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.