Brave (Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, 2012)

Brave is at once the most visually distinctive project Pixar has yet made and their most derivative work. Slightly dimmed as if filmed by natural light, the Celtic realm of stone and forest achieve a new level of realism for the studio's animation; even by their standards, I can think of no other Pixar film that invites such pure pleasure merely in scanning the frame for all its absurdly fine detail. Yet with this new peak of visual sophistication comes a story that mines Disney princess tales and blends it with the style and thematic content of Japanese animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki. But if this setup is less fundamentally "original" than, say, Ratatouille or Up, it nonetheless offers an important opportunity to alter and update a classic form of storytelling. After all, from old elements can come wonderful, new things.

For the first act, at least, Brave demonstrates this in spades. Merida (Kelly Macdonald) instantly establishes herself as an entrancing heroine; the daughter of a king who presides over a group of allied Celtic clans (Billy Connolly), Merida is groomed by her mother, Elinor, (Emma Thompson) to behave like a proper lady but above all cherishes a bow given to her by her father. The precocious child grows up to be an adventurous teenager, strong-willed enough to climb a sheer cliff just because it's there and so skilled in archery that various targets she erects around the castle woods might as well be quivers for how many arrows they hold in their bullseyes. When Elinor announces that the day has finally come for Merida to choose a suitor, the young woman's outrage burns so hotly that the flippant faux-independence of some recent Disney princesses looks even more laughable. When she says she doesn't want to marry right now, she damn well means it, and she goes to unexpectedly drastic lengths to defy her mother's wishes.

Day & Night (Teddy Newton, 2010)

[The following is an entry in Pussy Goes Grrr's Short Animation Blogathon, running April 23-27.]

My first experience with short animation was, naturally, old Looney Tunes cartoons played in syndication on morning TV when I was growing up in the '90s. Yet it was through Pixar that I first got the chance to see shorts (either animated or live-action) on a big screen. I still remember the first of Pixar's theatrically attached shorts—Gen's Game, the loopy back-and-forth of an old man ferociously playing himself at chess in a park—better than the feature it accompanied, A Bug's Life. Though I was far, far too young to elucidate how the short's construction hooked me, the way its cuts and "angles" made the old player seem like two distinct people each formulating secret strategies against the other was riotous and thrilling. For the longest time, the lingering, nostalgic giddiness Gen's Game produced made it my favorite of the Pixar shorts.

Until Day & Night. Released 12 years after 1998's Gen's Game, Day & Night was the first Pixar short since that one to be superior to the film it supported. The difference is that the earlier film easily stood out against Pixar's sophomore slump. But Day & Night, that was attached to one of the studio's finest, the unexpectedly poignant, technically superfluous Toy Story 3. At six minutes long, Day & Night proves as much a technical achievement as the feature presentation, and its driving theme as simple and direct yet illuminating and intelligent as the themes of maturation and moving on in Toy Story 3.

True to the time limitations of the form, the short sets itself up quickly. Opening on the usual Pixar 3D animation of an idyllic field, the camera pulls back until it reveals this world as being the tightly contained view of a transparent being existing in 2D space against an infinite black void. Stumbling about in his morning routine, this being happens across someone just like him. Well, almost. Instead of showing an area basked in the morning sun, this other creature offers a window into night. Startled, the two soon engage in a hostile pissing match to demonstrate their superiority, each showing off what goes on at their respective times to impress and cow the other.

The thematic implications are obvious, and only more so as the shortened plot swiftly moves the two from antagonism to mutual admiration and cooperation. Capped off with an old lecture from Wayne Dyer about the importance of embracing the different, Day & Night makes a clear, direct argument for children that warns against xenophobia and just generally hating the unknown. But what makes the film truly masterful is how it's put together. The movement of the two beings in the 2D realm, as well as their moods and expressions, is demonstrated through objects and sounds captured within their portal bodies. For example, when Day wakes up to a rooster crow at the start, thunderclouds communicate the cracking of stiff joints and the sigh of pleasure he emits when he walks into the releasing rush of a waterfall is...well, guess. Even better is the integration of the outer 2D space with the 3D textures within, enhancing the texture of both levels. For a more in-depth account of how this looked in a theater with 3D glasses on, I direct you to Tim Brayton's simply magnificent contemporary review of the short, which he later named the best film of 2010.

Tim's review is so incredible that I'll pretty much stop here, unable to equal his piece, much less add to it. Even his title, "Hegel for Wee Folk," is brilliant, though it also offers perhaps the one area where I can object to him on any grounds. Though the use of 2D and 3D to illustrate the conflict between day and night certainly highlights Hegelian dialectic in several respects, the film's final moments, of the dualities of the two creatures reversing, move beyond Hegel into something more reminiscent of Levinas. When the two stand side by side, the sun setting in one and rising in another (complete with a brief meeting of the two semicircles at the midpoint of both bodies), the self and other invert and become irrelevant, fictitious projections that compel us not into the hatred cautioned against by Dyer but in the fundamental need for empathy as espoused by Levinas. Whether it owes more to Hegel or Levinas, though, Day & Night still broaches at least one of the most challenging philosophers in history, even as it presents a cogent, easily parsed out message for kids. It's one of the best short films I've ever seen.

Cars 2 (John Lasseter, 2011)

I will not ask why Cars 2 exists because I've seen the merchandising figures from the first film. Nevertheless, it's a question I couldn't force out of my mind while watching this two-hour bore. After a string of ambitious, beautiful films that established Pixar as one of the most respected studios on Earth, they finally sink to the sad state of their bosses at Disney. This isn't a film, it's a preview of coming attractions at a theme park. I didn't stay through all the credits, but I nearly did just to see if it ended with an advertisement to come check out Cars Land next year at Disney California Adventure.

Underlining the sheer cynicism of this film's conception is the near-total lack of characterization. John Lasseter, whose erstwhile evocation of the young, winsomely childlike George Lucas here brings out the mercenary side of the Star Wars creator, transparently structures the film to avoid personal connection in favor of selling toys. Forgettable as the first Cars was, it at least spent time with its characters; Cars 2 throttles past the drama between Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and his loving but tiresome best friend Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), preferring instead to get in as many new vehicles as possible to make sure Disney's merchandise wing ends this year in the black.

The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004)

One of the stranger aspects of animation is how production studios tend to be viewed in auteurist terms. Mention Disney, Studio Ghibli or Pixar and people can get an instant image in their heads despite the disparities of style and content between movies produced by various directors and various animation teams all getting their paycheck at the same place. Brad Bird, however, is one of the few animators who enjoys any singular auterist cred, carrying pet themes across projects and displaying a love for a chic past with styles based off old advertisements.

Following the release of his magnificent retro sci-fi picture The Iron Giant, Bird hooked up with old pal and Pixar head John Lasseter and pitched a superhero movie for the studio. Yet despite the swap from traditional animation (with some digital elements) to 3-D CGI, The Incredibles looks like a logical stylistic continuation of Bird's retro style and love of isolated heroes. When I first saw it as a 15-year-old, The Incredibles instantly became my favorite Pixar movie, only to go years without watching it. Using the new Blu-Ray release as an excuse to rediscover the film, I approached it with nostalgia, but also reminders of some of the criticisms I'd read since I last watched it a few years ago.

A Bug's Life

Following the game-changing success of Toy Story, Pixar still had something to prove but also won themselves a great deal more breathing room from the heavy executive supervision that plagued (and occasionally helped) their first feature. Demonstrating that the creative team's penchant for grabbing story ideas from interesting places was no fluke, Lasseter and co. decided to adapt a number of films rooted in the great Japanese masterpiece Seven Samurai, specifically its loose parody, Three Amigos! But how is that interesting, one might ask? Well, they transplanted the story into the microcosmic world of ants, a universe so small that the words on the poster were written in lowercase.

Small protagonists set against wide backdrops are a Pixar staple, from toys who make even a child seem a giant to clownfish in the Pacific Ocean to a rat scurrying through the city of Paris to a wee trash compactor with treads that explores outer space. So, the idea of ants scurrying around a world where a blade of grass is proportionate to the size of a tree to a human (thus making the actual tree in the middle of the any colony seem like the Tower of Babel) surely caught the animators' imaginations. As few could argue, A Bug's Life represents a marked step up from the animation of the limited backgrounds of Toy Story: gorgeous green blades rub up against blue skies and fertile soil gives way to cracked, arid riverbeds in dry season. As seen on Pixar's Blu-Ray, A Bug's Life is one of the more visually tantalizing works in terms of its color scheme and large-scale design.

Unfortunately, the beauty of the backgrounds outweighs just about anything else in the picture, from the story to the characters to the design of the characters. Still working with technological limitations, the lack of fine texture in the plant life is excusable, but there are as many ants as blades of grass, it seems, and the shortcuts the animators take with the creatures that move stick out like sore thumbs among the rest of Pixar's spellbinding work across the years. Nobody seems to have a mouth distinct of the rest of the body, each colored in the same color as the body of the character in question with rudimentary teeth. Limbs typically flail, because when they move at a normal speed the animation looks awkward and unfinished.

The story does not have the usual Pixar ambition, either. Even more popcorn-oriented works like Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. have a spark to them, a point-of-view that A Bug's Life lacks. One could go all the way back to 1912 and watch Władysław Starewicz's The Cameraman's Revenge to see a movie about anthropomorphizing bugs (and the director used actual roaches and such for his animation), and the Pixar team only fitfully attempts to build a unique point of view from this angle, choosing instead to insert a number of weak puns and lazily construct a world that looks like our own, albeit made from our scraps. There's nothing about a bug's life that seems so very different from a human's, except Bloody Marys are made with real blood.

Following the Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven/Three Amigos! line, the colony of ants depicted in the film are subject to the harsh rule of grasshoppers, who demand heavy tributes of grain to get them through the winter months, taking most of the harvest each year despite the far larger number of ants. Only one ant, Flik (Dave Foley), a misfit with a knack for thinking up inventions but an inability to make most of them function properly. After his idea for a motorized harvester ends up knocking the stone containing the tribute pile into the lake it overlooks and he subsequently attempts to stand up to the enraged grasshoppers until cowed into submission, Flik seeks to redeem himself by traveling off the island to hire larger bugs to defend the colony when the grasshoppers return.

Instead of finding warriors, Flik inadvertently recruits a band of failed circus performers -- masculine ladybug Francis, high-wire spider Rosie, gigantic rhinoceros beetle Dim, put-upon stick insect Slim, two foreign pill bugs, Teutonic caterpillar Heimlich, praying mantis magician Manny and his wife/lovely assistant Gypsy -- when he mistakes their reluctant altercation in a bar for valiance and strength. When Flik discovers his error after bringing the bugs back to the colony and receiving a hero's welcome, he spends much of the rest of the film covering up the truth so as not to diminish morale and earn yet more scorn.

But then the movie shifts to focus on the colony's feelings of togetherness, surely to build up the suspense to the inevitable fallout from the revelation of the true nature of the "warriors," but Lasseter lets the tension slack, laying the groundwork for a message of standing up to bullies and working together to pull off a plan bigger than any one person (or ant). That's fine and dandy, but even the short length of the film does not allow him to reach the reveal quickly enough to draw any weight from the scene. Worse, this entire plotline comes to feel like nothing more than a typical romantic comedy tale, complete with Big Misunderstanding.

A Bug's Life rallies at the end, when the grasshoppers return and Flik sets aside his self-doubt and inspires the ants to victory. We see the evil Hopper's resolve break when faced with a bird, real or fake, and the ants finally understand their power and how they never needed outside help at all, though they respect and value the circus bugs' contribution. Pixar don't yet have the technology, team size and/or budget for great water effects, but the rainstorm that hits is made convincingly terrifying from the small perspective despite the fact that the water does not seem to leave lasting wetness on what it touches. Yes, the ending is pat, but so is everything else in the movie; at least Lasseter finally injects some blood in the picture for the ants' fight back.

There are aspects of the film I quite admire. It's background animation, of course, which still lingers in my mind and makes a Blu-Ray purchase worth your money despite all the flaws. I also enjoy the idiosyncratic voice cast, from Phyllis Diller as the queen ant to NewsRadio geek Dave Foley as Flik. Though I usually side with the voice actors in their conflict with name stars getting fatter paychecks simply to talk in their normal voices, the choices here are too unique to be stunt casting. And finally, I think the message is great for young kids, who -- let's be honest -- are the target audience of Pixar's films, much as everyone might enshrine them in the annals of the entire medium. No shortage of anti-bully movies exists to my knowledge, but A Bug's Life makes the case for never taking abuse no matter your age.

Still, there is a tedium to this movie absent in nearly all other Pixar movies. The romantic subplot between Flik and Princess Atta detracts from the rest of the story and doesn't have nearly the charm of the other computer-animated ant movie from 1998, Antz (how weird is it that two such movies came out in the same year?). That film did a better job with its neurotic protagonist, more distinctive character animation that was also truer to bug movement while still humanizing the creatures, and just generally more imaginative. I still pop in A Bug's Life from time to time, but it always brings me down a little to watch a Pixar movie and focus only on the "pretty colors."

Toy Story 3

About a month ago, I received an email from a reporter for RTE, Irish national radio, asking -- to my complete surprise -- for an interview related to the upcoming release of Toy Story 3*. Pat McGrath, a terribly nice man who put up with far too much of my nerdy rambling, read my reviews of the first two films of the series and liked them sufficiently to ask for my thoughts about the series and Pixar as a whole.

Now, I kept myself as in-the-dark as I possibly could for Toy Story 3, as I do for any film that catches my interest, so Pat caught me off-guard during the interview when he mentioned that the premise of Toy Story 3, about a college-bound teen leaving behind his toys, effectively targeted the film at my generation, specifically those who got to see the first movie as children in a theater -- I was 6 when I saw it -- and now find ourselves off to college. Because I tried not to let any unfair expectations build in my mind, I had not previously thought about this, and suddenly I felt excitement for the film that matched any of the art films I knew wouldn't come to my neck of the woods. For the first time since leaving childhood, I was in exactly the right age group to see an animated film. (This is also why, in the interview, you can hear me stumble when talking about this, to the point that I use the word "interesting" three times in less than 30 seconds because, damn it, I was very interested suddenly.)

After I sat down in the theater, however, I quickly realized that, as much as Toy Story 3 might be aimed at my generation, it must still play for the one that came after us. An understandable decision, to be sure, as mainstream American audiences still will not see an animated film as anything other than kiddie fare, and if Pixar has a tragic flaw, it is that they choose not to break through this ceiling despite bumping against it so often the glass must be one good shove from shattering at this point. Director Lee Unkrich, a longtime Pixar employee given his first big shot, clearly wants to do well by the series -- and, by extension of the first Toy Story's significance, the entire Pixar studio -- so he attempts to juggle the history of the franchise and the studio while still making a fresh story to appeal to younger children who may well be coming to Toy Story 3 to see their first Pixar movie.

Somehow, he pulls it off. Toy Story 3 deals in nostalgia, which is only natural because its characters are toys, which are rapidly becoming obsolete. With Andy all grown up and headed for college, the few remaining toys in his care find themselves awaiting an uncertain future bound either for the attic or the garbage can. Even Molly, now a tween still young enough to get away with playing with toys, has no interest in them, absorbed with her iPod and concerned only with taking over her brother's room and swiping whatever electronics he does not take with him. With only the slightest suggestion, Unkrich plants the idea into the mind of even a 20-year-old that "kids today" don't know the joy of tossing around some tacky plastic spacemen and cowgirls in your own imagined universe. For proof of this, one need only look at the opening sequence, a brilliant combination of the openings of the first two movies, in which Andy's playtime receives the grand, imaginative visualization that opened the second film (which incidentally presaged the modern mindset by replacing Andy's imagination with a video game). A child can envision a scenario more fantastically out-there than even the most sandbox-oriented video game can accommodate, and the first major heartbreak of Toy Story 3 is the presentation of this delightful use of free time in the flashbacks of home videos, as if capturing something that one day becomes just a memory and not a way of looking at the world.

If I might discuss Toy Story 3 in personal terms -- and, frankly, I can see no other way for someone my age to discuss it -- this opening sequence did not quite tug at my heartstrings, but it did something far more satisfactory: it put me in an oddly serene mood, a wistful reminder not simply of a happier time but an entire perspective that I lost. Watching Andy spin the same basic "story" of his playtime in the first film into an epic space Western, I remembered mashing up my own disparate types of toys into imagined wars for the soul of the galaxy, with Star Wars characters inexplicably fighting Army men and even the odd shark. To think that kids might lose that feeling made me want to leap to my feet in the theater and risk extreme incarceration by shaking the young children in attendance and screaming something largely unhelpful like "Don't you get it?!" before the hot sting of a taser hit my back.

Part of the appeal of the first two movies was the retro style of the toys, culled from the Pixar team's own childhood favorites, but now the age of the toys is just further proof of how outdated the very idea of toys is. These days, a toy like Buzz Lightyear, which looked so cool back in 1995 to my wide, 6-year-old eyes, might as well sit next to the ball-in-a-cup. When Molly's Barbie turns up with Andy's toys, she wears leg warmers and sports '80s hair, and the hollow reflection of chauvinist perception of the ideal woman now seems a hollow reflection of itself. Everything ages, including Andy's formerly manic dog, Buster, but the toys remain forever, sitting neglected in a toy box as Andy outgrows them. Over time, Andy and Molly dispose of all but the most beloved toys, and when someone mentions that Woody's belle, Bo Peep, got thrown out long ago, that brief moment creates a sudden gulf of sadness.

Thus, it comes as no wonder that, when the toys inadvertently find themselves at a daycare center instead of in the attic where Andy relegated all of them but Woody, they find the prospect of being played with for all eternity overwhelming: when the current crop of kids grows older, they are replaced by the next wave of tykes to lavish love upon them. (Toys would love Menudo.) It's certainly preferable to stealing Andy's cell phone and making it ring near them just so the boy will look at them. Upon their arrival, Woody, Buzz and the gang meet all the other donated toys, headed by Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear (Losto for short), a cuddly stuffed bear who serves as the Virgil for the new arrival.

Speaking of Virgil, what's most interesting about the setup of Sunnyside Daycare is how Unkrich expands upon the existentialism of Toy Story 2 by making the third installment into a plastic version of Dante's The Divine Comedy. Initially, the escape from the purgatory of Andy's dusty toy box must seem like Heaven, but, when the bell rings and a sea of toddlers burst in to play, the toys realize they've been sent to Hell, trapped in a room with too-young toddlers. Instantly, we see that Lotso isn't as friendly as he lets on and, like the planes of afterlife in Dante's epic, Heaven and Hell can exist right next to each other, a locked door separating the nightmarish den of two-year-olds from the older children who will really play with toys instead of destroy them.

Soon, Toy Story 3 morphs into a prison escape film, an odd choice but one that lends itself to a number of clever gags. Woody's first attempted escape starts on a triumphant, defiant note and ends with a high comic anticlimax, while the "caging" of Andy's toys recalls a number of classic prison films like Cool Hand Luke and The Great Escape. Most inspired in the breakout is the "Mr. Tortilla Head" bit, a gag that comes out of left field and wins the biggest laugh of the film. Unfortunately, in a film bookended by beautiful ruminations on the nature of aging (and, for toys, horrible agelessness), this angle takes away from some of the emotional depth that the film offers, falling into the trap of cultural references that only briefly entangled Toy Story 2, made more noticeable here by how unrecognizable the references to prison movies will be for children and even most teenagers.

However, every Pixar film builds aesthetically off what came before, and if the prison escape plot distracts from the greater resonance of Toy Story 3, Unkrich nevertheless uses the storyline to exhibit the same sweeping visual advancements displayed on the epic canvasses of Ratatouille and Wall•E into a confined space and doesn't lose an ounce of technical mastery. Lotso is animated with over a million individual thread hairs, allowing his bright purple fur to mingle with a hint of dirt and water damage, hinting at his true character and his backstory long before we see how his own past turned him into a bitter villain (a story that plays as a dark foil to Jessie's own heartbreaking tale from the last film). A cheeky, recurring bit involving Mrs. Potato Head's missing eye allows Unkrich to occasionally peek back at Andy's house without breaking the narrative, and the occasional overlap of what Mrs. Potato Head can see in Sunnyside and what her eye catches back home create shimmering mirages that only enhance the feeling of Sunnyside as a hell that mocks the toys' desires to be played with and to see their owner again.

With limited locations, Unkrich creates a number of unique setpieces using nothing more than inventive exploration and skillful lighting, such as the sickly, neon yellow-green of the interior of a vending machine where all the rulers of the Sunnyside toys meet. Lighting is actually the key component of Toy Story 3: after experimenting heavily with animated reflection with Cars and overwhelming the eyeballs with Wall•E, the Pixar animators shrink the scope from Paris and outer space to a daycare center, yet the lighting is possibly the studio's most memorable. The daycare's default lighting is hazy and oppressive, rather like the same alternately foggy and revealing light Steven Spielberg used in E.T. Toy Story 3 makes the audience feel like these toys are really in a prison, muggy and bleak. All Unkrich needs to do is alter that setup, switching out the stifling mix of sunlight and fluorescent bulbs with the harsh, blinding white of an interrogation lamp or sinister glows to completely change the way you look at the same setpiece. And there has never been a more terrifying moment in all of Pixar's history than the sight of a raging incinerator at the end, belching flames that have actually been animated to be too bright to look at for an extended period of time.

So, the film may be too long by about 10 minutes, which could have been rectified by either cutting out some of the waffle in the middle or teasing out the truth of Sunnyside for a few minutes instead of immediately revealing its dark side. Also, the middle bit, in contrast to the point made by the opening sequence in relation to the imagination, does too much of the piloting rather than let the audience connect fully the way they do at the start and the finish.

However, these minor tremors cannot derail the copious pleasures of Toy Story 3, and writing them down shows me how well the film manages to address and fix its mistakes. Unkrich inserts numerous callbacks to previous Pixar films (and even what appears to be a toy based on Miyazaki Hayao's masterpiece, My Neighbor Totoro), yet he never allows the film to get stuck into the rote of these sequels, serving only to remind the audience of the better films that came before. These are but minor touches in a narrative that expands upon the ideas of the first two: if Toy Story 2 posited the idea of toy (im)mortality and existentialism, Unkrich shows a toy losing its soul, when Lotso has Buzz's programming reset. As much as I suspect that the Pixar team cleared out so many of Andy's toys to allow for easier processing of all the new characters, the loss of so many old characters is logical, appropriate and heartfelt. Besides, the additions are more interesting than many of the original toys who would have outstayed their usefulness and appeal otherwise, such as a group of toys in the home of a sweet, imaginative girl named Bonnie; they take to their roles as if being a toy is an actual occupation, spouting out hilarious lines like "We do a lot of improv" and "Are you classically trained?"

But it all comes back to the central idea of the second film, the question of a toy's life when no one plays with it. When Andy surveys his remaining toys while packing for college, he dismisses his mother's assertion that he should donate them by calling the remnants of his childhood "junk." Unkrich then holds on the faces of the toys, unable to move in front of him, forced to absorb this cruelty with flinching, the frozen plastic eyes more heartbreaking than tears could ever be. Keeping that in mind, who can really blame Lotso for thinking, "We're all just trash waiting to be thrown away"? Toy Story 3 does not settle for simply giving us all our old pals to laugh with: it builds off what came before and reminds us what we leave behind when we mature. And then, somehow, it turns its heartbreaking final scene -- the most touching in Pixar's oeuvre -- into as hopeful and delicate a finale even as it sets off yet another iteration of the same cycle that lead the characters to this point. It may not match the heights of Toy Story 2, nor some of the studio's recent marvels, but Toy Story 3 may be the single best piece of evidence that there are people in this world who know exactly what it means to grow older without losing a sense of wonder, and they all seem to work for the same company.



*For anyone interested, the Toy Story segment Mr. McGrath for which interviewed me can be found on the page of Morning Ireland's broadcast from June 14 here. I rambled about all things Disney/Pixar/animation for about 20 minutes, about a minute of which survives in the final edit. It's almost certainly for the better, given how out-there I got with some of my material, but the idea that my slurred, half-suppressed Southern drawl can be heard for any length of time next to audio of John Lasseter on a bona fide radio broadcast is about as cool as it gets for a geek. Note: RTE's player requires either Windows Media Player or Real Player to run.

Wall•E

Depending on one's perspective, Wall•E is either Pixar's towering achievement or definitive proof of the studio's "overrated" usage of sentimentality and messaging. My own view has wavered between the two interpretations (though I would avoid that vile, simplistic term "overrated"), but it is telling that my negative thoughts concerning the feature crop up in the corners of my mind only after I drift further away from the most recent viewing, as if Wall•E's chief flaw is that I cannot watch it every day at all times.

No disrespect to the contributions of animators the world over for the last 70 years, but Wall•E easily stands as the most visually stunning and innovative feature since Fantasia. Working with cinematographer Roger Deakins, Andrew Stanton crafts a film with such perfect lighting effects that, in a number of places, one suspects that the animators laid the characters over real backgrounds, a ludicrous thought as nothing in the film -- neither its hellish vision of Earth nor the sensory overload of its space cruiser -- exists in the present. Look at the way Wall•E and EVE click a Zippo lighter, how its flame looks exactly like the real thing. Or how the ice ring around Saturn is so brilliantly blue up close, as the protagonist literally reaches out and touches the crystals, sending them off in an arc around the wee robot and somehow making him more cute.

Speaking of the actual character of Wall•E, the protagonist serves as a microcosm of the film's triumph. Obviously, he is not the first computer-generated character, but he is the first creature to be entirely made in a studio, cobbled together on computers and on soundboards. The animators did not have the benefit of a voice actor to provide guidance -- watch a making-of documentary on any of the other Pixar features, or a number of traditional animated films, and see how the animators designed a character's movements around the gesticulating of the actors in the recording booth -- yet they craft the most affected animated character in recent memory with nothing to go on but a few beeps and whistles from Skywalker Sound maestro Ben Burtt and a whole mountain of imagination.

Wall•E's relative silence recalls Dumbo, and this moving trash-compactor is certainly the most empathetically rendered character since Bill Tytla's softly drawn, self-contained magnum opus. Like Dumbo, Wall•E is so instantly lovable and vulnerable that, before Stanton even establishes a narrative, one cannot help but wish fervently that Wall•E "wins" or whatever it is the story will eventually ask of him. He's so cute that Stanton must feed the poor thing through a hellish gauntlet, as anything less would overload the screen with saccharine. Pinocchio and Dumbo faced horrifying trials for their innocence, but they never had to contend with the desolation of Wall•E's existence.

For while those two experienced extreme loneliness through their trying tasks, they never lived in full solitude; Wall•E toils on an Earth long since abandoned by the humans who polluted it beyond the point of sustainability, carrying out his programmed task of compacting the flood of garbage into neat cubes 700 years after people took off in space yachts to escape the suffocating toxicity of the planet. In the staggering opening sequence, the camera (it is impossible to call it anything other than a "camera," the sublimely programmed movements and cuts leaving behind even the marvel of the old multiplane) surveying a cityscape, only to reveal that the skyscrapers are made from those chunks of garbage made by Wall•E and his kin. Those other models litter the streets, having worn down over the centuries until they finally broke, a constant reminder of the solitude of the model that still putters about as well as, possibly, the filmmakers' wry prediction that all of the inevitable merchandise from the film shall eventually wind up in such a giant landfill.

Let to his own devices, our Wall•E has developed a personality: to occupy himself, Wall•E collects various trinkets among the rubble and heaps that interest him. A Frisbee, a paddle ball, a lighter, meaningless objects that this childlike machine gazes upon with wonder. In this wordless opening act, Stanton conveys this character's personality to the audience via such moments. Wall•E picks out a jewelry box with a sparkling diamond ring still inside, only to discard the object that catches our eye to play with the box. In the station where he makes his home, Wall•E has created numerous compartments for his knick-knacks, leading to an amusing moment where he hovers a spork in-between a tin of forks and one of spoons until he winds up placing it in the space between the two. Made to clean up the unwanted detritus humanity so carelessly tossed away, Wall•E now finds such trash to be his treasure.

He also fixates on an old tape of Hello, Dolly!, particularly the number "Put on Your Sunday Clothes." Hello, Dolly! is a musical with few admirers, one of Gene Kelly's weakest efforts that suffers from bloated extravagance and the miscasting of a young, popular Barbara Streisand in a role that called for an older talent. It helped accelerate the death of the live-action musical, and when people use the titular phrase today, they typically do so with mocking self-awareness, so that even those who have not seen the film are being indirectly sarcastic about it. Yet here it is, one of several emotional cruxes of this film,* a tantalizing look at the connection Wall•E feels he will never have. It also serves a clue to Stanton's stylistic approach: set far ahead in the future, using state-of-the-art technology, Andrew Stanton returns to old-school techniques for Wall•E, starting in the musical, the genre created by the sound era, then moving back further into silent film, especially the work of Charlie Chaplin.

As Wall•E does not speak, he becomes the repository for a number of physical gags, which fit neatly into the Pixar's usage of TDM -- Those Damn Montages. With only a pet cockroach to keep him company, Wall•E plays around on Earth, knocking himself over with a fire extinguisher and squealing in horror when he accidentally runs over his unharmed insect chum. When EVE, a significantly advance robot, lands on Earth to scan for plant life that would allow the humans to return to Earth, Wall•E instantly falls in love, and the montages of him attempting to befriend this sleek, surprisingly violent female bot proceed like a silent film courtship, filled with images of the guy making a fool out of himself in the quest for the lady's attention; most memorable is his demonstration of his "directive," hastily assembling a small amount of garbage to compress, which sags in a moment of nervous impotence. After EVE locates the plant Wall•E earlier found and locks down to protect it until a ship comes to return her to one of the cruisers, another montage shows Wall•E caring for EVE as he tries to snap her out of her stasis, holding up umbrellas over her in the rain that each get zapped by lightning. These moments are hilarious, but also endearing, a cheeky literalization of the old shutdown line, "I wouldn't go for you if you were the last man on Earth."

Then, the film hits a snag. A recovery ship comes for EVE, and Wall•E hitches aboard as the rocket launches back into space, taking us to one of the space yachts. Moving away from the earthy tones of the first act, Wall•E becomes a dazzling feast of colors; the yachts are just that, pleasure centers designed to overload the senses, a vacation that became mankind's home. What makes the transition all the more jarring is the insertion of a storyline that brings with it the realization that everything that came before it had no narrative, and it didn't matter. The second half does not make the first look better because it's inferior -- though no one would argue that it is -- but because it places the brilliance, the perfection even, of the first half in proper context: Wall•E grabbed us without anything to propel it. It moved on the strength of its images and its first two characters, characters who didn't even speak.

On the ship, Wall•E morphs into a more straightforward thriller, one that is, frankly, not bad, if a bit middle of the road. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, the scenes aboard the Axiom depict what happens to humanity when it surrenders its responsibilities to machines. Every job is performed by a robot, with people reduced to fat, self-absorbed blobs incapable of doing anything but watch holographic TV screens and eat as they lounge on hover-chairs. The autopilot even directly references HAL9000, and when the time comes for humanity to reassert itself over its tools, Stanton treats the simple act of a person using his own two feet again grounds for using "Also Sprach Zarathustra."

While these scenes do not contain the same consistent euphoria as those on Earth, Wall•E taps into its earlier atmosphere whenever the characters on-screen are predominantly robots (the best Pixar features, after all, contain both humans and another type of character, yet they focus more on the non-humans). We are treated to hysterical moments such as Wall•E impishly toying with a cleaning robot by smudging the ground in front of the robot before leaving a dirty tread over the thing's face, as well as the heavy emotion of Wall•E's near death in a giant trash compactor filled with enormous versions of himself. The move into space allows the visuals to match the overwhelming power of its two central characters, and one would be missing the point entirely by questioning the necessity of the change in scenery when it allows for a moment as pure as the "define dancing" sequence, in which Wall•E and EVE spiral around space like two strands of polymers forming a double helix (as if Stanton was breaking romance down to the molecular level). For all the last act's flaws, it still carries an aesthetic and emotional heft worthy of that which preceded it, which is so strong that the end would need to contain far more issues than it does to sully the first two-thirds.

Wall•E taps into numerous artistic and literary modes of expression. Wall•E's construction of a sculpture of EVE out of flotsam is nearly an ancient Greek display of affection, while the story as a whole plays like the tale of Noah's Ark, the Axiom of course being the vessel that guides humanity through the destruction.** It's no wonder, then, that Wall•E ends with a credit sequence that depicts the return to Earth through a progression of artistic styles. It moves from cave painting-like renderings of the ship returning, moves into Mesopotamian art and Egyptian hieroglyphics. As the world blossoms once more, the style eventually turns to impressionist paintings of trees and rivers before, finally settling on an 8-bit animation of Wall•E and EVE. The animators trace the rebirth of humanity by resetting art to Year Zero in order to chart mankind's progress via the quality of artistic expression. It also serves to place Wall•E in context, showing the path of animation from the earliest scribbles to painting to electronic programming, that led to the film. Is it presumptuous? You bet it is. Is it earned? Oh, hell yes.

Those who would decry the second half of the film as on-the-nose would be correct, yet Wall•E's lesson is an increasingly relevant one. We are not taking care of this planet, and a number of adults, many in notable positions, openly deny climate change and recommend, if anything, more environmentally destructive acts so as to preserve the status quo (and quarterly reports). Heck, an increase in off-shore oil drilling was just approved by q supposedly arch-liberal president who, we are meant to believe, wants nothing more than to take away our guns, God and unborn children. Ergo, the bald-faced proselytizing of Wall•E is as much a desperate plea to the audience's senses as it is a bubblegum distillation of the issue for children. I would argue that the film does not go nearly far enough, pulling the punches of its more damning accusations in favor of some cheap fat jokes. One cutaway shows children in a nursery being taught the alphabet via a program made by the corporation that runs the ship; these kids are learning through advertising, so why do we see only the deterioration of the human body, not the mind? The class-on-tape reminded me of a scene in Threads where the post-nuclear generation must learn from a scratched instructional video, so they grow up to be illiterate brutes with halting speech. I wish Wall•E played up that angle more (both films are, after all, post-apocalyptic movies).

Yet I find it increasingly difficult to hold much against the film. I've used the term masterpiece liberally lately (or at least thought it), but chiefly because I've been watching older films that have been proven classics. It's easy to use the word for such entries, but nearly impossible for that which is contemporary (which is as it should be). I have considered using the term to describe Wall•E before, but the word catches in my mouth like a stutter, skipping on "m-m-m-ma" until it finally seeps out like a line of drool that embarrassingly never breaks until it falls to the ground, suspended in the air for a few moments for all to see and mock. But out it comes at last, a personal truth I can no longer deny. Few films grab me like Wall•E, and if the last act is the price to pay for progress, then it is worth it. Furthermore, its environmental preaching is really just a secondary offshoot of a more affecting message, that we are all too absorbed in our life's programming to connect fully -- EVE locks down upon finding the plant at the expense of her relationship with Wall•E, while the humans are so captivated by their shiny screens that they don't even realize that half of the cruiser's deck is a pool, much less the people around them. Only by snapping out of routine and taking stock of the world can we find love and happiness. And if I forget this, if I look back on this review in the months and years ahead and regret calling Wall•E such, all I will have to do it watch it one more time.



*I also find it amusing that Hello, Dolly! should be revived by a feature from Pixar, the studio that finally repudiated the Western need to make nearly all animated films musicals (for some reason, Watership Down and The Secret of NIMH didn't prove this point sufficiently in their times).
**The name of the ship, the Axiom, is but another hint of the self-evident truth of humankind's destructive impact on the planet and the need to reverse it.

Toy Story 1 & 2

Looking back on Pixar's first film, Toy Story's impact on the field of animation has largely overshadowed its lingering worth as a piece of entertainment. It changed the face of popular animated films, sending the traditional cel method into further decline and promoting a whole new type of children's film. But now it looks dated; even in a sparkling high-definition transfer, the 3D animation no longer captivates like it used to, surpassed by a decade's worth of improvements and boundary-pushing.

What survives is the story, an agreeably simple tale, its plain themes of jealousy and acceptance a far cry from the more grandiose messages of Pixar's later features (which is perfectly OK). First and foremost, Toy Story begins with one of the most ingenious premises of any animated feature in history: what if toys came alive when no one looked? Various anthropomorphic mundane objects existed in older animation -- Pixar even tried the idea back in 1988 with the short Tin Toy -- but the brilliance of the film's setup is that it presents a mélange of all toys. Dolls, action figures, cars, even an Etch-a-Sketch and a Mr. Spell come to life when no one watches, devoted to pleasing their child masters but capable of feeling their own emotions.

The world of Toy Story is our own, except blown up out of proportion so as to be infinite and, often, terrifying. Ergo, it's both intimate -- with the primary action taking place in one of two bedrooms, yet vast. Set in the perspective of those wee toys, creatures no taller than a foot who can live out their entire lives in a bedroom, it also implicitly frames itself as the POV of a child. Everything -- the cars, the beds, the doors -- looks bigger, something to great for the brain to ever comprehend. People often refer to "childlike wonder," which stems from this perspective: if the world is this big, we think in our adolescence, what's out there for me?

I'd forgotten how quickly the story moves. John Lasseter, working with future Pixar directors Pete Docter and Andrew Stanton and hired hand Joss Whedon, crafted Toy Story into a zippy, episodic trek home after the initial cut of the film met with disastrous reception from Disney executives (ironic, given that the early print's weaknesses stemmed from these greenhorn animators following executive notes to the letter). In the final version, Woody (Tom Hanks), a cowboy doll and the favorite toy of a young boy named Andy, is less sarcastic and more desperate; his outbursts toward his "replacement" Buzz Lightyear, a sleek new spaceman toy who's all the rage, now contain an edge of fear of abandonment over the perceived condescension of the character as originally scripted. Lasseter introduces Woody, Buzz and all the other toys in the microcosm within minutes, establishes the jealousy Woody feels for the new arrival shortly thereafter and finally launches the two main characters into a nightmarish quest to return home after Woody attempts to kill Buzz and the two wind up stranded away from Andy's house.

He does so through a series of montages, which are prominent in Toy Story and would creep their way into most Pixar features. The dissolve from the Woody decorations that adorn the bed and walls of Andy's room melting into Buzz Lightyear posters and bedspreads, Buzz winning the hearts and minds of the other toys, even Buzz's later identity crisis when he must come to terms with the fact that he's a toy; Lasseter confines these relevant character moments to brief rhythms, allowing for instant connection but denying us a deeper connection to the more emotional elements of the narrative.

Instead, the audience is treated to a tour through bizarre scenarios, such as Pizza Planet. one of those hyperactive whirlwinds of flashing neon and dinging lights that seems to prepare kids for a life spent in a casino. Inside is a claw-grab game filled with alien plush toys who worship the metal appendage that "chooses" the worthy, as well as an uproarious Alien reference via a whack-a-mole game (Whedon came on after the initial print of the film was rejected, but I'd like to think that was his touch). Woody and Buzz eventually find themselves in the clutches of a vicious little Antichrist named Sid, Andy's next-door neighbor and a sociopath who rips apart toys for pleasure. Sid's room provides a horrific counterpoint to the lighthearted, warm feel of Andy's, whose walls even have blue skies and tiny wisps of clouds painted on them.

Yes, the story jumps along, frankly too quickly for its own good, but the wit is every bit as sharp and fast. Rarely has an animated film been cast so perfectly, an oddity given how many celebrities were involved instead of more capable voice actors. Hanks may not sound like a cowboy -- certainly not in the way that Tim Allen is dead-on as Buzz, but his exuberance sells the part better than someone trying to ape John Wayne or Randolph Scott could. His readings convey the wild bliss of being Andy's favorite, the mounting paranoia and resentment of Buzz's unwitting coup and the intense vulnerability that comes with his separation from Andy (though he's a toy modeled after an adult and meant for a child, Woody looks and acts like a lost kid in these moments). For his part, Allen has never sounded so interesting, save perhaps the Toy Story sequel: his programmed bravado the perfect foil for Hanks' deliberate histrionics. Allen of course came from Home Improvement, where he played up the he-man shtick in a manner that softened Al Bundy from Married with Children for easier mass consumption, but his deadpan is hysterical: listen to the way that Buzz deflates Woody's outburst at the gas station, culminating in the booming "YOU. ARE. A. TOY!" with a measured, calm, "You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity." Even the supporting cast is fantastic: Mr. Potato Head cracks wise the entire time, so who better to play him than the Merchant of Venom, Don Rickles? Lasseter uses the celebrities to either bolster or subvert the toys we see on the screen: how great is it to see Rex, a green, menacing Tyrannosaur revealed to be a neurotic, shy basket case voiced by Wallace Shawn? Nearly every joke sounds as if the actor delivering it ad-libbed it, so natural is the dialogue matched to the cast.

And yet, Toy Story shows its age. Lasseter wanted everything to look as real as possible -- impressive, given he had to work with 2/3 the money and 1/4 the staff that the previous year's The Lion King enjoyed -- but for all of the scuffed floors and striking foliage there is the matter of the human animation. Toy Story feature the most realistic humans in any Pixar feature, and also the creepiest. Even setting aside Sid, with his shaved hair and monstrous braces (which, frankly, aren't going to fix that jagged, gap-filled maw of his), every human looks unsettling, dipping well into the uncanny valley and never re-emerging. As quickly as I would recommend Toy Story for any animation class, I might do so as much to teach the perils of using the boundless possibilities of animation for realism as to impart the boundless possibilities it shows everywhere else.

After all, no film had such an impact on the progression of animation since Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, managing to take the limitless freedom of animation visible back in 1939 with Snow White and expand upon it. Frame animation still took hours of intensive work, but a setback as immense as Disney's immediate denial of the first cut would not damn the film to development hell. Lasseter and his crew managed to revolutionize the cinema, and if Toy Story no longer looks up to snuff (though its Blu-Ray treatment really is sensational), it still stands as one of the great cinematic achievements of the '90s. Besides, it's still Pixar's most universally appealing film, eschewing the moralizing that alienates some and crafting a straightforward, thrilling narrative that has lost only some of its charm. What more can you ask of a movie?

********

It is no secret that the conceit of the animated sequel ranks as one of the most abysmal, cynical forms of the cinema, a cheap cash-in released straight-to-video to drum up a bit more money for a studio looking for additional revenue in-between "legitimate" productions. Now, the notion that Toy Story 2 nearly suffered such a fate reflects the impact of the film itself; then, the fact that it did secure a theatrical release was the source of head-scratching. Yes, it carried over the same, high-profile voice actors and was the sequel to no ordinary animated hit, but that has no inherent bearing on the film's quality. For all anyone knew, Toy Story 2 would rehash the story of the first film, swapping out old jokes for new, not necessarily fresh, material and increasing the size without changing the scope. Besides, coming off the heels of the slight disappointment of A Bug's Life's reception, Toy Story 2 must have struck some as a return to the well.

When Disney took a look at some of the test footage, though, they understood that Lasseter and co. had hit upon something special once more, and their decision to give it a theatrical release speaks to the quality evident even in the early work. One imagines that the same doubts of animated sequels spelled out above weighed on the filmmakers' minds, as nearly everything about Toy Story 2 builds from the foundation of the first yet modified in ways beyond mere expansion of size. It pokes fun at the emphasis of realism in the first film by opening with a sequence set in deep space with Buzz Lightyear (complete with wry use of "Also Sprach Zarathustra") that eventually reveals itself to be a video game played by the toys in Andy's new room. Not really an "all bets are off" statement, it nevertheless rubs against the expectations placed upon it by the previous movie without self-consciously becoming everything it's not.

As it happened in the last film, Woody is separated from his beloved Andy, but the narrative does not simply play as another "long journey home" flick. Compared to the simple story of the original, Toy Story 2 varies its approach: where the issue of mortality played out literally in the previous film, what with Sid dynamiting toys in his backyard, here Lasseter and the writers ask a deeper question: we can now accept as read that toys are living creatures, but what do they think? Furthermore, how does one seriously define a toy's mortality? They cannot die natural deaths, so is the true test of a toy's life the length of time that a child plays with it?

This is heady stuff, and, in retrospect, Toy Story 2 prompted the shift in Pixar's storytelling to its current incarnation: adult themes nestled, not always snugly, in easily consumed children's entertainment. The movie begins properly with Andy, all set to take Woody to a cowboy-themed camp, accidentally tearing the seam in Woody's arm. So, Andy leaves Woody at home, and his mother sticks the favorite toy on the high shelf, placing him among the forgotten toys of Andy's infancy. There he finds Wheezy, a penguin squeak toy abandoned in this dusty purgatory after his squeaker broke. The experience shakes Woody, showing him the thin line between being a beloved part of a child's life to a compartmentalized memory with a tinge of sentimental reminiscence at best. Galvanized, Woody attempts to save these other toys from a yard sale, only to be stolen by a collector looking to make a hefty sum by selling Woody and a group of related toys to a Japanese museum.

Those other toys -- a cowgirl, Jessie (Joan Cusack), an old prospector, Stinky Pete (Kelsey Grammer), and a plush horse named Bullseye -- affect Woody's desire to return to Andy. They know what it's like to be abandoned and neglected; Woody hallucinated a nightmare in which Andy dropped him into an infinite blackness, but Jessie, Pete and Bullseye have lived that darkness in storage containers for years, and who knows how they got along before Al bought them (if a toy loses its life when it is no longer played with, then can Pete, never removed from his box as his toy model never sold units, be said to have ever lived at all?). Woody halts his attempt to escape long enough to process their plight, and he considers going with them. Better to live in a glass box beloved by children from afar for all time than to be physically involved for a few fleeting years.

This new complexity is visited upon Buzz as well, having undergone his identity crisis in the last film and finally come to grips with his reality as a toy. As he leads the charge to rescue his best friend, Buzz finds himself in a giant toy store, which contains an aisle filled with Buzz Lightyears. It's perhaps the memorable shot of the film, a commentary on the staggering overproduction and devaluation that comes with rampant consumerism marketed toward children, a visualization of the truth of a toy's feelings of individuality, a further counterpoint between Buzz and Woody (Woody now being a rare collector's item, while Buzz Lightyear is now a marked-down item due to market flooding) and, finally, as a means to allow our Buzz to pass on his received wisdom to another Buzz unit, still wrapped up in the delusion of being a real space ranger. As Woody suffers his own identity crisis, Buzz must handle someone else's.

With this leap in thematic depth and intelligence, it is perhaps no surprise, unpleasant as it occasionally is, that Toy Story 2 offsets this potentially child-alienating material by being the most pop culture-centric of Pixar's features.* At times, the Star Wars gags, as well as an ill-advised and already dated Jurassic Park reference, choke what is otherwise the wittiest of the studio's works. The biggest Star Wars reference of the film, involving the new Buzz and a toy Zurg, is extremely broad, yet the moment is amusingly parlayed into the deeper questions of identity that the film poses. Among the many jabs and pokes is a silly swing at Lassie-style exposition that people interpret from animal noises, as we see on an old clip of a Woody-based show where a group of woodland critters jabbers urgently at the Woody from the old program, who translates their chirps into an impossibly detailed account of the peril to which he must attend. Lasseter also inserts grand physical gags like Buzz and the other toys walking across the heavily-trafficked street to the toy store covered by traffic cones, thus causing a massive pile-up as cars halt and screech around unseen construction.

Besides being even funnier than the first, Toy Story 2 also contains a deeper emotional base. It can be somewhat bewildering to return to these films with a greater knowledge of Randy Newman; for my generation, the Toy Story films introduced us to Newman, not his albums, records like Good Old Boys and Sail Away, filled with the most biting, mordant pop songs ever recorded. His big moment in the previous film, "You've Got a Friend in Me," stands as one of his most upbeat numbers, a mite sarcastic when played at the start of the film, before Woody casts Buzz out of Andy's room in jealousy and spite, but by the end any trace of irony was scrubbed from the song. One could almost trace the maturation across the two films through the standout tracks of each: here, Newman counters the lighthearted "You've Got a Friend in Me," Newman stops the show with one of his most somber tunes, "When She Loved Me," made all the more depressing by giving it to Sarah MacLachlan to sing. Toy Story overloaded on the montages to save time and money, but the most affecting moment of its sequel comes in a clip series, showing Jessie's past before winding up in Al's collection. As we watch her owner, Emily, grow and play with Jessie less and less until she finally leaves her in a box filled with assorted crap to be given to charity, the strains of Newman's song does not so much tug on the heartstrings as rip them out as a replacement for a broken piano wire or two.

That the film also looks better than its predecessor should probably go without saying, given the significant difference in time, money, staff and available technology from what Lasseter had to work with four years previously. But the improvement in aesthetic reflects more than just the sleekness that comes with a bigger budget. Lasseter clearly reviewed the work done on the first Toy Story and concluded that the humans really were a bit creepy. While he did not run in the other direction with the people in the movie -- Andy looks mostly unchanged save a graphics update that benefits him immensely -- human rendering is more interpretive in Toy Story 2. Al's bad comb-over looks so real you could slick it back into place, but his frame is more cartoony, a caricature of a fat man that stops short of being insulting. The old man who comes to his apartment to repair Woody looks completely like a cartoon, a composite of every spindly old man who ever was (he may very well be a cousin or some other relative of the old lady at the start of Ratatouille). A Bug's Life marked a significant step forward for the studio aesthetically, but Toy Story 2 finds a balance between these sharp, unmistakably artistic looks with a story that's smart enough to enrich them.

It is miracle enough that Toy Story 2 matches its predecessor, not simply because it is an animated sequel but because it is a sequel at all. As a young(er) lad, I preferred the original's faster story and zippier one-liners to a sequel that I still loved, but now I wonder if Toy Story 2 isn't one of the few -- and it is certainly fewer than some of the more effusive supporters of the studio, including a younger me, would have you believe -- truly great films to come out of the studio. If every passing year makes the easily rationalized flaws of Toy Story more dated and noticeable, it also makes plainer the simple truth that this is a masterpiece, one of the few Pixar films for which this is applicable to all films and not simply its genre.

Personally, though, I would not separate one from the other. I cannot admit much particular enthusiasm for the upcoming third installment, though I have faith that it will be at least be worth the ticket price (increasingly high praise as theaters continue to find creative ways to screw their customers), but few franchise films play off each other as well as these two do: both Toy Story movies are, ultimately, about families and how, despite the old adage, we can choose them. It's an idea communicated most visibly and lucidly in the second film when Andy returns home from his camp to find Woody, Buzz and co. back safe, joined by some new toys to be appreciated by their imaginative owner, if only for a few more years. The boy enters his room to find the toys arranged on his bed welcoming him home even as they return to their plastic, immobile selves that they show to the humans. These toys feel love and friendship and joy and passion, so what's the use of fretting over tomorrow?




*And no, Joss Whedon wasn't involved with this one.

Up

Only Pixar could make an animated film about a man who soars above the rain forests of South America in his own house realistic. Up follows two of Pixar’s biggest successes to date in Ratatouille and Wall•E, and anyone who thought the streak might end has another thing coming. The idea of an old man flying his house may sound straightforward on paper, but in the hands of director Pete Docter it becomes Pixar’s most subtly moving film to date, even as it is also one of its most action-packed.

The flying house in question belongs to Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner), who grew up a fan of explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). He befriended his future wife, Ellie, through a mutual love of adventure, and they pledge to one day move to Paradise Falls in Venezuela. But, as it so often does, life gets in the way. Before you know it, the pair grow old and Ellie dies. As contractors buy up all the land around Carl’s home to turn into high-priced condos, Carl decides to pay tribute to his wife and ties thousands of balloons to his house to fulfill their dream. The floating house calls to mind the great Hayao Miyazaki, the primary influence on Pixar's films, and his Castle in the Sky, while the scene where the house lifts off the ground for the first time reflect that legendary moment in Herzog's great Fitzcarraldo in which he successfully drags a boat across land. It's a moment of pure euphoria, a fulfillment of everyone's fantasy of just leaving it all behind.

Unwittingly accompanying Carl is Russell, a young scout who happened to be on the front porch when the house lifted. Russell is your usual cartoon kid: plucky, motor-mouthed and pudgy. But his purpose here is not, as is usually the case, to remind Carl of forgotten youth and to reinvigorate the spirit; the man tied balloons to his house to live on a waterfall in South America, for Pete’s sake. For once, the child doesn’t have all the answers, but then neither does Carl.

At this point the film moves from a quiet tearjerker into a full-bore adventure, a multi-colored ode to old-fashioned serials and jungle treks. Carl and Russell befriend a gigantic tropical bird Russell dubs “Kevin,” as well as a talking dog. Yes, there’s a talking dog, but the way in which he speaks is rather clever, and he says what a dog might say if one could really talk. Much of the comedy comes from these animal compatriots, but this is one of the more dramatic Pixar films yet produced.

Up is the second film directed by Pete Docter, who also gave us Pixar’s heretofore most heartbreaking number, and he pulls out all the stops here. The opening, nearly silent segment won’t leave a dry eye in the house, but it’s by no means the only touching moment of the 96 minutes. Pixar films famously do not pander to the audience – which is impressive, considering the median age is below puberty – but Docter visually explores the themes and characters more subtly and elegantly than ever before. Often he pauses on a small, framed photograph of Ellie located next to the helm, and he beautifully captures the majesty of the rain forest that Carl dreamed about for decades.

That love of nature inspires Carl when he discovers that a familiar face has also taken up residence at Paradise Falls solely to capture rare creatures. Docter, who came up for the story for Wall•E, clearly cares about the environment, but the message here is neither as pronounced nor as didactic as Pixar’s previous hit. At last Russell and Carl must face down the villain in an aerial showdown that would make Indiana Jones proud, a ten-minute battle that mixes breathtaking animation, high comedy and exhilarating action effortlessly.

But for all its extravagance, Up succeeds because of its intimacy. Like the very best of Pixar’s productions, it’s concerned not so much with gags but drama, and the incredible animation only fleshes out the characters more: every bit of Russell moves in perfect harmony with his incessant speaking and Carl, giant square head and all, personifies the gruff and the charming aspect of that Walter Mathau-esque Grumpy Old Man. This is not a film about lost youth but of acceptance of loss and the courage to move on, and few characters in Pixar's ouevre display Carl's strength. While the much-hyped 3-D aspect of the film is, by the sheer nature of the technology, a gimmick, Up is an iridescent, eye-popping adventure that gives itself enough space to breathe and reflect, and in many ways it’s the film Steven Spielberg might have made if he had been an animator. At this point I can’t even act surprised that Pixar yet again have given us the warmest, most human and most original film of the year.