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Posts Tagged: Pixar

998 (134). Tale of Tales (1979, Yuriy Norshteyn)

by on February 14th, 2010 at 7:57 am in Film

Screened February 8, 2010 on veoh.

TSPDT #992 IMDb Wiki

Tale of Tales

First off, I want to encourage everyone in New York City to take advantage of an opportunity that I will sorely miss: an in-person appearance (alternative link to event) by Yuriy Norshteyn. This legendary 68-year old Russian animator rarely comes to the US; he may very well be traveling to raise funds for his first feature film The Overcoat, which he has been working on for nearly 30 years. In any case, please go in my place, as I will be on a flight to Berlin as he makes his appearance at the SVA Theater:

Monday, February 15: School of Visual Arts Theater (333 W. 23rd Street, between 8th/9th Ave.) This event is billed only as a Q&A so be aware that there may not be a screening. No price is indicated so I'm also assuming it's free.

To be honest, I am a recent convert to Norstein, like, as of this week. He has been touted on this site before, as one of the 100 Most Important Directors of Animated Shorts, as voted on by my colleagues at IMDb. Still, when Tale of Tales appeared for the first time on the TSPDT 1000 upon its most recent update, I had never heard of the film, despite it being voted the greatest animated film of all time at polls conducted by two animation film festivals.

So I won't pretend to be an expert on this film when I've been acquainted with its filmmaker for all of a week, and when there is already a book length study by animation scholar Claire Kitson available, which I will seek out. I will only say that I've seen this half-hour masterpiece four times in four days, and it feels like it's stayed with me for four years. It's as if Norshteyn sat with these images all his life, drawing them with such lucidity and palpable depth of feeling, that they make even the untold hours of ingenuity and laborious craft behind Pixar films feel relatively disposable. It summons a concept of the fermented image: a vision that has stayed with a person for as long as they've been breathing, and perhaps beyond that, like the wolf that lurks throughout the film, a folkloric figure as old as Russian blood.

To read the rest of the entry at Shooting Down Pictures, click here.




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A Matter of Trust: Pixar and Its Step-sibling

by on October 10th, 2009 at 11:10 pm in Film

By Michael Peterson

(Part of Pixar Week)

Sometimes, I don't know how I feel about Steven Spielberg.

Not because of his movies, understand; I have my favorites, my occasional dislikes, the same as everybody else. No, it's something else.

There's an old story, that while working on Jaws, Spielberg and George Lucas were screwing around with the animatronic shark after-hours, putting their heads in its mouth and such, and managed to break the thing. They took off into the night, laughing but nervous for breaking something so expensive. I always conflate that story in my mind with Bill Gates, on the verge of changing computing for the whole world forever, getting behind the wheel of a bulldozer, racing it, and slamming into a parked car. Continue Reading »




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A Pixar Week Compendium

by on October 10th, 2009 at 11:00 pm in Film

The House Next Door's Pixar Week runs from Oct. 4 to Oct. 11. If you'd like to contribute a piece, please e-mail Todd VanDerWerff at todd@vanderwerff.us

Look after the jump for a full list of posts.

Sunday, Oct. 11
Michael Peterson writes about how you never quite know what's going to make up your legacy and Pixar's connections to a video game company in A Matter of Trust: Pixar and Its Step-sibling.

Saturday, Oct. 10
Tom Elrod examines how Pixar's love of traditional family dynamics creates films that favor a traditional, social conservatism in Focus on the Family: Pixar's Small-c Conservatism.

Looking for something that compares the works of Henrik Ibsen to the works of Pixar? Then you've come to the right place, as Lawrence Horsburgh presents Lost in a World of Play: A Doll's House and Toy Story.

Friday, Oct. 9
Jack Patrick Rodgers looks at how John Lasseter's films both long for a bygone American age and celebrate the current one in Love and Loss in John Lasseter's America.

Ryland Walker Knight re-examines Brad Bird's compositions and ability to create a sense of taste purely through visual portraits in Ratatouille's Sense of Taste, of Place.

Colin Low finds Wall-E overpraised and explains just what he finds too cloying about the film to find it all that good in Besotted with Stars: The Problem with Wall-E.

Thursday, Oct. 8
Jonathan Pacheco catches Pixar paying direct homage to one of its main influences, Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, in Grandpa Carl's Flying House: Up and Howl's Moving Castle.

D.W. Gardner examines just why some of Pixar's films seem to advocate living your life within a narrowly defined set of boundaries and why some seem to advocate pushing past them in Pushing at Boundaries: The Two-Faced Ideology of Pixar.

Scott Nye examines both how his attitudes have changed and how three seemingly very different films examine the tale of a middle-aged man having a mid-life crisis in Meeting Mid-life with Maturity: American Beauty, Fight Club and The Incredibles.

Wednesday, Oct. 7
Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard have a back and forth on both Pixar's entire output and Wall-E in specific in The Conversations: Pixar.

Tom Elrod enjoys the one Pixar movie everyone agrees to dump on, and he defends it from claims that its message is muddled in Where Technology Meets Community: In Defense of Cars.

Colin Low takes a look at the two Pixar films he considers undisputed successes and laments the studio's output since the latter of those two films came out in Pixar's Peaks: Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles.

Tuesday, Oct. 6:
Stephen Russell-Gebbett compares the films of Pixar to the films of Studio Ghibli and finds them wanting in imagination and well-developed characters in Just a Toy: Pixar's Failure of Imagination.

Eugene Ahn looks at what Pixar does well when reflecting on what didn't work in director Shane Acker's computer animated film, 9, in Animation Reaching Too Far?: Pixar and Shane Acker's 9.

Monday, Oct. 5:
Odienator ventures down to his local multiplex to watch the two Toy Story movies in 3-D with the people in his neighborhood and reflect on the films themselves in Watching Movies: You've Got a Friend in 3-D.

Sheila O'Malley thinks back on two men in her life - one young and one old - and how her life and their lives are connected through Pixar's films A Bug's Life and Up in "Talk About the Movie": A Bug's Life and Up.

Sunday, Oct. 4:
Pixar Week editor Todd VanDerWerff discusses the history of the studio, the thematic concerns of its filmmakers and some of the things Pixar week will entail in The Studio as Author: An Introduction to Pixar Week.




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Focus on the Family: Pixar's Small-c Conservatism

by on October 9th, 2009 at 11:30 pm in Film, Politics

By Tom Elrod

(Part of Pixar Week)

Earlier this year, the National Review published a list of the top 25 conservative movies. Number two on this list was Pixar's The Incredibles:

This animated film skips pop-culture references and gross jokes in favor of a story that celebrates marriage, courage, responsibility, and high achievement. A family of superheroes—Mr. Incredible, his wife Elastigirl, and their children—are living an anonymous life in the suburbs, thanks to a society that doesn't appreciate their unique talents. Then it comes to need them. In one scene, son Dash, a super-speedy runner, wants to try out for track. Mom claims it wouldn't be fair. "Dad says our powers make us special!" Dash objects. "Everyone is special," Mom demurs, to which Dash mutters, "Which means nobody is."

Continue Reading »




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Lost in a World of Play: A Doll's House and Toy Story

by on October 9th, 2009 at 11:10 pm in Film

by Lawrence Horsburgh

(Part of Pixar Week)

I would be the first to grant that the similarity in the titles - A Doll's House and Toy Story—is unintentionally suggestive, and that not only would it be anachronistic and overreaching to suggest that Henrik Ibsen was somehow attempting to articulate the themes later explored in Pixar's film, but that it is moreover equally intellectually dishonest to argue that anyone at Pixar had Ibsen in mind when telling their story. The roots of Toy Story are public knowledge, discussed in the commentaries on both Toy Story films, viewable in the Tin Toy short, further elaborated in the excellent book by David Price. There's nothing to suggest that Ibsen had anything to do with it. Continue Reading »




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Love and Loss in John Lasseter's America

by on October 8th, 2009 at 11:30 pm in Film

By Jack Patrick Rodgers

(Part of Pixar Week)

One of Pixar's greatest accomplishments is that their movies are more than just terrific mass entertainments—they're personal statements from the directors that made them. Their filmmakers each have their own set of reoccurring themes and characters, and one of the most interesting examples to me is that director and Pixar head honcho John Lasseter keeps returning to the same subject matter. He's fascinated with relics of Americana from the past, and three of the four films he's directed thus far—Toy Story, Toy Story 2 and Cars—have focused on trends and lifestyles that have been tossed aside by our culture in favor of something newer and shinier. There's an element of poignancy and regret in his movies at how much things have changed, but Lasseter is also astute enough to know that American pop culture has been always been a little junky and disposable, and yet at the same time it's something that we can imbue with personal meaning. Continue Reading »




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Ratatouille's sense of taste, of place

by on October 8th, 2009 at 11:20 pm in Film

by Ryland Walker Knight

(Part of Pixar Week)


—It starts with a book. Continue Reading »




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Besotted with Stars: The Problem with Wall-E

by on October 8th, 2009 at 11:10 pm in Film

By Colin Low

(Part of Pixar Week)

For all that Pixar loves to celebrate its underdogs, WALL·E marks the first (and so far, only) time the studio has named an entire movie after its protagonist, neither effacing him into part of a wider community (Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, Cars) or a central mission (Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, Up). That WALL·E's name is shared by his peers and short for his mission—"Waste Allocation Load Lifter · Earth-class"—barely counts against this claim, since the acronym is pronounced like a regular human name. The movie is built on the premise that he is the last of his kind, and the essential pleasures of WALL·E do not spring from his assigned mission but in the tangents he chases beyond it. Though the break in titling scheme alone implies it, we can tell from the raves accompanying the movie's prologue—in which WALL·E is only character we encounter, save for a curly-feelered roach—that Pixar invests much of WALL·E's success on the cult of personality that forms around its title character. Continue Reading »




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(Pixar) Link for the Day (October 9th, 2009): The Secret Origins of Toy Story

by on October 8th, 2009 at 9:00 pm in Film, Links for the Day

Disney blogger Jim Hill of Jim Hill Media is one of the best bloggers out there for the inside story on what's going on inside the studio and inside of Pixar, especially on the business side of things. In this post from 2007, he takes a look at the Pixar Christmas special that never was that gave unexpected rise to the studio's current Hollywood dominance.

"Now where this gets interesting is that—at the very start of this holiday special—it was going to be established that Tinny was one of a set of tin toys that performed music. So when he finds himself alone in today's world, this tiny wind-up toy decides to set off in search of his former band mates.

"From what I hear, the story that Lasseter, Ranft, Docter & Stanton crafted for A Tin Toy Christmas was a real charmer. With Tinny first encountering a junkman and then befriending a chatty ventriloquist's doll before ultimately reuniting with his friends. And given that television executives had been very enthusiastic about the commercials that Pixar had produced to date, John & Co. thought that this project would then be a slam-dunk with the networks.

"Well, the people from Pixar were in for a rude shock. For the network execs that they spoke with absolutely loved the characters and the concept, they still weren't willing to pony up all of the dough necessary to actually produce A Tin Toy Christmas."

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.




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Grandpa Carl's Flying House: Up and Howl's Moving Castle

by on October 7th, 2009 at 11:20 pm in Film

by Jonathan Pacheco

(Part of Pixar Week)

If you read interviews or Wikipedia pages regarding director Pete Docter's inspirations for Up, you'll find an emphasis on lovable, grumpy actors, childhood fantasies, and real-life grandfather figures. I have no doubt that these all helped shape Docter's vision for Pixar's latest film, but I feel a particularly strong influence has been relegated to a footnote or an afterthought. Pixar garners comparisons to director Hayao Miyazaki with every new film, and I notice that the Japanese filmmaker's influence on Pixar's staff is perceived in the same way as Martin Scorsese's influence on an entire generation of directors: "How could he not have influenced them?" Yet, Up presents a special case, as the entire film can be seen as an homage not only to Miyazaki's work, but specifically to Howl's Moving Castle, the 2004 film for which Pete Docter directed the English voice talent. Continue Reading »




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Pushing at Boundaries: The Two-Faced Ideology of Pixar

by on October 7th, 2009 at 11:15 pm in Film

by D.W. Gardner

(Part of Pixar Week)

"YOU. ARE. A. TOY! You aren't the real Buzz Lightyear! You're... You're an action figure! You are a child's plaything!"

"You piece of dirt! No, I'm wrong. You're lower then dirt. You're an ant!"

In Pixar's first two feature length films, Toy Story (1995) and A Bug's Life (1998), after a violent confrontation, two of the main characters are face to face. One of them berates the other in defense of an age-old system of master and servant, a system that the other character actively denounces because this system gets in the way of his lofty ambitions. In both films, the plot centers on this conflict of those who wish to uphold boundaries and those who wish to break through them.

However, there's one main difference. In the film's ideologies, Buzz Lightyear is wrong, and Flik is right. Continue Reading »




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Meeting Mid-life with Maturity: American Beauty, Fight Club and The Incredibles

by on October 7th, 2009 at 11:10 pm in Film

by Scott Nye

(Part of Pixar Week)

Between the ages of 17 and 18, still with so much growing up to do, I saw a slew of films that would redefine what the medium was capable of and completely change my world perspective. Some people read books about inspirational, anti-authoritarian figures that became a rallying cry for a generation; I saw The Big Lebowski. Shortly after, a simple laid-back attitude wasn't enough, for I had witnessed Fight Club and American Beauty. Suddenly, I came to understand that getting good grades never really made me any happier—a temporary ego boost, perhaps, but never anything lasting. Further, I realized that getting Cs had never bothered me for more than a few weeks; by the end of a semester, I'd forgotten it ever happened. In fact, it seemed all of a sudden as though everything my Catholic college-prep high school was teaching me about life, outside of the spiritual realm, didn't really fit into the kind of person I saw myself as, and more importantly, the kind of person I wanted to be. Continue Reading »




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(Pixar) Link for the Day (Oct. 8, 2009): The Pixar Film That Never Was

by on October 7th, 2009 at 9:00 pm in Film, Links for the Day

Arguably the best collection of Pixar-related links and stories on the Internet is the blog run by David A. Price, author of the book The Pixar Touch and the blog of the same name. From that site, here's the story of Pixar making a short-lived attempt to produce an animated film in the '80s with Japanese backing called Monkey, based on a classic Chinese and Japanese legend.

"The film was called Monkey. It was to be a retelling of a classic, beloved tale of Chinese and Japanese legend. The monkey character is a trickster and magician who has adventures while accompanying a priest on a trek from China to India.

The film project started in 1985 while Pixar was still the computer graphics group of Lucasfilm. It continued for a while after the group was spun off to Steve Jobs as a separate company in February 1986. The Japanese publisher Shogakukan was to finance it. The film never got as far as storyboards, but there were lengthy, detailed story meetings. "

Links for the Day: A collection of links to items that we hope will spark discussion. We encourage our readers to submit candidates for consideration to keithuhlich@gmail.com and to converse in the comments section.




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The Conversations: Pixar

by and on October 6th, 2009 at 11:30 pm in Film

[Editor's Note: The Conversations is a monthly feature in which Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss a wide range of cinematic subjects: critical analyses of films, filmmaker overviews, and more. Readers should expect to encounter spoilers.]

(Part of Pixar Week)

JASON BELLAMY: Aggregate movie review sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes are never more predictable than when compiling the reviews of a Pixar release. Through almost fifteen years Pixar has been a cinematic goose laying digitally animated golden eggs. Not all of Pixar's ten features have been universally beloved, but even the studio's disappointing efforts, like 2006's Cars, have been treated by critics as mostly worthwhile. Generally speaking, to read reviews of Pixar movies isn't to see critics wrestling with the question of "Is it good?" but rather "How good is it?" The result creates something of a critical paradox. When a Pixar movie earns a rare pan, the studio's previous successes seem to work against it. Pixar becomes the A-plus student who suffers a C-minus grade for turning in B-plus work. It becomes the victim of a masterpiece-or-else set of expectations, thus making critical takedowns seem annoyingly nitpicky or pathetically contrarian (yep, that's an Armond White reference). At the same time, however, when Pixar delivers something that's truly and utterly magnificent, any praise heaped upon it seems empty. Gushing reviews of a Pixar movie come off like testimonials on the joys of army life written by soldiers in the North Korean military.

I mention all of this because it helps to illustrate how troubling it can be to have critical conversations about Pixar movies. When someone tells me Finding Nemo is "great," do they mean "It's a great piece of family entertainment with something for everyone," or do they mean "It's on my short list of the greatest cinematic experiences of all time, tied with Taxi Driver"? I can never tell if I'm supposed to be grading on a curve, if I'm supposed to be comparing Monsters, Inc. to just Dreamworks' Shrek or instead to There Will Be Blood and anything else. If I tell you that I found Cars to be tedious when I saw it on DVD at the age of 30, is that a valid assessment, or am I supposed to analyze the movie through the eyes of the 10-year-old for which it is intended? Why is it that if I tell people I found Toy Story cute but not special, I get wide-eyed looks like I've just insulted the 9-year-old in the school play for not being Meryl Streep?

These are issues we can cover over the course of our conversation, but for now all of that is setup for this: I absolutely adore Ratatouille and I have a fondness for A Bug's Life and Up, but at the top of the Pixar heap is WALL-E. This is the one Pixar movie that, while by no means flawless, I can call great without any hesitation or qualifiers. To me, it is a masterpiece, and not just of its genre. Of all the films I saw last year, there was a small handful that shared its company, but not a single one that was better. Ed, you hadn't seen WALL-E prior to this conversation, citing little interest in the Pixar series. My question to you now isn't if WALL-E is as good as I just described. Instead it's this: Is WALL-E better than you expected, a notable Pixar achievement, or is it just more of the same? Continue Reading »




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Where Technology Meets Community: In Defense of Cars

by on October 6th, 2009 at 11:20 pm in Film

by Tom Elrod

(Part of Pixar Week)

The key scene in Pixar's 2006 Cars comes about halfway through, as Lightning McQueen and Sally ride through the countryside and stop on a mountainside above the small, quiet town of Radiator Springs. McQueen notices the nearby superhighway for the first time and the cars on it brushing by the town without even knowing that its there. Sally understands and laments that, "The road didn't use to cut through the land like that interstate. It moved with the land." This is followed by a flashback to older times, when Route 66 was the country's main east-west thoroughfare and Radiator Springs was lively and full of visitors. The flashback shows the interstate being built, and then the town falling into decay. It's the clearest statement of the film's central concern: how technology forces change - and not always for the better. Continue Reading »




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