Jodie Cormer and Austin Butler ride bikes in The Bikeriders. (Courtesy Focus Features)
It’s hot, and you need to be in an air-conditioned movie theater. Lucky you, the lineup is stacked this week.
The Bikeriders
Arkansan Jeff Nichols, who is brother to Lucero frontman Ben Nichols, directs Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, and Jodie Comer in this biker gang epic. The Vandals MC began in the 1960s as a simple club for outcasts who like to ride. Over time, the organization slowly evolves into a dangerous organized crime syndicate. Can the original founders turn things around before the law cracks down?
The Exorcism
Russell Crowe stars as an actor who is playing a priest in a movie that looks a lot like The Exorcist, but for legal reasons is not. When he starts to see real demons, his daughter Lee (Ryan Simpkins) suspects he’s using drugs again. But the truth is much more complicated.
Inside Out 2
Pixar’s latest is the biggest hit since Barbie, breaking the box office cold streak that has had some predicting the death of the theatrical experience. Well, turns out all you have to do get people in seats is make a great movie and market it properly. Who knew? Read my rapturous review in this week’s Memphis Flyer.
Time Warp Drive-In: Odd Noir
On Saturday, June 22, see three Coen Bros. masterpieces under the stars at the Malco Summer Drive-In: The Big Lebowski, Fargo, and No Country for Old Men. “Nobody fucks with the Jesus.”
Buzz Lightyear (Chris Evans) and Izzy (Keke Palmer) take flight with the Space Rangers in Pixar's Lightyear.
If you’ve seen Toy Story, or any of its sequels, you know who Buzz Lightyear is. In the original film, the vainglorious astronaut action figure is the new toy that replaces Tom Hanks’ Sheriff Woody as Andy’s favorite. Voiced by Tim Allen, he’s one of the great sidekicks in movie history, and he’s already had a direct-to-video spinoff movie and a short-lived animated series.
Lightyear, Pixar’s latest animated opus, opens with a note of explanation: This is the film that Andy saw in 1995 that made him want a Buzz Lightyear action figure. It’s a particularly tricky way to reboot a character, now voiced by former Captain America Chris Evans. But it does have the advantage of creating a blank slate upon which Pixar’s army of animators can draw a whole new animated space adventure.
Lightyear opens with a huge spherical spaceship, colloquially known as The Turnip, hurtling through deep space. When the automated systems discover a potentially habitable planet, Buzz is awakened from hypersleep to check it out. He and his partner Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) scout the new territory to see if it’s worth waking up the rest of the colony ship, and soon find that the local life is angry and numerous. Their escape goes bad, and Buzz crashes the ship. In the process, the refined crystalline fuel that powers the ship’s faster than light drive is exhausted, stranding 1,200 passengers and crew on a hostile planet.
But Space Rangers are nothing if not resourceful, and the newly awakened crew settles in to create their own fuel from local resources. It’s not easy, and it’s made worse by the fact that they have to build a new ship for each new batch, because Buzz’s test flights tend to end destructively. Even worse, because of Relativistic time dilation, when Buzz flies at speeds near c, four minutes is four years to those left behind. He watches his friends and crew mates grow old, while he barely ages. Meanwhile, the colony is flourishing. Everyone else is leading a fruitful, reasonably happy life except Buzz, who is obsessed with completing a mission that began decades ago. To help cope, he is issued a robot cat named Sox (voiced by Pixar veteran Peter Sohn).
Finally, after returning from an almost successful test flight, he finds his friend and commanding officer Hawthorne has died of old age. The new commander is shutting down the test program, just as Sox announces that he has, after 62 years of work, finally found the right formula for hyperspace fuel. Buzz (who presumably has seen Top Gun: Maverick) steals the final test ship and sets off to prove he can finish the mission and rescue the colony that no longer seems to want or need rescuing.
Emperor Zerg menaces our hero in Lightyear.
The flight is successful, but the superluminal speed Buzz achieves also means his time dilation problem is much worse. He returns to a far future world where the colony is hiding from an invasion of alien robots under the command of Emperor Zurg (James Brolin). Buzz must rally a ragtag group of human allies, led by Hawthorne’s granddaughter Izzy (Keke Palmer) to destroy Zurg’s advanced spaceship and save the colony.
For a movie purposefully backdated to 1995, Lightyear draws on surprisingly contemporary sources: The time dilation situation from Interstellar, and a Gravity-esque vacuum crossing, being only two of them. (If ir had really been made in 1995, there would have had a lot more Star Wars references.) Writer/director Angus MacLane, who previously co-helmed Finding Dory, translates these grown-up movies for his younger target audience. As you can tell from my summary of the first act, the plotting is unusually dense — although it does stretch out a bit for big action sequences once Zurg arrives planet-side.
It probably goes without saying that Lightyear looks amazing, but I’m going to say it anyway. The film’s biggest asset is Chris Evans, who grasps both Buzz’s arrogance and endearing earnestness.
Lightyear does not have the emotional depth of Pixar classics like Toy Story or Up, so you could say it’s a lesser product of the storied studio. But I’m a big believer in judging a film on how well it accomplishes what it’s trying to do. Lightyear aspires to be nothing more than a fun space adventure, and that’s a mission MacLane and Pixar easily accomplish.
Pixar’s newest feature explores more than the hormonal changes a preteen endures in a typical coming-of-age film.
Before he expertly defined pandemic-era ennui with Inside, Bo Burnham made his directorial debut with the 2018 comedy Eighth Grade. Elsie Fisher stars as Kayla, a 13-year-old girl who is desperate to be liked and repeatedly crushed when no one notices her. The beauty and charm of Eighth Grade is in Kayla’s relentless optimism. She spends her time producing a YouTube advice show, even though she has no idea what she’s doing in her own life. In the end, she still doesn’t feel like she fits in, but she just doesn’t care so much about fitting in anymore. She closes the film with a message to her future self to keep going no matter how hard things get.
Kayla, the middle schooler with her anxieties fully on display, who is both fascinated and scarred by social media, is one of the most completely drawn characters in recent film history. There’s more than a little bit of her DNA in Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), the eighth-grader heroine of Turning Red. She has Kayla’s false facade of self-assuredness covering a core of anxiety. But instead of being a Midwesterner with a struggling single dad, Mei is a second-generation Asian from Toronto with a domineering mother named Ming (Sandra Oh) and an easygoing dad named Jin (Orion Lee). Mei funnels all of her anxious energy into being the perfect daughter for a mother whose aspirations for her include secretary-general of the United Nations. So, no pressure.
Unlike the unpopular Kayla, Mei has friends. Miriam (Ava Morse), Abby (Hyein Park), and Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) think Mei is brainwashed by her mother. Together, the girl gang are obsessive fans of the boy band 4*Town. (“Why are they called 4*Town if there are five of them?” asks Mei’s mom, to no good answer.) Closer to home, they’re currently crushing on a hunky 17-year-old behind the counter at the local convenience store. Mei thinks the boy obsessions are silly, until she finds herself absently drawing pictures of the bodega clerk as a sexy merman. To her horror, Mei’s mother outs her innocent crush to the pimpled teenage boy, who is understandably disdainful of her nascent merman fetish. When Mei erupts in rage for what may be the first time in her fiercely controlled life, she finds herself transformed. Not in the spiritual or mental sense, but physically transformed into a huge, fluffy red panda.
Mirror, mirror — who’s the panda-est of them all?
Her attempts to keep her panda-osity a secret quickly fail, and her mother informs her that it’s something of a family curse. Their ancestor Sun Yee was granted the ability to transform into a cuddly but very large red panda to defend her home from invaders, and all of the women since then have had the same ability. But since Bruce Banner can tell you it’s inconvenient to turn into a giant monster every time you get upset, the family has developed a magic ritual to imprison the panda spirit in a talisman. “There’s a darkness to the panda,” Ming says, and it’s better to bottle it up than allow it to roam free.
But is that really the right thing to do, wonders Mei? Her doubts only grow when her grandmother Wu (Wai Ching Ho) arrives to supervise the ritual with her girl gang of Asian aunties in tow. Should she embrace the panda within or submit to soul-crushing but safe normality?
Director Domee Shi is the first woman to helm a Pixar feature. Like her short film “Bao,” which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2018, Turning Red is a family story told from the perspective of a child in an Asian immigrant family. Although she’s only 34, Shi has storyboarded eight Pixar features, including the seminal Inside Out. As you would expect from a product of the Pixar machine, Turning Red is fleetly paced and visually inventive. Mei’s turbulent tween emotions bend reality around her before subsiding just as quickly as they came, and there’s a great reference to the mirror scene in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, only with cute animals instead of demons. The lycanthrope as stand-in for puberty trope works just as well here as it did when it happened to Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. It sets up some truly bizarre moments, such as when inter-generational panda trauma manifests itself as a furry-pocalyptic kaiju attack on the SkyDome.
As a Pixar fanatic, Turning Red is a welcome return to form after the unfocused Onward, but only time and rewatches will tell if it belongs in the storied animation studio’s upper echelon.
Those of us who are not doctors, nurses, or EMTs or others on the front lines of the fight against COVID-19 are faced with some time on our hands. The only silver lining to the situation is that our new reality of soft quarantine comes just as streaming video services are proliferating. There are many choices, but which ones are right for you? Here’s a rundown on the major streaming services and a recommendation of something good to watch on each channel.
Stevie Wonder plays “Superstition” on Sesame Street.
YouTube
The granddaddy of them all. There was crude streaming video on the web before 2005, but YouTube was the first company to perfect the technology and capture the popular imagination. More than 500 hours of new video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
Cost: Free with ads. YouTube Premium costs $11.99/month for ad-free viewing and the YouTube Music app.
What to Watch: The variety of content available on YouTube is unfathomable. Basically, if you can film it, it’s on there somewhere. If I have to recommend one video out of the billions available, it’s a 6:47 clip of Stevie Wonder playing “Superstition” on Sesame Street. In 1973, a 22-year-old Wonder took time to drop in on the PBS kids’ show. He and his band of road-hard Motown gunslingers delivered one of the most intense live music performances ever captured on film to an audience of slack-jawed kids. It’s possibly the most life-affirming thing on the internet.
From Netflix to Criterion: All You Need to Know About What’s Streaming
Dolemite Is My Name
Netflix
When the DVD-by-mail service started pivoting to streaming video in 2012, it set the template for the revolution that followed. Once, Netflix had almost everything, but recently they have concentrated on spending billions creating original programming that ranges from the excellent, like Roma, to the not-so excellent.
Cost: Prices range from $8.99/month for SD video on one screen, to $15.99/month, which gets you 4K video on up to four screens simultaneously.
What to Watch: Memphian Craig Brewer’s 2019 film Dolemite Is My Name is the perfect example of what Netflix is doing right. Eddie Murphy stars as Rudy Ray Moore, the chitlin’ circuit comedian who reinvented himself as the kung-fu kicking, super pimp Dolemite and became an independent film legend. From the screenplay by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to Wesley Snipes as a drunken director, everyone is at the top of their game.
Future Man
Hulu
Founded as a joint venture by a mixture of old-guard media businesses and dot coms to compete with Netflix, Hulu is now controlled by Disney, thanks to their 2019 purchase of Fox. It features a mix of movies and shows that don’t quite fit under the family-friendly Disney banner. The streamer’s secret weapon is Hulu with Live TV.
Cost: $5.99/month for shows with commercials, $11.99 for no commercials; Hulu with Live TV, $54.99/month.
What to Watch: Hulu doesn’t make as many originals as Netflix, but they knocked it out of the park with Future Man. Josh Futturman (Josh Hutcherson) is a nerd who works as a janitor at a biotech company by day and spends his nights mastering a video game called Biotic Wars. A pair of time travelers appear and tell him his video game skills reveal him as the chosen one who will save humanity from a coming catastrophe. The third and final season of Future Man premieres April 3rd.
Logan Lucky
Amazon Prime Video
You may already subscribe to Amazon Prime Video. The streaming service is an add-on to Amazon Prime membership and features the largest selection of legacy content on the web, plus films and shows produced by Amazon Studios.
Cost: Included with the $99/year Amazon Prime membership.
What to Watch: You can always find something in Amazon’s huge selection, but if you missed Steven Soderbergh’s redneck heist comedy Logan Lucky when it premiered in 2017, now’s the perfect time to catch up. Channing Tatum and Adam Driver star as the Logan brothers, who plot to rob the Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Inside Out
Disney+
The newcomer to the streaming wars is also the elephant in the room. Disney flexes its economic hegemony by undercutting the other streaming services in cost while delivering the most popular films of the last decade. Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars flicks are all here, along with the enormous Disney vault dating back to 1940. So if you want to watch The Avengers, you gotta pay the mouse.
Cost: $6.99/month or $69.99/year.
What to Watch: These are difficult times to be a kid, and no film has a better grasp of children’s psychology than Pixar’s Inside Out. Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) is an 11-year-old Minnesotan whose parents’ move to San Francisco doesn’t quite go as planned.
Cleo from 5 to 7
The Criterion Channel
Since 1984, The Criterion Collection has been keeping classics, art films, and the best of experimental video in circulation through the finest home video releases in the industry. They pioneered both commentary tracks and letterboxing, which allows films to be shown in their original widescreen aspect ratio. Their streaming service features a rotating selection of Criterion films, with the best curated recommendations around. You’ll find everything from Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 silent epic The Passion of Joan of Arc to Ray Harryhausen’s seminal special effects extravaganza Jason and the Argonauts.
Cost: $99.99/year or $10.99/month.
What to Watch: One of the legendary directors whose body of work makes the Criterion Channel worth it is Agnès Varda. In the Godmother of French New Wave’s 1962 film, Cleo from 5 to 7, Corinne Marchand stars as a singer whose glamorous life in swinging Paris is interrupted by an ominous visit to the doctor. As she waits the fateful two hours to get the results of a cancer test, she reflects on her existence and the perils of being a woman in a man’s world.
It’s strange to contemplate how Dungeons & Dragons has conquered the world. The game began in the early 1970s in a Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, hobby shop. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson, and the shop’s owner, Jeff Perren, were avid wargamers who created sets of rules to govern battles between brigades of miniature army men. During one game set in medieval times, someone (exactly who is the source of much controversy and a few lawsuits) had the idea that, instead of controlling whole armies, they could try playing as individual heroes. Gygax added rules for using magic and fantastic monsters to fight and published the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.
For a game that has been described as combining “the charm of a Pentagon briefing with the excitement of double-entry bookkeeping,” the nerdy hobby spread like wildfire. By 2017, after the game’s fifth edition was released, there were an estimated 15 million players in the United States. But D&D’s legacy goes far beyond the tabletop. The basic concepts introduced by the game — characters defined by a set of skills and statistics whose success or failure is based on random rolls of the dice, and who gather treasure and useful items as they gain experience and advance in level — underlies video games from The Legend of Zelda to Call Of Duty to Grand Theft Auto. But I think D&D’s greatest cultural contribution was the creation of the “generic fantasy setting.”
Tom Holland and Chris Pratt voice the Lightfoot brothers.
J.R.R. Tolkien had taken a scholarly approach to creating Middle Earth, using elements of myth and legend from Northern European antiquity. His numerous imitators were much less rigorous about who they stole from, and Gygax read all of them, gleaning their best ideas and combining them into one syncretic setting. Everything from Shrek to Game of Thrones to Skyrim seems to take place in variants of the D&D world.
Pixar’s newest picture Onward takes the generic fantasy setting as its jumping-off point. “Long ago, the world was full of wonder!” the opening narration exclaims. Bearded wizards in pointy hats palled around with pegasus-unicorns. But magic is famously not user-friendly, so some spoilsport had to go and invent technology, and now the elves and trolls and centaurs live in a world that looks like a Northern California suburb. It’s elf Ian Lightfoot’s (voiced by Tom Holland) 16th birthday, and he’s an awkward nerd who can’t get anyone to come to his party except his big brother Barley (Chris Pratt) and his mom Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). The boys’ father died when they were very young, but Laurel reveals that he left a gift for them to be delivered when Ian turned 16. It turns out that accountant dad was secretly a wizard, and his legacy is a magic staff, a Phoenix jewel, and a spell that would bring him back to life for one day only, so he could meet the children he left behind.
Barley is an avid player of Quests of Yore, a D&D-equivalent game that, in this world, is strictly historically accurate. He tries and fails to make the spell work. But when Ian tries, his latent magical powers activate, and he succeeds. Well, he partially succeeds — meaning he brings back just the lower half of his father. The brothers have 24 hours to complete the spell and materialize the rest of dad.
Directed by Dan Scanlon, a longtime Pixar staffer who wrote and directed 2013’s Monsters University, Onward never fails to be fun and engaging. But I think the Pixar label actually hurts Onward. Had this come from any other creative team, it would be hailed as a fantastic film. But since it’s Pixar, it invites comparisons to masterpieces such as Toy Story 2.
Onward is a beautiful piece of animation, even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of Coco. It features a relationship between two brothers that feels deep and real, even if it doesn’t reach Inside Out‘s depths of psychological insight. Its action sequences are thrilling, particularly the climax where our heroes fight a magic dragon assembled from the rubble of technological society, but they never touch the complexity of The Incredibles.
Onward does have one element superior to its Pixar equivalents: Guinevere, Barley’s custom van airbrushed with a fantasy scene of a pegasus, has more personality than the cars from Cars, and even though it never talks, it still gets a heroic moment inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road.
Like Corey (Octavia Spencer), the manticore restaurateur who has to answer to her investors, we’ve become jaded to Pixar’s techno-magic and worn down by Disney’s domination. But don’t let that discourage you from taking up Onward‘s magic quest.
This is the fourth superhero movie review I will write this year. People have been asking me, are you sick of them? The answer is yes.
But I still get excited about a sequel to The Incredibles. The Brad Bird film is a top tier Pixar creation, one of the best superhero movies ever made, and, since it was released in 2004, clearly way ahead of the curve.
Mr. Incredible, Elastigirl, Dash, Violet, and Jack-Jack are back after a 14 year hiatus.
Incredibles 2 opens pretty much immediately after the events of the first film. Tony (Michael Bird), a classmate of Violet (Sarah Vowell), is recounting the events of the attack by the Underminer (John Ratzenberger) that served as the original’s coda. His audience is Rick Dicker (Jonathan Banks), a government operative whose job it is to keep secret the true identities of superheroes. Dicker dutifully erases the memory of moment when Tony saw Violet without her domino mask on, which has the unfortunate side effect of erasing all memory of her, including the fact that they had a date tomorrow night.
The battle against the Underminer provides the bravado opening action sequence any self-respecting superhero movie wants to have, and it immediately outdoes most all of them. The kinetic sections of The Incredibles, like the fight with the Omnidroid, were groundbreaking, and in the five-superhero-movie-a-year timeline we find ourselves in, frequently copied. Fourteen years worth of Pixar technological advances get splashed up on the screen in the first ten minutes, and it’s, well, incredible. A few jokes seem to be written just to show off the water modeling advances. The depth of the image in some shots is mind blowing, even in 2D. IMAX is definitely the preferred format for this one.
With the help of Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson), Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson), Elastigirl (Holly Hunter), Violet, Dash (Huck Milner) and Jack-Jack stop the Underminer’s destructive rampage, but they still run afoul of the secret bane of every superhero—massive property damage liability. About to be cut off by their government benefactors, the heroes are contacted by Winston Deavor (Bob Odenkirk), a telecom tycoon who wants to mount a campaign to legalize superheroes once and for all. He and his sister Evelyn (Catherine Keener) have crunched the numbers, to discover that the least destructive super hero in existence is Elastigirl. They offer to back her with a generous salary, a new Mid Century Heroically Modern house, and most importantly, insurance.
Holly Hunter voices Elastigirl, who gets to go all Batman in this long-awaited sequel.
After a heartfelt talk, the Parrs decide to accept the offer, even though it means that Mr. Incredible will be a stay at home dad to three super kids of varying ages. From there, the film falls into what is now a familiar episodic pattern. Pixar’s studio mates Marvel have succeeded by emphasizing character over plot, and Incredibles 2 follows suit. Mr. Incredible’s parenting tribulations are put on a equal footing with Elastigirl’s increasingly perilous confrontation with Screenslaver. Incredibles 2 once again proves that the key to truly great superhero films is a strong villain with the timely Screenslaver, who uses smartphones and TV screens as tools of mass hypnosis.
Judging from the responses of opening night audience, Jack-Jack is the breakout star of the picture. Trying to keep tabs on a toddler is hard enough for Mr. Incredible, but Jack-Jack is exhibiting all kinds of new superpowers, like eye lasers and shape changing. His ability to travel through parallel dimensions provides a great opportunity for Bird to stage a Poltergeist callback with Nelson, who plays the beleaguered dad in both films.
Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson, center) is called to help Mr. Incredible (Craig T. Nelson) parent the super toddler Jack-Jack.
Bird, who returns to voice super-designer Edna, makes a major comeback after his last film, the disastrous Disney corporate branding assignment Tomorrowland. Incredibles 2 fires on all cylinders, but now that we’re all immersed in the expected beats of the superhero movie, it lacks the shock of the new felt in 2004. But it’s a genuine crowd pleaser that rewards viewing on the big screen, which is what a summer movie is all about.
One of the biggest changes in the Hollywood film business is the increased importance of the international markets in studio balance sheets. It’s just not possible to make the math work on a $150 million budget (and the tens of millions of hidden dollars used for marketing and promotion) without selling a lot of tickets in Europe, Japan, South America, and, most importantly of all, China. Everybody likes explosions, good guys vs. bad guys, and sexy starlets. But there are some things that just won’t fly in Beijing — like comedies that are too dependent on the nuances of language. The complaint (which I frequently make) that big blockbusters have gotten stupider is only half true. In fact, they’ve just become easier to translate.
The chase for offshore money has inspired a number of strategies, such as releasing different cuts in different countries which feature more prominent roles for native language speakers, as happened in both Kong: Skull Island and Independence Day: Resurgence, resulting in crappy, disjointed editing. But those results are considered a small price to pay for market flexibility, and the assumption is that white American audiences don’t want to watch Asian heroes and heroines. But it’s not just box office that the studios are after, it’s investment money, too. Attracting Asian capital by making Hollywood product designed for Asian audiences has led to such tone deaf debacles as Matt Damon fighting Mongol tentacle monsters in The Great Wall.
On the other hand, there’s Coco. The new film from Pixar is a master class in how to make stories with a definite cultural identity that have broad appeal to all audiences. Coco‘s dual settings are Mexico and the hybrid Catholic/Mesoamerican afterlife hinted at by Dia de los Muertos iconography. Putting a film in a holiday tradition is, of course, a time honored Hollywood trick that has brought us everything from Bing Crosby crooning “White Christmas” in Holiday Inn to Bruce Willis battling terrorists in Die Hard.
Coco‘s hero is Miguel, voiced by Anthony Gonzalez, a young boy born into the sprawling Rivera family. The clan’s stock and trade is shoemaking, a craft that has kept them afloat and prosperous for four generations. Miguel’s great grandmother Imelda (Alanna Ubach) was married to a musician who ran off to pursue his career after their daughter Coco (Ana Ofellia Murguía) was born. Ever since then, the family has operated on a strict no-music policy, forcefully enforced by Elana (Renee Victor). But Miguel, naturally, loves music and has secretly become a skillful mariachi, and when he accidentally breaks a picture frame from the family’s Day of the Dead ofrenda, he discovers that his missing great grandfather probably became Mexico’s most famous musician, Ernesto de la Cruz (Benjamin Bratt). Miguel’s quest to reclaim his family’s musical heritage gets twisted when he accidentally transports himself to the Land of the Dead, where he meets his deceased family members who still hate music, and Héctor (Gael García Bernal), a down on his luck troubadour who offers to take Miguel to meet de la Cruz. For Miguel, returning to the Land of the Living is dependent on resolving old family mysteries.
Coco is visually as sumptuous as anything Pixar or any other animation studio has ever produced. Director Lee Unkrich and the Pixar team of hundreds of animators of all possible specialities take complete advantage of the 4K format to bring sparkling lights and eye-popping color to every frame. The facial animation, particularly when Miguel sings, is worlds better than even Unkrich’s last Pixar outing, Toy Story 3. Aside from the fact that virtually everyone involved is Latino, the story and characters are pretty standard Disney fare. Hector, for example, is basically a skeletonized Baloo the Bear from Jungle Book. But even if it’s formulaic, the formula is executed with love and care and extended to an audience which hasn’t had it before. The wisdom of this strategy became obvious earlier this month, when it took Coco two weeks to become the highest grossing film in Mexican history. The real secret to making it in the globalized film market is there is no secret, just solid fundamentals and a dash of love.
Whenever I hear about a new Pixar movie, I get excited. Maybe Cars 2 wasn’t up to the incredibly high standards the studio set with The Incredibles and Wall-E, but it’s still more entertaining than 90 percent of movie-like products extruded every year. Months ago, when I heard about Inside Out, I was a little dubious. The concept of personifying the dueling voices in your head as you debate how to get through life was tried in a short-lived TV series from the 1990s called Herman’s Head, not to mention the infamous sperm paratrooper sequence in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, But Were Afraid To Ask. Could the crack troops at Pixar successfully mine this hackneyed premise, or was this going to be another Monsters University misfire?
You betcha they could! Inside Out is wall-to-wall brilliance that will be spoken of alongside Toy Story and Up as the best of Pixar’s legacy.
The little girl whose head we’re inside is named Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) She’s being piloted from a cerebral control room by a team of emotions led by Joy (Amy Poehler). Riley’s reactions to the events of her life are determined by a running debate between Joy, Fear (Bill Hader), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), and Anger (Lewis Black, obviously). Things are going along fine for the happy 11-year-old until her family moves from small-town Minnesota to San Francisco. The family encounters irksome but predictable, problems adjusting to the new environment. The moving van with all of their possessions gets lost. The house they move into isn’t as nice as the one they left behind. People in San Francisco put broccoli on pizza.
Riley
Riley’s bridge crew works to keep her on track with Joy at the helm, but as things get hairy, the emotions find themselves on a sinking ship. An accident throws Joy and Sadness out of Headquarters, leaving Fear, Disgust, and Anger alone to run the show. As Riley’s young life starts spiraling out of control, the opposites Joy and Sadness must work together to find their way through her memories and unconscious mind and return to the control room.
Pixar veteran Pete Docter is Inside Out‘s ostensible mastermind, but in the famously collaborative Pixar spirit, he shares his director’s credit with animator Ronaldo Del Carmen. Their work visualizing abstract psychological concepts is creative, fun, and illuminating. Both Riley’s drab, everyday existence in San Francisco and the riot of color and shapes in her head are perfectly rendered, and the stories told in both environments complement and inform each other. Every detail has been thought through and perfectly executed. There are references to Chuck Jones, Hayao Miyazaki, and early Disney collaborator Ub Iwerks, as Sadness and Joy travel through Imagination Land and the experimental Abstract Thought chamber. There’s not a false note anywhere in the talented voice cast, but Poehler and Richard Kind, who plays Riley’s long-neglected imaginary friend Bing Bong are the two standouts. There’s even a Frank Oz voice cameo!
Like classic Looney Tunes, Inside Out is ostensibly directed at kids, but speaks even deeper volumes to adults. It’s funny and exciting, and its lessons go down easy. Significantly, the film posits that the worst case scenario is not a mind consumed with sadness, but one that can no longer feel anything. Joy’s ultimate embrace of the other emotions to create a richer life experience for Riley is both moving and sharply observed. Docter also takes the occasional aside to look at the emotional debates going on in the minds of characters other than Riley to emphasize that everyone has his or her own struggle. Its central theme of staying aware of the different emotional and cognitive forces pulling you to and fro as you go through life seems like an extremely valuable lesson for children. Frankly, it’s pretty valuable to me, too. Inside Out is a movie I wish I had seen a long time ago.
Pixar goes futuristic in WALL-E, an animated story about a lonely robot that looks something like a mechanical E.T. or a mini-me of the ‘bot from Short Circuit. In this dystopian vision, humans have abandoned an Earth made toxic by garbage and now live in a gigantic floating space ship while sending robots back to clean up the planet.
The film is set in a further future in which even this attempt has been abandoned and the protagonist is, apparently, the last functioning worker-bee robot on Earth. WALL-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter — Earth Class, and, as the film opens, there’s only one functioning WALL-E left on the deserted planet, diligently performing his programmed duties by converting human refuse into neat, stackable bricks. But WALL-E has a personality too, setting aside interesting remnants of human civilization — a Rubik’s Cube, a Twinkie, and a VHS of a film musical — to take back to his metallic shelter.
One day WALL-E is visited by a more advanced ‘bot, Eve, sent back to Earth on a reconnaissance mission. Eve looks something like a cylindrical iBook, and she and WALL-E are well-conceived and animated creations, with distinct, relatable personalities discernable despite minimal dialogue. (There’s a passing nod to silent cinema here with the relationship a kinda, sorta reworking of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights.)
This vision of a future in which cities are submerged by skyscrapers made of trash and humans have been reduced to lazy, passive, sub-verbal consumption machines is essentially Idiocracy for kids, except the evil-corporation subplot — starring Fred Willard, in the flesh — is clearly aimed at parents in the audience, and that hints at the problem.
Instead of merely following its premise into what should have been a Pixarized version of the Spielbergian wonder of movies like E.T. and A.I., WALL-E lapses into noisy, semiviolent confrontations that mimic run-of-the-mill sci-fi and action flicks for teenagers and adults. It might be a little too scary and violent for younger children, but, really, kids of all ages deserve better.
A better model for a good kids’ film comes from one of the year’s other animated hits, Horton Hears a Who! (or, to cite an earlier Pixar triumph, Finding Nemo, which was the directing debut of WALL-E‘s Andrew Stanton) — a film not saddled, Shrek-like, with would-be-clever pop-culture references or content clearly aimed over the heads of the kids who make up its alleged audience. As such, Horton won over this adult viewer in ways that WALL-E — which panders to me, though not as baldly as Shrek — couldn’t and also won over my 3-year-old, who sat rapt for Horton but bailed after 10 minutes of WALL-E.
