movies on a Saturday, a Sunday and a Monday, all June 17th in consecutive years.

A lot of things had to go just right for that to happen.

The first year, they had to schedule the Cars 3 preview screening for a Saturday, instead of the usual Sunday. My family and I went to that for free so I could review it. The movie opened that Thursday, June 22nd.

Incredibles 2 opened a week earlier than that in 2018, on June 14th, but for this to work out I had to not get invited to a critics screening of that. I can't remember why I didn't. My editor might have flubbed something. I had to instead take my kids that Sunday, on what was a really rainy day if I remember correctly.

But the strangest turn of events had to be this year, when for some reason the advanced screening of Toy Story 4 was not on a weekend at all. When I saw it was scheduled for a Monday, I thought I couldn't go, since some of these screenings are planned for weekday mornings or afternoons. But then I noticed it was set to start at 6, and realized that not only could I go, but the rest of the family could as well. We all went even though it was a school night, because the alternative was to shell out more than $50 for their three non-free tickets this weekend.

The streak of Pixar sequels on June 17th will die here, as the next Pixar movie, Onward, a) is not a sequel, and b) comes out next March. I suppose I could end up watching it with my kids on video in June, but that seems unlikely.

Given that the original Toy Story is in my top ten films of all time, and the sequel was my #2 movie of 1999 (I didn't yet keep rankings when the original came out, but it would have been my #1), I probably should be writing a Toy Story 4 post that doesn't exist just to point out a coincidence. Maybe in the coming days I will. But my review will also post in a day or two, or may have already by the time you read this (check for the link to your right).

I'll save my soapboxing about why the series did not stop at three (but that I liked the movie anyway) for that forum.

The good, the bad and the really bad

I've decided my eight-year-old son is my animation polar opposite.

When we were trying to pick out a movie on Friday night for movie night, it was his younger brother's turn to pick. Of course, the older one never misses an opportunity to try to influence a situation with his words. (Shrewdly, if successful, this would get him two picks in a row, as this would technically be his brother's choice.)

"I'd watch anything Madagascar," he said to his brother. "Anything Madagascar is good."

This is a guy who, just moments earlier, turned his nose up, with prejudice, at The Lion King -- a movie with a lot of the same subject matter, only good. As I've told you before, he also claims to hate Toy Story and Finding Nemo, though I was at least encouraged that it was the younger one who vetoed Wall-E, which the older one would have been willing to watch.

Still, as a general principle, the eight-year-old seems to be Team Dreamworks while I am Team Disney/Pixar.

Sigh.

It's not that I don't like any Dreamworks films, because that's certainly not the case. However, my typical relationship with Dreamworks is to see the first in every series of films and leave their umpteen sequels unwatched. Even the good ones, like Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon. (Actually, I saw the second How to Train Your Dragon but not yet the third.) To be fair, I may be conflating multiple different non-Disney/Pixar animation studios here, as the prime example of this is Ice Age, which is Blue Sky, not Dreamworks.

The original Madagascar had been the poster boy for what I think Dreamworks does wrong with its movies. Too manic, too many characters getting hit in the head by falling objects. You don't need me to elaborate. You've seen these movies.

Anyway, I greatly disliked Madagascar and make a habit of commenting on my dislike for it whenever it comes up in conversation. I wear that dislike almost as a badge of honor.

Over the years, though, people I trust have diminished some of my bluster about Madagascar. Having liked the first movie well enough, they shouldn't have held any sway over me at all. But these are people whose tastes are otherwise trustworthy, and they seem to have an especial fondness for Madagascar 3, the one with the circus afros. Which, by the way, is not a good standout detail to know about a movie.

On Friday night, I felt like it was maybe time to give the Madagascar series another shot, so indeed, we queued up Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. (Wait, isn't Madagascar the country actually in Africa? Or off its coast anyway?)

Ugh.

Instead of rejuvenating the potential of the series, the second Madagascar killed it dead where it stood. I didn't figure it was possible to like it less than I liked Madagascar, but that sure was the case. The vocal performances are annoying (a big complaint I had with the first), the jokes are unfunny, the heartwarming storylines are utterly perfunctory, and the hitting on the head is plentiful, at least metaphorically if not actually.

Consulting Letterboxd, I see I gave the original two stars out of five, at least as a retroactive assessment of my feelings toward it when I started on Letterboxd in early 2012. The sequel? I gave it only half that, making it the rare animated movie to get only a single star from me. (Off the top of my head, I can think of only two others: All Dogs Go to Heaven and The Nut Job.)

I'm not going to further deconstruct my dislike for Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, but I did want to give one more thing that I think is dumb about it: It has way too many silly side characters. Following in Despicable Me's footsteps -- or is it the other way around? -- these movies have their minions in the form of the penguins. However, then they also have King Julien and his sidekick. And there are also two posh monkeys who are like Statler and Waldorf on the Muppets. Predictably, it's way too much.

I also wanted to explain the meaning of my subject for this post, because there was a funny coincidence to this viewing.

As you will recall, I only just watched The Good, the Bad and the Ugly for the first time on Wednesday night. I watched Moneyball in between, but Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa made for the second consecutive new-to-me movie featuring Ennio Morricone's iconic theme song from the Leone western.

"The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" -- also the name of the song -- plays a couple times during the film, whenever this elderly New York tourist on safari shows up on screen. See, in typical Dreamworks fashion, she's a fightin' granny who tussles with Alex, the lion voiced by Ben Stiller. As the music reminds us of a much, much, much, much, much, much (catch your breath) much better movie, she delivers roundhouse kicks to Alex and says "Bad kitty."

Really bad indeed.

Am I really going to just not see Finding Dory?

It's been more than two weeks since Finding Dory hit theaters, and I have yet to see it.

The two weeks are significant because most cinema chains only allow me to use my critics card to see a movie within the first two weeks of its release. I am very congizant of that deadline and yet I have let it pass on Finding Dory.

So I had to ask myself: Am I going to just not see this in the theater?

It's not the craziest question for most people. Most people these days don't give a shit whether they see something on the big screen or the small screen, or, increasingly, whether they see it at all.

But you're talking to a guy (or reading a guy, anyway) who made a Pixar movie his #1 movie of last year. And who ranked Finding Nemo as not only his #2 movie of 2003, but as his 16th favorite movie of the 2000's.

I should be all over that shit like white on rice. To put it crudely.

And yet I haven't been. For this, I blame my son.

Time was if a movie was animated and was going to be in movie theaters, I could sell my son on it. Or rather, he didn't need selling. He either didn't fully understand what we were doing, or hadn't yet developed the agency to state an opinion on it. We just went and Daddy knew best.

But he's almost six, and now he has an opinion about everything.

When I asked him if he wanted to see the sequel to Finding Nemo -- which he's seen at least twice -- his answer was non-commital to negative. In fact, worse than that, it was almost condescending. "No thanks," he said, as if he was way above movies about fish swimming around in the ocean. The condescending part was that I could detect in his tone that he was trying to let me down easily. A sign of maturity as well, I suppose, but forgive me if I'm not seeing the silver lining at the moment.

My wife tried again on a separate occasion and got no traction either.

But it's been ages since I've gone to see an animated movie in the theater without being accompanied by my son. I don't feel like I need him as an excuse to go, but I've just gotten so out of the habit of it. It's a nice way of killing two birds with one stone -- I get to see a movie, and we get an activity that helps move the day closer to bedtime. (If you think that's a cynical view of parenting, you probably aren't a parent.) I feel like instances of killing only one bird should be reserved for movies my son can't see with me.

In fact, if you want to find the last animated movie I saw in the theater without my son, you have to go all the way back to the 9th of November, 2012. That's when I saw Wreck-It Ralph with two friends. Ever since my son's first theatrical experience -- Planes, on September 21, 2013 -- I haven't seen an animated movie in the theater without him.

I could easily let the streak continue. I have a precedent of not budgeting theater time for Pixar sequels. I saw Monsters University on video, and I didn't even see Cars 2 in the year of its release. I saw it two years later. Who's to say Finding Dory should be any different? Who's to say it's any less of a cash grab? The critics I've seen seem to be divided on its value.

But then there's the part of me that doesn't want to miss something that could be great. And if I'm looking at precedents, it may be more instructive to look at animation in general. My #1 movie of last year was Inside Out, another Pixar film, and my favorite movie out of 35 so far this year is Zootopia, another Disney film. If Dory has a chance to be in those movies' ballparks, I should make time for it.

And so I think I will. In fact, I've decided to go tonight. That is, assuming I don't collapse from exhaustion sometime around 6:45. I did wake up at 4:30 this morning, and was never able to get back to sleep.

I said earlier that "most" chains don't let me see a movie for free if it's been out for more than two weeks. Not all. So fortunately, I still won't have to pay.

Mike Wazowski and Lightning McQueen may not have deserved a chance in theaters for their sequels, but Dory the fish does. She's earned my trust, I think.

So tonight, find her I shall.

Advanced

Now that it's taken me nearly a week to write this, it doesn't seem quite as exciting, but last Sunday I got to see Pixar's latest, Inside Out, a full 11 days before it hit Australian cinemas. That's 12 days before U.S. (Thursday release vs. Friday release), and 13 if you consider that we're a day ahead.

That makes it probably the coolest advanced screening I've gotten to attend as part of my reviewing gig at ReelGood.

But it was also the best for another reason -- Inside Out is the best movie, period, I've seen in some time.

We're not just talking about Pixar getting back on top of its game. We're talking about Pixar getting back on top of everyone's game.

I won't go on at length about how great Inside Out is -- if you check back soon, I'll have a link posted on the right-hand side to my actual review -- but I do want to discuss one of the most phenomenal and unlikely things about it:

It wasn't the least bit hard for my four-year-old to understand.

You surely know that Inside Out features a cast of anthropomorphized emotions vying for control of a child's brain. It deals with all sorts of heady concepts like Core Memories and Abstract Thought and Islands of Personality. Advanced concepts, to be sure.

And Pixar made it effortlessly accessible to a child.

I must admit I was bracing myself for a barrage of in-movie questions. I wasn't prepared to love it as much as I did, so in my mind I was fully prepared to answer them without being annoyed at the disruption. The worst possible outcome would be that my son was bored and would want to leave, but I had that nipped in the bud. You see, my wife was at the screening with us while my sister-in-law stayed home with my younger son, and I made sure to emphasize that if anyone had to depart early with him to the lobby, it had to be her. After all, the only reason any of us were there in the first place was that I was reviewing the movie -- the whole movie.

Near the start I was concerned that my worst fears might be realized. There were telltale signs that my son would, at the very least, be a distraction, and at worst force my wife to leave early on in the movie. I had clearance to stay, but I'd feel guilty if they had to twiddle their thumbs in the lobby for an hour. What happened was that after the absolutely lovely opening short, called Lava, my son turned to my wife and complained that he was hungry. Normally we would have picked something up at the concession stand with which to ply him, but we wasted our pre-movie time on window shopping outside the cinema. So this plea for food was going to go unanswered, and could certainly metastasize into far worse behavior.

Except once the movie started, there was not a peep from my son. Not a peep.

Actually, he did make one comment during the movie, but it wasn't even a question. I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was some kind of observation. The kind that proved he was engrossed, and would not be a threat to leave.

He also laughed in a lot of the right spots, even if I felt some of it was just social laughing based on the reactions of others. And our audience laughed a ton during this movie.

After we got out, I asked him if he had any questions about what had happened in the movie. He didn't. And to pry further, in order to rule out the fact that he was just pretending he understood because he didn't even know where to start with his questions, I asked a few follow-up questions. He ended up offering a startlingly intelligent analysis of why the movie was called Inside Out. I mean, intelligent for a four-year-old.

Maybe it's my son that's advanced.

But for now, I'm just crediting Pixar on making a firgging awesome movie.

Dreamworks' inadvertent rival pimping

This is the story of how my son's interest in watching Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit always ends in a viewing of Toy Story.

My son is allowed to watch as much as two hours worth of TV when he wakes up on weekend mornings. Scoff all you want, fellow parents. Deep down, you know you treasure those two hours as an invaluable time to do things around the house. (Even if the things you're doing are not very meritorious, such as updating your blog.)

So each morning after I get him up, we go through an often-circuitous rigmarole about what he wants to watch. This process is complicated by the fact that he sometimes doesn't know the name of the thing he wants to watch. Often I use our Recently Watched section of Netflix streaming as a major crutch, and many mornings, we fill these two hours by stringing together a number of half-hour shows.

However, a feature also does the trick of getting us most of the way there. This is where it gets a little tricky. When he's requesting Cars, does he want to watch so-called "Fin Cars" ("Different Cars"), a series of tall tales told by Mater, which runs 36 minutes? Or is he talking about the two-hour feature, which we just bought about a month ago?

Another area of ambiguity relates to Wallace & Gromit. The short films (A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave) used to be available for streaming in a package. I don't think they are anymore, so when W&G get requested nowadays -- as they did this morning -- I put in our DVD of The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

And then usually take it right out again.

See, something about seeing the Dreamworks logo come up makes my son want to watch Toy Story instead.

I had no idea what it was until this morning, when the phenomenon happened again.

"Ina watch Toy Story," he said in that tone of voice that's almost a whine, but not quite, as those balloons float up into the clouds, and the boy starts fishing on that crescent moon.

This morning I tried to take note of what is causing this association in my son, and it occurred to me pretty quickly once the Toy Story BluRay had gone in.

See, the opening screen of the BluRay, where they ask you your preferred language for the disc options, is Andy's wallpaper -- which happens to be a big screen of blue broken up by regular intervals of clouds.

Bingo.

You know, Dreamworks' is probably screwed no matter what it does. I'm kind of surprised the Dreamworks logo doesn't make my son want to watch a different Pixar movie, Up, which we also own. After all, the logo prominently features balloons as well.

Then again, it's very unlikely that my son knows the title Up. It's a bit abstract for a child. When he does request it -- which is rare -- I believe he refers to it as "Balloons." Or "buyoons," which is how he pronounces it. (My son is learning Spanish at daycare, and may have heard that word spoken with the Spanish convention of turning double L's into a Y sound.)

Of course, if we're talking patterns, here's another predictable one that also relates to my son changing his viewing preferences based on a visual trigger:

Once he's set up with his viewing option, I like to set myself up with my laptop at our kitchen table, which looks in on the living room where he's watching his shows. If I can see him, he can see me, and my laptop immediately reminds him of his absolute favorite viewing option:

"Diggers."

"Daddy, ina watch diggers," he says/whines.

See, before we showed him any TV, we allowed him to watch construction equipment ("diggers") on youtube on my computer. In time, "diggers" came to refer to anything watched on the internet on daddy's computer -- trains, helicopters, even shows on potty training. Although TV is now an option for him and has been for almost a year, "diggers" has never been fully supplanted.

And more often than not, when I've got my computer out, my son will slink over and try to start climbing up on my knee, and begin full-on whining if he is even remotely denied.

So here's another skill parents have gotten down: adaptation. Now, I bring my work computer home every weekend, so he can watch diggers on my work computer, while I use this one to write this post, the one I'm finishing right about ...

... now.

The movie that never goes on sale

We all know that the price of movies in physical form has plummeted in the past couple years. Even movies that are indisputably great can sometimes be found on BluRay for around $5. (That's how much my Terminator 2 BluRay cost, as I keep mentioning every time I invariably return to the subject of the cost of owning movies.)

But there are certain movies that remain pretty much as expensive as they were when they were first released. The one I'm thinking of today is Cars, which is now over six years old, but priced like it was brand new.

As Toy Story made it into our BluRay player for the second weekend in a row this weekend, I'm all the more eager to step up my plan that's been gestating for awhile, to diversify our collection of movies that are appropriate for kids. Specifically, to buy Cars for my son for Christmas. He'll turn 2 years and 4 months on Christmas day.

Cars seemed like a logical choice, because not only is it an absolute slam dunk choice for my son (we already own a Cars storybook that he loves), but it's a movie that I also really like. In fact, I ranked it 13th out of the 77 films I saw before my ranking deadline in 2006. Not only that, but the Cars franchise has room to grow. Neither my son nor myself (nor my wife, but that's a little less surprising) has seen Cars 2, so after we just can't stand Cars anymore but my son still requests it, Cars 2 will be waiting to provide us a change of scenery.

The thing is, Cars is probably one of the most profitable movies in the history of the medium, in terms of the demand to own it. I don't have any numbers to back that up, but there's a reason Pixar made Cars 2 when the original Cars didn't receive the usual praise directed at one of the studio's films (or win the Oscar for best animated feature, the only Pixar film not to do so since Monsters, Inc. -- except for the sequel, which wasn't even nominated). The reason is that kids frigging LOVE Cars, and the merchandise sells through the roof.

Why, then, would you discount something that sells so well?

Answer: You wouldn't.

So I can't just waltz into a store and pick up a DVD of Cars for $10. When I was at Target yesterday, the DVD was still $19.99, the BluRay still $29.99.

And I'm sorry, I'm not going to spend that much money on a movie for a 2-year-old.

Because it's different buying a present for a 2-year-old than for an adult, isn't it? The goal behind getting a present for your child is not to demonstrate how much money you spent on them, which, regrettably, is sometimes the goal with adults. (It's one of the reasons I don't mind paying full price for presents for adults -- I feel that on some level, the amount of money I spend on them is a measure of how much I care about them.) The goal with a kid is simply to deliver the present. You wouldn't care if you got it for free, as long as the kid received it and was happy with it.

I could never give an adult a gift I'd gotten for free -- I'd feel too guilty. Maybe as an additional throw-in gift, but not their only gift. I'd feel like it was some kind of a deception, a violation of the unspoken rules of gift giving. But kids don't think like that. They just care about the material results.

Which actually leads me to a potential solution to my problem, something I would never do with an adult but could easily do here: buy it used. Again, with a child, there isn't that moment when they remove the wrapping paper and make an immediate judgment about the condition of the present and what it might have cost. My son will just see a DVD with Lighting McQueen on the cover, and his eyes will light up.

I should pause here to note that Cars is by no means the only example of movies that retain their full value, even years after they've driven off the lot. I'd bet the whole Pixar catalogue rarely goes on sale, and there are probably other perennially successful children's titles (The Lion King, Shrek) that are always going to be near peak demand. But by being the most kid-oriented of its kind, Cars is probably a lot more in demand than, say, Wall-E. I wouldn't be surprised if I could waltz into certain stores and pick up a $10 Wall-E.

So yeah, maybe I need to pick up that $6.89 used Cars DVD on Amazon, because even on Amazon, I can't find a new one for any lower than $14.99.

What's the essential difference between Amazon's $14.99 and the $10 I was willing to spend if I found it at Target?

Well, to take it back to the beginning of this post, I could buy a BluRay of Terminator 2 for that difference. 

And then you'd still have to add in shipping.

So while my son is still young and hasn't yet developed an adult understanding of the do's and don'ts of exchanging presents, I'll give him hand-me-down movies just as I give him hand-me-down clothes.

And in the process, maybe I'll also hand down to him my love of movies.

It's all in the writing

There are others in the game, but it's safe to say that the two current titans in animation are Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks. We can lump Disney and Pixar together because a) Disney owns Pixar, and b) when combined, their output about equals that of Dreamworks.

(Sorry, Universal/Illumination Entertainment -- I'm not inviting you to this party for the disappointing Despicable Me and Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. I'll also now make a dutiful mention of Fox' Ice Age movies.)

Although I certainly prefer the animation styles of Disney/Pixar, I'm not going to credit them with having a significant technical advantage over Dreamworks in that department.

And so, when/if Dreamworks does poach employees from Disney/Pixar, they shouldn't be poaching the animators. They should be poaching the writers.

The writing is why Dreamworks is Pepsi to Disney/Pixar's Coke.

The latest example is Rise of the Guardians, the movie I accidentally saw on Thursday night. I had gone to the Sherman Oaks Arclight for an 8:00 showing of Lincoln, but was denied as the result of an apparent sell-out. Although the "big board" did not list the movie as sold out, neither could I purchase a ticket to it at one of the kiosks. And I was close enough to start time not be able to wait behind over 20 dodos who didn't realize you can also buy tickets from the machines. Even if I did, the wait might only confirm what I already suspected about the paucity of available tickets.

Since it started only five minutes later, Rise of the Guardians was an obvious Plan B. (Though I first made sure that Anna Karenina wasn't playing anytime soon.)

My response to this movie was sluggish from the start. That's not to say I thought it was poorly made. As I said before, I prefer the character designs in Disney and Pixar, but I could easily recognize the virtuoso work on display here. I just wish it weren't so manically dizzying, is all. So frantic with color and action and general zaniness. "You can tell they worked really hard on this" was the backhanded compliment that kept occurring to me.

It was really the writing that let me down. The inability to make me care about the characters. The inability to give them depth. The inability to fill me with wonder. The inability to make me laugh.

That was the thing that surprised me most about Wreck-It Ralph, which I saw a couple weeks ago. Not surprised that I cared about the characters or was infected with the contagious sense of wonder, but that I was laughing hysterically. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that the movie was perfectly tailored for a child of the 1980s to get its references, but Wreck-It Ralph may have been the hardest I've laughed at a movie this year. (I'll also note that I saw it with two friends who are the same age and have the same references, which certainly helped.)

I didn't laugh once during Rise of the Guardians. Not once.

I might consider Wreck-It Ralph an anomaly if not for the fact that Disney's previous non-Pixar animated release, Tangled, gave me the hardest single laugh I can remember having in the theater. That's a bold statement, but it may be true. I distinguish this hard laugh from other hard laughs because I kept giggling about this particular line of dialogue for minutes afterward. If you've seen the movie, it's when the thief turned hero, Flynn (voice of Zachary Levi), finds himself in an improbable sword fight with a horse, backing up toward the edge of a long dropoff. Yelling above the ruckus, Flynn tells the horse (who, true to nature, can't speak), "Just so you know, this is the strangest thing I've ever done." I'm almost starting to laugh now, just typing this out.

As a comparison, let's look at the other recent Dreamworks movies that didn't make me laugh: How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda ... well, maybe once or twice each. I did laugh at Monsters vs. Aliens, but that stands out as an exception that I attribute more to the vocal actors than the writing. I'd say its third act gives a good idea of its structural failures from a script perspective.

Why are there so many recent Dreamworks Animation movies I'm not even mentioning here? Because I didn't even deem them worth seeing. That list includes the last two Madagascar movies, the second Kung Fu Panda, the last three Shrek movies, Puss in Boots and Megamind. I did really enjoy Bee Movie back in 2007, but had a much more negative impression of it on second viewing. (That also probably speaks to the writing, as that script is all over the place.)

Pure Pepsi, I tell you.

Now, I haven't seen Pixar's last two movies, either. But I do expect to catch Brave in the coming weeks. I'm probably saving Cars 2 for when my son inevitably goes crazy over the Cars movies, which will happen just as soon as we expose him to the first one.

I do realize that the claims I'm making here are rather broad. In fact, if I looked up these movies, I'm sure I'd find their scripts credited to dozens of different writers, multiple per movie in most cases. Naturally, a group of dozens of different writers have varying strengths that should seem to operate independently of whatever studio is employing them.

Except Pixar and the last two Disney films do have a certain unifying force that gives them a consistent quality: John Lasseter. You know, the guy who basically founded Pixar and directed the first two Toy Story movies. (We won't mentioned that he also directed what many people considered three of the lesser Pixar movies, A Bug's Life and the two Cars movies. For the record, I do really like the original Cars.)

I can't be sure to what extent Lasseter meddles in the day-to-day operations of these movies, but I have to think that his fingerprints are all over Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph, which certainly qualifies as a good thing. In fact, it seems as though he's putting more of himself into making really good Disney movies than really good Pixar movies, as Brave seems likely to be the second straight Pixar movie not to win the Oscar for best animated feature. (If you were asking me today, I'd bet on Wreck-It Ralph to win this year.)

Assuming that he does meddle (and that this is a good thing), it's probably not standing over the shoulder of an animator, grabbing his mouse arm and operating the animator like a puppet, showing him the right way to give texture to individual hairs on a character's head. Nope, I'm thinking he's in the writer's room, figuring out just the right way to give the characters texture, dimension and heart.

The results speak for themselves. Disney/Pixar movies feature characters and scenarios you care about, which lead to exciting and poignant narrative climaxes.

Dreamworks?

With Rise of the Guardians being a particularly valid example, Dreamworks movies are just a big light show. 

Not so Brave after all?

That sound you hear is a sigh of relief from hardcore Pixar fans upon the release of Brave.

True to its name, the film represents Pixar's return to its risk-taking ways of old. After two straight sequels -- one that was well received (Toy Story 3) and one that wasn't (Cars 2) -- the company is finally returning to something brand new, something with uncertain merchandising potential featuring characters we've never met before. The return is temporary, as the sequel to Monsters Inc. (called Monsters University) is due out in June of 2013. (I just read that it is technically a prequel.)

But I'm kind of wondering if Pixar isn't relying on our sense of familiarity for this one, too.

Oh, there are surface similarities to How to Train Your Dragon, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's actually a bit more shrewd than that.

Remember a little movie called The Hunger Games that came out in March?

Yeah, that movie also featured a tough female protagonist who's handy with a bow and arrow.

Don't think this didn't cross their minds over at Pixar.

The actual release date of the Hunger Games movie would have been largely serendipitous. But back when they announced what was then called The Bear and the Bow in April of 2008, they had to know that The Hunger Games would be made into a movie, and that by June of 2012, it would already be either a big hit, or a highly anticipated release sometime in the near future.

Hadn't they?

Ha. No. See, this is what happens when you start writing a blog post before fully researching the thing you're writing about.

Suzanne Collins' first Hunger Games book was not published until September of 2008 -- nearly six months after the movie that would become Brave was announced.

So The Hunger Games and Brave are actually just another case of that phenomenon we see so often in Hollywood -- the convergence of similar ideas that are ready to hit the multiplexes within months of each other. Often times, one of those ideas is a direct rip-off of the other, even if it makes it to theaters first. In this case, though, it seems like just a coincidence.

Of course, it's not like The Hunger Games and Brave are similar outside of the fact that a young girl wields a bow and arrow in both. It's not like these are two competing movies about the life of runner Steve Prefontaine.

So why did I make you read a whole post in which my conclusion ultimately contradicted my original thesis?

Hey, I'm lucky if I get the time (or have the ideas) to write anything these days. If I've got actual content up on the page, I'm publishing it.

Here's hoping you love Brave ... and that I start finding the time to post more often.

Is Pixar getting lazy?

Used to be that Pixar was pathologically committed to forging new, original material that never failed to be just the thing the zeitgeist needed. Like clockwork, Pixar would release one film per year that seemed to stretch our collective imaginations in one direction or another, toward things we had never seen before, and get five-star ratings from critics in the process.

Now? I'm concerned about the upcoming period of laurel-resting.

Granted, Pixar's latest, Toy Story 3, is the first sequel the company has made in 11 years (since the brilliant Toy Story 2), and by all standards continues Pixar's unblemished record of excellence. But we're about to enter into a period that might be telling in terms of how Pixar plans to settle down in the coming decade.

Namely, you're about to get a lot more sequels.

With the Toy Story movies, there was never a doubt about the company's direction. I know we're only talking about a small sample size with just one previous sequel, but I don't think anyone thought Toy Story 3 was a sign of encroaching laziness on Pixar's part. Toy Story 2 had set a precedent that sequels were acceptable for Buzz, Woody and pals -- and that these sequels had the chance to be nearly as good as, if not better than, the original.

Now, however, the rest of the Pixar catalogue is being opened up to potential franchising. No longer are the Toy Story movies the exception that proves the rule (I'm never sure if I'm using that notion correctly) -- the rule of forever breaking new ground.

Most of you have probably heard that Pixar's next movie is Cars 2, which is set to open on June 24, 2011. But did you know that the following year, Monsters Inc. 2 is being released as well? Wikipedia has it scheduled for released on November 16, 2012. (We'll already know if Barack Obama won reelection by then.) I'm sharing this now because I just found out myself -- yesterday, while checking Billy Crystal's filmography. (If you remember, I wondered in yesterday's post why he no longer acts.)

It'd actually be three sequels in a row for Pixar if not for the fairytale Brave, once titled The Bear and the Bow, which is scheduled to be released on June 15, 2012 -- marking the first time two Pixar films will be released in the same calendar year.

I don't have a problem with the movies they chose to franchise -- I'm a bigger Cars fan than almost anyone I know, and I also really dig Monsters Inc. It's just the quick run of sequels, three out of four films, that seems like a worrisome trend. (And for the record, Brave doesn't sound as promising as other original Pixar material -- it features knights and princesses and other areas that have been done to death by dozens of Pixar knockoffs.)

If these three sequels, why shouldn't we be expecting Finding Nemo Again? Further Up? The Even-More Incredibles? Why not Ratatouille 2, or perhaps, more appropriately, Rata-2-ee?

And then, when they're done with all that, maybe Cars 3 and Monsters Inc. 3? And don't forget Toy Story 4.

I'm not sure if "laziness" is really the correct term, but it seems logical that it's easier -- or at least a safer bet -- to write new adventures for tried-and-true characters, than to produce new characters who may not catch on in the same way (or may not have the same possibilities for merchandising). It's a lot easier if you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time you go to the drawing board. Reinventing the wheel has worked so far, but Pixar must wonder: For how long?

The years 2007 to 2009 may not have been my favorite years for Pixar movies, but there's no doubt that the triumvirate of Ratatouille, Wall-E and Up raised the profile of Pixar from mere purveyors of children's entertainment to the prestigious makers of dramatic art they are today. In some reviews of Toy Story 3, I even sensed the critic struggling with the dilemma of how to address the basic frivolity of a third Toy Story movie, relative to the weighty issues considered in the last three films. But Pixar has gained such a teflon image, there's no way a critic could question the studio, which benefits from an automatic presumption of greatness, a golden touch that never fails. Fortunately, most critics didn't really feel the need to question, because Toy Story 3 ended up being great. The sighs of relief were audible that this revered company had continued its winning streak.

That's why I'll be especially curious to see the reaction to Cars 2. The first Cars, although inordinately popular with small children (my friend watched it literally 30 times with his young son), didn't leave most adults searching for newer and greater accolades. In fact, it's fair to say that some even turned their noses up at it. I'm the exception -- I really loved the film. But there's no doubt that many people consider it Pixar's weakest or second weakest film (A Bug's Life being the other contender).

If people rhapsodize over the sequel to a movie that features cars with googly eyes, it'll serve as proof to me that either a) Pixar really can do no wrong, or b) the brainwash is complete. Part of the reason we love Pixar as much as we do is because we want to love Pixar that much -- we need to love Pixar that much. If critics wax philosophical about Cars 2, we'll know that Pixar's new phase of going back to the well has been accepted, even endorsed.

If not, it could tell us that our love affair with Pixar is contingent on them continuing to expand our minds -- continuing to present us with rats who want to be gourmet chefs, with trash compactors who want to love, and with old men who tether their homes to hot-air balloons.

I guess we have almost a year before we'll find out.