Toy Story (1995) Review – This town ain’t big enough for the two of us!

February 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Over in that house is a kid who thinks you’re the greatest, and it’s not because you’re a space ranger, pal. It’s because you’re a toy. You are his toy! – Woody

Rating: 4 stars (out of 4)

The success of Toy Story was almost unprecedented: Critics made it the fourth best-reviewed film of all time. Viewers flocked to the theater; no film sold more tickets in the US in 1995. Its maker, a little-known rendering company called Pixar, catapulted to stardom. Disney earned its biggest hit ever not made by the Walt Disney Animation Studio.

Oh, and it was the first computer-animated feature, ever. A few films — including Disney’s own The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast — previously mixed in some computer-generated imagery (CGI) as special effects. Plenty of commercials and theatrical shorts had been created entirely with electrons, but never a full-length film.

(And yet, the success of Toy Story was still only “almost unprecedented.” Exactly one film innovated so profoundly and successfully before it: 1937′s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first hand-drawn animated film ever.)

Pixar’s strange history as a computer hardware and software company — documented in the engaging The Pixar Touch by David A. Price — suggests that Toy Story could easily have come out as little more than a technical exercise. With all of the effort involved in creating a 80-minute computer graphic, little details like plot, characters, and script could have been lost in the mix.

That’s what makes the most staggering success of Toy Story – its pure, giddy, rich, poignant storytelling — one of the great, unlikely Hollywood victories of all time. Simply, Toy Story is nearly a masterpiece, one of the best films of its decade, and one of the best animated films ever.

It all starts with the premise, which is simple on the surface but cuts deep. Toys come to life when their owners are away. They have their own little world, organized like a small community. They worry mostly about typical things: love, wellbeing, friendship, safety. Their deepest desire is to be played with by their owners. This undercurrent of longing — to be played with and valued — allows the Toy Story series to embody all sorts of existential metaphor.

There’s also a powerful contradiction contained in the premise: the toys can’t (or don’t — more on this later) move or express anything when humans are around, even though entertaining humans is their life calling. This paradox drives much of the film’s suspense and thematic depth.

Among the key triumphs for the film is its multi-dimensional characters. Most memorable are the odd couple at the heart of the film: Woody and Buzz Lightyear. Woody starts the film Andy’s favorite toy, a position that commands respect among his fellow toys. Fortunately, he’s a good leader and he organizes the toys into a productive community. As two stressful events — moving day and the dreaded birthday, when old toys are replaced with new gizmos — approach, Woody does his best to keep Andy’s toys calm and prepared for any disaster.

With Woody’s power and responsibility has come an inflated self-importance. He relishes in the role as favorite toy and leader. Admittedly, it’s an important role: Without him, it seems, there would be no order within the toys’ community and no hero for Andy’s elaborate, imagined adventures. The other members of the toy community mock Woody’s seriousness a bit, but seem to respect his authority.

Woody is voiced brilliantly by Tom Hanks, who infuses the protagonist with humanity and comedy. His inflection and energy turn some plain lines into classics, especially one of cinema’s great rants: “You are a toy! You aren’t the real Buzz Lightyear! You’re an action figure. Y0u are a child’s plaything!”

Equally memorable is Buzz Lightyear. Woody had spent the morning before the birthday party comforting his fellow toys that they wouldn’t be replaced, but Woody himself turns out to be the one in danger. Buzz Lightyear knocks Woody off the bed and off the top of the toy totem pole. All of the toys immediately embrace him as the new, cool toy and leader. Even Woody’s beloved Bo Peep admits that Buzz has “more gadgets on him than a Swiss Army knife.”

Yet Buzz has a self-delusion that surpasses Woody’s, and it’s this confusion that drives the film: He doesn’t realize that he’s a toy. He thinks he’s really a space captain. As Rober Ebert put it, “Buzz is the most endearing toy in the movie, because he’s not in on the joke.”

Throughout the first half of the movie, Buzz operates as if he’s temporarily crashed on an alien world and has to repair his cardboard box space ship. This leads to some of the funniest moments in the film, when Buzz makes off-handed observations in a militaristic, formal tone. “I don’t believe that man’s ever been to medical school,” he remarks when toy-abuser Sid plays the part of a toy surgeon.

Because of Buzz’s persistence to his world view, his transformation is quite poignant. His belief that he’s the Buzz Lightyear comes crashing down, quite literally. Woody is forced to make a change in his self-outlook by the end of the film, but it’s nothing compared to the complete identity crisis Buzz goes through.

Credit voice actor Tim Allen for capturing these complexities. Billy Crystal was initially desired for the role, but he turned down the role, so Allen was offered the gig. Crystal’s rejection was ultimately a fortuitous twist to the film. Allen’s everyman, blue collar take on Buzz allows the character to remain relatable. Crystal’s detached, high-pitched voice (later utilized to great effect in Monsters Inc.) could have pushed Buzz into an unlikeable character.

As brilliantly-conceived as Buzz and Woody are on their own, the real magic happens when the two are together, which is the better part of the movie. Both are completely confident of their place in the world, and so the first half of the movie is loaded with great scenes where each thinks the other is the craziest toy alive.

This comes to a head in the aforementioned scene at the gas station. Buzz tries to escape to get in touch with Star Command to defeat the Emperor Zerg, while Woody just wants to get back home in time for moving day. “You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity,” says Buzz. It’s a remark that seems woefully ironic at first, but grows more true the more you think about it: Woody had forgotten that his role as a toy was the be there for Andy, not fulfill his own self-image as a leader and hero.

After Buzz’s delusion collapses along with his self-meaning, Woody helps him infuse a new meaning. In one of the more brilliant scenes of the film, Woody and Buzz’s flawed world views intersect: Woody, to escape his plastic cage, has to admit that he’s not inherently “better” than Buzz or any other toy, even if he fancies himself important. Buzz, with the help of a Woody pep talk, sees that their is a certain value and duty in being a toy. His radio may be a sticker, but the “Andy” scrawled on his foot is truly a badge of honor and responsibility.

This turning point kicks the film into its third act, which finally sees Buzz and Woody working together in a radical shift from the first two acts. Fortunately, the two cooperating is nearly as entertaining the two clashing, particularly in the climax. My favorite moment of the movie is when the two re-use an earlier exchange in an entirely different light: “This isn’t flying, this falling… with style.”

 

While many of the aforementioned scenes rank among the movie’s many superior moments, I also want to commend the opening of the film. So much of what makes Toy Story great — the respect of imagination, the honoring of the sacred bond between child and toy, the thrilling use of CGI to create perspectives and worlds that move — are summarized in those first five minutes. Plus, there’s the music, the brilliant combination of score and original songs by Randy Newman, epitomized by “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”

“You’ve Got a Friend in Me” has since become a standard. The simple, catchy tune works a basic expression of love as well as an embodiment of the core themes of the Toy Story series. Particularly seeing the later films’ use of the song, it’s hard not to marvel at how well the song captures so much at the heart of Pixar’s films.

Newman also contributes two other original songs to Toy Story, “Strange Things” and “I Will Go Sailing No More,” the former of which works better than the latter. Though I love the scene where Buzz learns the truth about his toyhood, the song adds an extra layer that was not necessary. The scene would have probably been more effective with a simple score.

Aside from that, the music in Toy Story is exceptional. Newman’s score resonated so strongly that he has been brought on for five more Pixar scores.  Toy Story 3 holds his best work, but Toy Story is no slouch, particularly during the climax.

Toy Story shines in the details as much as it does the sturdy framework of the story. The side characters — from the loyal Slinky Dog to Spud the maniacal hound to Hamm the gearhead — are all given distinct personalities and animated with an astonishing amount of humanity and personality. Rex the cowardly dinosaur sticks out as particularly funny, but it’s hard to crown anyone other than the little green aliens as the most memorable secondary characters of the film. I guess all space toys have trouble with their grips on reality (including Zerg from Toy Story 2).

There are so many inspired small touches of artistry — reflections on the glass of Buzz’s helmet, messages on the Spell ‘n’ Speak, throwaway one-liners, quick and creative establishing shots that would have been impossible in hand-drawn animation — that I’m willing to forgive the movie’s few flaws that come out after close watching, particularly on the technical side. It’s really incredible how little of the film suffers from technical issues (credit the brilliant direction of Lasseter and others for hiding most flaws) but it makes the few poorly-rendered animations of humans and dogs all the more glaring.

I also found the storyline of Sid’s toys a little bit less engaging than the rest of the story. While I enjoy the idea of a toy hell at Sid’s house, the interaction with his deformed toy experiments is nearly too on-the-nose for the rest of the story which maintained a subtle and understated thematic backbone. The “don’t judge a toy before you really know him” message is a bit excessive even if it plays nicely into the growth of Woody.

The semantics of the toy/human relationship are also a bit fudged here. This film seems to indicate that toys choose not to speak and interact with humans. After all, Woody does come alive (*) in front of a person for a brief second in Sid’s final scene. This seems at odds, though, with other basic properties of the human-toy world division as shown. The notion that toys can’t be seen “alive” by humans for metaphysical reasons, not by choice, seems to be the ultimate explanation in the other chapters of the trilogy and is one that seems to fit the logic of the world a bit better.

(*) Before he comes alive in front of Sid, Woody mentions that they’re going to have to “break a few rules.”

My last complaint is the closing scene of the film. I’ve never been a fan of movies that end on a punchline, and so the joke final line and shot end the affair on a down note compared to a film that’s otherwise so universally strong. It’s a flimsy complaint, but these are the types of nits you pick when a film is so close to perfect.


These complaints aren’t enough to tarnish in any meaningful way the giddy excellence of Toy Story. Sixteen years later, the original still packs a tremendous punch and tells a story worth experiencing again and again. It may not tackle big ideas as ambitiously as later Pixar films, including the later parts of the Toy Story series. But, scene-by-scene, it’s perhaps the strongest film the studio has produced. There’s not a minute in these 81 that fail to soar to infinity and beyond.

A few other thoughts:

  • One underrated element of Toy Story is the variety of faces that Woody makes. Had his faces failed to be effectively expressive, the film would have greatly suffered.
  • There’s a bit too much emphasis on Mr. Potato Head here: too many gags that involve his face falling apart and perhaps too much of his bitter skepticism.
  • Toy Story has a few silly, throwaway gags from characters or beats we never see again: The shark who steals Woody’s hat, Buzz’s experience as Mrs. Nesbitt, and a few others.
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Happy 25th Anniversary, Pixar!

February 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

On February 3, 1986, Pixar became an independent company by LucasArts selling the organization to Steve Jobs. (Little known fact: Jobs’ first billion actually came from Pixar, not from Apple.)

Pixar spent its first decade exclusively releasing shorts before it partnered with Disney to bring you Toy Story in 1995. The rest, as they say, is history.

To celebrate their milestone — and, mostly, just because I want to — I’ve been revisiting Pixar’s films and shorts and have a few features and reviews in the oven.

In the mean time, you can read my mini-reviews of Pixar’s first ten films in the retrospective I wrote. Or, you can read The Onion’s hilarious, profane column by fake John Lasseter.

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The Best of Earn This: Dan’s Picks

January 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

For the past few months, I’ve been meaning to do a sweeping revision of everything I’ve written for Earn This. I finally waded through the archives, polishing and trimming and clarifying to make my writing stronger. I’m notoriously bad at picking up every grammar or wording error before I publish an article, but my archive of articles should be pretty clean now.

The revision process also allowed me to figure out what has worked for me as a writer and what hasn’t. I was pleased to find that I did not hate my writing quite as often as I expected to. Here are ten of the articles I most enjoyed writing and re-reading, sorted loosely by how highly I regard them:

Most of my favorite articles have been about topics I’m particularly passionate about, so I’ll start with my retrospective on my favorite band of the 2000′s. I had a lot of fun digging deep in to Relient K’s seven albums. The result is, as far as I’ve been able to find, the most extensive critical analysis of Relient K’s artistic growth ever written. Clocking in at nearly 5,500 words, it’s among longest and most detailed pieces I’ve written for Earn This.

I’m an unabashed Pixar fanboy — as everyone should be — so it was a real pleasure to revisit and break down exactly what’s so magical about these films. My biggest regret with this article is that I didn’t space it out into multiple articles like I would with the Relient K retrospective; 4,000 words is easier to process in ten chunks than one.

While I’m on the note of animation, I should probably point out that I attempted to spend an entire month writing every day about animation. Though I aborted the endeavor  – and the notion of a themed month — about halfway through the month, it was still a learning experience. I spent dozens of hours reading books and watching movies to write this retrospective on Disney’s Golden Age. It was a lot of effort but a lot of fun, and I’m pleased with the output.

I’m a huge fan of TV comedies that take their characters and plots seriously. The best TV shows are funny and substantial. That’s why I get bummed when sitcoms that verge on brilliant slip backwards into inanity. During a spring when a couple of my favorite shows made some serious plotting missteps, I wrote a post recounting a few of my least favorite examples of “The Moonlighting Fallacy.”

Towards the end of 2009, I sat down and started riffing on some of my favorite albums and artists of the past decade. The result is goofy but still one of my favorite articles I’ve written for the site.

While I’ve tended towards features and retrospectives, I’ve written some reviews for Earn This, too. The review that I had the most fun writing was a 3.5 star appraisal of How to Train Your Dragon. I actually saw the film twice and did a lot of research on the making of the film prior to writing this. My goal was to take a more analytic and deep look at the film — which I adore — than any of the other critics did.

Despite my love of animated features, I’ve never been impressed with animated TV series, with a few exceptions — The Simpsons and Batman: TAS, mostly. This year, I added another entry to that list. Avatar: The Last Airbender is streets ahead of any other kids-oriented animated television show I’ve ever seen. Everything about it — the plot, the characters, the animation, the world, the attention to detail — is phenomenal and worthy of attention from serious TV fans. I never got around to reviewing the second or third seasons of the show (I’d like to some day), but I did get to overview a bit of what makes this show stand out in my review of the first season.

I’ve been a lifelong admirer of the 1995 Toon Disney film A Goofy Movie. It’s not perfect, but it’s a funny, engaging, heartwarming classic as far as I’m concerned. I loved writing this piece not just because I got to defend that long-held opinion of mine, but because I had the chance to go through the movie and pick out screenshots from a few of the movie’s most representative scenes. It was the first time I tried taking my own screenshots to include with a post, and I enjoyed it so much that I’ve repeated this several times since.

I’ve had multiple people read this article and tell me “you should write more articles like that.” I asked them to clarify, and they said they meant: concise, well-researched, entertaining stories about currently relevant topics. I find its warm reception strange, because I wrote it in about a half hour between classes.

A stupid article for many reasons: It compares items from different, apples-to-oranges forms of media. The article is more than 6,000 words long; nobody would ever want read that in one chunk. Plus, the holes in my movie/music/games/etc. knowledge are glaring. And yet, I don’t think any article has been so much damn fun to write.

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The Office (UK) – Impressions from a fan of the American series

December 29, 2010 By 1 Comment

The U.S. version of The Office is my favorite show of all time (for a variety of reasons, all of which will be detailed in a post published probably some time around when this season’s finale airs). Yet, until this past week, I had never seen the British original. In the past five days, I’ve watched the twelve half-hour episodes and the feature-length series finale.

I figured there may be a few other fans of the American incarnation who have never traversed the British original. So here are a few spoiler-free thoughts on the the UK version of The Office from the eyes of a fan of the American version.

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The Invention of Lying (2010) – And the most confused movie of 2010 is…

December 7, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Rating: two stars (out of 4)

The Invention of Lying just doesn’t know what it wants to be. It spends its first third belaboring its premise — a world where people are incapable of lying — with the same joke over and over. Then it shifts to a Yes Man-type attempt at an inspiring tale. Then it shifts into a religious satire. And finally into a generic romantic comedy. It’s all a bit discombobulated and, unfortunately, unsatisfying.

Though the cast is full of lovable stars, they feel a bit strangely used and discongruous. Ricky Gervais leads the pack and only sometimes does a good job. He absolutely nails the satirical elements, but the conventional portions of the film fall short in spite of Gervais’s prodigious charms.

Jennifer Garner stars opposite Gervais and she is as winning as always. There’s not much chemistry between her and Gervais, primarily because her role is in the romantic comedy portion and that’s where Gervais falls flat.

The supporting cast is an all-star bunch but takes very odd roles: Louis CK is good at his deadpan but the character written for him contributes little. Rob Lowe as the foil doesn’t play to his strengths as an actor, and Jonah Hill’s contribution is very strange and short-lived. (Side note: Both CK and Lowe have appeared in the exemplary sitcom Parks and Recreation to much better effect.) Tina Fey and a few other stars appear for mere moments; why bring in the big guns if you have nothing for them to do?

The reason to see this film — aside from the first few minutes before the premise grows tired — is the extended scene where Gervais essentially invents God (“The Man in the Sky”). It is Gervais at his finest and most natural: biting, sarcastic, subversive. No other scenes in the film quite reach the hilarious heights of that atheistic satire of religion, even though later scenes toy with the idea — particularly a scene where an unkempt Gervais resembles a certain religious figure.

Others may be more hooked in by the premise than I was. I just thought a main character with all the knowledge and upper hand — he alone has the ability to lie in his world — was largely unappealing. But even if you buy the premise, large portions of the film have little to do with the film’s hook. Honestly, I can’t imagine anyone really loving this film unless they’re really smitten with Gervais. The film is just too schizophrenic to ring with any sort of truth.

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It’s Kind of a Funny Story (2010) – Kind of a moving one, too

October 14, 2010 By 1 Comment

Rating: 3 stars (out of 4)

There was a point about halfway into It’s Kind of a Funny Story when I was confident the film was headed into four-star territory. The set-up in this movie is phenomenal in three ways: the way it establishes its conflict, the way it introduces its colorful cast of characters, and the way it establishes a lightweight yet moving tone. While the second half of the film is a bit derivative and a let-down, the overall effect of the film is a fulfilling and inspiring one.

Sometimes the line between depression and happiness is razor thin, and Funny Story is about that line. Why is central character Craig (Keir Gilchrist) depressed? He has a loving family, he goes to a great school, he has friends, he has no particularly dark secrets. He’s just not very happy. He feels alone.

And so he begs a doctor to let him into the mental ward of the hospital, North 3, after he has a suicidal dream. He wants an easy way out. As soon as he gets there, he witnesses just how scary “real” mental disorders are. The patients — ranging from a bed-ridden Egyptian man who Craig shares a room with, to chronically depressed father Bobby, to quirky wristcutter Noelle — terrify and confuse him at first.

Central to Craig’s growth and ability to answer the questions he has about himself are Bobby and Noelle. Emma Roberts does a good job as Noelle, capturing a seductive balance of innocence and darkness. As you could probably guess from the posters, if not the casting decision alone, Noelle becomes something of a love interest for Craig, and they way they discover each other is adorable. It reminded me of a few of my favorite film romances, Before Sunrise and Garden State, in the earnest self-definition that it accompanies.

Meanwhile, Zach Galifianakis is astonishingly good as Bobby. He had me cracking up and on the verge of tears in the same scene. His presence is still a little bit uncomfortable, a la The Hangover. But where his star-making role primarily used Galifianakis as a comic crutch, he has a real character in Funny Story. Heartbreaking and moving, Galifiankis’s Oscar-worthy work alone is worth the price of admission.

The supporting cast does a solid job, though I came to question a few of the casting decisions. Particularly, I wasn’t a fan of the choice for Nia, Craig’s longtime crush. Zoe Kravitz never gives off a “Miss Perfect” vibe to match the characterization in the script.

The film never dawdles too long on Craig’s obsession with Nia, nor any conflict. It moves so briskly through the drama that I almost wish there was another 30 or 45 minutes to flesh it out. But the rapid pace has its perks: I dug the lightweight tone for most of the film. It would’ve been easily to screw up the tone of this film, but, for the most part, the the underlying giddiness never detracts from the seriousness of the topic.

Funny Story also briskly intercuts dream sequences and abstract representations of Craig’s mental state. Think 500 Days of Summer. There are also lots of flashbacks with narration and other tools that often get dismissed as contrivances but are a key part of this film’s experience.

The tone’s few trouble spots come towards the end. First, the film dips into some really tired romantic comedy tropes. I loved the blooming romance between Noelle and Craig for about two thirds of the film, until the generic third-act boy-loses-girl twist sends it into a nosedive from which it never fully recovers.

Even more troublesome is the questionable conclusion for the rest of the ward. After the film convincingly depicts the different ends of the spectrum of mental disorder spectrum, the conclusion of this film almost trivializes some of the more serious mental diseases.

There are people — such as this film’s Muqtada — who need more than a little joy and momentum to be cured. Some mental patients will always need serious therapy and medicine to cope with major issues. I did not detect an acknowledgment of that truth in Funny Story‘s ending.

At the same time, dwelling on the patients with serious mental illnesses would’ve bogged down the film from its central theme, which bubbles with passion and rings of truth: We need to live our lives in a way that make us happy.

The presentation of this theme connected with me on a very personal level. I really empathized with Craig’s impulses, along with many of the particulars of his situation: While I’ve never been close to suicidal, I have seen a therapist for many of the same reasons Craig begs the doctor to check him into North 3.

There will be people who hate Funny Story for showcasing a white, upper-middle-class teenager without any serious problems who mopes around. For me, that was the main strength of the film: Anyone, anywhere, even someone as lucky and well off as me, can suffer from an unfulfilled life. But fulfillment doesn’t just magically happen: We have to earn it.

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Avatar: The Last Airbender, Book 1: Water (2005) – The tip of the iceberg

August 28, 2010 By 1 Comment

Rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of 4)

Though it’s easily the weakest season (or “book”) of the show’s three, the excellent first season of the Avatar: The Last Airbender is firmly in the category of superior children-oriented entertainment that’s deep and exciting enough to be appealing to all viewers.

The show’s opening sequence explains that the world of Avatar — an alternate version of Earth — was for centuries in balance between four nations. Each nation is named after one of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. A small percentage of people born to each nation are blessed with the ability to “bend”– spiritually manipulate through a hybrid of martial arts and magic — their element.

A hero known as the Avatar is the one person in the world who has the potential to bend all elements, and also enter something called the “Avatar state” which is a heightened power combining all four elements. It’s the Avatar’s role in the world to maintain balance and peace of the four nations. When one Avatar dies, he or she is reincarnated.

Avatar: The Last Airbender begins its story a hundred years after the Avatar has vanished. The Fire Nation has taken over, hunting the Air Nomads to extinction and the Water Tribe to near-extinction. A brother and sister of the Water Tribe, Sokka and Katara, discover a member of the Air Nomads frozen in an iceberg.

We quickly learn that this Airbender, Aang (rhymes with “bang”), is in fact the Avatar, and the time has come for him to fulfill his duties and restore peace and balance to the planet.

Meanwhile, a banished prince of the Fire Nation, Zuko, has been tasked with capturing the Avatar to restore his honor. When Aang reappears, Zuko quickly begins tailing him.

I’ll end my explanation of the premise there, because Avatar is rare in how quickly its plot progresses and expands. Suffice to say that The Last Airbender is a globe-spanning epic, and it shows in these twenty episodes.

Like any great television story, regardless of genre or intended demographic, Avatar thrives because its characters are both well-defined and dynamic. The characters start out as basic types: We’re first shown Aang as the naive one, Katara as the optimistic one, Sokka as the comic relief, Zuko as the obsessed villain, and Iroh as the goofy wise-man. But these types serve as springboards for more complex creations. Every major character is given depth and ambiguity that is gradually revealed.

Few kids’ shows dare to have a serial story. But Avatar is one long arc with several multi-episode stories and a very strong continuity that makes it tough to watch episodes out of order. This provides for a more satisfying storytelling than the usual one-and-done format for animated stories.

I wish the creators had taken it even further, though. “Water,” the official name of the first season, has a large set of one-offs during the beginning and middle of season that don’t move the story forward. But even these one-offs enrich Avatar‘s world. Episodes like “Jet” and “The Kyoshi Warriors” really depict destruction and suffering caused by the invasion. (Plus, almost every episode gets some sort of reprise in the later seasons, making every episode essential.)

Focusing a bit more on the serial plot and less on one-offs would have given the writers a chance to solve one of the problem the season faces in its final episodes: some serious pacing hiccups. The changes the characters go through in the Northern Water Tribe are seriously rushed. Sokka’s relationship with Yue and Katara’s training in waterbending take place entirely over just a couple of episodes when they’re really major developments worthy of longer arcs.

The finale also suffers from a few plot twists that abandon the emotionally grounded reality of the show for a conclusion that’s awe-inspiring but not moving in the same way the next two season finales are.

Each one of the main characters has their moments to shine. Aang’s gradual maturity is convincing, but especially believable following his heartbreak at discovering the fate of his people in “The Southern Air Temple” and guilt after inadvertently hurting Katara in “The Deserter.”  It’s hard to imagine that the snot-covered Sokka of the pilot could ever be a convincing character of pathos, but his fury at Aang in “Bato of the Water Tribe” is earned, as is Katara’s seduction then reversal in “Jet” and response to finding “The Waterbending Scroll.”

But the show-stealer, beginning with “The Storm” about halfway through the season, is Zuko. Though he’s obsessed — and whiny at first — the show slowly chips away at his shell to reveal a startling portrait of shame and pain. His journey is at the heart of the show, perhaps even moreso than the title character’s. The show brilliantly parallels Aang and Zuko in numerous episodes, and most of these are among the season’s best — particularly “The Storm,” perhaps the entire season’s highlight.

Zuko has too many great moments to mention them all, but his big revelation in “The Blue Spirit” and moments of vulnerability and doubt towards the season’s conclusion are particularly unforgettable.

Along with characters that work on an emotional level and a plot that works on a intellectual level, The Last Airbender‘s first season also works in a visual and visceral level. The design of the show is stunning, heavily influenced by anime and other Eastern art. You can see some of this in the plotting and the comic timing, but it’s especially apparent with the looks of the characters and settings.

It’s not a cheap knockoff, though. Rather than making a watered-down Naruto and Dragon Ball Z, the makers of Avatar instead use it as inspiration. They borrow a Japanese visual style, fuse it with some other Asian influences (detectably, some Indian and Chinese motifs), and presents in a distinctly American manner. Rather than diluted, the show’s diversity takes the strengths of many of its inspirations, and presents it with a level of care and detail unheard of in a weekday afternoon programming.

The best comparison I can come up with is Batman: The Animated Series. This gem from the mid ’90s had a wide variety of stylistic influences, but had a style all its own. Both shows have a maturity and darkness to them, though both still clearly fall under the umbrella of kid-oriented television.

Both shows are fun to look at, but have something beneath the surface. Batman paired, visually and thematically, noir-fused shots and a palpable menace. Avatar instead pairs a natural, earthy look with a moral urgency in a decaying world.

The most striking visual element of Avatar are its stunning “bending” action sequences, which are a breath of fresh air from typical fisticuffs and gadgetry of American adventure shows. The creator’s wring every conceivable situation from these supernatural abilities. Instead of having the characters stationary, calling forth magic or spells, the action is more kinetic and physical. These sequences alone make the show worth watching.

Another strength, equally important to Avatar’s success as the characterization and action, is the show’s allegiance to traditional storytelling. Every episode – or at least, every excellent episode – has stakes and consequences on its own. Yet, everything feels like it’s a part of a greater whole. Watching these episodes in sequence, they successfully feel like a first act to a large narrative.

Perhaps the biggest annoyance of the season and series as a whole is simply its nature as a kid-oriented show. Because it’s aimed at less experienced viewers, the lessons and themes of the show are rarely left implied. Pretty much everything is spelled out, which can come across as a bit cheesy, even contrived, at times. It doesn’t significantly diminish the quality of the show, but it could be off-putting at first to people weaned on mature, prime-time TV.

There’s also a childishness to the show’s silly humor that I find endearing but might grate others. The show improved on this in the other seasons as they realized they had a wider audience than they initially anticipated. Again, it’s a quirk of the show that the childish-at-heart will probably enjoy.

Overall, the first season of Avatar ranks among the best American-made animation of the past decade, even if it fails to reach the phenomenal heights of the next two seasons. It overcomes a few pacing issues towards the end of the season and a few throwaway episodes to be must-watch for anyone with a taste for animation, fantasy adventures, and kung-fu. Even those who don’t fall in that category will find plenty to love in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Book 1: Water.

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Inception (2010) First Impressions: A dream within a film within a dream

July 18, 2010 By 1 Comment

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Edit: You’re probably better off reading Grant’s excellent review of Inception than this rambly mind dump. Proceed at your own peril — this is a wordy post.

Taking a break from my month of animation posts, here is a semi-review of Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, Inception.

Before you read on, I should warn you that this post is spoiler-heavy, and even if it wasn’t, there’s not much intelligent discussion that can be had about Inception until you’ve seen the film. Also, I’ve deliberately not rated the film out of four stars, simply because Inception is so dense that I couldn’t cut to its core enough to fairly evaluate it. Though I loved it, I need to see it again before I can decide whether the film is a masterpiece or simply a convoluted ruse. (The truth is probably somewhere in between.)

Now that I’ve had a day to process my first viewing of it, after the jump are a few takes I had on the film, from the plotting to the subtext, and more.

[Read more...]

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What was the greatest decade for animated films?

July 15, 2010 By 5 Comments

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This post is part of The Month of Animated Features.

Without thinking too much about it, what’s your gut answer to the headline?

Once you take a close look at the catalog of animated features released over the years, the answer becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly. First, let’s examine this question in terms of rigid numeric decades — e.g. “the 1950′s” would be eligible as a decade, but 1967-1976 would not be eligible as a decade.

Before I reveal what I believe is the clearly correct answer, let me go over how I evaluated each decade. As a reminder, I’m concerned mostly with enduring artistic quality and entertainment value, as opposed to issues separate from the product itself, like influence, technical innovation, or reputation.

[Edit: To reiterate, I'm focused exclusively on feature-length animation. I am not including animated shorts, TV shows, etc. This is especially important when considering the early decades in which theatrical shorts were very popular. While those are compelling in their own right, they are not relevant to this analysis. The logical flaws in this distinction have been argued, but I'm sticking with this constraint.]

Perhaps we should look first at the peak films of each decade. Generating a list of five of the best animated features from each decade should make it a little bit more clear which decades stand out as particularly weak or strong. We’ll start with the 1940′s, since that was the first complete decade with American-released animated films. (The movies are in no particularly order.)

  • 1940′s: Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, Dumbo, and… umm… Bugville?
  • 1950′s: Cinderella, Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, Peter Pan, and Animal Farm (UK)
  • 1960′s: Yellow Submarine (UK) and 101 Dalmations. Then… The Jungle Book? The Phantom Toolbooth? Sword in the Stone?
  • 1970′s: Allegro Non Troppo (Italy), Fritz the Cat, Watership Down, Fantastic Planet (Fr.), and Heavy Traffic
  • 1980′s: The Little Mermaid, Akira (Jap.), Castle in the Sky (Jap.), Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Secret of NIMH
  • 1990′s: Toy Story, Toy Story 2, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Princess Mononoke (Jap.) [just to have something non-Disney]
  • 2000′s: Wall-E, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Shrek, and Spirited Away (Jap.)

Upon looking at those lists, there are a few obvious cuts. The 1960′s go out the door first, quickly followed by the 1970′s. The 1940′s have a tremendous top four, but thin quickly afterwards, so they have to go, too. The 1950′s, 1980′s, 1990′s, and 2000′s all seem worth consideration.

But if you start trying to come up with the five next best films from each of those decades, it becomes obvious two decades really warrant consideration for the top spot.

  • 1950′s: Alice in Wonderland… followed by… maybe the claymation cult favorite Hansel and Gretel? The Sword in the Stone? That’s about it.
  • 1980′s: My Neighbor Totoro (Jap.), Grave of the Fireflies (Jap.), Barefoot Gen (Jap.), The King and the Mockingbird (Fr.), and… that’s it?
  • 1990′s: Aladdin, Tarzan, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Iron Giant, and A Bug’s Life
  • 2000′s: Up, Finding Nemo, Howl’s Moving Castle, Kung Fu Panda, and Monsters Inc.

So, assuming you want at least ten great-or-borderline-great films from whatever decade you choose, the only real contenders here are the 1990′s and the 2000′s. You could argue that I’m biased because that’s really the only time I was watching movies, but I think the lists back me up.

(Quick sidebar that will receive expansion later: There is a very compelling conclusion from this observation: Animated film has been better the past two decades than it ever was before that, period. This statement will probably bother some purists and historians — the ones who dubbed 1918-1960 the so-called “Golden Age” of animation.)

So, which decade of these two is it, then? Just looking at the ten films as the best from each decade, even if there were a few that I missed that you’d have chosen, it seems relatively balanced. So I will go through a few more bits of evidence.

  • Exhibit  A: The Annies — a set of annual awards given out for excellent work in animation — were instituted in 1991, when they nominated three films for Best Animated Feature. Starting in 1998, they expanded the nominations to four or five pictures, peaking with six nominations in 2009.
  • Exhibit B: The Academy Awards added the category “Best Animated Feature” in 2001.
  • Exhibit C: According to Rotten Tomates — if you count only movies with 20 or more reviews — the 1990′s had 12 animated films with a 90%+ critical approval, whereas 2000′s had 21 animated films with a 90%+ critical approval. If you expand this to all films with at least five reviews, the minimum required by RT for a movie to have a valid approval rating, then the 1990′s have 16 and the 2000′s have 28 with 90%+ critical approval. Bring this bar down to 80%, and the 1990′s had 29, while 2000′s had 58.
  • Exhibit D: On the IMDb poll, the 1990′s have 12 on the list of the 50 most popular animated films. The 2000′s have 21 on the list.

You could find reasons to ignore any one of these on their own, but the more you stare at the facts — and look at lists of films from each decade — the more clear it becomes that there was a serious expansion in the quality, credibility, and breadth of animation in 2000′s; this is evidenced by the number of popular films and the increased industry respect through more Annie nominations and the Academy Award category.

Look closely at which films were released when, and you have trouble finding great animated films in the first half of the 1990′s not produced by Disney. The Annie Awards in particular are pretty revealing. I can tell you with pretty strong confidence that Space Jam, Ferngully, Little Nemo: Adventures in Slumber Land, The Swan Princess, and Once Upon a Forest — all Best Animated Feature nominees — would have had a tough time being nominated in the 2000′s in any year. They’re decent, but not quite best-of-the-year material. For most of the 1990′s, it seems like The Annies struggled to find at least three options. (And in 1996, they didn’t even try — they just gave it to Toy Story.)

To spin it one last way, the weakest year for animation in the 2000′s was probably 2004, with 2003 not far behind. Only 1999 (TS2, The Iron Giant, Tarzan) from the 90′s definitively tops them. Every other year from 1990′s was weaker than every year from the 2000′s.

There’s just a richer, more diverse group of studios and film-makers using animation these past ten years than ever. The result is the strongest slate of animated movies, and it’s honestly not even close. Credit the 1990′s for reviving the medium and for providing what will remain some of the most cherished animated films of all time. But don’t let nostalgia for the Disney masterpieces plus the merely decent non-Disney fairy tales that filled theaters trick you into choosing it as a stronger overall decade.

So, to answer the question raised in the headline: the 2000′s (with the 2010′s projecting to at least match it) were the greatest, with the 1990′s taking silver, and the 1980′s taking bronze. That’s a nice upward trend that excites me about the next few years.

A question with a less clear-cut answer is “What set of 10 years gave us the best animation?” For this discussion, I will allow 2010. I know we’re only six-and-a-half months into the year, but 2010 has been so good for animation so far that this half year trumps most other full years.

So, there are two answers for which I think you can make a really good case: 1999-2008 and 2001-2010. The problem is that 1999 and 2009 were two of the best years ever for animation, and they’re just far enough apart that you can’t include both of them.

These two spans obviously have a lot of overlap, so let’s consider the films not included in both of these categories. From 1999-2000 — so in the first span, but not the second — you have Toy Story 2, The Iron Giant, Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove, Chicken Run, and Fantasia 2000 probably in that order in terms of significance. In 2009-2010 — in the second span, but not the first — you get Toy Story 3, How to Train Your Dragon, Up, Coraline, Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Princess and the Frog, Despicable Me, and The Secret of Kells.

Again, I’m hesitant to fixate on the present and overlook the past, but I have to side with the more recent 2001-2010. I can pretty confidently say that the past ten years have been the best overall years for animation ever.

Note: Perhaps you’re wondering why I included a frame from The Sword and the Stone, of the 1960′s. One reason is that Merlin’s looking ponderous, as appropriate for a post with a question for a headline. The other, more prominent reason is that I forgot to bring up the film in my overview of Disney during “The Golden Age” and wanted to give it some recognition. A glaring omission of a passable film. [Edit: Not true following my recent revision]

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Disney’s Golden Age of Feature Animation, Part 2 (1950-1963): Walt’s last stand

July 10, 2010 By 4 Comments


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This post is part of The Month of Animated Features. Read part one of Disney’s Golden Age historical overview here.

Following the 1942 release Bambi, the next several years were not a kind decade to Walt Disney’s animation studio. With a limited staff and limited funds, they produced only six “package films,” only one of which — the 1949 Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad — showed any real promise.

With the studio on the verge of bankruptcy, they needed a surefire success or risked going out of business for good. So Disney turned to what had worked for him best in the past: A classic fairy tale with a beautiful princess. He hoped his new project, Cinderella, would strike gold the way Snow White had in 1937.

Cinderella used the largest budget of any animated film to that point — more than $3 million. It was an everything-or-nothing gamble for Disney, who had learned the hard way that pricey full-feature films weren’t a guaranteed source of income. He encouraged his animators to use some shortcuts to scrimp. For example, almost every scene involving human characters was filmed first with sample actors in cheap live action. Animators used this live film as a reference, which saved them significant amounts of time in the planning and drafting phases, with the side effect of detracting somewhat from the staff’s creative freedom following that filming.

[Edit: I have received numerous inquiries from friends and readers curious about this process and how it could possibly save money by adding in that middle step. I've been searching for a more detailed explanation in my animation books, but I've found little. Here's a Wikipedia article describing it.]

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The one significant part of the movie not filmed beforehand were the scenes involving the animals, including the cat Lucifer, the friendly mice, and the assorted dogs and mice. As a result, the film ended with something of a clash between the naturalistic humans and zany animals.

Nonetheless, the film was a smash and an resoundingly satisfying movie, emotional and exciting. The writers really put Cinderella through the wringer, giving her aunt and stepsisters truly evil personalities. The movie also has a real sense of magic and romance, particularly in the first dance between Cinderella and the prince.

Disney wisely decided to retain full rights and responsibilities for the soundtrack, using his new record label to print the soundtrack. The self-produced soundtrack album made a tremendous profit for the company, as did the film in the box office.

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Aesthetically, the film works but does not sparkle with Disney’s best, in part because the character animations are occasionally bland as a result of the live action-to-animation process. Still, it’s a great fairy tale (more compelling and classic than Snow White) and a memorable movie particularly highlighted by the lively animals.

While Walt Disney hoped Cinderella would be a beginning of his second reign as a beloved, influential animator, it would sadly be the last film whose final product bore large amounts of Walt’s own fingerprints. The studio’s next several projects featured intermittent work from Disney himself, but the man had become increasingly frustrated with animation. His later efforts were focused on live-action film and TV, and particularly on his new passion project, Disneyland.

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Next on the animation studio’s slate was Alice in Wonderland, released in 1951. The film had an extremely rocky production and was long in the works, to the point that Disney himself pretty much abandoned the product. His decisions to deviate from the Lewis Carroll’s source material, to make the film all-animated instead of featuring live-action characters, and use frequent, short songs were all maintained.

The film is something of a mess, but an enjoyable one. It focuses on the whimsical verses of Carroll’s books. The voicework and animation are uniformly strong, but the plot is too episodic and surreal to be fully satisfying — even with the changes that brought the story back down to earth slightly.

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Perhaps because of its colorful vibrancy, Alice received some surprising love from critics (purportedly, Walt expected backlash from fans of Carroll’s work), but failed to catch fire in the States. It’s one of the few films from the decade to not become a massive hit.

Disney the company has strongly supported the film in spite of its early disappointment. Alice was one of their first films released to home video, and it has featured prominently in parades and attractions at Disney theme parks.

Much like Fantasia, the company also eventually banked on the film’s popularity with drug-users during the psychedelic era. The film’s 1974 re-release, promoted with trippy posters, was such a massive success that the company only waited seven years to release it again.

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While 1951′s Alice was only a middling success, 1953′s Peter Pan was a rousing one commercially. The highest grossing film of 1953, Pan also ranked among the more inspired animated features of the decade. The animation, overseen in part by Disney and in part by many of his most experienced animators, was vivid and imaginitive. Plus, the film featured much more of a coherent story than Alice.

Some of the philosophical quandaries of J.M. Barrie’s imaginative world allowed Peter Pan to resonate deeply with many viewers in ways that even 1950′s blockbuster Cinderella hadn’t. Unfortunately, a subplot of the film is extremely racist by today’s standards. The group’s encounter with the “Injuns” and ponderings of the “Red Man” are simply painful to watch, something that has tarnishes the enjoyability of an otherwise lovable tale with one of Disney’s great villains: Captain Hook.

As was the case of the other 1950′s Disney films, the production of Peter Pan was a long, drawn-out ordeal. Disney secured the rights to the film early, then the film sat in purgatory during World War 2, before finally being dragged out of the vaults and completed.

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But Disney’s next film, Lady and the Tramp, had an even longer and more perilous development. Some reports have early work on the film beginning as early as 1937, the year Snow White came out. Yet Lady and the Tramp kept being shelved by the studio until the early ’50s, finally receiving a release in 1955.

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Writers and fans remain divided on whether Lady and the Tramp deserves the title of “classic,” but surely its title romance is one of the strongest and most compelling among the studio’s works. The film has typically strong animation and a warmth to it (including the famed spaghetti scene) that evaded Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, and to a certain extent, even Cinderella. The film resonated strongly with audiences, surpassing the box office of every Disney animated feature except Snow White.

Walt Disney’s role in Lady in the Tramp was again much smaller than in the earlier films, and the studio would produce only three and a half more features under his tutelage: 1959′s Sleeping Beauty, 1961′s 101 Dalmations, 1963′s Sword in the Stone, and the early stages of 1967′s Jungle Book.

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Sleeping Beauty was conceived, like Cinderella, as something of an heir to Snow White, but Disney’s increasingly short attention span with animated features caused the film’s creative vision to be dispersed primarily to the visual design department, a change that shows. The scenery and character animation of Beauty are of the first order, with stunning detail and colors.

But the story is the weakest of any of Disney’s full length features to that point. The film seems to get a free ride from Disney loyalists, perhaps for its purity and naivete (much like Snow White), but there’s no shying away from the lack of memorable characters, thematic undertone, or plot complexity. History has been kind to Sleeping Beauty, perhaps kinder than it should have been.

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Audiences at the time were not entirely enthused by the project, as the film only narrowly made a profit. The unexpectedly poor results forced the studio to make large-scale layoffs. But in time, Sleeping Beauty eventually earned its keep, with seven re-releases bringing cash to Disney’s coffers from 1970 to as recently as 2008.

The penultimate film released in Walt’s lifetime was 101 Dalmations, a charming entry to the Disney canon. A newer, more efficient technique of transferring animation to film gave Dalmations a sharply defined look, with strong black lines outlining characters and pieces of the sets.

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Many animated Disney films have been as defined more by their villains than their heroes, and 101 Dalmations is one example. The wonderfully named and animated Cruella de Vil at times resembles a demoness more than a fashion-obsessed plutocrat. She also receives one of the most memorable Disney numbers of the decade, a catchy ditty that paints her as a menace.

The film only debatably fits into the “Golden Era” of animation, as its new animation technique and style and its modern setting don’t particularly fit with any of Disney’s other works to that point. Still, 101 Dalmations retains a level of entertainment above any Disney animated film following it until at least  1977′s The Rescuers, if not 1988′s Roger Rabbit or 1989′s The Little Mermaid. It’s hard to completely discount Walt’s presence, as the studio would quickly reach a weary inconsistency following his death.

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Last — and perhaps least — among full-length animated features in Disney’s lifetime was 1963′s The Sword in the Stone. The film was conceived and directed by animator Woolie Reitherman, who pitched the idea of adapting an Arthurian novel to Walt Disney in spite of reservations from his fellow animators. Disney OK’ed the idea — in part because he loved the Broadway show Camelot – and Reitherman put the vision to screen.

The end result felt more like a jazzy, modern-toned re-interpretation than a timeless adaptation. Though the film has some good songs and a few dazzling scenes and visual devices, the plot is too episodic and the characterization too weak.

Sword in the Stone was a mild success commercially and critically at the time of its release, but time has not been kind to this chapter in Disney’s animation. Leonard Maltin writes “The film is charming, and enjoyable, but it lacks the spark that set so many other Disney films out of the ordinary.”

Martin Goodman of The Animated Movie Guide mocks the central plot and character: “[Main character] Wart doesn’t need either brains or brawn. He is already the future king and has only to yank the sword from its resting place anyhow. Merlin should have told him five minutes into the film and then gone to Bermuda; we would all have been spared this silliness.”

Walt Disney’s death in 1966 seems a good moment to cap The Golden Age, as most film historians agree the period was cooling down by the late fifties and early sixties, both in the spheres of features and shorts. Though Disney’s role was greatly diminished in the above-average 1950′s films compared to the masterpieces of the late 1930′s and early war years, his presence and artistic sensibilities still reigned and even carried over to 1967′s Jungle Book, the last film that Walt had any direct input on.

Regardless of where you draw the closing line for Disney’s Golden Age, it’s clear in his quarter century of animated work,he produced a large slate of classics and even a few masterpieces worthy of repeated reviewings. His influence is still detectable in animation in countless ways, not the least of which is simply the ambition and amount of love poured into animated features the way he did from the format’s birth. To this day, animators and writers turn for inspiration to the likes of Pinocchio and Bambi, because attentive visual design and storytelling never die.

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