Upcoming Films of Disinterest

The friendliest place on the web for anyone that follows U2.
If you have answers, please help by responding to the unanswered posts.
Wow Cars 2 is not faring too well on Rotten Tomatoes :ohmy: Is it the first Pixar movie that got a rotten rating?

The first one was the only Pixar film I've given a miss, simply because the idea of talking cars somehow holds zero appeal to me.
 
While it depresses the hell out of me that Pixar has finally made a profound misstep...

Hahahahahahahaha...fuck them for revisiting their most mediocre film to date for $$$$$$$. Cars was uninspired the first go-around, but boy was it marketable. Pixar, forget about the borderline Dreamworks fare and go back to tapping into the imaginations of children and their parents' hearts through your art. Really excited about Brave.
 
the idea of talking cars somehow holds zero appeal to me.

I think you're going to regret that statement.


KITT2000.jpg
 
Cars seemed to be aimed directly at mouth breathing nascar fans' mouth breathing kids. no thank you
 
I'm sad for Pixar's record to be tarnished after 16 years. They'll still have the box office streak alive. I think they're gonna regret delaying Brave from Fall 2011 at this point though, it would have been better to quickly cover the black eye.
 
While it depresses the hell out of me that Pixar has finally made a profound misstep...

I'll probably be dissed the hell out of for this, but I'm kind of pleased. I like a few of Pixar's movies, for sure - but at the same time, I fucking hate them. I hate that fucking smug, boring Cal-Arts style. I hate their cheap-ass ploys to make me cry like the start of Up. I hate the way people ask me if I've seen and loved the latest Pixar movie just because I'm genuinely interested in animation and want to work in that field. I hate the way adult critics go on about "oh no cartoons shouldn't make a grown man cry!" like Pixar's the first to put emotion into animation. I hate the way they just dominate the industry.
 
I agree with the above. Totally overrated.

For all Pixar's accomplishments, nothing they have made is anywhere near the rarified air of Studio Ghibli's best work, or last year's The Illusionist. The idea that something like Toy Story 3 would even be mentioned in the same breath alongside a towering achievement like Spirited Away is laughable.

Their style really bores me at this point; with the exception of Wall-E, the design and characters all look rather cookie cutter.
 
I'm totally indifferent to pixar. If the movie is good, cool. If not, I don't really care. But as far as design goes, I'm fairly certain that they're somewhat limited by rendering times. The simpler the shapes that make up a character, the less processing intensive the rendering. Of course, sometimes having to work within constraints results in the most creative output, but that doesn't seem to apply here. Either way, just sayin'
 
All I hear is tiny violins when laz talks about Pixar. Let's be honest here, what other mainstream studio could get away with making projects like Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, etc? None.
 
The whole "Pixar's the last bastion of great studio filmmaking and/or pinnacle of modern animation" narrative is really tiresome. They've released some solid family films as well as a two fantastic genre pieces (The Incredibles and Wall-E) but the collective blowjobs every time they release something is tiresome.

Cars 2 will make a shit ton of money and Disney would rather have that than another Wall-E type project any day.

I'm more excited by John Carter of Mars than anything else.
 
The whole "Pixar's the last bastion of great studio filmmaking and/or pinnacle of modern animation" narrative is really tiresome.

Especially when there are, what, like 5 Studio Ghibli films that are better than anything they could hope to achieve?

Spirited Away
Mononoke
Nausicaa
Grave of the Fireflies
Porco Rosso

That list could probably be longer.
 
I love Pixar's films, I have pretty much from the beginning, but it's becoming harder and harder to do so for the reasons all of you have stated. It's not like the movies they make are all that different from the stuff Disney was putting out at its best. They're the best at CGI animation, but the fact is it's still fucking CGI animation, which I'm never going to love, so, yeah, I'd take a Studio Ghibli film every time over a Pixar one. Same goes for something like The Illusionist (though I still haven't seen it :().

All THAT being said, Pixar can gtfo for making a sequel to Cars which was already pretty awful to begin with.
 
We should also throw Aardman into the mix of the great modern animation studios, thanks to them and Tim Burton stop-motion has been greatly advanced and found some mainstream traction.

I think early Pixar was great family entertainment, harkening back to Walt Disney's formula of heart, and humor that would keep children entertained and touch adults as well. They are also the pioneers of an entire art form the way he was with feature length traditional animation. Their scientists and artists are the reasons why many of the things that are possible with CGI exist today. Their technical prowess is reflected in the sophistication that blows every other CGI studio out of the water, and really started to be evident in Finding Nemo. Later on they started to gamble more and be much more mature while spending the mouse house's money and managed to still keep their box office numbers ridiculously high. Ratatouille is a big budget film that other than featuring talking animals is not at all oriented towards children, yet they pulled it off. Wall-E managed to sell a nearly dialog free movie to ADD children and their parents, though honestly neither demographic is among those who praised it so highly. Then they brought in Roger Deakins to try and lend Wall-E a more cinematic quality than previously envisioned in the genre, and lo and behold the first time DreamWorks makes a stunning CGI feature (How to Train Your Dragon) they hired the same man. Wall-E also carried with it an environmentalist message without shoving it down your throat the way Happy Feet did. Up has more broken-family tragedy in it than Walt's movies put together, but goes on to not only tell a fantastic adventure story but create a very restrained life-lesson story amongst that mayhem. And Toy Story 3 managed to be a hybrid of both early Pixar and adult-oriented Pixar.

These are legitimate achievements, no matter if their films are to your taste or what else is going on in the film industry. Cars 2 aside, any film fan has to be happy that some people with this kind of heart, technical skill and creativity have a ton of cache in a typically vapid Hollywood. Last bastion of animation? Obviously not, but that doesn't negate what they are.

It's like indie hipsters whining that people go on and on about the awesomeness of mainstream music and ignore the latest and greatest Pitchfork-approved album-- just because there are under-recognized artists out there doesn't take away their achievements nor does it mean that there can't be good things in the mainstream as well. There's room for both, one kind just happens to be more marketable than the other. I'm saying that I'm happy that one such group has found a fairly amicable partnership with a behemoth like Disney.

Also, let me remind you that Miyazaki won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature before any Pixar film did. If his films also managed to be box office smashes in the United States would we even be having this conversation?
 
They weren't box office smashes because Disney owns the U.S. distribution for all Ghibli films, and underpromotes them in favor of their own homegrown product. It's a pretty nefarious practice, to be honest.
 
That may be true, but let's be fair though, they don't have the potential audience in the US that Disney animation has/had.
 
You honestly think that even with the same marketing push that say Tangled got a dubbed anime picture would be a box office smash in the United States, even if it was a masterpiece?
 
Yes.

All kids LOVE Totoro, sadly something they've had to catch up on only through VHS and DVD.

And I do think Spirited Away and Ponyo could have been box office juggernauts. Just look at the international earnings. Spirited Away did $6 million in France, and only $10 million here. You know how small France is by comparison?
 
You guys are biased as fans, Spirited Away would absolutely not touch the kind of money Finding Nemo made. Miyazaki's fans in America are mostly anime fans, the style just does not have mainstream acceptance here. But we'll probably just go back and forth on this as usual.
 
Back
Top Bottom