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Patrick R

"Cars sucks." - A Pixar Thread

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And again, the film villainizing the exceptional capitalist and not the regulatory government kind of takes it far out of Ayn Rand's territory.

 

Yeah, my friend's argument was never quite that The Incredibles was Randian in premise, more just broadly elitist and privileged, by creating a plot where those born with superpowers deserve them, even if they use them irresponsibly, and those without do not. Just thought I would add it to the discussion, sorry if it was unhelpful or uninteresting!

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Not at all! It's just that your friend's complaints are shared by the larger contingent of who (not entirely unfounded, in my opinion) complain that Brad Bird's work has a streak of Ayn Randian philosophy through it, and I never did think that fit The Incredibles too much. Sorry I wasn't more specific.

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Yeah, my friend's argument was never quite that The Incredibles was Randian in premise, more just broadly elitist and privileged, by creating a plot where those born with superpowers deserve them, even if they use them irresponsibly, and those without do not.

 

I don't see that in The Incredibles at all.  Nobody with powers makes elitist statements about whether they deserve power or other people don't, except Dash who is admonished for it by his mother.   You have two kids doing irresponsible and dangerous things, Buddy with his inventions and Dash with his speed.  They both get in trouble for it and in the end the difference is not that Dash's powers are innate, but that he's willing to accept supervision and guidance from adults.

Mr. Incredible is tempted to run off and use his powers irresponsibly and his redemption is learning to value his common human role as a father above that desire to get thrills from using his special powers.

 

And again, the idea of giving people superpowers is not really on the table.  That's Syndrome's rhetoric, but what he's actually doing is using his own inventor superpowers to make weapons for himself and sell weapons to other people.

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I don't see that in The Incredibles at all. Nobody with powers makes elitist statements about whether they deserve power or other people don't, except Dash who is admonished for it by his mother. You have two kids doing irresponsible and dangerous things, Buddy with his inventions and Dash with his speed. They both get in trouble for it and in the end the difference is not that Dash's powers are innate, but that he's willing to accept supervision and guidance from adults.

Mr. Incredible is tempted to run off and use his powers irresponsibly and his redemption is learning to value his common human role as a father above that desire to get thrills from using his special powers.

And again, the idea of giving people superpowers is not really on the table. That's Syndrome's rhetoric, but what he's actually doing is using his own inventor superpowers to make weapons for himself and sell weapons to other people.

I'm not going to keep posting in this thread after this, because I haven't been participating in the rewatch itself and I'm not really in the mood to keep explicating a third party's opinions, but I think you're putting your thumb on the scale by referring to Syndrome's technical aptitude as a "superpower." In the movie itself, the depiction of such aptitude is not made with the same language that the actual superpowers are, even if the tech that it produces results in other superpower-like aptitudes.

Like I said, you can finesse it to the point that I'm sure it bears no authorial intent, but the superhero family are all shown either to act responsibly with their powers or to be given the chance to correct their mistakes, making them out to be deserving, while Syndrome is shown to be irresponsible, thus undeserving. Unless I'm misremembering, Mr. Incredible never really owns up to his role in Syndrome's genesis and his unwitting assistance in Syndrome's plans, beyond his initial shock of discovery, and at the end he's still disgusted that Syndrome's using his tech to "pretend" to be a superhero. There's definitely a double standard there, although it's arguably a natural consequence of telling a story with good and evil people in it, and it's wholly unsurprising to me that, for some viewers, it drowns out the themes of family and responsibility. Not for me, like I said, but I know at least one.

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at the end he's still disgusted that Syndrome's using his tech to "pretend" to be a superhero.

 

This is also not in the movie.  The disgust is at him building a robot that kills people so he can pretend to be a hero, not that he's pretending to be super.  It's the killing people to try to make himself look good and sell weapons that's disgusting.

And Mr. Incredible doesn't apologize for chastising Buddy for being irresponsible any more than Helen apologizes for chastising Dash for being irresponsible.  Because Bob and Helen were right and Buddy and Dash were wrong.

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Mr Incredible does apologise (or voice regret) for treating Buddy badly, in the scene where he first meets Syndrome, iirc, but that's probably more about how he said those things to Buddy than what he said.

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Well, since no one seems bothered either way (have we all just seen the later ones too recently? Was it really only the older ones we wanted to revisit?), I went ahead and re-watched WALL-E.  This film is great. Gorgeous cinematography, evocative score. Wonderful storytelling, from the many wordless sequences to the great cause-and-effect structure once WALL-E gets on the ship and becomes the 'foreign contaminent' that throws everything into wonderful chaos, and it still takes time out to have some quiet moments even late on in the film. Full of nice touches too, like the incorporation of live-action (which reminds me of Lilo & Stitch using Elvis in a similar way).

 

My only real issue is that the climax resolves very quickly - I could have done with the humans doing a little more to save themselves (at least have a couple of them run with the boot) and perhaps the damage to WALL-E being clearer (he seems to hang on indefinitely after getting zapped, this could have done with a ticking clock or something).

 

I'll be interested to read your partner's writing on the treatment of fat characters in this, Patrick, if/when they post it.

 

It struck me too that we can probably find older opinions about these films from when they were released on the forums, which would be interesting. I seem to remember someone thinking this film's implied happy ending for the humans unearned.

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It would take a pretty unreasonable brand of person to have anything negative to say about the treatment of fat characters in Wall-E. Unlike certain films, where weight is a punchline, or a horror show, in Wall-E, all of the overweight characters are attractive and positively portrayed. There's also the fact that the fat is a complete side effect of the absolute infantalization of consumerism gone awry

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I think I've said it before but Wall-E is one of the few films where the post-film credits sequence just ruined it for me. The feasibility of what happened there was so low it just made me angry.

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Your comment is probably what I'm remembering!

 

EDIT: yes it was. I think the evolving art styles (cave painting up through greek urns and Picasso to pixel art) implies that they don't immediately fix everything, but that they go back to basics (hence the scenes of fish catching etc) and slowly redevelop society with knowledge of previous mistakes.

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Are we giving up on this, then? We should have watched Up by now and we are halfway through Toy Story 3 fortnight.

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Cars definitely didn't help, but I think there's a broader force at work here (well, beyond the fact that all voluntary endeavours lose focus after a while). For me at least the earlier Pixar films are what I think of when I think of the company, and as the company and I get older we both see less originality and novelty in the new stuff.

 

A few examples:

  • Brave - In principle I love archery, redheads and mystical Celt lands. So why can't I remember a damn thing about that film?
     
  • I didn't even know there was a film called the Good Dinosaur until I just looked back at the list of Pixar films.
     
  • Monsters University - I also saw that, I also can't remember anything about it other than a vague feeling of squandering the worldbuilding of the first.
     
  • Cars 2 - I don't feel like I need to add anything here.

 

So although we're not all the way into "late game" Pixar yet, seeing it on the horizon saps my enthusiasm to continue.

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Right, we should be on Cars 2 by now, so I'm just going to wrap this re-watch up for y'all from memory/guesses:

 

Up - good opening sequence, the rest is a well-presented mess

Toy Story 3 - unimaginative with utterly misjudged tone

Cars 2 - [guess] more fun than the first one but a load of different ideas and pastiche thrown together

Brave - boring

Monsters U - uninspired and unfunny

Inside Out - great as long as you don't expect it to map exactly to psychological processes

 

all guesses: 

 

The Good Dinosaur - aimed at a younger audience; mainly sappy, with a couple of cool action sequences

Finding Dory - even more boring than the first one and slightly more irritating

Cars 3 - soulless

Coco - will look & sound great but suffer in comparison to Grim Fandango for being too clean. Better than Book Of Life though.

Toy Story 4 - more fun than 3, might match 2 for inventiveness

The Incredibles 2 - will self-indulgently focus on its themes over its stucture and therefore not be as satisfying as the original

 

Done.

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Next summer, get ready to face the cars again...

 

 

So as far as I can make out, it's going to be about cars getting old and having to learn new tricks to stay current?

 

(actually I just wanted to dig up this thread to see if anyone had watched anything released later than Wall-E, which was the last Pixar film I saw. Sounds like I haven't missed much)

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Not for this thread, no. Can't be bothered to re-watch any of those films if no one else is going to discuss/suffer with me!

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I intend to continue on with it but I'm rewatching it with family and right now the living room is torn apart for renovations. And I'll be damned if I'm watching Cars 2 by myself.

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Please note down your thoughts on Cars 2, then watch Up and share your thoughts on that and then we can get this watch-through going again and you can share your Cars 2 thoughts with us in 4 weeks time!

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On 6/16/2016 at 1:20 PM, Ben X said:

Finding Dory - even more boring than the first one and slightly more irritating

 

Nailed it.

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The note I took after watching Finding Dory last year: "A soulless cash in that adds nothing to the characters and has an incredibly lazy script. Didn't feel like I was watching a Pixar movie."

 

To add to that, I'd say it makes the first movie worse by contaminating my memory of the characters by making them all worse. I got into an argument with a guy at my friends wedding over how it was one of the worst movies released last year but just got a pass for the merit of the first film. His counter argument of "Who doesn't want to see more of those characters!" perfectly proved my point. I've forgotten most of the film at this stage but I remember really hating it and struggling to stay to the end.

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Since I missed the rewatch when that occured, I'll just do some sort of overall writeup of some thoughts.
I updated the doc SuperBiasedMan did in 2015. I put my and the world's opinions there.

 

My top five is probably:

 

1. WALL-E

2. Up

3. Monsters Inc.

4. The Incredibles

5. Brave

 

I just recently rewatched all Cars movies plus the third one.

 

I don't have that big of a problem with Cars except the second one because it's horrible shit. The third one was more on the line with the first one, ok to watch once I suppose. It's a slight rehash of the first movie with some added changes. Lightning is now old, we get it.

 

Inside Out was weird, it had so many good elements with it, but it felt like there was so much more in there that they could've shown us and processed. I got the feeling like it was a rushed job and that the team at Pixar quickly came to the ending just to finish it, so many things seemed to have been left out and only shown bits and pieces? Did it have a troubled development time? I know Brave suffered a lot about that, I remember reading about the problems they had while making Brave. Changing directors and all that.

 

Monsters University I saw in Japan a few years ago, it felt like a hollow prequel to the original movie which was one of Pixar's greatest movies. Though I really liked the performances that John Goodman and Billy Crystal gave in the prequel. They are a fun duo in the Monsters movies and seems like a perfect match, I wonder how much search did Pixar have to do in order to find these two excellent guys to do the voices. But yeah, just like Problem Machine said earlier, Monsters U is still ok, but compared to many other Pixar movies it just is nothing special.

 

The only Pixar movies I haven't seen yet are The Good Dinosaur and Finding Dory. The dinosaur movie I intend to see at some point, but Dory I don't care about much at all.

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On 6/16/2016 at 6:20 PM, Ben X said:

The Incredibles 2 - will self-indulgently focus on its themes over its structure and therefore not be as satisfying as the original

 

Well, I can't really claim that my guess was wholly correct, though there was some heavier-handed stating of themes and some issues with structure - mainly that it's essentially a re-run of the first movie, beat for beat, and that it's not really much fun when

the Incredible parents get hypnotised

. All the action sequences, acting and family dynamics are still great though. One final issue -

no resolution with the Underminer!

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Oh yeah, I already forgot that I saw Incredibles 2 last week. Maybe that speaks of how forgettable it is. Man, what a waste - it's almost exactly the same movie as the first one.

 

Thematically (the superhero family, Bob aching for his glory days, should superheroes be tied to law) and plotwise (one parent gets into an exotic adventure while the family is left behind, a 'surprising' twist at the end, obligatory Edna dress-up scene). And was it just me, or is Bob a lot less likeable here? He seemed incredibly selfish in his unwillingness to be happy for his wife when she got to have fun. The kind of jealousy that made it very hard to root for him at any point.

 

Why bother making a sequel 14  years later when you're not going to say anything new with it? Worse, where the first movie felt topical and fresh, the superhero genre has since seen MASSIVE changes, to the point where it now felt quite dull. Props for the amazing soundtrack though.

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