J.D. Hansel

Disney

Inside Out Review

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(CONTAINS SPOILERS)

PureFlix is – and I expect always shall be – my archenemy, but Pixar sure does come close.

Pixar seems to exist only to irk me specifically more than anyone else on the planet, and it has a few tricks for doing this that serve as “the Pixar old standbys.” To me, a movie that tries to tug on the heartstrings too soon is like a guy who gropes a woman’s bum in the first minute of a blind date.  It is blatantly violating, and yet Pixar gets away with it constantly.   Both Pixar and Disney have become notorious for killing off characters seemingly solely because they don’t know how else to hold our attention, or they think we’ll feel unsatisfied with our Disney experience if we don’t meet a certain tear quota.  I think it is largely because of Pixar that killing off a character in a children’s movie is no longer an act of courage, but ironically of cowardice, fearing that the audience cannot be emotionally moved enough by the characters without a death involved.  They also have one of the fundamental principles of storytelling backwards: anyone who’s taken a high-school-level class in journalism ought to know that empathy with a character is used to make the audience care about a situation, so to use a situation to try to make people empathize with a character is taking the horns by the bull.  Yet, somehow, projects under Lasseter’s thumb frequently use emotional, tragic circumstances in an attempt to make us care about a character – in lieu of simply writing a character that’s interesting from the get-go regardless of circumstances.

Above all, Pixar is notorious for an awe of “The Aw.”  “The Aw” can refer to either the sound a canned sitcom audience makes when a character is sad, or the sound that a stereotypical (or perhaps typical) preteen girl makes when brought joy by immense cuteness and sentimentality.  As a proud skeptical cynic, I find that watching Pixar with a crowd is comparable to being a punk rocker at a Carpenters concert – the urge to puke is overpowering.  Sometimes watching Pixar makes me feel more like being in a very strict religious school, except the intense dogma has been replaced with intense sappiness that is inflicted upon me.  Now, the studio that lives to make us cry – a prime directive I find mildly immoral and satanic – has the audacity to make a film about the importance of sadness.

So why in the name of Bing Bong do I love this movie?

Well, it was pleasant, impressive, and simply fun in every way from start to finish, and actually seemed to be aimed right at me for a change.  The film is the most imaginative commentary on the human mind I have ever seen, only closely followed by Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex.  As a big believer in the notion that the replacement of practical effects, puppetry, hand-drawn animation, and painted sets with CGI has largely been to the detriment of film, and I do think the film could have benefited from being a 2D or puppet film instead.  I must recognize, however, that this is probably the best all-CGI film I’ve seen in terms of visuals, so it’s certainly on par with The Lego Movie in at least one regard.  The way the human mind is imagined in this film is just so clever that one wants to spend forever wandering about this world, much like in The Wizard of Oz.

I also consider Inside Out to be Oz-like in terms of story structure, and unlike some films, this pulls off an Oz storyline without seeming weak or unoriginal for a second.  I think every screenwriter should study Inside Out as an example of how to write a nearly perfect screenplay.  It’s a very interesting premise to begin with, and the execution of the idea satisfies by exploring all of the areas of the mind that one would hope to see explored.  Pixar’s take on dreams was spot on, it’s take on memories was clever, and its joke about facts and opinions was absolutely brilliant.  Somehow this script is mostly a series of wonderfully clever jokes, but they never get in the way of the plot.  The characters were all delightful, and the casting was superb. I liked essentially every character in this movie – even Sadness.

This, of course, leads to my thoughts on both the portrayal of Sadness, and the use of sadness.  The role of Sadness essentially seems to be adding weight and significance to important people, places, and things in our lives by revealing how painful it would be to lose them.  This is just a modification of the age-old contrast excuse: bad must exist in order for good to have meaning.  Pardon me for getting philosophical, but I’m not a fan of this argument since knowledge of bad would actually be all that is required for good to have meaning, and no actual, existent bad is necessary in any form.  This means that sadness is still an unnecessary emotion if one has a sufficient amount of knowledge, understanding, perspective, and good reasoning. While Inside Out’s solution to the Sadness problem is not perfect, I do think it is acceptable, but I personally would have emphasized the important role sadness has in empathy.  This brings us to Bing Bong.

Somehow they found a way to incorporate death, and it’s in the most bizarre way, especially when one considers that people can recollect things that they’ve long forgotten, so a mere mention of Bing Bong from Riley’s mom could resurrect him.  Still, the decision to kill of Bing Bong is an odd one simply because it’s not really necessary, which just makes it feel like an excuse to get the audience crying. I suppose that he was, by the end of the movie, just dead weight, but he could have stuck around.  The cleverness of using his wagon to get back up over the Cliffs of Insanity made that scene powerful and impressive enough as it was, and the wagon had no need to stall.  This is, however, nitpicking.

Amazingly, nitpicking is all I can do to criticize it. This comes so amazingly close to the perfect screenplay that I am just as impressed as I’d hoped I would be.  I am so happy that Pixar finally made a hilarious, charming, and imaginative movie that’s right up my alley.  At last I can congratulate Lassiter, Docter, and the rest of the Pixar team for a job well done.

62 Inside Out

Tomorrowland Review

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When approximately 22 minutes had passed, the critics checked out. The first trailer for the film, which screamed with unwarranted mediocrity, instantly brewed a batch of immense apathy in the moviegoers’ heads.  The marketing was dreadful, so the critics were eagerly awaiting the chance to convict the movie of being dreadful as well.  They got their chance about 22 minutes in, when the film reaches the pinnacle of preachy.  All of the teachers tell the high school students that doom is inevitable – the end is near – and while our optimistic protagonist raises her hand to argue, they all choose to ignore her.  When she finally is given the chance to speak, she asks the obvious question, “Can we fix it?”  The teacher is stumped by the question, because apparently everyone in this movie lives in a world where no one has bothered to ask what we can do to make the world better.

But that’s not where the story really starts.  Let’s start earlier, at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Yes, the film starts there, at what was perhaps the biggest display of optimism about the future in history. The movie starts (as more Disney films should) by getting us excited about the movie we’re starting to watch, and giving us a dose of nostalgia while playing great Sherman Brothers music is a really good way to do that.  This is where audio-animatronics were revealed to the public, most notably in the attraction “It’s a Small World,” which is where audio-animatronic children can transport people to another dimension.  … No, really, that’s the ride’s purpose according to this movie. It takes them to a dimension where cliché visions of the future are re-hashed with gray CGI, creating a world of half-hearted semi-wonder, with a side of Diet Whimsy.  However, when viewed through the eyes of the child we’re following, Frank, there is some wonder to be found in it.  Fortunately, there are a few clever details and touches that seem rather original – especially the magic floating swimming pools – which make the clichés far more bearable than one would expect from just watching the trailer.

This, however, is not the focus of the film.  The focus of the film is Hugh Laurie’s speech at the end. The entirety of the film builds up to the moment when he finally explains what has been going on this whole time.  Essentially, visions of what will happen at the end of the world have been subtly broadcast directly into the minds of the people of earth.  This should obviously be a wake-up call to get to work on fixing the problem, but instead, humans acted like humans.  They ate it up, they yelled and fussed and complained about it, they preached that the end was near, and in the end, it became an excuse.  It became an excuse to act like they cared about what was important, while in reality they used what could have been a great chance to do some good as a chance to be lazy.

The cleverness of the film is that the whole movie builds up to the unveiling of a self-fulfilling prophecy machine (arguably a sci-fi equivalent to American cable news), and ultimately humankind is more to blame for the end of the world than any villain.  The problem with the film is in the delivery of this great concept. The use of real people, places, and events creates the sense that Tomorrowland is trying to depict the real world somewhat accurately.  This becomes a problem nine minutes in when “It’s a Small World” has a secret built-in tunnel to another dimension, at which point the suspension of disbelief is gone since not even Disney could pull of such a feat in the 1960s.  However, this part of the movie was not absurdist enough to effectively communicate to the audience the message they needed to hear: “THIS IS NOT YOUR WORLD; it’s a silly caricature of it.”

But Disney wouldn’t be brave enough to say that, would they?  Naturally, they think they must make the audience believe that it is the world we’re living in so that we’re shocked.  Disney seems to think we won’t be invested in the film if what’s on screen is too surrealistic.  Therein lies the irony – the movie itself becomes the machine it antagonizes by saying, “This is reality and it stinks,” rather than saying, “This could be reality.”  (As if that isn’t bad enough, it commits an even worse crime by saying that our reality includes certain special people who inevitably improve the world.  So if I, the viewer, don’t think I’m one of those people, why would I feel motivated to make the world a better place?)  This could have been avoided had the film been an absurdist comedy, creating a world with obviously stupid caricatures of mankind, which takes away the preachy tone, while simultaneously allowing the filmmakers to scream to the world, “DON’T YOU DARE LET YOUR WORLD BE ANYTHING LIKE THIS LUDICROUS ONE.”

To be fair, there are other interesting elements of the film to discuss as well, such as the clever concept of a society where all the world’s geniuses got together in another dimension.  In terms of characters, I find it hard to believe that the lead actress is a genius, but I suppose she at least does a decent job at making the character likable.  Frank’s a pretty good character on the whole, and Hugh Laurie does a nice job with his part too, but none of them are as charming or impressive as Raffey Cassidy, who plays the little girl named “Athena.”  She’s kind of amazing, and I really like this character, but I spent half the movie waiting for the writers to kill her off since I could tell they’d do it eventually.  Her death was probably the most predictable part of the story though, as most of the film kept me wondering what was going to happen next.  The movie surprisingly handles exposition well using the old trick of making the audience want answers, and then providing them, rather than explaining to the audience what we haven’t asked to have explained.  Still, part of why the story took interesting and surprising turns that kept me wanting answers is the lack of any logic in the story whatsoever.  I was constantly finding things that the robotic characters, being computers at heart, should have handled much more logically, so I felt more like I was watching a to-be-CinemaSins than a Disney classic – another issue that could have been dodged with a tongue-in-cheek approach.

Still, at the heart of the film is its message, and while the message seems straightforward, I don’t think the critics and I agree on what the message is.  The message I choose to take from the film is that I need to get off my butt, roll up my sleeves, and get to work on making the world a better place, but I suspect that that resonated with me since I’ve already felt that way for so long.  For the average viewer, I fear that this may not have been received the same way.  There is always a danger in an optimistic message as such messages tend to ignore reality and substitute it with the way they’d like to see the world.  This movie is, to some degree, guilty of ignoring reality, which does bother me.  It does, however, use clever ideas, a fun story, and interesting characters to give the world the slap in the face it needs and say, “You have no excuse now – go get to work and make the world better.”

58 Tomorrowland

The Rocketeer Review

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(MINOR SPOILERS)

I really like Timothy Dalton.  I greatly enjoy watching Jennifer Connelly.  This movie was recommended to me by a friend, and I was pretty sure I would love it.  Unfortunately, the movie was largely dull and uninteresting for the first half.  The protagonist was a bore, and the antagonist was honestly more likable and charming.  The concept could have been very interesting, but I just couldn’t get into it for quite some time.

Then, much like in Hannah and Her Sisters, there was a redeeming scene.  Finally, when the story was starting to get interesting, they gave a scene to Jennifer Connelly’s character, who had to give the best performance of her life.  The scene was an absolute delight, largely because I could finally focus on a couple of the characters that mattered to me.  Seeing this scene in this movie felt like the geeky kid on the sidelines had just jumped up and did a slam dunk, so I couldn’t help but applaud.

On the whole, it’s not a bad movie.  Some of the characters are interesting, the concept is rather unique, the screenplay gets better and better throughout, the visuals and soundtrack are frequently impressive, and I could easily see why someone would really like this movie.  For me, however, I like a protagonist who’s likable.  Say what you want about film being a visual medium, but let’s not forget that visuals alone are not the point – otherwise you could just go to a Smithsonian art museum for free and see better visuals than most great films have to offer.  The point is storytelling, and at the heart of every story are its characters.  If the movie had a stronger main character, the story would have been much stronger, which would have made the film rise above “okay.”  The one redeeming scene, however, earned this film an extra half a star above par.

55 The Rocketeer

Into the Woods Review

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What do you call a movie that feels much longer than it really is, and yet stays very interesting throughout?  You call it Disney’s Into the Woods.  (About two thirds of the way through the film, my friend joked that they must still be making it and sending footage to the theater as they go along, creating a literally never-ending story.)

You should see this movie.

Let’s talk flaws first.  Between the lighting, set designs, and color grading, the woods look like a slightly fantasized version of… well, the woods.  Like the woods by the park where you used to play, or at least the way they might have seemed to a reasonably imaginative child.  That’s nice and all, but this was a missed opportunity to create unique woods in a unique fantasy world, like they did in Jim Henson’s Labyrinth.  And, while on the subject of visuals, the way the film opens is essentially a modified jump scare, which I found incredibly annoying.

Because of the nature of the stage musical upon which this film is based, the story structure is a bit odd.  Without giving too much away, the film gives few warnings that its structure is going to throw off some viewers.  I… don’t know how I feel about this.  It is certainly one of the many thing about this film that had me saying, “Woah, are we really doing this, movie?  Are we really doing what it looks like we’re doing?  Wow.  Okay then.”  Honestly, that reaction wasn’t really a bad one – it meant I was intrigued and surprised, mostly in a positive way.

Now that we are talking about things I liked, I think the casting was pretty good, and the film featured one of my very favorite Johnny Depp performances.  I also really liked the way that Little Red Riding Hood was written and performed; her voice is the one that was stuck in my head afterwards because it stands out in much the same way that her bright red hood does.  Which, again, is mostly a plus.  Since the story and music are, for the most part, right out of an impressive Sondheim musical, it’s pretty much a given that they are impressive in the film.  Even the look of the film, in spite of my rant above, has a lot to offer (and you can click here for Exhibit A).

The story, characters, music, theme, and other elements are strong in this film.  This is amazingly dark, with moments that are hard to believe Disney would keep in, and I think that makes it all the more memorable.  It has a couple of little problems, but it sticks with you.

38 Into the Woods

Big Hero 6 Review

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MINOR (MINOR) SPOILER ALERT

Watching this movie was an odd experience for me because I felt like I was a spectator rather than part of the experience.  That is not to say that I did not enjoy it.  Big Hero 6 is a well built film, that successfully makes the characters likable, the story understandable and interesting, and the twist sorta kinda mildly surprising.  The score to this movie is really cool, and it accompanies the lovely animation (that often had me gushing at its beauty, which I hardly ever do with CG movies) very nicely.

They were even kind enough to label the hero of the movie!  I’ve been wanting movies to do that for a long time.

Essentially, this is a good movie that was done correctly.  However, it felt distant to me.  Maybe it’s just because CG films tend to have that effect on me for some reason, or maybe it’s because I went in with an observer-like mindset.  I think a large part of my problem was the fact that it was, at its core, a superhero movie.  It is about a genius who has the ability to make the gadgets and gear necessary to fight a masked criminal, who happens to be the guy who caused the death of someone important to the hero.  We have seen that movie before.  This movie may introduce new elements, but it does have a rather cliché story, and pretty cliché characters, making it seem like I have seen it before.  It also has notable Disney movie clichés, which also make me step out of the experience and become an observer.

Still, this is a fun movie that has many impressive elements, and is certainly a good time for the kids.  If you like simple stories in slightly futuristic worlds with simple characters and great animation, you’ll really enjoy this one.

29 Big Hero 6