You... are a CHILD'S PLAYTHING!!!

"Suddenly, my imagination has come alive - like toys, when my back is turned!"

- Tracy Jordan, 30 Rock



It has stunned me that my animation blog has run for this long, gained this many readers and secured this many opinions without anyone calling me out for being a Pixar fanboygirl. I've been waiting for it to happen just so I can justify myself.

Dear Dreamworks, Blue Sky, Sony Pictures Animation, Disney (yes, Disney!!) and all other competing CG Animation studios:

You're doing it wrong.

I originally approached Toy Story 3 with slight trepidation; how could Pixar possibly pull off a "part three"? The sequel of a sequel tends to be either when a movie series falls off the rails, runs dry of ideas or simply stops trying. I am glad to say that with Pixar's latest effort, this is not the case. Toy Story 3 may be one of the best animations Pixar have ever produced, sliding into position next to The Incredibles and Wall-E.

Now to explain my position, I am not completely crazy about everything Pixar makes. In particular, I tend to cock an eyebrow in the direction of John Lasseter. I love the man for his insistence that 2D animation is, and should be, far from dead (admirable words coming from the man who started this whole '3D Animation' craze in the first place), and I love him for wanting to bring some goddamn magic back into the cold-hearted business of the Disney board of executives after all these stolid years.
But the guy just can't come up with cool ideas.

What he can do is take any asinine concept for a story and write it into something totally engaging. Even if he leaves the titles of such films off-puttingly basic: Cars, A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc and Toy Story don't really grab your attention in the way something more abstract like Ratatouille might, but the films are solid and they are watertight, completely devoid of the eye-rolling problems I am infected with every time I set eyes on an animated film by a rival company. Why is this?

Because John Lasseter gives a fuck about the story!!!



Enough, at least, to stop for a second and say "this isn't working. The script feels wrong." This is about eight steps further than Shark Tale ever took. Pixar take their time with movies and often spend months rewriting the scripts for their films until they are happy with it. There are legends surrounding story teams (a term I doubt even exists in a studio like Dreamworks Animation) spending weeks locked in the writing room trying to iron out a difficult problem that is slowing the film down or causing the film to suffer, and they do not move on until they have fixed it.

What this all comes down to is that basically, even Pixar's weak films are good. I actually enjoyed Cars. Despite it starring Owen Wilson!! A Bug's Life is a lark, even though it is kind of pointless by Pixar standards. Monsters Inc. seems a little light, but is very touching and I like it the way it is.

Toy Story 2 was one of those movies for me. It was a movie that I thought was really good, I don't know about fantastic or fucking brilliant, but a heartily pleasant romp and proof that Pixar can handle sequels.

Obviously Toy Story 3 was going to be the same thing again, right? Perhaps with just a smidgeon less impetus, but still more fun to watch - if only for nostalgic reasons - than Cars. Right?



I am not particularly embarrassed to say that Toy Story 3 had me fighting tears at several points. I laughed hysterically at the jokes; I shrank forward on my seat wondering what could possibly happen next; I felt my eyes well up at the many expertly handled moments of pathos; I felt my skin crawl at that GOD DAMN CREEPY MONKEY.

The trailer showed such a paltry amount of what this movie has to offer. It was a shadow of the full experience. Why is this? Because if they included anything more, there would be spoilers. Allow me to put my scriptwriter's hat on for a moment...



Script is perfect. Do not touch.

Toy Story 3 is a touchstone in storytelling. It is the best "part three" of a film series I have ever seen. It is not so much a sequel as a reinvention of Toy Story. Buzz and Woody's closing chapter has as much of an impact today as the first installment had on the film industry, and the world, back in the seemingly ancient year of 1995.

The hilarious part is that before the film rolled onto the screen, I had to endure a series of insufferable trailers for 3D movies that at the best of times, made me giggle once for every two winces of unbearable discomfort, and at the worst of times, had me locked in a perpetual cringe. At a later date I will be interested to directly compare the strangely familiar premises of Megamind and Despicable Me once they are released on our shores, but I honestly don't think I have the energy or patience to withstand Disney's Tangled. As for that movie about the owls, well, the Australian accents are just fucking offputting. After such struggles of endurance (and only at a minute or two each!!), Toy Story 3 stampeded into my senses like a billion, trillion, zillion first orgasms in my brain.


I want to see this again. And I am going to.

That is all.

Up Yours

Okay, so this movie came out a while ago, it was one of those 3D movies for kids.
Maybe you've heard of it, it's called Up.



No, not the one with the gay cock! I meant UP. The Pixar one.

This movie didn't frustrate me. Something else did. The people who saw it before me.
The dialogue consistently went something like this.

Up viewer: "Man. Up came out and it was amazing/boring. I really loved/hated it."
Me: "Oh yeah, what was it about, exactly?"
Up viewer: "Well, uhh. It was about this old guy who like, put lots of balloons on his house and it flew up into the air."
Me: "..... that's it?"
Up viewer: "Oh, well there was a fat boy scout who he became friends with. Cause at first he was all grumpy."

If I was lucky, I would be treated to the extended explanation, which went thus.

Me: "Okay, so a grumpy guy flies his house up with a bunch of balloons and he meets a boy scout, then what?"
Up viewer: "Oh! Well, you know. Uhhm. There's like, this bird that they meet, it looks really weird. And there's a dog in it too."

And that would be what they told me. In full.

HEY ASSHOLES, I FIGURED THAT OUT FROM THE FUCKING PREVIEW.



My sneaking suspicion that I still cannot let go of (I only saw the film two days ago - I mean did you expect me to rush out and see it with an explanation like that??) is that these people never actually saw the movie. They were just so fucking lazy that they wanted to pretend to be the Pixar fanatics they're not and relayed what they saw in the trailers of another movie.
So maybe you could argue that by giving away more of the movie, you'd be ruining the surprise.

What surprise?! Was there really anything to spoil in this movie?!

In case you're retarded, I won't bother explaining the oh-so-difficult twists and turns packed into this totally unguessable movie. Yeah okay, I'm getting cynical, but this is aimed more at the human red herrings that fed me this bullshit storyline than Pixar.



Wait, what the fuck - there are planes in this movie? And a blimp? Well gee, who do they belong to? The bird? Or the dog, maybe? Did the scouts come looking for the little boy who got trapped in the flying house with the old man? This sounds like a story. Maybe some kind of adventure.
Well, if you're like me and have taken an ice age to see this movie, let me let you in on a little secret.
Up is a lot better than the trailers make it out to be.

Okay, so maybe it isn't Shakespeare. And by Shakespeare, I mean The Incredibles and Wall-E, which were perfect in every way. But for a good old Pixar thrill ride, it was pretty good.
The old man doesn't start out grumpy like these asshats told me. He actually starts off a pretty nice guy, and becomes grumpy. For what I would call a pretty good reason. And he didn't just inflate these balloons in his house for no reason two minutes into the movie. Why don't you watch this film before explaining the plot to me?

It reminds me of a funny story involving a certain game for the original Playstation X, called "Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver".
My brother and I were addicted to the game that came before it, the original in the series: "Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain". Now many of you will know that I love vampires, but I fucking hate vampyres. Whiney emo pussy romantics have ruined these once brutal, savage creatures of the night by fetishising them into beautiful faggot goths, but Blood Omen was the real deal. Vampires that could turn into bats, mist or wolves, and drank blood by telekinetically sucking the blood in a stream from their victim's slashed-open bodies into their mouths.



Oh, god yes. Forget your sexual metaphors and romanticised fang-hickies. This was it.

At the very beginning of the intro of the sequel, Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver, we are even teased into thinking that the new hero is some kind of lipstick wearing goth. He looks more than a little bit gay.



But wait a minute! He doesn't look like that on the cover of the game!



Whoah, my mistake. The hero is BADASS. How did THAT happen?? My brother happened to have a friend who had the game, and he told us that the story involved some new bad guy creating a race of super zombies by throwing winged slaves into a vortex that changed them into weird superbeasts. But the hero decided to secretly defect! Hmm, okay. Then we played the game for ourselves.

Uhh, no. That's not what happened at all.

It was about Kain ruling the world for thousands of years after the events of the first game and Raziel, one of his loyal servants, had grown a pair of wings and Kain hated this so much that he broke the guy's wings and threw him into a portal of certain death. Then Raziel was resurrected yet more thousands of years later by a mysterious spirit who wanted to use Raziel as a tool to destroy Kain.

So how the fuck did he get THAT from THIS?
The answer is simple.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFiLNc46jAM

Watch for the actual story. Then watch it again with the sound turned off to get this other guy's fucked up version.

Gee, wow! This guy must have played the game with a broken set of speakers but still wanted to impress us by pretending to know what the story was.

The point of all this is that I felt the same sense of bafflement when I watched Up. Except this time it felt good. Because the movie wasn't as boring as all these idiots who had obviously never watched the movie made it out to be.



See, the thing about Up is, I think a lot of people were disappointed in it because they were expecting it to be The Incredibles or Wall-E. Well Jesus Christ. Give the man some credit. Peter Docter didn't direct those movies, Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton did, respectively. Docter's last film was Monsters Inc. It wasn't my favourite movie, but I still liked it, and personally I think Up is an improvement.
You get this old prick who's had it with everyone still alive, who devotes his life to what initially appears to be a noble cause but winds up being a pointless, even selfish persuit. The film is indeed packed with action, adventure, and characters other than the old man, the Asian kid and a couple of weird-looking animals.



Perhaps the bad guy lacks the emotional depth we are beginning to crave for animated characters. I mean come on, Pixar have pulled it off before. But his intentions are believable enough; he's just a secluded old man with a murderous obsession and a really bad case of paranoia. We've all met one before. You may have even had to live with one at some stage.



The only thing I don't like about the villain is that he is apparently a zillion years old and the dynamics of this are never really explained. Shouldn't he be in a wheelchair or something by now?
Anyway, I think people are beginning to get a little harsh on Pixar. One thing I like about this studio is that they never fuck things up.
They might come out with a movie that wasn't as heart-poundingly exciting as the last one, or as heart-tuggingly emotionally involving as the one before that. But is that a reason to call it a boring movie? You might as well say The Fifth Element was a bad movie because it lacked the complexity of the dialogue in Citizen Kane. Personally, I like the fact that Pixar are always pushing the boundaries by giving different directors a spin and taking the settings in unexpected directions. And focusing on making sure the story is coherent rather than how much the models look like the voice actors who play them. And having the team of artists and the team of programmers in separate divisions. And talking to animation magazines about how proud they are of their story team, and not their suite of computers that run Linux. You know, things that other studios DON'T do.


This movie was like rape without the confusing physical pleasure


Holy shit this movie sucked for so many different reasons


No, seriously, was I the only one who hated all these fucking cowpats?

Now for the real shocker, Up is actually a good movie. Sure, it has some of the usual Pixar eye-rollery (the "cross my heart" theme felt really lame, but maybe that's just me), but Pixar eye-rollery is forgivable. It's not like Blue Sky eye-rollery where the reason your eyes are rolling is because you are physically convulsing in disgust at what you are watching.
The story made sense, it was fun, I ended up really liking all the characters, there were a lot of really funny moments and it had a heartwarming conclusion that (thank GOD) didn't bash our brains in with some kind of moral lesson.

I just wish I hadn't been inflicted with all those half-assed reviews from people who hadn't seen the movie or I might have been able to watch it in 3D.


Awww, the dog misses out on the 3D experience. But then he probably doesn't have very good depth perception anyway. But I'm not a vet so I wouldn't know