[b]FROM “FILM COMMENT” MAGAZINE - JULY/AUGUST 2008
[/b]Why are Pixar films so vastly superior to Dreamwork’s sorry output? By and large, Pixar makes better-looking and far less cluttered movies, but the simple truth is that any one of its eight features and numerous shorts is better concieved and more fully imagined than Dreamworks. Does John Lasseter have superior taste? One things for sure: he doesn’t get his market research confused with his artistic process…
Everyone wants the pleasure of storytelling, but they are loath to relinquish enough precious sophistication to fully surrender…moviegoers have apparently become gripped by fear of being exposed as naive, or stupid, or apt to believe in anything but their own skepticism. How do you give yourself over to anything when you’re convinced that nothing is worhty of your credence?
The Pixar team, right from the beginning, found an ingenious way around this dilemma. They begin with respect for their audience as sentient human beings rather than average consumers.
While Pixar sticks to the broad outlines of the kid’s adventure formula (the quest to get home/rescue the princess/save the world against unlikely odds, realized through last-minute inspirations/reversals/teamwork)…and some tried-and-true character formulae (the odd couple of Woody and Buzz, the indomitable dreamer of Flick), the films share a genuine commitment to story, character, and “location”.
Whereas any given Dreamworks movie takes place in some vauge “setting”, every Pixar film is an exciting excavation of some fondly remembered past.
The largely wordless first half of WALL-E is a ballet of deftly choreographed mechanical slapstick, and it’s one of the more charming interludes in recent Amercian movies. Was it Stanton’s refusal to include dialouge that forced him into such simple purity?
What makes this section of the film so lastingly poignant is its strange sensation of a world without people in which the idea of human personality nonetheless persists.
How can a multimillion-dollar corrporation ask us to believe that they’re actually opposed to commercialism and totaltarianism?
Simple. They make good and lasting products instead of disposable ones.
However, the most lasting image from this eminently lovable moive is WALL-E, soaring through the heavens in pursuit of his beloved, dipping his mechanical hand into a patch of stardust.
Truthfully, there have been many equally fine visions since the dawn of CGI animation, some of them from Dreamworks…but they seem to have timed and shaped on an audience expectation graph: Epiphany #1 goes HERE, Transformative Realization # 5 placed HERE…cue Hans Zimmer Orchestral swell…
The galactic idyll, on the other hand, is the emotional center of the moive, gently inciting us to drift through the stars alongside its romantically-single-minded hero!
high-five I really admire your insights and thoughts into the movie.