Sunday, May 31, 2009

Toy Story 3!

Cool!

3 comments:

Kylopod said...

I loved the first two Toy Storys, but it's been ten years since the last one, and Pixar has shown signs of wearing out after their masterworks Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. I was underwhelmed by Wall-E (I'm in the minority, I know), and they've had some mediocre efforts, like CARS. You can't go on forever being the best animators in the business.

Am Kshe Oref - A Stiff-Necked People said...

Alas, no. Same thing happened with Disney's regular animation, too. They had some amazing movies, like the Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. Then, starting with the Lion King (I know. I'm in the minority for this one), they started going downhill. Personally, I hated the Lion King. And their best effort in all these years has been the first Mulan, and ITS only redeeming quality was Eddie Murphy (and that's not saying much...). Frankly, though, I didn't really like Finding Nemo, either. I found the plot and most of the jokes old, tired, and unoriginal. Haven't seen Wall-E. Enjoyed The Incredibles. LOVED Monsters, Inc.

Well, let's see what happens...

Kylopod said...

One important thing that happened between Aladdin and The Lion King was the death of Howard Ashman, who co-wrote the music. The Disney musicals haven't been the same since then. When they hired Phil Collins to do treacly pop songs for video sequences during Tarzan instead of having the characters sing, I knew the musical form was dead. Pixar has wisely avoided musicals.

Note that I'm not telling you not to see WALL-E. You may like it, even though I didn't. It's one of these futuristic anti-utopian warnings, and I admit it had some powerful moments. But I missed the sense of fun that the other Pixar films exude, especially since when I saw it in the theater it was preceded by a more traditional Pixar short that was quite funny.

Many people, apparently, think WALL-E was a masterpiece. I could see it was reaching for greatness, but it never seemed to live up to its promising setup.

There actually isn't a single Pixar film I haven't admired on some level. Even at their worst, their creativity is unparalleled by anything I've seen from the other computer-animation studios. Actually, apart from the Shrek movies made by DreamWorks, I haven't seen one good non-Pixar CGI cartoon. (There have been some good recent stop-motion pictures, like Coraline.)

Pixar always creates a vivid, compelling alternate universe of anthropomorphic animals, robots, toys, cars, etc., plugs in an age-old plot formula, and almost always makes us laugh at least a couple of times.