Pixar!

One of the least disputable opinions about entertainment today is that Pixar is awesome. Have you met anybody who thinks Pixar movies are lame? I haven't. They are meticulously made works of art, designed to amuse and provoke thought in audiences of all ages--with very few exceptions (well, one, as I will mention below), they succeed.

(I have found something that bothers me a little about Pixar movies overall, though. It occurred to me when I was watching A Bug's Life and the girl ant swoops in and saves the boy ant but then the boy ant immediately thinks of the plan that will save everyone!, and it's this: Pixar's never done a movie with a female lead. It's not like they don't have strong/admirable female characters, but ten movies and no girl/woman main character? That's fairly weak sauce. I guess it's probably just because fewer than one out of ten people working at Pixar are ladies [just a theory, based on the list of people who've been the lead writers and directors of them], but still. C'mon.)

Of course, there are better Pixar movies and not-as-better ones, so I've decided to rank them. Anyway, here they all are, in order of how good (I think) they are. Saving the best for last:

#10: A Bug's Life
I hadn't seen this one 'til a few weeks ago--I realized it was the only Pixar movie I hadn't seen, and I needed to watch it if I were to make this list complete. And it turned out that that was the only good reason to see it.

I'm not saying it's a bad movie. I am saying that it's thoroughly mediocre. The lead characters are fairly dull; the supporting characters are too numerous, and none of them get more than one note to hit; and the dialogue is completely uninspired. It was just pretty boring. It's the only Pixar movie I can think of that seems more aimed at kids than it is at everybody.

Still, the craftsmanship in the animation is, as always, top notch. I particularly liked the movie's use of water. I know that's a weird compliment, but I really dug it. The bugs are all small enough that they can deal with little blobs of water and just carry them around. (Thanks, surface tension!) And then at the end there's this big rainstorm, which drives everybody into a panic, because raindrops are so big, relatively speaking, that it's like watery bombs dropping from the sky. That was cool and obviously well thought-out.

#9: Cars
I was under the impression that Cars was a big hit until I saw the box office, Metacritic, and Rotten Tomatoes numbers on Wikipedia. Sure, it's still a big hit by normal standards, but it's the lowest rated Pixar movie by far in the MC/RT percentages (Metacritic is made up of ratings given by regular people; Rotten Tomatoes is a compilation of critics' opinions), and lower than any but Pixar's earliest two films in box office gross. This aligns with my personal opinion of it--I think it's only OK/pretty unremarkable--but I was surprised because I get the impression that this was a huge, huge hit with little kids. It seems like everybody on the internets who has a little boy watches Cars every day and buys the boy(s) tons of tie-in merchandise. This is probably why they're making a sequel to this one when only Toy Story had so far rated a second (and soon a third) chapter.

I find this movie unsettling because, unlike other Pixar features, it is set in a world with no logical relation to our own. All the others are fantasy-tied-to-reality: what if bugs/fish/toys/rats had complex societies and inner lives? What if superheroes/monsters were real? What might happen in the future? But Cars isn't like that. It's more "what if cars had eyes and mouths for some reason and existed indepently of any sort of creators and there were no humans anywhere in sight even though car geography, morality, and language was identical to our own?" It's just weird, is my point.

Also, as a person from a small town, I have some pretty strong opinions about the movie's message that small towns are morally superior and that convenient interstate travel is evil, but I should probably move on.

#8: Ratatouille

(I'm not trying to insult Ratatouille with its eighth ranking. I'm not thinking of it as third-worst, just as the one that there happen to be seven above.)

I never quite know how to feel about this one. If A Bug's Life seems uniquely unappealing to adults, this is the one that I can't imagine really speaking to children. I could be wrong--I've never watched it with a child, after all. I know there's a fair amount of action-adventure rat peril in it, but my lasting impression of it is as a fairly quiet film about cooking and about how dreams and aspirations are admirable, but don't always come true (at least in the ways you think they will).

My one quibble with Ratatouille is this: it's apparently a maxim in storytelling (or moviemaking? I keep trying to find the place I recently saw this and can't) that you can get the audience to take one leap with you but not two. This film asks you to take the leap that rats are sentient. OK, not a problem. Then it asks you to also accept that a rat can control a human, marionette-style, by yanking on the human's hair. Maybe this doesn't bother anybody else, but it does me.

Again, I'm not saying this is a bad movie. I've only seen it once, but I'm glad I did. It's a very good movie--just not as good as others like, say,

#7: Finding Nemo

I expect people to disagree with me for putting Nemo this low. I'm not saying it's not really-super-good. It is. It's sweet, it's action-packed, it's fun to look at. It has the whole package.

I don't think it would be nearly as good without Dory, though. Dory really sets this movie apart. She's so fun!

#6: WALL-E

I like WALL-E, but not nearly as much as everybody else does. The prevailing opinion seems to be that it was super innovative and creative that they sustained interest in those wordless scenes at the beginning. But I was raised on old-school Looney Tunes (and the lesser cartoons like Tom and Jerry), and I've seen dozens, if not hundreds, of wordless cartoons. WALL-E's wordlessness was well done, to be sure, but it's not like it had never been done before.

WALL-E and his pet cockroach are adorable, EVE is ok, the fat helpless humans are pretty entertaining, the Fred Willard cameo is great, and the outer space stuff was really fun to watch, but I just didn't find any of it earth-shattering.

This is what it boils down to: one of my measures of whether a movie is great is if, when I leave the theatre, I keep thinking about and want to keep talking about the move I just saw. (For instance, you could not get me to shut up about Star Trek a few weeks ago.) A great movie should be the subject of conversation for the whole dinner afterward and/or the whole car ride home. When I saw WALL-E, I basically thought, "Oh, that was nice," and I was done.

#5: Toy Story

I will fully admit that my placement of this one so high is probably influenced at least in part by nostalgia. This is the only Pixar movie that came out when I could be classified as a kid (I was twelve, and "tweens" hadn't been invented yet) and, you know, it was the first of its kind.

I haven't seen it for awhile, but I'm reasonable sure it would still hold up. It's very funny (what with the tiny green aliens and the neurotic dinosaur and all). But it's not quite as good as--

#4: Toy Story 2

Is it some sort of heresy to think that Toy Story 2 is better than the original? I don't care if it is. Toy Story 2 is, as the kids (that is, the kids ten or fifteen years ago) say, "da bomb." Four things that make me prefer it to the first one: 1) it's more epic. It covers more space and more time (I'm thinking of the very old "Woody's Roundup" TV show and the flashback to let's say the 7os when Jessie was owned by a little girl) than the first. 2) it's more touching. It's a good thing that this one didn't come out when I was a kid, because I was worried enough about the feelings of my toys. That's why the whole melancholy theme of children growing up and abandoning their anthropomorphic playthings really gets to me. 3) Woody's not a jerk. I prefer rooting for characters that are likeable, and Woody is fairly unlikeable in the first one. Yes, I know he's dealing with a lot of stress what with Buzz upstaging him and all, but he could have calmed down a little. Finally 4) Riders in the Sky music. Always good times on its own merits and, as far as I'm concerned, far preferable to Randy Newman. Randy Newman is kind of my enemy, guys.

#3: Monsters, Inc.

I love this movie. It's just so cute. It's the cutest movie ever. Fuzzy monsters? Adorable toddler? SO CUTE.

Its one flaw (by my count) is the ending. Spoiler alert here, I guess. I can't help feeling like the very very end, where it turns out that Mike rebuilt Boo's door for Sully, so he could go back and see her after all, is tacked on/a cop out. I know it was supposed to be mean that Sully wasn't allowed to see her anymore, but it also made sense. It is better if human kids don't end up in the monster world (what with their causing of blackouts just by a fit of laughter), and the human world isn't ready for monsters. Also, what kind of relationship does Sully expect to have with this kid? They can't really hang out, because that would involve Sully just hanging around in her room (with a high probability of her parents coming in at some point and freaking out), or Boo being missing from her room for long stretches of time (which, by the way, means that Boo's parents knew she was kidnapped while she was in Monsteropolis, and there had to have been police looking for her, candle light vigils, who knows what. No way her parents are going to be lax keeping an eye on a kid that got mysteriously kidnapped for a day or two). Also, shouldn't Sully get married to some monster lady and have his own kids? He obviously has a large capacity for fatherly love, and he should use it on somebody who lives in his own dimension.

Similarly, I hope they don't make a Monsters, Inc 2. Partly because the whole Boo part of the story would be weird, but mostly because I doubt they could improve on the original. The nature of story (with the big paradigm change in how monsters relate to human children) wouldn't be conducive to a sequel.

#2: Up

Great! I'll try not to give anything away since it's new. Let's just say it's funny and also very sad. It's lovable and visually lovely. Five stars.

I agree with what Craig said on Facebook--3D wasn't worth the extra money. I wanted to see the 3D version because I'd never seen a 3D movie before. And the format was well-suited to the film, what with all the height and depth. However, I had a headache going in and the 3D did not help. Terrible call to see a 3D movie with a headache, that's my helpful tip.

#1: The Incredibles
This isn't just one of the best animated movies ever; it's one of the greatest movies ever. It's smart, it's funny, it's action-packed, it's thoughtful . . . it's amazing.

The thing about it that has always struck me (and most of you who read this blog have probably heard me say this before, but oh well) is the dynamics of the family. I first saw The Incredibles right after I took a class on "the sociology of marriage," and the writers of the film may well have read some of my textbooks. The way that Bob and Helen relate to each other, speak to each other, divide up their responsibilities; and the way that the kids and parents interact with each other . . . it's incredibly nuanced, sensitive, and true to life. It's the most accurate representation of a typical American family I've ever seen on film.

The voice acting is also just spot on. I mean, who knew that Craig T. Nelson was such a good voice actor (or such a good actor, full stop)? I didn't. Holly Hunter and Jason Lee are also particularly awesome. And then professional history nerd Sarah Vowell is good, largely because her funny little grown-woman voice is well-suited to playing an awkward teenage girl.

And that's just the nerdy stuff. All the regular stuff--the action, the jokes, the characters, how good it looks--that's all top-notch too.

Man, I have definitely got to watch The Incredibles again.