81–89 of 89 posts
I have watched every single video in this series. To be honest, it was a disappointment. There are a few cool videos, but most of it is very surface level. You won’t get any deep or thorough insights into what makes good characters, stories etc. I would suggest you pick up some books on story telling and the rest will do itself, if you are a programmer.
any book recommendations?
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I like Pixar a lot. But maybe it’s just a matter of personal taste. Letting go is a unifying theme in Up but my problem with the movie isn’t that it’s bad but that you had a table of all the guys at Pixar spitballing scene ideas and then glueing them all together. The result just feels episodic, in a bad way, and commercially manufactured. Up is a really good movie but I don’t want every CG film to have the Pixar pre…
'Up' is one of the best films of all time, followed by an additional hour and twenty minutes of pretty-decent movie.
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I feel that Pixar’s mastery of storytelling is overrated. Coco was lovely but I find their movies to be needlessly sad and curiously episodic in form. In “UP”, each sequence was very well crafted but they fit together randomly as though each scene was brainstormed by a group. They lack a singular vision in their films, there are no auteurs at Pixar: just art by committee. This isn’t to say that their stories are bad,…
Hmm, no I disagree strongly. I quite like Pixar's stories. In particular I appreciate how differently they come off to adults vs. children in ways that feel meaningful to both. As a kid, I completely missed what were obviously concerns of Mr. Incredible's infidelity. In the emotions one, kids see the obvious narrative that the emotions control the child, whereas adults are likely to see the emotions as a metaphor for…
That's the impact that I recognize with Pixar, a movie a like Soul and an Auteur like Pete Doctor.
For anyone looking for a deeper dive into how Pixar iterates on their movies and how highly-functioning creative teams can work in general, Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull is a really interesting book. It goes into the history of Pixar and some of the detail of how they work with actual stories from the movies they've made. One of my favorite anecdotes from the book is how they nearly almost lost all the work they did…
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> "I feel that Pixar’s mastery of storytelling is overrated." me too. the incredibles was pixar's high point of storytelling imho. of the first six films, i liked the toy stories the least. a bug's life , monsters, inc. , finding nemo to the incredibles was like a crescendo of animation, reaching a satisfying zenith of art. cars , which came next, was ok (but unoriginal for storytelling, the characters were mostly gr…
Maybe the whole mastery of storytelling is overrated per se. They were talking about how they build on their own experience, an epiphany - which is the essence of what they try to express. When I think of the great books and movies that I love I hardly remember the whole stories, but more a certain idea, scene or mood. And thus doesn't that mean that the stories are merely vehicles, like mechanical means to transport…
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Recently I have been watching a bunch of pixar movies that have been blockbusters, but I really haven't seen before. I like their themes and story telling, but something that bothers me for their major pictures is it feels like they all follow a very similar overall narrative: - some sort of "buddy" movie - some sort of "we only have x amount of time to solve our crisis we got into" - the two buddies have some sort o…
Tropey story beats do get a bit tiresome, but they're there because they work. Fiction that flaunts defying these tropes tends to be pretty great, but its still rare, and probably doesn't feel very good unless the viewer is already tired of the original. Buddies fight and, having acknowledged their primary character fault, reconcile, is one that is everywhere in children's fiction. I also find it boring.
These tropes aren’t new inventions, they go back into thousand year old myths, so it does seem like they really do appeal to the human brain, ie the Campbell monomyth/hero’s journey.
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Truly it has quite a bit of depth and is not predictable from the start. Certainly it appeals more to girls. Pixar movies tend to be rather didactic: "OK we are going to talk about [death|depression|aging|following your passion]" whereas the best kid movies just tell a great myth.
> Truly it has quite a bit of depth and is not predictable from the start. It... really isn't. There's not much depth or unpredictability. It's the regular Disney hero journey: oh, I'm a misunderstood loner, oh, I've found my own path, oh, I've prevailed. Oh, and comic reliefs. There are "unexpected" twists as in "wow, these sisters don't need a strong man to save them", and that's as much depth as it gets. Unlike, s…
From what I can see as a father: that's basically sisterhood :D
TBH I hardly remember Coco's story although I watched it entirely. I do not remember it was bad though, rather unremarkable story wise. Frozen may look as a kindergarten movie but there is clearly an attempted murder in it (Hans over Anna) which is only prevented by a magical intervention (Olaf). I would say, although I may use too big words here, Disney is closer to naturalism, whereas recent Pixar movies are more transparent and explanatory. You would have guessed I prefer naturalism (in literature at least, I don't know if it actually extends to cinematography ;)
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Frozen teaches kids all the wrong lessons. Shirk your responsibilities. Ignore your community. Focus on yourself. "Let it Go" is like an ode to everything I dislike about American culture. It's so very American. Best animated movie I've seen in the past decade was probably Moana, but I can't say I've seen many.
Well, actually the moral of Frozen is the absolute opposite - by shirking her responsibilities the community suffered, and she had to go back and face reality to restore the kingdom. The moral of the story was 'running away is not the answer'. "Let it go" as a song needs to be considered along with it's reprise: Elsa: "I'm such a fool, I can't be free. I can't escape from the storm inside of me... I can't control the…
You can feel the film's heritage, in which Elsa really was supposed to be the villain. It didn't evolve that way, setting up a genuine shock at the big reveal. Let It Go ends up mashing the I Wish song and the Villain Song, and (with Menzel's breathtaking voice) comes out doubly exciting. It makes the film feel a little uncoordinated, in a way that I like because it doesn't just follow the tropes.
But I think they didn't even understand that success themselves, and the sequel was rather poor. It dismissed the fact that the first film turned out to be about sisterhood, in a genuinely touching way, and thus lost its heart.
For anyone looking for a deeper dive into how Pixar iterates on their movies and how highly-functioning creative teams can work in general, Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull is a really interesting book. It goes into the history of Pixar and some of the detail of how they work with actual stories from the movies they've made. One of my favorite anecdotes from the book is how they nearly almost lost all the work they did…
Creativity Inc came out in 2014 and John left in 2019. I'm not sure how that would have been covered or relevant to the book.