Tag Archives: pixar

Aug 03

To infinity … and beyond!

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When I Facebooked that I was getting ready to watch “Toy Story 3” at our church’s family movie night (held each Wednesday in August), my sister-in-law in North Carolina responded that I should have a hankie handy. Well, I had a bandana, but I’d worn it as a sweatband on the walk from my apartment to church (more about that in a second) and it was so wet I had to rinse it out and it was draped over a chair on the opposite side of the fellowship hall when I needed it.

And, yes, I needed it. Call me an over-emotional sap, impugn my manhood if you like, but I needed it. The Pixar people have a grasp of storytelling that is almost unique in Hollywood. They know what a story is supposed to do, they care about their characters, and they write and rewrite until they get it right. I’ve heard that you have to have a thick skin to work there; it’s not mean-spirited, but their work process is brutally honest, and if your idea isn’t good enough it will be shot down.

Our annual “Movie and a Meal” event is fun, and it’s allowed me to see a lot of great family films that I didn’t see in the theater. I will, however, probably skip “It Takes Two” next week – I saw enough of Mary-Kate and Ashley back when one of my nieces was going through a Mary-Kate and Ashley phase.

The August 24 movie intrigues me – I’d never heard of it until this week. It’s a 1993 movie entitled “Rigoletto,” described on its Wikipedia page as having thematic elements similar to “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Man Without A Face,” and “Phantom of the Opera.” It’s not directly related to the Verdi opera by the same name (which would be a strange choice for family movie night).

Anyway, back to my walk. The first half of last week, I was recovering from a cold. The second half of last week, my brother and sister-in-law were in town, and between the two of those I didn’t make it to the rec center at all last week. I resolved to do better this week. I made it to the rec center on Monday, and today I thought it would be good exercise to walk to church for the movie – a good 25-30 minute walk each way. I left about 4:40.

It was good exercise, but man, was it hot. I and my bandana were sopping wet by the time I got to church. The walk back was still kind of warm, but not quite as miserable.

Dec 26

Props to WALL-E, Michael and A.O.

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I did not realize that Ben Mankiewicz and Ben Lyons had been replaced as hosts of “At The Movies,” the show formerly known as “Siskel & Ebert” and “Ebert & Roeper” before Roger Ebert’s thyroid cancer surgery left him unable to speak.

I like Ben Mankiewicz as a host on Turner Classic Movies, and I used to enjoy Ben Lyons’ father Jeffrey when he hosted a similar movie review show on public TV. But the Mankiewicz / Lyons version of “At The Movies” just didn’t seem to carry the same weight as Ebert & Roeper, much less Siskel & Ebert. The younger, hipper critics seemed to be performing as much as reviewing.

New hosts Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune and A.O. Scott of the New York Times took over (I now find out) in September, and from the episode I saw tonight they have much the same tone and outlook that Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert brought to the program. They don’t seem to be trying to impress the viewer with how clever they are; they’re just passionate about movies and like talking about them in an intelligent way.

In addition to their regular movie reviews, they’ve apparently spent the past few weeks counting down their top 10 movies of the decade, and they revealed their top picks tonight. Scott’s, much to my delight, was “WALL-E.”

I’ll have to set “At The Movies” up on the DVR.

Dec 05

Just what the Docter ordered

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Pete Docter of Pixar, the director of “Up,” is the “Not My Job” guest on this week’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!”

Happily, even though Carl Kasell is retiring this month from his role as the newscaster for NPR’s “Morning Edition,” he will remain as the announcer, scorekeeper, and prize (he records a message on the winners’ answering machines) for “Wait, Wait.”

Jun 20

I’m going to keep this up until you go see it

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James Lileks, on “Up”:

I hadn’t really been looking forward to “Up” with tingling anticipation. A grumpy old crank in a floating house – well, no doubt misadventures will ensue. A bumbling sidekick kid: fine, target market and all that. I saw the trailers, read the preview stories, rode the chair with the helium balloons, but I wasn’t leaning into it.

[snip]

Now I suspect that everyone at Pixar smiled to themselves when they read reviews of “Wall-E” and its Surprising Emotional Connections, because they knew what was coming next, and thought: nothing, you ain’t seen it yet. My two-by-four to the heart, let me show it to you. The first 15 minutes of the film are just achingly wonderful, and anchor every subsequent moment of fantastical whimsy in a story you cannot guess from the previews. it hurts, it’s so good.

Jun 16

Oswald’s revenge

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In the early days of the 20th century, a young animator created a cartoon character, Oswald the Rabbit, and began producing cartoons under contract to Universal Studios.

Trouble is, Universal owned the rights to the character, and one day an executive at Universal stole the animator’s staff and his character right out from under him, taking the “Oswald the Rabbit” cartoons in-house.

The animator vowed that he would own his own characters from that point forward. He created a new character, also a rodent, but instead of big black rabbit ears, he had big black mouse ears.

Fast forward a few years. The National Football League decided to make Sunday, rather than Monday, its flagship night for prime time football. NBC hired John Madden away from Disney-owned ABC so that Madden could be the color commentator for “Sunday Night Football.” Al Michaels, who was still under contract to ABC, was originally going to stay and be the announcer for the lower-profile “Monday Night Football” as it moved to corporate sibling ESPN.

Then, Michaels decided he wanted to stay with Madden and many of the production staff who were moving from ABC to NBC. Michaels needed for ABC to release him from his contract, and so negotiations began between Disney and NBC Universal. As I posted in 2006, relatively new Disney CEO Robert Iger, fulfilling a promise he’d made to Walt’s daughter, made the nearly-worthless rights to Oswald the Rabbit a part of the negotiation. When Al Michaels went to NBC, a very small part of the deal was that Oswald came home to Disney.

After seeing a movie, I often go to its IMDb trivia page, and after seeing “Up” I discovered that the villain in the movie has a full name one letter away from the Universal executive responsible for stealing Oswald in the first place. The guys at Pixar take details like that seriously, and so it’s no coincidence.

Somewhere, Walt is smiling.

Jun 16

Up (no spoilers)

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I wrote this last year:

It’s the law of averages; one of these days, the folks at Pixar Animation Studios are going to fire a dud. Maybe it will be a first-class stinker; maybe it will just cause people to shrug and say “that’s not up to their usual standard.”

Whenever that may happen, it did not happen in 2008.

It didn’t happen in 2009, either. “Up” is a wonderful, funny, sad, life-affirming movie that you need to see whatever your age or situation. Even though I am a guy, I have to tell you tears were running down my cheeks about five or 10 minutes into the movie, and again at the end (but for far different reasons!). In between, I laughed heartily, I was on the edge of my seat, and I was dazzled by a sense of place and wonder which would have been remarkable in a live-action movie but which is completely inexplicable in a computer-animated one.

I watched it at our local movie house (only $6), and so I didn’t get it in 3D. I’m sort of glad; I’m not sure the 3D would have added anything.

See this one on the big screen, though. Make the time.

Jul 04

More on WALL-E

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Here’s a great review of WALL-E from a United Methodist web site. An excerpt:

Where the movie really shines—and where it is most daring—is in the two leads. Most of Wall•E is completely free of dialogue, leaving the robots and others to express themselves entirely in body language. Wall•E, a perpetual klutz, comes to resemble the lovable losers of the silent-film era.

Jun 27

WALL-E (No spoilers)

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It’s the law of averages; one of these days, the folks at Pixar Animation Studios are going to fire a dud. Maybe it will be a first-class stinker; maybe it will just cause people to shrug and say “that’s not up to their usual standard.”

Whenever that may happen, it did not happen in 2008.

WALL-E is great. Just great.

A few advance reviews accused it of being a heavy-handed “message movie,” and maybe even a political polemic. Balderdash. It’s certainly no more of a message movie than “Ratatouille,” and — like “Ratatouille” — it is entertainment first, parable second. For one thing, the cartoonishness of its apocalypse is self-deprecating; it both makes its point and mocks itself for having a point. There’s a major vein of science fiction that has some sort of apocalyptic, look-what-we-did-to-ourselves slant. At its best, it can be poignant; even at its worst, it can be overlooked if the story and characters are good enough.

“WALL-E” goes way beyond good enough. It’s beautiful, and thrilling, and fun. See it as soon as possible.

The short subject, “Presto,” is terrific as well, just as we’ve all come to expect from Pixar.

By the way, I was shocked to see a teaser trailer for “Pink Panther 2″ in which Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau tries to weasel his way in to a screening of … “WALL-E.” “Pink Panther 2″ is from MGM; “WALL-E,” of course, is Disney/Pixar. Why would one studio want to promote the other’s product? I’d read in advance that “WALL-E” incorporates some live-action clips from a well-known movie musical, and so I thought maybe this was some sort of quid-pro-quo in return for MGM giving Disney permission to use the clip.

But I looked it up just now, and the musical in question was produced by 20th Century Fox. MGM had nothing to do with it. So there must be some other explanation.