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Showing posts with label Pixar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Pixar. Show all posts
Monday, July 13, 2015
Monday, July 13, 2015
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In Still Ill Morrissey sang, "Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?". Inside Out asks the same question, an animated summer blockbuster entirely about a 12 year old girl's fears. The twist is that we experience them from inside her head, as the personifications of her emotions bicker amongst each other for control.
They are Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Black) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling); miniature primary coloured cartoon figures that embody each emotion. Their HQ is in the centre of the brain, and they jockey for position in an effort to influence the girl's behaviour. The actions they nudge her towards result in new memories, which appear as glowing bowling ball sized spheres, which roll down ramps and end up lodged deep within the mind. This inner world is precisely what Pixar's famed for; a fantastical scenario that's instantly comprehensible.
The narrative it's in service of is almost brutal in its straightforwardness. Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is a happy young girl who enjoys ice hockey, acting silly and hanging out with her friends. But change comes a-knockin', her family upping sticks from snowy Minnesota to San Francisco. Lonely and isolated in her new environment Riley gradually becomes homesick and miserable. Within her mind this is shown as 'Joy' being accidentally jettisoned from the mind, with Sadness in tow. Disgust, Fear and Anger are left to take the controls, while Joy and Sadness battle their way back to primacy and come to terms with each other's existence.
Adaptation to changes in personal circumstances run right through Pixar's oeuvre, from Andy moving house in Toy Story to Ratatouille's Remy navigating life alone in the big city to Carl's disquiet at the skyscrapers sprouting up around his suburban home in Up. Though the particulars of each story are surreal (talking toys/rats, flying houses etc) the emotions are instantly relatable.
Inside Out takes these underlying themes to their logical conclusion. This makes for an intensely focussed children's film; one without an antagonist, pop culture references and even the traditional comedy sidekick (well, sorta). The eventual thrust of all this is a fable that encourages its audience to be in touch with sadness and understand that it's perfectly natural to feel blue once in a while.
This is a pleasantly emotionally mature message, Inside Out's conceit giving us a scaffold upon which we can imagine their own emotions competing for control. It's also a view of human nature where the individual is entirely a product of their environment and memories. This determinism stands at odds with the typically Manichean Disney fare of pure-hearted hero/ines and irredeemably evil villains. Inside Out isn't exactly radical cinema, but still, this mechanical psychology separates it from the subliminal Judeo-Christian value systems that lie at the heart of most children's (and lets face it, most adult's) mainstream cinema fare.
It's a credit to the writers and directors that Inside Out is such an intellectually satisfying film. If it were to that standard in every way it'd be up there with Pixar's best; but in places, sadly, it comes slightly unstuck. In a rare mis-step, the character design is a smidge unimaginative, with the 'heroine' emotion, Joy looking rather like a young Marge Simpson and the rest of the emotions broadly descriptive designs that lack that special Pixar pop.
This feeds into an ever-so-slightly safe aesthetic. It's as though the high narrative concept requires the environment design to be predictable in order to let us comprehend it. I can understand that, but I'd rather have seen the Pixar animators/designers let off the leash in creating a world purely of the imagination.
Admittedly there is the odd visual flourish, specifically a battle through the land of abstract thought that twists and flattens the characters, or a sequence where a 'dream movie studio' is hijacked to create bizarre imagery to wake Riley up. Unfortunately these are the exception rather than the rule; the later action sequences serviceable yet uninspired.
Nitpicking aside, Inside Out is an excellent piece of cinema. After the triple blows of the awful Cars 2, the disappointing Brave and the mediocre Monsters University I feared that Pixar had lost their golden touch - by my money their last inarguably excellent film was Toy Story 3, five long years ago. Inside Out restores the studio's lustre, underlining their status as a powerhouse of imaginative, emotionally satisfying cinema.
★★★★
Inside Out is on general release from 24 July 2015
Monday, July 1, 2013
Monday, July 1, 2013
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Monsters Inc was and is a fantastic film. It deftly creates a complex, surreal and comprehensible world that makes a weird amount of sense. I imagine there's tonnes of stories that can be done within this universe, yet Monsters University focuses on one of the more prosaic and (frankly) kind of dull. Was there anyone that walked out of Monsters Inc dying to know just how Mike and Sully got their qualifications? Does Pixar imagine that this is the story we're clamouring to hear? Do they picture people idly wondering either they went to technical college or university, what they majored in, perhaps even speculating on the subject of Mike Wazowski's no doubt meticulously researched dissertation. Now, finally, we learn the answers to these burning questions.
Monday, January 7, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
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Whenever
Pixar re-release one of their films in 3D there’s a faint whiff of the
cash-in about it. It’s unattractive
in a company that prides itself on originality and the pushing
forward of boundaries.
These aren’t films designed with 3D in mind, and these releases are partly a result of the fact that post-converting a computer animated film into 3D is a relatively easy
one, at least compared to a live action film.
For some
reason I’ve always viewed ‘Monsters Inc’ as one of Pixar’s lesser creations. For me, Pixar are at their finest when they’re
taking the audience on epic journeys: all three ‘Toy Story’ films have their
characters covering huge distances (relative to their sizes anyway), ‘Finding
Nemo’ takes us halfway around the world and ‘Wall-E’ explores the universe as a
whole. ‘Monsters Inc’ is far more
static, a comedy taking place in a handful of locations, maintaining a
tight focus on character development rather than high adventure.
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| The monsters go to work. |
The conceit
of the film is to examine the life and world of the ‘monster under the bed’. Children’s closet doors worldwide are
actually portals to ‘Monstropolis’, a city inhabited by monsters of all shapes
and sizes. The city is powered by the
company, ‘Monsters Inc’ by the screams of children, which are collected by blue
collar monsters spending their days popping into children’s bedrooms, scaring
the hell out of them and then hopping back through the portal. The ‘top scarers’ in this system are Sulley and Mike (voiced by John Goodman and Billy Crystal respectively).
Sulley
and Mike are absolutely perfectly designed.
They are overtly monstrous, but also relatable enough to get the audience’s
sympathy almost immediately. At first
glance the fuzzy blue Sulley seems incapable of scaring anyone, he’s got big
expressive eyes and a modest, friendly demeanour. But he is
a good scarer, as we see later in the film when we see him at work. He’s the straight man to Mike, a one eyed green
bowling ball with limbs. Mike is a
fantastic creation, frazzled and somewhat justifiably self-centered, yet also
deeply in love with a receptionist.
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| Mike and Celia's relationship is genuinely sweet. D'aww. |
As the story begins they’re at the top of their game and life is good, but soon a spanner is thrown
into the works, namely the arrival of the human child ‘Boo’ into their world,
who arrives clinging to the back of Sulley.
Children are seen as a terrifying, poisonous and toxic presence in the
monster world, so Sulley and Mike endeavour to get her back to her bedroom
without anyone realising that she’s in their care. It’s a
compelling scenario, one is executed flawlessly. They've harnessed some dark arts over at Pixar; writers and artists with direct access to my heartstrings that
they’ll pluck relentlessly without me ever feeling manipulated. ‘Monsters Inc’ is for the most part a broad
comedy, and channels Warner Bros animated shorts in a big way. But it all hangs together as a whole due to
the relationship between Sulley, Mike and their unexpected charge,
Boo.
Boo is a
brilliant creation. Voiced by
2 year Mary Gibbs, she cutely babbles and wanders her way through scenes
with an innocence that hilariously undercuts a lot of the tension the
characters try to create. Her good nature powers the central bit of character development in the film, that of Sulley dealing with the responsibilities of unexpectedly becoming a surrogate
father. This change in Sulley directly impacts upon Mike. At the
start of the film they’re on the same page, but Sulley’s priorities shift so far
that the two come into conflict with each other; Mike wanting everything to go
back to normal whatever the cost, and Sulley wanting the best for Boo.
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| Boo, in a monster costume. |
Technically the film is nearly flawless. To 2013 eyes there are a few slightly ropey looking creations in the background, but Pixar have always known both the limitations and possibilities of their technology and nothing jumps out as obviously dated. The big technological step forward when this was released 12 years ago was Sulley's fur, this being the first time that they'd dare to try rendering a lead character covered in long hairs. The effect looks as impressive as it did then, so realistic you want to reach out and stroke it.
The voice work remains superlative. Generally voice actors perform their work alone, and the dialogue is spliced together at a later date, but Goodman and Crystal performed together at the same time, resulting in beautifully natural back and forth dialogue. I guess when you're recording dialogue for animated films, you use your voice actors when they've got free time in their schedules, and generally don't bother to get them all in at once at extra expense. 'Monsters Inc' shows that sometimes, this expense is worth it for the uplift that the spontaneity gives to the performances and the characters.
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| Billy Crystal and John Goodman together in the recording booth. |
'Monsters Inc' is interestingly plotted, the villains being an ambitious scarer who develops a sinister new way of extracting screams from children and Henry J Waternoose, a rapacious capitalist who cares more about the survival of his business than the human cost running it entails. I had only a vague memory of the plot from watching it on its release, and I was surprised to see a neat little anti-capitalist critique fuelling much of the main plot. The film presents us a classically styled besuited and portly boss, running a factory that literally runs on the screams of children. It's like a cartoon from the 'Socialist Worker'. Our heroes are blue-collar workers with an innate paternalistic trust in their boss as someone who has their interests in mind. Naturally he doesn't; he's developing a more inhumane yet more efficient method of extracting screams that will put Sulley and Mike out of a job.
"I'll kidnap a thousand children before I let this company die, and I'll silence anyone who gets in my way!" - Henry J Waternoose
I particularly like that after they've defeated this nefarious plot and saved the day, our heroes head outside to find that they have indeed put the company out of business and left the entire workforce unemployed and miserable. It's nice to see a film that considers the consequences of the actions of the hero, pointing out that even doing what is obviously the right thing can have unintended results on the wider community. Fortunately Sulley has realised that the sound of children's laughter is even more potent than their screams and reconfigures Monsters Inc. to harness this instead of their terror. Sulley replaces Waternoose as the factory boss, signified by his donning a tie and a clipboard to examine his workers.
Sulley's tie has disturbing implications. Throughout the film he's the epitome of the blue-collar worker (even down to literally being blue), but now he's begun to elevate himself above the other monsters. He's now his best friend Mike's superior and employer, a situation that can only inevitably lead to conflict between these two former buddies. In addition, while times are good in the factory at the moment and labour relations are positive how we are to know that the situation is sustainable? The desperate and sinister Waternoose was once a worker on the 'scare floor', and from the initial respect he has from his employees may have once been like Sulley. Is our furry, gregarious blue-furred hero destined for a slow transformation into a warped, manipulative, profit margin obsessed fat 'kitty'? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Perhaps if the monsters working on the scare floor had been properly unionised they'd have had the wherewithal to reorganise Monsters Inc as a worker's co-operative to prevent history inevitably repeating itself?
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| Times are good... but for how long? Notice that Sulley is no longer 'Sulley' now. He's James P. Sullivan CEO. |
It's also worth recognising that Disney itself has parallels to the fictional corporation of 'Monsters Inc'. While Monsters Inc makes money from using children's screams as a source of energy, Disney Corporation makes money exploiting child labour in China, and considering that there are reports of colleagues committing suicide as a result of being scolded by factory bosses may well literally be running a corporation reliant on the screams of children. It's for reasons like this that at the back of my mind I always feel that even when Pixar make wonderful films with an anti-materialist or environmental message, that there's a nugget of hypocrisy lurking deep down at the core.
But that's enough politics. 'Monsters Inc' is a classic of animation that's perhaps unfairly overlooked compared to some of Pixar's more overtly ambitious technical and narrative ventures. It's a rock-solid comedy with a brilliantly original premise that executes it perfectly. It's also astoundingly self-contained, telling us all we need to know about the characters and their world in an hour and a half. There's a sequel due this summer, 'Monsters University', which I have reservations about. Is it going to be a 'Toy Story 3' or a 'Cars 2'? While I'd rather Pixar be putting out original films, if anyone can make the subject matter work its them.
The 3D adds nothing of note by the way, but it doesn't distract either.
****/*****
****/*****
'Monsters Inc 3D' is on general release from January 18.
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