Pixar Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Inside Out 2 (2024)

June 15, 20242024, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Japan, Pixar, Theatrical

*/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein
directed by Kelsey Mann

by Walter Chaw Inside Out 2 hasn’t resolved any of the issues I had with the first film, which boil down to if I’m meant to treat this conceit seriously, then you should probably treat it seriously, too. I grew up with Judy Blume and can’t recall a single instance in her books where a young girl’s emotional development was a playground for cheap gags and high concepts. The sequel’s plot is inane, of course: Riley (voice of Kensington Tallman) goes into puberty around the time of summer hockey camp and experiences the complexities of self-doubt, self-loathing, and anxiety attendant to adolescence. All her thoughts and actions are retrofitted around the decisions made by a cadre of anthropomorphized emotions as they battle for supremacy over a TARDIS-like control centre located somewhere, it seems, in Riley’s frontal cortex. The stakes are elevated because Riley is a vulnerable young woman, not because she’s an especially well-developed character. Because she’s blonde, blue-eyed, and adorable, every little thing that doesn’t go well for her is cause for people raised in this culture to tsk and worry. I would go so far as to say the stakes are outsized for what this is, i.e., a nonce of a nothing-burger, precisely because we are hardwired to cherish this species of porcelain vessel independent of any personal knowledge of her. She is a pinnacle of a cultural ideal, and if she is troubled, we are troubled.

Elemental (2023)

June 14, 2023****/****, 2023, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
screenplay by Peter Sohn & Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh
directed by Peter Sohn

by Walter Chaw I tell this tale over and over again as I see echoes of it pop up now in a landscape temporarily interested in the particulars of the immigrant story, but my parents came to the United States in the early ’70s to complete their educations: my mother her Master’s in Secondary Education, my father a Ph.D. in Geochemical Engineering. They settled in Golden, Colorado, in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains, after getting married at the Justice of the Peace, saying their vows phonetically and anglicizing our family name before my father really knew how to write in English–if you were ever wondering why it is my name is spelled “Chaw” when it was more common to go by “Chow” or “Cho” or “Chou.” My dad, he did his best. Rather than teach or pursue a career in mineral mining or oil, he decided he wanted to be his own boss. His temperament, I think, made it hard for him to work for someone else. So he opened a rock shop in Golden, learned silversmithing, and made and repaired jewelry. I don’t know if it was his dream to do this, but it’s what he did for the rest of his life until the stress and misery of it killed him at 54. My mom was pulled into it with him but quit when he died. I disappointed them both long before that, changing my major from Biochemical Engineering to English long about the time I ran into Differential Equations freshman year. We were estranged until my wife insisted we invite them to our wedding. My wife is the angel of my better nature and guardian of the tatters of my soul.

Lightyear (2022)

June 26, 20222022, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Drama, Family, Pixar, Sci-Fi

**/****
screenplay by Jason Headley, Angus MacLane
directed by Angus MacLane

by Walter Chaw Angus MacLane’s handsome-looking Lightyear gets enough things right that it’s unfortunate it can’t quite shake how its best parts are borrowed from Joe Haldeman’s classic The Forever War. It has more problems than that, granted, mainly with how its thin supporting cast fails to give the film the humour and pathos it needs to honour the by-now-familiar “heartwarming tearjerker” Pixar formula. There’s not a lot of rewatch value here, alas, and that has everything to do with Lightyear‘s awkward dialogue and inability to stick the landing–maladies, both, that afflicted co-writer Jason Headley’s previous Pixar outing, the similarly disappointing and COVID-doomed Onward. The highlight of the piece is robot cat SOX (Peter Sohn), who provides the film its credulous audience surrogate as well as its adorable animal-sidekick comic relief. By himself, SOX saves Lightyear, though he can’t elevate it above the airless jokes and pained delivery. What a shame, considering the movie sets a new bar in terms of the complexity of its digital imagery and animation. With Taika Waititi in the cast, I gotta think they could’ve hit him up for a quick joke polish.

Turning Red (2022)

March 12, 20222022, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Streaming

**/****
screenplay by Julia Cho, Domee Shi
directed by Domee Shi

by Walter Chaw There’s a classic ONION article where an Asian San Francisco dry cleaner is picketed for upholding harmful Asian stereotypes that I think about a lot–especially when I wonder what would happen if I ever wrote something about my experiences with a domineering mother and a father who often stood by and watched when I could’ve used a champion. There are so few representations of Asian-Americans in American film that the other edge of that sword of getting a shot at telling a story is, what if the story we tell is merely a (hopefully) more nuanced version of the same old shit? Asian women are slotted into two types by this culture: prostitutes and dragon ladies–the assumption being that the former eventually ages into the latter. They are fetish objects with their own category in porn and shorthands for stentorian parenting and management styles, heavy on the scolding and light on the positive affirmation. These stereotypes arise from WWII GI encounters with brothels in Pacific war zones and a myth of Asian exceptionalism constructed to pit Asians against Blacks in the United States. I have seen white versions of these characters as well (both the whore and the drill sergeant-as-mom), but I have also seen the entire range of human possibility expressed through white faces and bodies in the same films. What I have not seen is a similar courtesy extended to minority characters. One dragon lady in a movie filled with other Asian faces and experiences is fine; it wouldn’t even be unrealistic. When it’s the only characterization, however, it’s a problem that actually gets people murdered. I mean, no one watches Carrie and thinks Mrs. White is a stand-in for all white mothers.

Luca (2021)

June 16, 20212021, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Jesse Andrews, Mike Jones
directed by Enrico Casarosa

by Walter Chaw Enrico Casarosa’s Luca is a gentle love letter to the Miyazaki-verse set in a small, coastal Italian town called “Porto Rosso” in an obvious nod to Porco Rosso. The body of it, meanwhile, is parts of Ponyo, parts of Kiki’s Delivery Service, bits and pieces of shots and sequences from Spirited Away, and even the scavenging scenes from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Luca‘s message of acceptance is general and loose enough to allow for a couple of innocuous interpretations, the obvious one being the Depeche Mode-ism of how people are people and shouldn’t, therefore, get along so awfully, the more potentially impactful one a coming-out tale in which the residents of a cloistered community realize their friends and neighbours harbour secrets about their identities that they’re afraid to reveal, lest they be ostracized, even murdered. It’s tempting to go here, not just because the central drama revolves around the friendship between little Luca (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) and his buddy Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), but also because of the late-film reveal that a pair of elderly spinsters in town are identically coupled. There are also moments where it’s clear that Alberto, without being interested in her, is jealous of the relationship blooming between Luca and Giulia (Emma Berman), the little girl who takes them in when they find themselves needing a place to stay. It’s there if you want it.

Soul (2020)

December 22, 20202020, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Music, Pixar

***/****
story and screenplay by Pete Docter, Mike Jones, Kemp Powers
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) teaches middle-school band to a group of largely-disinterested kids and dreams of becoming a big-time jazz pianist like the one he saw in some smoky bar his dad dragged him to one time when he was a kid. His dad was a musician, see, and made a little name for himself. Joe’s mom, Libba (Phylicia Rashaad), is a seamstress who owns her own business. She funded Joe’s dad’s “career” because the world is hard on small things. (Artists and their dreams, too.) Joe is offered a full-time teaching position on the same day he scores a gig with the great saxophonist/vocalist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett)–the same day, as it happens, he gets into a terrible accident that will result in his death unless he can convince the superintendents of an A Matter of Life and Death-esque afterlife to give him a second chance. That second chance comes in the form of 22 (Tina Fey), an “unsparked” soul needing to find that certain je ne sais quoi in order to be “born” in, I presume, a human host body on Earth. The rules are diaphanous, with no great expectation to ever cohere. It doesn’t matter. Pete Docter’s Soul isn’t that kind of fantasy. It isn’t about the metaphysical, after all; it’s really only about something as simple yet as difficult as the importance of living in the moment. Gathering ye rosebuds whilst one might, if you will. It’s not deep. I guess it doesn’t have to be.

Onward (2020)

March 6, 20202020, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley, Keith Bunin
directed by Dan Scanlon

by Walter Chaw Onward is notable not because it features Disney/Pixar’s first LGBTQ character (a cop–Jesus, you guys–voiced by Lena Waithe), but because it’s the family-friendly studio’s first stoner comedy. Dan Scanlon’s follow-up to his middling Monsters University is an unholy amalgam of Detroit Rock City and Weekend at Bernie’s that finds two elf brothers, Ian (voiced by Tom Holland) and Barley (Chris Pratt), going on a quest to resurrect the top half of their dead dad’s body for the one magical day they’ve conjured for him via an ancient spell and a “phoenix crystal,” the double for which serves as the film’s exhausted MacGuffin after they squander the first one. The setting is an industrialized world where there was once magic; as technology became easier than memorizing spells and perfecting belief, magic was left to lie fallow, just waiting for a winsome young elf with father and confidence issues to reintroduce it to the world. You can read this a few ways. The way I’m choosing to interpret “magic” is as a metaphor for the American progressive movement, which died at the end of the Sixties with a series of assassinations. If we lay this over Onward, then the film becomes a call to action for progressives in this country to rally after decades of being buried under the inequities of late capitalism.

Toy Story 4 (2019)

June 19, 20192019, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Stephany Folsom and Andrew Stanton
directed by Josh Cooley

by Walter Chaw Much like AI, Steven Spielberg's similarly fascinating, similarly imperfect spiritual collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, Josh Cooley's Toy Story 4 asks questions about creation and the responsibility of the creator to the created. Toy Story 4 is itself the product of a chimeric parentage, this being the third sequel to a franchise that is to Pixar what Mickey Mouse is, or once was, to Pixar's parent company, Disney. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is a modern archetype of the sort described by Barthes: an image, a sign, encompassing an entire history of meaning for members of a sympathetic culture. It means one thing by connoting a multitude of things. The Toy Story films rely on the shared human experience of creating totems in the endless fort/da exercises we engage in as children. Inanimate objects are imbued in that way with our expectations of our parents and our disappointments with them, too, as we re-enact events real and play out dramas imagined. They are practice and we invest them with the payload of our souls; the root of the term "animation," after all, is that literal investment of a soul, and so many of our creation mythologies–Prometheus, Eve, the Golem–consider the lives of the lifeless. The Toy Story films are disturbing because they occasionally cause us to question our moral responsibility to things we gift with life only to abandon emotionally, if not always physically. (A quick scan around my office finds it to be a plastic chapel of toys I couldn't buy as a child.) They are disturbing because they speak to ideas of free will vs. predestination that apply to us–created beings, perhaps, programmed along certain paths and predilections certainly. Toy Story is epistemological theology.

Incredibles 2 (2018)

June 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Around the midpoint of Brad Bird’s fantastic Incredibles 2, Mr. Incredible (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) catches his son Dash (Huck Milner) on Dash’s way to the bus and pointedly tucks his homework in his backpack. Yes. This happens. This happens every day of the school-year with my 11-year-old son, who is bright, funny, and kind, and can’t for the life of him remember to put his completed homework in his freaking backpack. There are dozens of moments in Incredibles 2 like this. They’re small, throwaway character bits that would’ve taken hours or days to animate and voice correctly, and the real thrill of a movie like this–of any Pixar or Miyazaki when they’re clicking–is little moments like these. In Princess Mononoke, for instance, the prince crouches to take a drink from a stream, but before he does so, he loops his bow over his head and under his arm in a completely natural gesture that would be invisible but for its meaningful utility: this guy has spent a lot of time in the woods, drinking from springs and using his bow. It’s biography conveyed almost subliminally in under a second. In Incredibles 2, a breathless Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) calls from a hotel room upon getting “reinstated” as a superhero in this universe where being super is illegal, after which she bursts excitedly into the story of her day while stay-at-home dad Mr. Incredible makes the right noises and turns on the television. The film is wise to cultural/gender issues that can arise when the woman is the breadwinner; to teen girls in daughter Violet’s (Sarah Vowell) efforts to get a boy to notice her (I have a teen girl, too; it’s spot on); and to an American’s unique social programming, which says that anyone can be anything through the power of belief and effort. Not for nothing, the villain of the first film is the manifestation of toxic fandom in the schlubby body of a white guy calling/diagnosing himself “Syndrome.”

Cars 3 (2017)

June 20, 20172017, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Sports, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Kiel Murray and Bob Peterson and Mike Rich
directed by Brian Fee

by Walter Chaw I don't understand very much about the Cars universe. I don't understand its rules. Do the sentient cars feel pain? What part of them needs to "die" in order for them to die? The implication is that the voice actor needs to die, but even then the Paul Newman-voiced "Doc" is resurrected (along with Tom Magliozzi's "Rusty") in Cars 3 through the miracle of old voice outtakes and flashback sequences. It raises questions about sentience in a Blade Runner sort of way. It invites speculation that this is all a post-apocalyptic nightmare in which our "smart" cars have either outlasted, or outwitted, their primate creators. I wonder, too, about how they reproduce, as these films have always been clear that there are "children" in this universe. Or are they like child vampires: wizened monsters trapped in infant chassis? When I look at a sentient ambulance in this one's central "Flesh Fair" demolition-derby sequence and how its patient bay is built for a human-sized customer and not a car, well…it raises questions. And let's talk about the idea of a demolition derby in a film populated entirely by thinking, feeling cars. What would the human equivalent to this be? Thunderdome? It's worth a conversation, though it's not the conversation Cars 3 wants to have.

Finding Dory (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

November 15, 20162016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Disney, DVD, Family, Pixar

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Victoria Strouse
directed by Andrew Stanton (co-directed by Angus MacLane)

by Walter Chaw Credit is due Pixar and writer-director Andrew Stanton (co-directing here with Angus MacLane) for wanting to right what I don’t know anybody really perceived as a wrong. I remember thinking when I first saw Finding Nemo that Dory’s inability to retain short-term memories was a product of her species. In the new Finding Dory, it’s revealed to indeed be a mental disability, one that her parents (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) worry over a great deal in a series of flashbacks. They create coping mechanisms for their daughter. They devise a literal shell game so that when Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) inevitably gets lost, she can find her way back home. It’s an interesting tactic to take, this mild scolding that what was funny at first is in fact a debilitating, dangerous disorder. And a good portion of the film looks for ways to valorize Dory’s condition, to avoid making her the butt of jokes or an object of pity. For the most part, it does this by surrounding her with characters who also have a disability: Hank (Ed O’Neill), an octopus that’s lost an arm (“Septipus!” says Dory, “I can’t remember, but I can count!”); and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a hopelessly myopic whale shark. Lest we forget, Nemo (Hayden Rolence, taking over from Alexander Gould) has a deformed fin, something he flaps at dad Marlin (Albert Brooks) after Marlin says something disparaging about Dory’s memory issue.

Finding Dory (2016)

June 20, 20162016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

**/****
screenplay by Andrew Stanton and Victoria Strouse
directed by Andrew Stanton

by Walter Chaw Credit is due Pixar and writer-director Andrew Stanton (co-directing here with Angus MacLane) for wanting to right what I don't know anybody really perceived as a wrong. I remember thinking when I first saw Finding Nemo that Dory's inability to retain short-term memories was a product of her species. In the new Finding Dory, it's revealed to indeed be a mental disability, one that her parents (voiced by Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) worry over a great deal in a series of flashbacks. They create coping mechanisms for their daughter. They devise a literal shell game so that when Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) inevitably gets lost, she can find her way back home. It's an interesting tactic to take, this mild scolding that what was funny at first is in fact a debilitating, dangerous disorder. And a good portion of the film looks for ways to valorize Dory's condition, to avoid making her the butt of jokes or an object of pity. For the most part, it does this by surrounding her with characters who also have a disability: Hank (Ed O'Neill), an octopus that's lost an arm ("Septipus!" says Dory, "I can't remember, but I can count!"); and Destiny (Kaitlin Olson), a hopelessly myopic whale shark. Lest we forget, Nemo (Hayden Rolence, taking over from Alexander Gould) has a deformed fin, something he flaps at dad Marlin (Albert Brooks) after Marlin says something disparaging about Dory's memory issue.

The Good Dinosaur (2015) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 23, 20162015, 2016, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disney, Family, Pixar, Road Movie

***/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B+
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He's clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him "Spot" (he's a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film's final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar's The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It's far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

The Good Dinosaur (2015); The Revenant (2015); The Hateful Eight (2015)

December 25, 20152015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Disney, Drama, Family, Mystery, Pixar, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
***/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

THE REVENANT
***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, a bear, angry junketeers
screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

Inside Out (2015)

June 18, 20152015, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve & Josh Cooley and Pete Docter
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw Films are objects and their interpretations are subjective. I start this way because there’s a sequence in Pete Docter’s Inside Out that enters an area of, literally, abstract thought–and then later, its characters accidentally spill crates of “facts” and “opinions” and have trouble getting them sorted out again. (“It happens all the time,” they’re reassured.) Someone brilliant once said that the measure of a work is the extent to which it’s examined. Inside Out is destined to be examined a lot and, therefore, deserves a great deal of merit–but for as uncannily perceptive as it is at times, it’s just as often pernicious in its gender stereotyping and establishment of straw situations that betray its core honesty. I’m reminded of Docter’s similarly-flawed, similarly schizophrenic Up, whose prologue is easily among the cinema’s best silent melodramas while the rest of it is missed opportunity, curious under-reaching, and overly dependant on shtick. Docter’s cited Paper Moon as a seminal film in his development. Of his three movies thus far, only his first, Monsters, Inc., deserves mention in the same conversation from start to bittersweet finish.

Monsters University (2013) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 12, 20132013, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Pixar

Mu2

**/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A
screenplay by Daniel Gerson & Robert L. Baird, Dan Scanlon
directed by Dan Scanlon

by Bill Chambers On a school trip to Monsters, Incorporated, young cyclops Mike Wazowski, the kind of pipsqueak who gets saddled with the teacher when his classmates choose partners, sneaks onto the scaring platform and follows an octopus-like creature through one of the closet-door terminals. Rather than reprimand him, the monster tells Mike he might have what it takes to become a scarer and gives him his cap, Mean Joe Green-style. That hat bears the logo of the Scarer’s alma mater, Monsters University (better than Fear Tech!); an undergrad is born.

Brave (2012)

June 20, 20122012, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Theatrical, UK

**½/****
screenplay by Mark Andrews and Steve Purcell and Brenda Chapman and Irene Mecchi
directed by Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman

by Walter Chaw Brave…isn't. Not very. It's by far the most conventional Pixar film, and while it's better than either Cars, that's only because the Cars movies are simply awful. Brave has a plucky girl heroine who disobeys her mother, makes a hash of things, then solves everything at the end through the murder of the antagonist. It has an adorable animal sidekick (three of them, actually), treats an entire culture like a broad ethnic joke, and misses every single opportunity to be about something. Huzzah! When we say as a culture that something's for children, we mean that it's better–unless we're talking about media culture. Brave is for children, and its only connection to things like WALL·E, Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, or Ratatouille is its company's pedigree, fading fast until Brad Bird or Andrew Stanton decides to strap 'em on and jump back in the ol' computer-animated saddle, riding to the rescue as the company founded on their beautiful complexities descends into absolute, uncontroversial, shallow mendacity.

Cars 2 (2011)

June 24, 20112011, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Ian Pugh, Comedy, Disney, Family, Pixar, Sports, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Ben Queen
directed by John Lasseter

by Ian Pugh SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Trading the ’50s Americana of the original for ’60s British adventure, Cars 2 seems, for a moment there, like it might actually work. The inhumanity that Walter Chaw correctly attributed to Cars scores a few subversive points in this sequel, filled as it is with complicated stunts that are, amusingly, impossible for automobiles to perform. (Even sillier: all of the anthropomorphic spy cars are retrofitted with Gatling guns and assault rifles.) But all is lost as tow-truck hick Mater (voice of Larry the Cable Guy) takes centre-stage in a convoluted espionage scheme, meaning that Cars 2 stoops to the same mistaken-identity spy parody that children’s movies have beaten into the ground since 1966’s The Man Called Flintstone. The subversion runs completely dry after the pre-title sequence, as our resident Connery (?) Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) jumps and shoots his way across oil derricks, only to hand over the reins to the blander heroes of the previous film. So the same old car jokes prevail as Pixar keeps shovelling coal onto a dead fire. Find one more extraneous character in Finn’s liaison Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), whose primary function is to prove that Bondian double-entendres don’t have much impact when everyone’s name is a double-entendre.

The Incredibles (2004) – [2-Disc Collector’s Edition – Widescreen] DVD + 2-Disc Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

April 5, 2011****/****, 2000s, 2011, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Espionage, Family, FFC Must-Own, Pixar, Superhero

****/****
DVD – Image A+ Sound A+ Extras A+
BD – Image A Sound A Extras A+
written and directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw The first hint that there's something at work in The Incredibles far beyond the pale is the casting of Sarah Vowell as the voice of wilting Violet, the wallflower older sister in the Incredibles' nuclear family. Vowell herself is a brilliant satirist, a gifted writer, and in her heart o' hearts, a bona fide autobiographical anthropologist. She mines the tragedies of her life for insight into the thinness of the onionskin separating our ability to function with the iron undertow of self-doubt and disappointment that comprises all of our paralyzed yesterdays. The Incredibles does a lot of things well–a lot of the same things, as it happens, that Sarah Vowell does well. Through two Toy Story films and last year's fantastically topical Finding Nemo, Pixar has provided the new gold standard in children's entertainment, and it has consistently done so by injecting an amazing amount of insight and depth into the foundation of its bells and whistles.

Toy Story 3 (2010) [2-Disc] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy

November 2, 20102000s, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, DVD, Family, Pixar

***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A-
screenplay by Michael Arndt
directed by Lee Unkrich

by Walter Chaw Woody (Tom Hanks) refuses to shake Buzz's (Tim Allen) hand in farewell at around the middle point of Pixar's Toy Story 3, marking a dark return of sorts to the petulant Woody of the first film and a harbinger of things to come as the picture closes with sights and sounds that are easily darker than anything dreamed of in its predecessors. Maybe it's the comfort that comes with being part of an established franchise–with the knowledge that the only watermark to exceed is that left by its own thorny, complex second chapter. Whatever the case, Toy Story 3 is more ambitious than Toy Story 2 yet less successful as well, mainly because the first half of it seems uncharacteristically uncertain of itself. It's a feeling of awkwardness that in retrospect coalesces into this idea that maybe it's dread that colours our reintroduction to these characters. Half of their number is gone without explanation, after all, including Woody's love interest, Bo. He grieves for her. We'll come back to this. Their owner, Andy, prepares to go to college, leaving the toys to limbo in his attic until some hoped-for, equivocal day when maybe Andy could have children of his own and thus reconnect in some pat, schmaltzy epilogue, we fear, through a closed circle of eternity via progeny. The picture resorts to nothing so simple as that, thankfully, wrapping up instead with a worthy extended post-script that returns the series to its origins, though not without irreplaceable losses and an absolute clarity of purpose that binds this trilogy into something like a definitive, modern existentialist philosophy. While it's not Dostoevsky, it's not that far off, either.