K. Waste posted:

With the aside about Goofy, it behooves me to cite Father's Week-End: http://www.b99.tv/video/fathers-week-end/

Quite the contrary, this is not a short about how Goofy tries and fails to live up to the identity of the modern man. Rather, the short clarifies that the joke - as in Father's Day Off and Fathers Are People - is that modern man's sufferings are interpreted as ironic vindication of his sacred, patriarchal role.

With that in mind, let's un-package your accurate assertion that Pixar's films are quasi-autobiographical, and its relation to your less stable reading that the films speak against a 'maximalist,' corporate ideology. As with Hedrigall's assumption that Inside Out is about helping children deal with their emotions (as opposed to unemotional children's films?), that 'sadness isn't marketable' is not an observable trend in Disney's works. Disney films are not only replete with tragic and traumatic scenarios, but highly dependent upon them as informing the generic fulfillment of their characters' aspirational fantasies. This is a quality that Pixar shares with and draws upon from Disney's legacy; working towards the parallel ends of sublime, optimistic conclusions that, while they may go against certain expectations of the protagonist, are never disruptions of the 'just world.'

To write accurately about Inside Out, we have to contend with the fact that it presents a symbolic order that is at once explicitly inspired by corporate, managerial trappings, but in which there is explicitly no "profit" in conventional terms. Inspired by the capitalist culture into which they are conceived, they still fundamentally present capitalism without money. "Capital" is represented instead purely by the stable and continued functioning of the symbolic order.

So Joy's position as a manager is not 'to maximize profit.' Her position is to 'keep the peace,' which she interprets as necessarily requiring her to take a dictatorial role, marginalizing Sadness and the other emotions, and unilaterally determining the progress of the corporation-as-person. Further, the lesson that she learns is not that she needs to 'take the loss' by including Sadness in order to enhance quality of life. Rather, she learns that sharing managerial duties - the synergy of different managerial philosophies - is an inevitable and necessary part of ensuring that the corporation-as-person not only survives, but continues to grow. She learns that she was actually inhibiting maximalization of what Riley could be.

The essential deviation in our readings comes from what I feel is your erroneous perception that conventional, generic animated features avoid the depiction of suffering/sorrow/etc. in order to maximize profit; whereas I just think that most films are mediocre, but necessarily market these qualities just as deliberately and efficiently as they market the sublime ending. Pixar does not choose to make children cry any more or less than Disney does. The irony is that Pixar (now Disney Pixar) is valued for being more Disney than Disney.

K. Waste posted:

To reach climax, you merely need to ask yourself: Where is the "crying time" in Cars 2? A Bug's Life? WALL-E? The Incredibles?

What we've inadvertently come to in critically un-packaging Inside Out - because it is such a transparently honest film about storytelling and management philosophy - is that there is an entire meme about the perceived nuance and emotional depth of Pixar movies which is not supported by a consistent historical reading of the texts. Pixar does not 'want to make children cry' in order to enhance their quality of life. Pixar (or the abstract managers who are hired to coordinate the creative teams under them) are merely very adept at making conventional family cinema, and the extent to which they explore tragic themes and scenarios is motivated by the particular stories they want to tell.

And to that end, none of them resolve themselves in a manner that could even be described remotely as, like, melancholy. There is always the sublime realization of a just world which is largely indistinguishable from the already naive one in which the characters began.

Anecdotal British films such as Watership Down and Animal Farm illustrate succinctly the confrontation with trauma, mortality, and, most importantly, lack of materialist fulfillment which the Pixar meme selectively ignores. This isn't even a case of 'subversive vs. reactionary' films - both of those films are actually rather arch-reactionary. But at the same time, they are far more overt examples of precisely the kinds of stories (and aesthetics) that 'can't be made' in the contemporary climate which Disney-Pixar dominates, and which their major competitors won't even touch. The point of all Disney-Pixar movies - not just Inside Out - is that "sadness is good." But this is just a generic platitude, and part of an ideological fantasy.

K. Waste posted:

And if Pixar decided to recruit Charlie Kaufman to adapt a Don DeLillo novel, then we'd see some poo poo.

Hedrigall posted:

http://people.com/movies/beauty-and-the-beast-disney-first-openly-gay-character-lefou/

LeFou is literally gay for gaston

K. Waste posted:

I agree: they should make the remake more like the Cocteau film.

K. Waste posted:

I just realized that Charlotte's Web was also '73. I doubt a re-watch of it will be as endearing as I found it as a child, but the showtunes are basically cooked into my brain, so might as well post my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bTSs3hTNRE

Pick posted:

I know, I loved this movie as a kid and this song, and now when I re-watched it for some amusing nostalgia I was just like, aw drat, this contributed to some of the art I've seen in my time. drat you charlotte's web

They didn't know...

K. Waste posted:

Sometimes a half-eaten hot dog is just a half-eaten hot dog.

K. Waste posted:

CDD has musical numbers and also looks better in hindsight because it was dealing with intersectional politics 'before it was cool.' The montage at the end of modern movie posters parodies while Darla has been 'punished' by being a bill-poster is still more explicitly gross than the feigned sarcasm at the end of Zootopia ("It was a classic doing the wrong thing for the right reason kind of a deal").

K. Waste posted:

Correction: Darla Dimple is a distraction from the sick culture that made her an idol. She is also an exploited child.

Hedrigall posted:

I learnt so much about American history and culture by reading old Mad magazines from the 70s and 80s when I was a kid! They really do capture current events and the cultural zeitgeist in a fascinating way.

Clumsy Card House posted:

Coco teaser. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNCz4mQzfEI

The end shot of the city looks promising.

The Ayshkerbundy posted:

Pablo Bluth posted:

Teaser trailer for the next film by the national treasures that are Aardman...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QNxWO_t2qM

sexpig by night posted:

That's just such a grim image.

K. Waste posted:

All three of these things should be brought back, as should the overarching context, in which you pay a single price to watch whatever's programmed and stay for as long as you want.

K. Waste posted:

I'm way too much of a pansy to do this, no matter how bored.

ImpAtom posted:

They technically have to play the film even if nobody buys tickets because you don't know if someone is going to buy a ticket after it starts.

SatansBestBuddy posted:

probably not, no

K. Waste posted:

I almost want to blame Pixar, because it seems like, even if it's only at an anecdotal level, the only kind of strong or visceral emotions that are treated as implicitly consistent with mainstream animation is tear-jerking sentiment. Meanwhile, some folks are going back to Dumbo and need to figure out 'what went wrong in my brain watching this,' even though the body of short animated work Disney produced before and contemporaneous with the film is more than enough to resolve the issue. There is no contradiction, Dumbo was always a whimsical cartoon with, like, minstrel numbers and poo poo.

Shadow Hog posted:

for instance, I love the way she delivers "and don't forget the importance of body language!"