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.
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