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starkebn posted:Pixar: "What if we made a movie where a person's emotions were anthropomorphised characters in their head?" The problem is that - no matter how many times one can stress that they actually do like and appreciate a film - to certain individuals all critical reading will be treated as repulsion or malice towards 'the intended audience,' which forces them to dance around the actual content of the film and form of its presentation, and willfully misrepresent it. The aspect of Inside Out being appraised is not that, "That's not how emotions work." What has been very straightforwardly addressed is the writing and production design of the film. It is not a coincidence that emotions are not reductively anthropomorphised, but more specifically presented as managers of one individual's consciousness. It is not a coincidence that Sadness is left with the thankless job of consulting technical minutia, which she uses to save and warn Joy numerous times as they interact with an environment which is conceived of explicitly as vast corridors of virtual files. It is not a coincidence that, besides these emotions, there are 'lower level' actors in this environment who literally wear hard hats and drive golf carts. It is not a coincidence that the different aspects of the girl's personality are conceived of as theme parks and generators.
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Feb 28, 2017 03:22
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Timeless Appeal posted:The brilliance of Joy as a character is that she is both simultaneously mother and child. She is literally an aspect of Riley and also Riley's caretaker. Like The Giver, Inside Out is a fable on the necessity of pain to children who are often very averse to suffering or unfairness. But it also does the harder thing of teaching parents that if you're to accept that lesson for yourself that means letting your child suffer. 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 fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Feb 28, 2017 |
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Feb 28, 2017 04:54
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Magic Hate Ball posted:im gonna cum dude keep going 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.
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Feb 28, 2017 07:02
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Magic Hate Ball posted:It's necessarily a soothing form of storytelling, like having an emotional epiphany in a windowless Target. And if Pixar decided to recruit Charlie Kaufman to adapt a Don DeLillo novel, then we'd see some poo poo.
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Feb 28, 2017 20:20
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Hey, man, Batman is only an ephebophile
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Mar 1, 2017 04:44
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Is that your bat-grappling hook, or are you just happy to see me?
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Mar 1, 2017 05:13
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So far, all of the 'changes' as revealed really just come down to more exposition: the enchantment upon Beast always applied to the castle/servants, but now it's explicit; LeFou was always a queer-coded sycophant, but now he's explicitly homosexual; etc. Most of that extra 40-minutes is gonna be photographs of characters talking with pathos - especially Belle, because she's the phallic-mouthpiece of the film's themes. Some of it will be, like, making the fight with the wolves 'more epic' or whatever.
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Mar 3, 2017 16:20
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Barudak posted:They should remake beauty and the beast but its a stable timeloop story where Gaston is both the cursed prince and the Beast and Belle is both his lover and the witch. I agree: they should make the remake more like the Cocteau film.
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Mar 3, 2017 17:16
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I believe it's FernGully
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Mar 3, 2017 19:09
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Magic Hate Ball posted:why go cocteau when you could go borowczyk? Because I think we can still get probated for that.
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Mar 3, 2017 20:32
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Yo, animation thread, if you were up at 2:15 a.m. eastern like I was last night and watching Turner Classic Movies, you got treated to a seriously dope double feature: Belladonna of Sadness and Fantastic Planet. I was not expecting both of them to be such masterpieces of the anticlimax, but they both certainly lived up to their aesthetic notoriety. Plus, they were both released in 1973! https://vimeo.com/181140870 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwrip4d1JFc They immediately spurred me to consider the two other great '73 animated films I've seen. (Nah, except for the opening credits, Disney's Robin Hood ain't one of 'em, nor are the two Charlie Brown specials from that year.) Obvi, Ralph Bakshi's Heavy Traffic is one of 'em: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj59CU8suAk The other was the Pick-recommended Maugli, which is technically a feature compilation of shorts made between '67 and '71: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIOo6oKdLCQ 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
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Mar 5, 2017 17:28
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Please don't post about your fetishes. Sometimes a half-eaten hot dog is just a half-eaten hot dog.
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Mar 5, 2017 19:54
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Speaking of Rock & Rule, have a binge of 1983 animated feature trailers/clips (sometimes whole movies) just from the top of the wiki list: Abra Cadabra: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud-jgWdwuf0 Adventures of the Blue Knight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTy_JCVcJwk Aesop's Fables: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwAEDNC4KLM Barefoot Gen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QFNP-UV9jo Boi Arua: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svYUBr10E18 Les Boulugres: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kygEsBRuu90 Cheol-in samchongsa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awk2JSQ8Lz8
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Mar 5, 2017 21:09
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Magic Hate Ball posted:I feel compelled to share a favorite of mine from two years later: This is dope.
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Mar 5, 2017 21:26
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I like Cats Don't Dance, but am willing to concede that it's exactly as mediocre as Zootopia. Liking something is not the same thing as appraising its quality, after all.
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Mar 6, 2017 05:28
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Applewhite posted:So... not mediocre at all but actually excellent? I can get on board with that, though personally I think CDD is a little better than Zootopia. 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").
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Mar 6, 2017 15:41
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Magic Hate Ball posted:Darla Dimple deserved death. Correction: Darla Dimple is a distraction from the sick culture that made her an idol. She is also an exploited child.
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Mar 6, 2017 23:18
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Applewhite posted:Maybe in real life that's what she would have been but in the movie it was pretty clear she was in control. She was not in control, which is why the moment her conspiracy to destroy studio property for the sake of sabotaging minority talent was discovered, she was blacklisted from the industry and now posts bills. The people who were always in control were L.B. Mammoth and the fickle Hollywood establishment. The entire climactic musical sequence is devoted to illustrating just how not in control Darla is.
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Mar 7, 2017 00:13
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Applewhite posted:Dude. You're getting way into the weeds with this. Darla was a spoiled, selfish brat who used her fame and fortune to abuse people. She was the villain of the movie and her comeuppance was just. Darla, even within the diegesis of the film, is explicitly not responsible for Hollywood's systematic discrimination against animals. Even the bus driver exhibits casual speciesism towards Danny and all the animals in Hollywood. I am not talking about real life - I am critically reading Cats Don't Dance, and noting how it articulates of a fantastic, escapist scenario, where we are shown and told explicitly that superficial bigotry is just a mask for systemic injustice, but symbolically resolve these issues by lumping them onto the specter of an individual, conspiratorial threat. The irony is that Danny goes to Wooly's trailer and, while continually attempting to rationalize that his failings are accidental, is told, 'No, Hollywood doesn't want animal stories.' Functionally, the film is not about Danny internalizing this lesson, but the plastic cartoon universe stretching to accommodate his dream.
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Mar 7, 2017 01:07
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Hedrigall posted:I too am gravely concerned about discrimination against animals in hollywood The animals are meta-persons - they represent oppressed people. But even at the facetious level of your joke: animals are and have been consistently mistreated and exploited in film productions. Applewhite posted:In Cats Don't Dance, Darla bullied the director, blackmailed L.B. Mammoth into getting her way and destroyed studio property as part of a plot to personally ruin Danny. None of those behaviors were the result of her being manipulated or used by the system. She thrived in and exploited Hollywood's systematic prejudice, but she was not a victim of it. Darla at no point blackmails L.B. Mammoth. You are confusing L.B. Mammoth (the producer and head of Mammoth Studios) with the director of Lil Arc Angel, who she also never blackmails, but threatens physically. But you are already losing track of the argument. I am not saying Darla didn't do bad things. She explicitly did, which is why, by the end of the film, she now posts bills. I am saying that getting rid of Darla doesn't fix anything. Darla is not the head of Mammoth Studios. L.B. Mammoth is old as dirt - he was refusing to produce and promote animal talent except in the most degrading and utilitarian of roles before she was ever born.
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Mar 7, 2017 01:26
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Applewhite posted:Okay so you're saying that you're disappointed in the end because defeating Darla didn't solve the larger problem of animal prejudice in Hollywood? I have explicitly said that I like Cats Don't Dance. I am not critically reading it in order to express disappointment, but for the sake of ideological critique itself. The point is that, despite its superficial trappings and connotations of historical discrimination, the conflict of Cats Don't Dance is resolved in an unremarkable fashion consistent with reactionary ideology. Hollywood is obviously a bad place where an entire subsection of the populace is demoralized and exploited to prop of the spectacles of a ruling class. But Darla being 'defeated' (no longer famous and given an unglamorous, low-paying job) takes the place of confronting the endemic problems that actually inform discrimination. The Grauman's Chinese audience doesn't just change their minds - their minds are blown, but half the reason this happens is because Darla's further attempts to sabotage the animals backfires spectacularly. God himself wants the Lil Arc Angel to be exposed, so God is the only reason that Hollywood actually stops oppressing animals unilaterally. The ramifications for other animals are never addressed.
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Mar 7, 2017 01:51
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Hot take: If your animation isn't even slightly fetishistic it's probably pretty boring.
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Mar 7, 2017 04:00
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Applewhite posted:Thank God for the big butt and bread boobs on the hot dog bun in Seth McFarlane's "Sausage Party" (2016) or else that movie might have sucked. Hedrigall posted:Lol just lol if you put a pencil (or any other mark-making implement) to paper (or any other materia) for any purpose outside of propagating your sexual desires in visual or written format IT BE THE TEAR OF THE GOOFY GOOBERS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3eNr-xxA7s
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Mar 7, 2017 05:04
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ungulateman posted:the first spongebob movie is a lowkey masterpiece I don't even think it's that low-key - The Spongebob Squarepants Movie is really good, and not just because it features infantilized Motörhead, which automatically wins in my book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6WKOZGWh2g The fact that it's a parody of a deep cut and not a single makes it even better.
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Mar 7, 2017 06:06
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I would definitely go to a theatrical run of Belladonna of Sadness and invite people. It's a really sad movie, but it's also really effectively tragic and even agitational. It's basically a psychedelic, cinematic adaptation of the Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. There's an entire sequence where people's defecting to a pagan orgy is represented with their genitalia becoming animals.
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Mar 9, 2017 03:12
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I too must express a rather bitter disenchantment with the way hypothetical zoophilia takes the place of actual depictions of literal animal loving, which is something that really can be observed with great ease and doesn't need to, like, be viewed on 'pervy forums' or something. It's just not that funny compared to how dynamically emotional it can be to watch depictions of any kind of sexuality in the animated medium, which is why Anomalisa is required viewing. But, of course, there's the more scandalous variety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7spNAbUx2Lg Like, yes, there's zoophilia in Belladonna of Sadness, just in that the line between is completely blurred by the end, and then the climax is Dadaist Hell. This is from the "Joining of Adam and Eve" opening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnlgCMqlAYs It's straight into pop art degeneracy and occultism after that. K. Waste fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Mar 9, 2017 |
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Mar 9, 2017 03:32
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Hedrigall posted:I still want to see it! What's the best Bakshi film? Probably Heavy Traffic, Wizards, or American Pop. But Fritz the Cat is really good. Its harsh, incendiary aesthetic is like an animated riff on Medium Cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rj6doZ1bFo
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Mar 9, 2017 03:51
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Das Boo posted:lol, Belle's one quality that makes her the intelligent Disney princess is "likes to read" and they decide this is a good character to not know/understand Shakespeare. In all fairness, this is very faithful to the 'original' Belle, who "likes to read," but whose favorite book is a romantic fairy tale about a clandestine prince. The disaster for Beauty & the Beast fans is that the remake is already, imminently ruining the original film by clarifying it.
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Mar 15, 2017 17:43
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So here's a surprisingly good direct-to-video animated feature: Batman: Gotham Knights
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Mar 27, 2017 22:30
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PenguinKnight posted:Agreed. We need more animated anthology films in general. When they were on Netflix, I was a pretty big fan of the Genius Party series. I like how even though Studio 4°C and Madhouse produced two separate segments each, the style is completely different. The characters are never illustrated the same way twice, even Batman and his entire suit completely changes, and the first vignette/quasi-frame narrative is even in itself split into sub-stories. It's really a rather deftly crafted project even if it still bares that uncanny dysphoria between the voice-casting and dialog direction and 'out-sourced' animation, but here it feels kind of appropriate.
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Mar 27, 2017 23:21
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Das Boo posted:I loved, loved, loved the animation in Have I Got a Story for You. 4°C does this gloriously fluid motion of repulsive character designs and it just comes together in such a marvelous, unique fashion. I adore straight-ahead morphology in 2D work and that poo poo pooouuurs across the screen. It really elevates the grating tone of the writing and performances in that scene - and it's pretty much the perfect set-up. An anthology within an anthology, all about the act of perceiving Batman, before spiraling away from infantile imaginings to the complete clusterfuck that Bruce Wayne's life and Gotham is at its core. Waffleman_ posted:Which segment was the one where Bruce was an incredibly pretty boy? Because that's my most vivid memory of Gotham Knights. That's "Field Test," and in context Bruce being a pretty boy is part of the unstated conceit of the film that, like "Have I Got a Story for You," it actually begins telling the same story, but from multiple perspectives, in reverse chronological order, before we 'snap back' to the present. In the segment between them, "Crossfire" shows two MCU cops debating over whether they should be aiding and abetting Batman or not, who end up caught in the crossfire between an Italian and a Russian mob. Batman jumps in and saves the day. "Field Test" clarifies that the "Crossfire" of the title is actually Bruce's fault - in "Field Test," a very similar scenario results from his botched mission to force the Italians and Russians to a truce.
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Mar 28, 2017 00:55
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Robindaybird posted:I swear to god reviewers don't know how to review animation movies, they seem to hold them to completely different standards than live-action movies. It's the same standard, it's just that most reviewers, by definition, are reviewing a product and 'experience', and are not usually very good at/used to appraising the formal qualities of filmmaking or narrative at a critical level. That Sausage Party is merely mediocre is taken implicitly as a high point. That's it's an inferior variation of much more exceptionally trashy movies like Bee Movie, Antz, and The Spongebob Squarepants Movie is indistinguishable from, say, DreamWorks or Blue Sky making 'inferior Pixar' movies. The standard is the hearsay, perceived popular experience of particular modes of entertainment, not necessarily whether the film itself is remarkable. If reviewers were running around like chickens with their heads cut off saying Sausage Party is the worst scandal upon mainstream American animation ever, they would be using the same standard, and still wrong.
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Mar 31, 2017 18:16
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Aces High posted:whoa now what's trashy about Antz? I enjoyed it more than A Bug's Life I didn't say it was unenjoyable, I said it was trashy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mu14oUfkN1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJBYN27qZ7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEHgb0n7TFw A Bug's Life is only similar in a reductionist sense: It's a family animated movie about anthropomorphic ants, with an eccentric worker and princess at the romantic center, released in 1998. But in Antz, instead of Dave Foley as a friendly blue inventor, the protagonist is a nebbish loser with a shrunken, brown body and the voice of Woody Allen. In A Bug's Life, Flik goes on a journey to find great warriors to defend his colony, and in a humorous misunderstanding, brings back circus performers. There is a big action sequence, but no one is seriously injured or killed. In Antz, Z-4195 "Z" becomes a soldier for the opportunity to see the princess, and ends up on a suicide mission reminiscent of Starship Troopers. He is the only survivor. Sinners Sandwich posted:Spongebib Squarepants movie isn't trashy though No, it is. It is a film which constantly reminds you that it's just a film, that its hero is a useful idiot who doesn't learn anything, that the rulers and bosses of its world are corrupt or even mad with power, David Hasselhoff is a cyborg. That's primo trash.
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Mar 31, 2017 20:05
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This Japanese short animation archive is the poo poo. Have A Story of Tobacco: http://animation.filmarchives.jp/works/playen/41025
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Apr 1, 2017 23:27
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I like the Disney adaptation all right. It's mercifully shorter, as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NwYL-fxyus
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Apr 3, 2017 14:39
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K. Waste posted:Yo, church: Relevant cross-post.
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Apr 9, 2017 14:20
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Turn on Turner Classic Movies if you haven't. Like, right now.
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Apr 10, 2017 01:49
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Otherwise, have William Kentridge's Mine: https://vimeo.com/66486337
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Apr 10, 2017 02:54
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My dream cels are the ones from How to Be a Detective of the silhouetted windows from the opening so I could frame and arrange the whole sequence on a wall.
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Apr 23, 2017 00:42
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smug n stuff posted:idk if it's been discussed already, but Wes Anderson is making another stop-motion movie! Yoko Ono?! SOLD!
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Apr 25, 2017 21:15
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