A lengthy list of self-references and in-jokes
A lengthy list of self-references and in-jokes in Pixar’s movies, including the infamous Pizza Planet delivery truck. Mit pictures. (thx, x amount)
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kottke.org posts about Pixar
David Gallagher dings Beowulf for using digital
David Gallagher dings Beowulf for using digital actors, resulting in an uncanny valley problem for the movie.
It’s impossible to watch “Beowulf” without sensing that the “actors” are being pushed around by invisible forces, not living and breathing on their own.
I noticed the same thing when I saw the trailer in the theater a few weeks ago. I’m stunned that the filmmakers thought it was OK that the whole thing seems soulless and constantly reminds people that, hey, this is fake, you’re watching a movie! It’s a real testament to Pixar that they’re able to stop short of the uncanny valley (they’re still obviously cartoons) and still imbue their characters with life and emotion (see Anton Ego’s revelation in Ratatouille).
Update: I forgot that Zemeckis and company did the creepy Polar Express as well.
Pixar is releasing a DVD with a
Pixar is releasing a DVD with a bunch of their short films on it. (via jimr.ay)
Pixar: no female leads
Michael Hanscom notes that Pixar has not made a movie with a lead female character and this unfortunate trend looks to continue with Wall-E.
What’s been frustrating so far is simply that in many of Pixar’s prior films, there’s no particular reason why one or another of their characters couldn’t be female rather than male — would Ratatouille have been any less well done if he were a she? Would the rescue of the ant colony be less spectacular if Julia Louis-Dreyfus had voiced Flik against Dave Foley’s Prince Atta?
Wall-E update
Wall-E is Pixar’s next movie, to be released in June 2008. A new teaser trailer is due to be released today at 8pm ET, although a French site has jumped the gun and is displaying it now (much better HD version). Does it make sense even if you don’t speak French? Yes, because the movie isn’t going to have any dialogue. Says director Andrew Stanton: “I’m basically making R2-D2: The Movie”. At least it’s not in Aramaic. And talkies are overrated anyway, right?
Pixar has also launched a promotional web site for the film. The site was formerly just a placeholder but is now faux-corporate brochureware for Buy n Large, maker of the Wall-E robot. The site is full of ridiculous corporate-speak like “by visiting the Buy n Large web site you instantaneously relinquish all claims against the Buy n Large corporation and any of its vendors or strategic partners.” Check out the Nanc-E under Robotics/Robot Models for a chuckle. (thx, david)
Update: The English trailer is now available at Yahoo in HD (480p, 720p and 1080p).
Video of a Charlie Rose interview with
Video of a Charlie Rose interview with Pixar’s John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. This was about a year after Toy Story had been released and a few months before Apple bought Jobs’ NeXT.
Short video feature on how Pixar rendered
Short video feature on how Pixar rendered all the food in Ratatouille. (thx, meg)
A Slate slideshow (with video) showing work
A Slate slideshow (with video) showing work from Brad Bird’s career, from his early tests to The Iron Giant to Ratatouille.
In the battle of Steve Jobs (CEO
In the battle of Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) vs. Steve Jobs (former CEO of Pixar and current Disney Board member), Steve Jobs (Apple) was the clear winner. Apple sold an estimated 500,000 iPhones this weekend — grossing somewhere between $250 million and $300 million — while Pixar’s Ratatouille grossed $47.2 million.
Update: Some more interesting iPhone statistics, including Apple’s stock price increase since the iPhone was announced ($32 billion increase in market cap) and that iPhone was mentioned in 1.25% of all blogs posts over the weekend. (thx, thor)
Update: Apple’s stock price went down this morning in heavy trading. I guess Wall Street wasn’t so over the moon for the iPhone?
Ratatouille opens today and it’s got a
Ratatouille opens today and it’s got a score of 94 on Metacritic, which puts it in a tie for 6th place on the all-time list.
Artist Lou Romano is on fire. He
Artist Lou Romano is on fire. He did the cover for the June 25th New Yorker and he’s the voice for Linguini, the main human character in Ratatouille. Visit Romano’s blog.
Patton Oswalt, who does of the voice
Patton Oswalt, who does of the voice of the main character in Ratatouille, shares some details to look for in the film. “Everything that Ian Holm, as the evil Skinner, does — especially his teetering-on-the-edge-of-insanity rant to his lawyer about that ‘rat’ that no one else sees but him. The animators I talked to had so much fun rendering his lines — ‘An animator’s dream’, according to one of the character design staff. Also, the animators used his toque like the shark’s fin in JAWS — you always see it moving closer among the stoves in the kitchen. Hilarious.” (thx, martin)
A look at the available details of
A look at the available details of Pixar’s next few films. We know about Ratatouille and Wall-E but there’s details about Up, Toy Story 3, and Pixar’s first live-action film (???).
Ratatouille
With its latest film, Pixar manages to achieve something that few other big Hollywood films do these days: a convincing reality. The body language & emotions of the characters, the machinations of the kitchen, the sights and sounds of Paris, and the dice of the celery, Ratatouille gets it all right, down to the seemingly insignificant details. As we walked out of the movie, my wife, who has spent time cooking in restaurants (with Daniel Boulud, even), couldn’t stop talking about how well the movie captured the workings of the kitchen. To be sure, a G-rated kitchen but a true kitchen nonetheless.
I’m not quite sure how this is possible, but the people in Ratatouille acted more like real people than the actors in many recent live action movies (especially the rats), like they had realistic histories and motivations that governed their actions instead of feeling scripted and fake. The world of the movie felt as though it had existed before the opening credits and would continue after the curtain fell. Systems that have arisen through years, decades, centuries, millennia of careful evolution and interplay with one another were represented accurately and with care. In The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander writes of the quality without a name:
There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. The search which we make for this quality, in our own lives, is the central search of a person, and the crux of any individual person’s story. It is the search for those moments and situations when we are most alive.
Pixar’s search for this quality in the making of Ratatouille is impressive. And in a way, necessary. In order to draw the audience into the film and make them forget that they’re watching animated characters in an animated world, the filmmakers need to get everything right. Motions too exaggerated, motivations glossed over, plot too uncoordinated, and the whole thing loses its sense of authenticity. People need to act like people, omelettes need to sag off of spatulas like omelettes, and the only woman chef in a haute cuisine French kitchen needs to behave accordingly.
This is an interesting state of affairs. In comparison, the live action movies have become the cartoons. Not all of them, but certainly many Hollywood movies have. Spidey 3, Transformers (I’m guessing), Die Hard 4 (guessing again), anything Eddie Murphy has made since the mid-80s, Wild Hogs, Blades of Glory, RV, etc. etc. I could go on and on. So what are we to make of a cartoon that seems more real than most live action movies? How about we stop thinking of them as cartoons or kids movies or animated films and start considering them as just plain movies? I’d put Pixar’s five best films — Toy Story 2, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, and let’s throw Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant in for good measure — among the best big budget films made in the last 10 years, no caveats required.
Oh, and I don’t want to give away the ending, but I will say that Ratatouille also has something to say about critics and criticism, a topic that’s currently under debate in foodie circles and has been discussed many times in different areas of the blogosphere. It almost seems as though the film’s message is aimed partially at bloggers, and for those that care to listen, that message is both encouraging and enlightening.
A teaser trailer for Wall-E, Pixar’s newest
A teaser trailer for Wall-E, Pixar’s newest movie, due out in summer 2008. That sounds like a heck of a lunch. (thx, scott)
The Pixar media machine is getting cranked
The Pixar media machine is getting cranked up for the release of Ratatouille…here’s another article about the movie in Time. By the way, if you’re organizing any sort of advanced screening in NYC, the proper procedure is to notify me immediately.
For Pixar, the making of Ratatouille included
For Pixar, the making of Ratatouille included some time in real kitchens and restaurants, complete with a stop at the French Laundry for some face-time with Thomas Keller.
There’s no permalink, but if you go
There’s no permalink, but if you go to the Disney home page, they’re playing 9 minutes of Ratatouille, the new Pixar movie. There’s two clips…one takes place pretty close to the start of the movie and the other a bit later.
Update: For those of you outside of the US, here’s the YouTube version of the 9-minute Ratatouille clip.
Update: A more permanent and higher quality version is up on the Apple site.
Here’s the first full (and I believe,
Here’s the first full (and I believe, leaked) trailer for Ratatouille, Pixar’s newest film. It’s in English with Chinese subtitles.
An interview with John Lasseter on how
An interview with John Lasseter on how the Pixarification of Disney is proceeding.
How to use Photoshop to make your
How to use Photoshop to make your car look like one of the characters in Pixar’s Cars.
Here’s the public’s first look at the
Here’s the public’s first look at the newest Pixar film (after Ratatouille): Wall-E. Looks like it’s about robots and is directed by the guy who did Finding Nemo, in my estimation the best Pixar film to date. (via waxy)
Lengthy interview with Steve Jobs from 1995. “I’m
Lengthy interview with Steve Jobs from 1995. “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
Photos from a visit to Pixar. “Whenever
Photos from a visit to Pixar. “Whenever they get an idea for a story and there is something that they aren’t sure they know how to do yet, instead of putting 250+ people on a project and spend millions on something that they are unsure of, they will put 30 people on it and have them to create a short to see if it can be done.”
Short video made by Pixar/Disney’s John
Short video made by Pixar/Disney’s John Lasseter when he was a student at CalArts in 1979. (via bb)
Cars
[Warning, might be some spoilers.] Cars was perfect. The problem is that it was a little too perfect. After seeing the movie on Friday, Meg and I came up with three reasons why Cars missed.
1. Perfection. Some people don’t like Wes Anderson’s movies because of his emphasis on creating set-driven movies instead of plot- or character-driven movies (ditto George Lucas). With Cars, Lasseter has made himself a perfect world of cars — the petulant young racer, the lawyer Porsche, the Hispanic lowrider, the hick tow truck — but it’s a world without soul, without surprise. Everything was a little too obvious.
2. Inanimate characters talking. This was the first Pixar movie in which non-human-like or non-animal characters talked. In Toy Story, Buzz, Woody, and even the T. Rex talked, but the TV didn’t, nor did the Etch-a-Sketch. In A Bug’s Life, only the insects talked. In Cars, you’ve got these inanimate objects talking to each other, and while they did a great job making them seem human, I just couldn’t get into the characters; it felt fake and inauthentic.
3. Unlikable main character. For the first half of the movie, Lightning McQueen is a flat-out jerk with zero redeeming qualities. I remember reading an interview with John Lasseter recently where he was talking about one of the first rough cuts they did of Toy Story in which Woody was too sarcastic. After seeing it, they realized this and tempered Woody’s sarcasm with some like-ability, so that the audience would be pulling for him to change his ways, a deep-down good guy that needs to see the light. Lightning didn’t deserve redemption…he was just an asshole.
Cars is a fine movie with a lot to recommend it, but it’s just not up to Pixar’s normal standards. I was disappointed.
First trailer for Ratatouille, by Pixar and
First trailer for Ratatouille, by Pixar and Brad Bird (who did The Incredibles and The Iron Giant). ps. Cars opens today! Zoom!
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