Steven D. Greydanus has posted an excellent follow-up to my post yesterday on the three phases of Pixar history. The term, “three phases”, is Steve’s, though it does articulate what I was getting at — and it isn’t the only area where he improves on what I was trying to say. I particularly appreciate this bit:
I’m not sure it’s entirely persuasive to say, as Peter does, that the three phase 2 films, initiated when Pixar was likely thinking outside the Disney box, necessarily “aim higher” than the seven films of phase 1. In particular, I think The Incredibles aims as high as any film in Pixar’s oeuvre.
I would put it this way: The basic premise of each of Pixar’s first seven films fits comfortably within mainstream expectations for Hollywood animated family films. Anthropomorphic toys, bugs or cars; friendly monsters saddled with a human child; a father-and-son fish story; even a family of incognito super heroes — these are all concepts that could easily be pitched to Disney execs without making anyone blink or sweat. Pixar might take these concepts in brilliant directions, but there’s nothing about the basic concept of any of these films that especially pushes the envelope of family entertainment.
With the next three films, on the other hand, there is something audacious and outside-the-box about the premise itself, in terms of family-film expectations. A talky picture about a French rat who wants to be a chef? A substantially dialogue-free slapstick adventure about a lone robot in a post-apocalyptic world of trash? An elderly widower absconding with his house via balloon to South America? None of these hits you over the head as a ready-made idea for an animated family film. There is something counter-intuitive about each of them. Here is where Pixar pushes the envelope, not just in terms of how to make a animated family film, but even what it is possible for an animated Hollywood family film to be.
Phrases like “pushes the envelope” and “something audacious and outside-the-box” are precisely the kind of thing I was thinking of when I used the phrase “aims higher”. I certainly never meant to suggest that Pixar hadn’t aimed for excellence with any of its previous films!
Perhaps — to steal an idea from Daniel Thomas MacInnes at The Ghibli Blog — it would help to draw an analogy to, say, the Beatles. When the band started out, they were basically writing and performing the same kind of love songs as most other rock bands of their era — but they aimed to be the best in their field, to the point where they could even cover someone else’s song and it is their version, rather than the original, that everybody knows today (cf. ‘Twist and Shout’). Then they began to push the envelope by broadening their horizons and using the sort of music and lyrics that nobody had really used in a pop song before.
And so it was that MacInnes argued a couple years ago, based on Ratatouille (2007) and WALL•E (2008), that Pixar was now in its “Rubber Soul phase“, pushing the boundaries of animation just as the Beatles once pushed the boundaries of pop music. But MacInnes didn’t think Pixar had quite arrived at its big breakthrough yet, and so he wrote:
. . . when Pixar finally breaks the barriers imposed upon American animation, the new paradigm will prove a surprise. It will be different. How? In what way? I can’t say. They must be willing to push themselves further than ever before, and push the audiences further than ever before.
Alas, that does not seem to have happened. Even as MacInnes wrote this, Pixar had already announced plans to make Toy Story 3 and Cars 2; and since then, word has leaked out about their plans for Monsters Inc. 2. It is, you could argue, as though the Beatles had decided to abandon their plans for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and had gone back to covering songs that had already been covered by the Isley Brothers.
As Steve notes:
Pixar’s roster of coming films are all well within the “Disney box.” They may turn out to be excellent films and worthy successors to their predecessors, but there’s nothing envelope-pushing about any of them.
To this I would add that Pixar’s slate of upcoming films is, if anything, even more Disney than Disney. And what I mean by that is this: Disney has produced any number of animated sequels and spin-offs over the years, but nearly every single one of them has been made for TV or the straight-to-video market. Of the 50 films produced by Disney’s feature-film division, only two have been sequels, namely The Rescuers Down Under (1990) and Fantasia 2000 (1999) — but Pixar will have already made three sequels, with another reportedly on the way, by the time its 12th movie, Cars 2, comes out next year.
Anyway. That was more than I was going to say, but one thought led to another, and there you go. I do want to respond to two other minor points in Steve’s post, though.
First, he describes The Princess and the Frog, the first Disney cartoon to be made from scratch since John Lasseter took the reins at that studio, as “pure Disney, competent but not elevated.” Ironically, though, The Princess and the Frog is very much a Lasseter production, from the Randy Newman score to the A113 Easter egg; what’s more, in an audio commentary on the DVD that came out this week, one of the directors states that Pixar had already toyed with making its own version of the “frog prince” story set in New Orleans, because New Orleans is “John Lasseter’s favorite city in the world.” So just as Lasseter brought a Pixar sensibility to Disney’s Bolt (2008), which was already being developed under the title American Dog before Lasseter came along and ordered massive rewrites, so too Lasseter’s influence can be felt on key aspects of The Princess and the Frog.
Second, Steve asks if anyone is talking about making a sequel to The Incredibles (2004) — and, well, as a matter of fact, they are, at least according to a blog post that Jim Hill wrote just over a year ago. But Hill says there’s no chance of that talk becoming action until director Brad Bird has gotten 1906, his movie about the San Francisco earthquake, off the ground. Uh, no pun intended.
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