Friday Night List #1

[amurderofcows]

Pixar's ten feature films, ranked in order of my enjoyment of them:

1. The Incredibles
   
2. Up
   
3. Ratatouille
   
4. Finding Nemo
   
5. Wall-E
   
6. A Bug's Life
   
7. Toy Story 2
   
8. Toy Story
   
9. Monsters, Inc.
   
10. Cars

Comments

[henkkuli]

1. Ratatouille - For the music, the compelling voice work by the actors, the realistic animation of mice, the beautiful rendering of Paris. And that scene where Anton Ego takes the first bite of Ratatouille and is immediately transported back to his childhood gets me every time.

1. Up! - I have never found the first few minutes of a film so moving. The story of redemption is incredible to me, and that dog with the voice chip is absolutely fantastic.

1. The Incredibles - Michael Giacchino is an effin' genius, and I loved the social commentary. Banality of the suburbs and all that.

1. Wall-E - Pixar took a turn toward the bleak and dystopian here, and they did a wonderful job.

5. Toy Story - The Original. I love the series; it's just that it's not as developed intellectually as the others.

6. Toy Story 2 - How can you not be moved by the scene where the girl doll is rejected as her human grows up?

7. Monsters, Inc. - I actually loved this movie, and the way the story arc went and ended. Unfortunately it was ruined by a relationship of mine in which we saw the movie together, and I started cutesily calling her "Boo" and she called me "Sully." Now I think about that when I think about Monsters, Inc. and it's kinda off-putting.

8. Finding Nemo - It had great animation, and some cute lines, but I saw it once and didn't feel like seeing it again.

9. A Bug's Life - Feh. Take it or leave it.

10. Cars - This provoked zero reaction in my whatsoever, but I guess the reason they're doing a sequel is that it's huge with little kids. My neighbor kids couldn't quit talking about it.

[amurderofcows]

The realistic portrayal of mice was a controversial decision at Pixar. When the original director of the film was fired, they were moving more in the direction of cartoonish mice which wouldn't yield such an "ick" factor. Brad Bird insisted on more realistic mice, which made the heads of the studio very nervous, especially in scenes where you see a whole bunch of mice, moving more or less like real mice do, in wide shots. Bird insisted on the more realistic mice, and Ratatouille did well at the box office; it's the third-highest grossing Pixar film, although it's also the only Pixar film for which over two-thirds of its revenue came from outside the US.

The beginning of Up moved me to tears, both times I saw the movie, and that doesn't happen much. I'm not the tearing-up-at-movies type.

I also appreciated the libertarian themes in The Incredibles, unexpected in a "kids'" movie, which have Bird's fingerprints all over them. A lot of people took Wall-E as a message film about environmentalism, but that isn't, uh, a reflection of the creators' politics at all.

I think they're making a sequel to Cars because John Lasseter is obsessed with cars, and he's the guy who gets to decide what gets made. Cars was not one of the higher-grossing Pixar films, and didn't do well at all in foreign markets, where Pixar usually makes 50-60% of their money.

One thing I like about the Toy Story movies-probably the main thing I like about them-is this strangely tragic relationship that exists between children and toys they don't know to be sentient. It touches something deep in me, because I projected a lot of consciousness onto my toys when I was a little kid. From what little they showed of Toy Story 3 in the trailer, it looks like they're putting that theme front and center in the new movie.