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.”
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.
You should be ashamed of yourself. You made your mother cry.
– My father, on the phone tonight.
Actually, he was making a little joke before thanking me for recommending that they go see “Up.” I told him to tell her that her son cried, too.
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.
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.