I thought the message of Cars was, "Hey, Tex Avery's One Cab's Family was cool, let's make a whole movie like that!"
Pixar Merger with Disney Has Hurt Quality
- Thread starter VulcanJedi
- Start date
Not that bad though I did read the film is better suited to kids than adults, which is probably why the film is like what 95 minutes? which shocked me. Anyay I still love Pixar
The first reviews i read this summer made it clear this was sub par Pixar. Plus, These reviews remind me of Lion King: except in this case we had 15 years of great movies. Lion King was a departure from the three previous, excellent, films: Little Mermaid, Beauty and Alladin--we went from classic Broadway style music and dialogue to Circle of Blechh. Three great films built up enough goodwill..but it was all downhill after that. I love Pixar and hope these missteps are noted.
Even if that's so, like I said, what's subpar for Pixar is still a pretty damn good movie for Hollywood in general (unless it's got talking cars in it). I can think of no possible reason why I would not recommend Brave to anyone. There is nothing wrong with it that I can recall and a lot that is right with it. Actually I'd call it at-par or somewhat above-par for Pixar -- not on the level of their best films, but nowhere near being one of their weakest.
Pixar has had a habit of heavily reworking their stories well into the production phase, which is far more feasible in animation than live action (as Andrew Stanton learned the hard way), but without a strong scipt or story to start out with, is bound to falter at some point. From what I've read, they wanted to do a princess movie without a traditional fairy-tale villain, which is commendable, but never quite found a compelling alternative.
Dude, an ode to old-timey WASP values, which Cars (a blatant ripoff of the Michael J. Fox movie Doc Hollywood) very much is, is not the same thing as a Klan mission statement.
The longing for a more innocent, pastoral age is as old as civilization itself, and has been a core feature of establishment ideologies as diverse as Jefferson's farmer-citizen American ideal and the Nazi's obsession with the hardworking, small-town Germanic volk. And how does Cars end? With the suggestion that modern, tech-based capitalism (in this case, Nascar) can, with a little prodding, help the sleepy little town (whose distance from modernity shielded it from the vices of metropolitanism) regain its dormant economic strength without corrupting its pure, old-fashioned culture. Subversive? Please.
I agree with you. One possible cause I think is that movies like Up and WALL-E weren't doing so well on the merchandising front. There is no doubt some from pressure from above to produce more merchandise-friendly films such as sequels.
I missed this comment before... I thought Brave had a very clear message, one that's embodied in the title. As I said in my review on a different board:
Well.. Cars burned me real bad when it comes to Pixar.. up until this point i adored their movies. They were unique, had their own style and their own story to tell.
They had a heart.
With Cars Pixar made a run of the mill, paint by number movie any studio could have produced.. like the ones from Dreamworks or any other animation studio that relies on big names to voice the characters and promote the movies.
Up until that point it was enough for me to know it was a Pixar movie to go see it and know i'd get a good movie with a good story.
Well.. if Disney took the reins over that heavily i'll mourn Pixar for a while and hope that some day a bunch of insanely creative, crazy people who just want to tell some stories find someone who'll back them up and open door for them so they can produce stories without pressuring them or telling them how to do it.
It'll happen.. might take a while but a new Pixar will come.
They had a heart.
With Cars Pixar made a run of the mill, paint by number movie any studio could have produced.. like the ones from Dreamworks or any other animation studio that relies on big names to voice the characters and promote the movies.
Up until that point it was enough for me to know it was a Pixar movie to go see it and know i'd get a good movie with a good story.
Well.. if Disney took the reins over that heavily i'll mourn Pixar for a while and hope that some day a bunch of insanely creative, crazy people who just want to tell some stories find someone who'll back them up and open door for them so they can produce stories without pressuring them or telling them how to do it.
It'll happen.. might take a while but a new Pixar will come.
I got a bad feeling about this. ;-)
But that doesn't mean they stopped making good movies after that point. Cars was followed by four of their best films in a row: Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3. The only weak one since Cars was Cars 2. It's not the studio as a whole that's suffered, it's just that one concept that falls below their usual standard.
I've got to disagree. It may not have been totally original but I adored Cars - it's my favourite Pixar movie. And it's not like I'm American on a nostalgia trip or a petrol head - not only am I not a car buff, I can't even drive.
Now Ratatouille was a turkey - by the numbers that any studio could churn out...
I thought Ratatouille was superb. Brad Bird has yet to make a bad film.
Ratatouille being "paint by the numbers." How is a rodent wanting to be seen as a great chef "paint by the numbers." Ratatouille was a wonderful, unique, film.
Cars was essentially a remake of a Michael J. Fox movie.
Cars was essentially a remake of a Michael J. Fox movie.
Every story's been told before, more or less; what matters is the execution. Ratatouille was brilliantly executed with lots of imaginative details and story/character beats. Cars was just kind of okay, feeling more like going through the motions. I haven't even seen the sequel.
I don't know what other animation studio you would expect to see make a lengthy story about a rat who wants to be a chef and spends a lot of time on the finer points of haute cuisine.
I'd really like to know why you think Cars is good and Ratatouille bad.
I'll give my view on why i don't like Cars much.. it was too predictable and the characters were too bland. Now obviously Pixar movies tend to have uplifiting ends and it's no surprise Cars does too.. that's not my critique. I just felt that Cars lacked that certain spark that made the story worthwile.. it lacked an original idea and as someone else pointed out it was basically Doc Hollywood remade into computer animation and people replaced by cars.. for me that's too simple for Pixar (even if the focus of the story was different from Doc Hollywood).
What i love about Pixar is their unique ideas.. with Ratatouille they took a rat and made it into a gourmet and cook. A rat of all things.. by many considered to be a very dirty animal that shouldn't even be in the vicinity of a kitchen yet they took the idea and ran with it and made a damn good movie with it.
Finding Nemo.. a fish in search of his son who meets many strange characters along the way and learns something about himself - a tale about parents who need to learn to let go and overcome their fears.
Wall E.. a robot who falls in love with another robot and follows her (by accident more or less) and in the process leads humans back to devastated Earth - a lovestory mixed with an ecological/social warning to humans.
With Cars i never felt that anything had its own idea or even an interesting one.. everything was cliché. Hotshot, arrogant main character, hillbilly character, the grumpy old guy who teaches the main something, the love interest etc.
Granted.. these ingredients are found in many other movies including Pixar's but they managed to still inject something that made the sum more than its parts. This is what i felt Cars lacked.. i didn't even bother with Cars 2 because of it.
So if it's true that Disney is putting pressure on Pixar to turn out movies at a faster rate so they can profit more i'm very worried. It seems Disney hasn't learned a lot through the years after they reduced (or shut down) the cheap direct to video sequels of their major animation movies or they simply fail to grasp the uniqeness of Pixar and that creativity needs time.
But as I said, that assumption doesn't make sense, because the Cars movies are the outliers. There have been six movies since Cars, and the only weak one was Cars 2. So the problem is not with Pixar as a whole, only with that particular concept.
I thought the first Cars had tons of heart and character. I was resistant to the concept at first like everyone else, but the great storytelling very quickly won me over (much like with Ratatouille).
Unfortunately the sequel ditched all the quiet character stuff and became just a wacky saturday morning cartoon.