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Patrick R

"Cars sucks." - A Pixar Thread

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I was skeptical of my memory. Surely Toy Story 2, a film I last saw in 3D in 2009, wasn't as good as I thought. Surely it wasn't as funny, wasn't as smart, wasn't as moving, wasn't as-

 

Yes. It's so good. So so good. I cry so damn hard at the "When Somebody Loved Me" sequence. And this time around it's actually about something (acceptance of death!) as opposed to Buzz's "But toys are cool too, I guess." arc in part 1.

 

The introduction of the second Buzz is the smartest part of the movie. So funny.

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My favorite part of that was realizing that now they could just we do all the Star Wars jokes with actual Star Wars toys now. And by favorite I mean most vaguely terrifying.

 

I'm also surprised about how well I thought the When Somebody Loved Me montage worked. I find more and more that the Pixar montage just feels cheap in lazier and lazier ways. But we'll get to that.

 

And bonus fun fact: the When Somebody Loved Me bit was the first time I remember being legit depressed to some (in retrospect) minor degree. That made me one bummed out 8 year old. I couldn't throw toys out for like a decade after that.

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Onto Monsters Inc tomorrow, so last chance for anyone to watch Toy Story 2 and agree with me that it's not that good.

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No, I really disliked Toy Story 3.

 

Just watched Monsters Inc (though I've seen it a good few times before), and still find it very enjoyable. Love the production design and the performances (vocal and animation- especially Sully, Mike and Boo's faces), lots of inventive gags and set-pieces. It pretty much only has one setting, though - high-energy farce - so it can feel a little tiring at times. 

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January 18th - 31st A Bug's Life
February 1st - 14th Toy Story 2
February 15th - 28th Monsters, Inc.
February 29th - March 13th Finding Nemo
March 14th - March27th The Incredibles


All right, here it is. The movie that actually brought me to like Pixar. And it's the first time I ever saw it on Blu Ray. My set contains two BRs and I still could not find the incredible "gag reel" anywhere. On my DVD, it's clearly in the extras AND attached to the end of the movie. It may not be on the BRs... or I haven't found it yet. MotherFUCK. :tdown:

 

Regardless! Pixar's technical leap from Toy Story 2 to Monsters Inc. is breathtaking. Sully's range of emotion is brilliant, and I still have fits of laughter when I see him fainting repeatedly. This is so_well_done. And Boo... the eager smiley nod, the stiff lower lip, the sudden change from determined rage to accomplishment pride after beating up Randall. I'm still melting, and it's definitely not because the character model is particularly great (Mary Gibbs did a stellar job as well though). With the BR's detail, texture becomes pure show off. I found Sully's fur to be really impressive. Of course, Pixar was soooo proud of handling texture here that it's ritually overexposed. And 'more' is neither better nor more realistic. As a result, my eye continuously hung on irrelevant details instead of the movie's action. Good thing I know it by heart anyway. :P

 

 

/edit: GOT IT. The Outtakes were on the second disc. Choose "Humans only" from 4 item menu, then "Release" from 13 item menu, then "Outtakes & Company Play" at the very bottom of the twice scrolling 11 item menu. Wasn't that easy.

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Ha ha, thankfully they seemed to tire of farty out-takes after doing two of them for TS2. The ones in M Inc are pretty rote but then they segue into a proper little epilogue which is really nice.

At least one person has managed to keep them up on YouTube, it seems.

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I really enjoyed Toy Story 2 and agree with Patrick. The second Buzz really was great and kind of retroactively made Buzz's situation in Toy Story 1 work a bit better. The gags and the lessons learned all made sense and worked quite well throughout the whole movie. I find the scene with the old toy repairman fixing Woody especially cathartic to watch. I think generally, this movie explores what it means to be a "child's plaything" much more effectively than the first movie

 

My only real complaints:

  • The end sequence where a toy riding a toy horse catches up to a plane on the runway. I guess I'm not too fond of clumsy chase sequences where there is the constant back and forth where you think they are rescued, but then the prospector jumps out and pulls Woody back and then he does get rescued, but they need to save Jessie. It seems to be a staple of these types of movies to have these frustrating to watch, drawn out chase sequences.
  • The overarching message that toys don't belong in a museum and should instead be played with. Yeah, the bad guy was an asshole for stealing Woody but they never really sold me on the idea that it was somehow worse for a toy to end up in a museum than to be played with and eventually forgotten by a kid. I guess I could make this same complaint about The Lego Movie too although I think it was handled much better there.

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  • The overarching message that toys don't belong in a museum and should instead be played with. Yeah, the bad guy was an asshole for stealing Woody but they never really sold me on the idea that it was somehow worse for a toy to end up in a museum than to be played with and eventually forgotten by a kid. I guess I could make this same complaint about The Lego Movie too although I think it was handled much better there.

 

I'm way behind and haven't even seen a Bug's Life, but this makes much more sense if you see it as analogous to human experience. It's better to live life and risk heartbreak with relationships rather than wall yourself off from connection but have a relatively pleasant time because it's safer than possibly repeating painful experiences.

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I'm way behind and haven't even seen a Bug's Life, but this makes much more sense if you see it as analogous to human experience. It's better to live life and risk heartbreak with relationships rather than wall yourself off from connection but have a relatively pleasant time because it's safer than possibly repeating painful experiences.

 

Yeah, it definitely works a lot better when it's framed that way.

 

But if I were a toy, I would totally prefer to be in a museum with all of my matching accessories and a sweet little display to live in. It would obviously be of much higher quality than some cardboard box fort that I'd be forced to live in if I were owned by a kid.

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It comes down to the problem with the first film, where a world in which toys are sentient creatures defies all rational thought. 

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"What if?" premises certainly spiral out of control when you're trying to simultaneously develop them and retain consistency.

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I really enjoyed Toy Story 2 and agree with Patrick. The second Buzz really was great and kind of retroactively made Buzz's situation in Toy Story 1 work a bit better. The gags and the lessons learned all made sense and worked quite well throughout the whole movie. I find the scene with the old toy repairman fixing Woody especially cathartic to watch. I think generally, this movie explores what it means to be a "child's plaything" much more effectively than the first movie

 

My only real complaints:

  • The end sequence where a toy riding a toy horse catches up to a plane on the runway. I guess I'm not too fond of clumsy chase sequences where there is the constant back and forth where you think they are rescued, but then the prospector jumps out and pulls Woody back and then he does get rescued, but they need to save Jessie. It seems to be a staple of these types of movies to have these frustrating to watch, drawn out chase sequences.
  • The overarching message that toys don't belong in a museum and should instead be played with. Yeah, the bad guy was an asshole for stealing Woody but they never really sold me on the idea that it was somehow worse for a toy to end up in a museum than to be played with and eventually forgotten by a kid. I guess I could make this same complaint about The Lego Movie too although I think it was handled much better there.

 

I also made the connection between this and Lego Movie when I posted about the latter (Merus and I continue the conversation over the next page and he mostly convinces me that Lego Movie handled it okay).

 

I do find it amusing that a lot of you are bothered by stuff like "a magic toy horse couldn't run that fast!" and "a talking, circus-owning flea couldn't exert that much pressure on a bottle!"

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Monsters Inc is, I think, my favourite one of the lot too. It just feels like a brand new idea executed perfectly. Like Ghostbusters, or Star Wars or a Miyazaki film, it's a 90-minute peek into a fully realized, convincing, interesting new world. I think Monsters Inc achieves this the best, and I've grown to appreciate that it's a self-contained movie that just ends, unlike Star Wars.

 

I really enjoyed Toy Story 2 and agree with Patrick. The second Buzz really was great and kind of retroactively made Buzz's situation in Toy Story 1 work a bit better. The gags and the lessons learned all made sense and worked quite well throughout the whole movie. I find the scene with the old toy repairman fixing Woody especially cathartic to watch. I think generally, this movie explores what it means to be a "child's plaything" much more effectively than the first movie

 

Yea Toy Story 2 is an excellent example of a sequel. The characters have grown up and changed, and we're diving deeper into stuff that was touched on in the first movie. Other-Buzz an Jessie are both cool "what-if" scenarios for Buzz and Woody to think about and respond to.

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I also made the connection between this and Lego Movie when I posted about the latter (Merus and I continue the conversation over the next page and he mostly convinces me that Lego Movie handled it okay).

 

I do find it amusing that a lot of you are bothered by stuff like "a magic toy horse couldn't run that fast!" and "a talking, circus-owning flea couldn't exert that much pressure on a bottle!"

 

Jesus Ben, why do you keep thinking things I think but like several months to years before I do? First it was Jurassic Star Wars, now this? Not to mention the LucasArts playthrough being partially (mostly?) your idea.

 

And honestly, I'm not sure that anyone else aside from me is bothered by those things. The problem I have with these things is that a magic toy horse still has to follow the laws of physics that clearly still apply in the toy universe. He's not a flying unicorn and he doesn't even have batteries. He's just a regular ass toy horse and has to use his magical toy muscles just like all the other non-battery powered toys. There is no reason why he should be able to catch up to a plane when it has been clearly established elsewhere in the toy universe that their little toy legs physically limit their running abilities to basically make them scaled down versions of us. A full grown horse could maybe catch up to a car driving on an average surface street so it would stand to reason that a toy horse 1/1000 the size of a full horse could, at best, maybe catch up to the RC car driving at full speed in Toy Story 1 (and even that would be a stretch).

 

And the flea being able to put enough pressure on that lighter fluid bottle to shoot out a stream of fire is utterly ludicrous! It completely breaks the movie and makes it even more pointless because that flea would have been capable of taking out the entire group of grasshoppers with a few matches and some well placed shots of lighter fluid. Screw the bird. Flick is an idiot for wasting his time on that stupid bird instead of capitalizing on the destructive capabilities of that lighter fluid and that flea.

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Honestly, I think grown-ass people need to watch more cartoons because cartoons are awesome. 

 

I think my problem is more that the grown-ass people making some of these movies need to stop injecting Looney Toon antics into every animated work in a lame attempt to appeal to kids. They spend all this time building these incredible worlds and go to painstaking lengths to build a good level of internal consistency and then throw it out the window so they can have a clumsy Tom and Jerry-esque chase sequence. Why is this necessary? Do they throw that kind of stuff into these movies intentionally or have they internalized it so deeply that they can't fathom making an animated feature without it? It's infuriating.

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Oh crap, was the flea you as well? Sorry, thought I was spreading the paraphrasings around a bit.

Re. me pre-empting you, great minds think alike, I guess (but the greater ones get there first).

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A few more things about Monsters. Inc coming up.

 

First up. Having a door in a room that doesn't lead to another room, but to some kind of tiny pantry for clothes and other stuff, called a closet, that seemed a very weird thing to me when I first travelled to the States. In other words, this entire international approach may not work particularly well for the scream collecting company. No wonder they're on the brink of bankruptcy. :P

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I was just wondering where the whole idea for teleporting doors comes from, and of course it's obvious.

That final scramble is the world's most intense Scooby-Doo door chase.

 

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Saw Monster's Inc! Random Thoughts:

 

  • Great Saul Bass-inspired credits sequence! I had no memory of this!
  • None of the Pixar movies so far have full cast and crew credits sequences. Does that ever change?
  • Boo is wonderful but the laughing kid at the end still has a touch of creepy Pixar human face.
  • The fact that I even like Billy Crystal in this is kind of a miracle, considering how loathsome I find him outside of it.
  • Annnnnnd then the terrible jokes start. The worst part of these early Pixar movies. A sampling: "Yeah, didn't I see you on Monsteropolis' Most Wanted?" "STALK/DON'T STALK" (seriously, I think about STALK/DON'T STALK sometimes randomly during the day and get so mad), "BABY BORN WITH FIVE HEADS! PARENTS THRILLED!" (why is this in the newspaper?) "GAIN 10,000 POUNDS PER WEEK! SCARE YOUR NEIGHBORS!" (why would someone in this universe want to scare their neighbors?) "Can I borrow your odorent?", "I'm gonna take her to a monster truck rally." (is this a regular truck rally in this world?) etc. etc. etc. etc.
  • Between the iron fist of the CDA, and the civil engineering disaster that is designing a city for a population who all have completely unique and varied bodies (including blob people who fall through sewer grates and monsters who set things on fire when they sneeze) Monsteropolis seems like a dystopian nightmare.
  • The furry monster who gets shaved is the best. That little dance as he backs out of the door and goes "I'm on a rolllllllll" is the best.
  • Randall feels like a weak villain. I don't understand who he is, or how he invented this other scream machine.
  • Door chase is as good as advertised.
  • "We can't leave her here! This is the men's room!" "That is the weirdest thing you have ever said." Best joke in the movie.
  • I love the Simpsons teen-voiced janitor guys.

 

All in all it's pretty good. I think more could have been done with the story, particularly between Sully and Boo. As is, it feels like it gets close to telling a story about growing a sense of responsibility through fatherhood, but it never quite gets there. Maybe because Sully isn't developed enough. As is, I guess it's just about green energy? But even as an environmental story it's so facile (It's nicer energy and it's ten time better!) it doesn't really mean anything.

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