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Pixar, DreamWorks, and Related Matters

[Click here to go to the most recent posting on this page. Follow these links to some of my reviews of computer-animated features: Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, Shrek 2, Madagascar, Happy Feet, The Polar Express. Click here to go to a complete listing of reviews.]

From Benjamin Sanders, a British visitor to the site: You mention in your review of The Incredibles the problems of stylization in The Iron Giant's character designs, which you say "seemed scrawny, their capacity for expression deliberately suppressed, perhaps in unfortunate emulation of Japanese anime." The implication being that the design inherent in all Japanese anime is to the detriment of the expression of character.

The worry I have with this notion is that it seems to suggest there is only a very limited aesthetic area in which the hand-drawn animated film can operate succesfully. As a result, if animated films are to be succesful in coveying their characters' inner life and thus the true emotive depths of the story, they will end up looking fairly similar. Which would be a shame.

I would like to hear your thoughts on the work of Michael Dudok De Wit and his three short films Tom Sweep, The Monk and the Fish, and the Oscar-winning Father and Daughter, if you've seen any of them. The style of the cartoon characters in both these films is very simple, the faces no more than circles with two dots for eyes, and a line for the nose. The camera is also pulled back and kept away from the closeup, so that the use of facial features, such as cheeks and mouths and noses, is not possible.

Despite such limitations and strong stylization, the amount of life brought about by the way in which these little people move their bodies is delightful, and in the case of Father and Daughter, conveys the simple story, and the issues of loss and longing it presents, most effectively. It's far removed from the type of character design and animation you yourself admire the most (as seen in Bob Clampett's best films), but I doubt such an approach would be as effective in telling the same story.

Indeed in your excellent discussions with John Kricfalusi, you argue against his objections to Disney restraint in the animated feature film, suggesting there should be room for both approaches to animated film making.

In regards to Japanese anime, is this not just another approach that reflects yet further restraint, and a rejection of the overacting often witnessed in Western animated films for a more subtle approach to suit the stories they desire to tell?

As an admirer of Hayao Miyazaki's films, such as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, I couldn't see the the personality animation of Disney films, nor that of the likes of Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones, or any of their stylistic approaches, working as effectively in telling those stories about those characters. Afterall not all characters are colourful, or flamboyant personalities, some are quiet, reclusive, but all good ones are complex.

In a review of The Incredibles in the Daily Telegraph the critic Sukdhev Sandhu responds to the question of whether the new Pixar film is the masterpiece it is widely acclaimed to be with an interesting answer:

"I'm not sure. The digital flatness of Pixar animation blinds me with its kinetic sophistication, but it isn't textured or human enough to imprint itself on my imagination for very long.

"More than that, though, I'm unconvinced that the future of child-orientated films should lie in pictures that recall quite so many others, from Flash Gordon and Star Wars, to the Spy Kids series. Its turbo energy makes it, at times, just like a junior version of Mission: Impossible. Maybe that's what young audiences want these days: fast and furious barrages of noise and action, films which tell them that 'doing' is everything.

"But there has to be place, in the West, for films that teach their audiences how to look at the world and not to flee from vulnerability or mystery. Japanese anime—Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away—regularly creates such strange fascination. Now more than ever, as consumer societies are provoked to hyper accelerated, corporate-generated over-stimulations, we need artists willing to make pictures that drift and undulate, that are about indefinable moods as much as full-on action, that ache with sadness, wonder, and helplessness, that show to pre-adults that life is often inexplicable and irresolvable."

I think that the type of film that Sukdhev Sandhu would like to see, that deals with issues and moods of characters that animation tends to shy away from or ignore, is achieved by the likes of Michael Dudok De Wit's short animation Father and Daughter.

I think Miyazaki similarly tries to approach his feature animations with the same emotional aesthetic. At times I don't think his animation is complex enough to display all those nuances of melancholy, sadness, and indefinable moods, but I don't think this is the fault of the stylization.

While I'll agree that certain styles might be more conducive to opening up a character's inner life, that shouldn't mean others couldn't work or for that matter, eventually be more effective. After all, the challenge of animation is to bring life to that which has none.

The kind of films Miyazaki and Michael Dudok de Wit want to make, and that Sukdhev Sandhu would like to see, require a different approach to a Disney film, or a Warner Bros. short, and the animated cartoon is flexible enough to accommodate this.

MB replies: I think you're exactly right about animation's ability to accommodate a great many different approaches to, as you say, "opening up a character's inner life." What troubles me is that so many animation filmmakers have used stylization, in its many forms, not as an alternative means of exploring those inner lives, but as an excuse to avoid the challenges posed by character animation.

Miyazaki, for all his virtues, is guilty of this very sin (as you seem to acknowledge by saying that his animation is sometimes not "complex enough"). As I wrote in one of my first articles on the site, Spirited Away—a film I admire greatly—suffers not from stylization, but from Miyazaki's decision, for whatever reason, to reduce his characters to "little more than ciphers, their appearance and their actions almost wholly dictated by formulas. ... To the extent that Chihiro, Miyazaki’s ten-year-old protagonist, wins our sympathy, it’s not because the animation brings her to life (except perhaps in fleeting moments when she slips into the paralysis of fear), it’s because Miyazaki places her in an environment as persuasively weird as those in the most obvious of his sources, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. But how much more powerful the film would be—how much more involving—if Chihiro had been animated so that she were wholly present on the screen (or, for that matter, if she were a real actress in a computer-generated environment)."

I'm embarrassed to say that I haven't seen Michael Dudok de Wit's films yet, but from what I've read about them, they meet character animation's challenges head on, even though he works within stylization of a particularly austere kind. I hope to see those films soon.

As to why filmmakers as gifted as Miyazaki should have seized upon stylization as a refuge from the sternest demands of their medium, I'm sure that the success of Disney animation and its derivatives is the reason. From the early forties on—roughly the point at which Disney animation ceased any meaningful growth—the Disney films have stood like a monolith in the path of anyone who wants to explore new ways to animate characters. In rejecting the style of Disney animation and character design, though, a great many filmmakers—Miyazaki among them—have also rejected the end that style was intended to serve, namely the creation on the screen of characters who are wholly artificial but fully alive.

I suspect it has become harder to make that distinction in the last forty or years or so, with most Disney animated films—and Disney-rooted films like those from Bluth, Pixar, and DreamWorks—offering a kind of animation that repels many people who care about the art form. This degenerate phase was a long time building, but it bloomed unmistakably in Woolie Reitherman's wretched Disney features of the sixties and seventies. Those films were sanctified by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in their 1982 book Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, which has, regrettably, become a guidebook for many people in animation in the years since.

In the Reitherman films and their artistic descendants, "personality animation" occurs on two levels. On one level, the animator depicts the character; on the other, he instructs us in how we are to regard that character—through the character's self-conscious cuteness, perhaps, or through the indulgent smiles of other characters that are supposed to be responding to that cuteness. Earlier Disney animation was, by contrast, concerned almost entirely with the character itself, trusting that the audience would respond appropriately if the animator revealed the character fully. The difference is huge—and not to the advantage of the more recent films. Too often, the animators of today's films insist through their cues that we care about characters that clearly mean nothing to the animators themselves.

There has been, with this change in the animation itself, a change in the way some of its most prominent practitioners talk and write about it. The tone has been not just smug and self-congratulatory, but curiously ingrown, so that people like Thomas, Johnston, and John Lasseter can linger lovingly over a technically accomplished piece of animation—Thomas's animation of the squirrels in The Sword in the Stone, for instance—without ever acknowledging that the animation is embedded in a dreadful film and may even have contributed to that dreadfulness.

(When I interviewed Thomas and Johnston, they usually responded to my questions with the weary condescension of elderly theologians who had granted an audience to an initiate with only a clumsy grasp of the True Faith. The last time I interviewed them together, in 1987, I asked them in effect why, if the animation in the Reitherman features was so good, the films were so bad. Their replies sounded like answers to a question of some kind, but not the one I had asked.)

It has always been difficult for anyone who wants to make a character-driven animated film to ignore the Disney cartoons. There is now the added complication that so much Disney-derived animation has become a continuing affront, an affront compounded by the willful obtuseness of many of the people who make that animation and profess to admire it. Given these circumstances, so conducive to fury and contempt, it's understandable that filmmakers would be tempted to scrap the whole tradition—the emphasis on a character's inner life, as well as the drawing and animation style—as they try to make films that look and feel very different from anything Disney-related. I hope they'll do the latter, but not the former.

[Posted December 3, 2004]

From Gene Schiller: I like your opinionated style—extreme viewpoints make for good reading. But a few comments.

Regarding Disney's Sword in the Stone [mentioned in MB's reply to Benjamin Sanders, above], I believe I understand your general antipathy, but here's what I think the layman sees: narrative cohesion; amusing, expressively drawn characters; clever dialogue and colorfully detailed settings and effects which help create an aura of magic. This, along with some useful lessons for the small fry, presented without a trace of self-consciousness or condescension. I found it a nice, nay, even flawless entertainment. I can see why Frank, Ollie, and Woolie were proud of it.

I think you underestimate the significance of the human voice. Animated drawings, no matter how realistically rendered, are still animated drawings which can only begin to approximate human feelings and complex thought patterns. The voice is your anchor in reality.

I like your comment on The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie that your favorite scene is the one in which the pencil stroke of the human hand is evident. That's why I like stop-motion. Unlike the more sophisticated product of CGI, one can always detect the human hand, whether in the meticulously crafted figurines, or in the ingeniously contrived sets and special effects. It's the fun of showing what can be done with limited means and limitless imagination.

From John K. Richardson: I'm convinced that there will eventually be the capability for more spontaneity in the acting in CGI films. It just seems to me a matter of ever more transparent and speedy interfaces, which I believe will come in time. (Of course, I'll always want a steady diet of hand-drawn cartoons as well.) In Nick Park's stop-motion work, especially Creature Comforts, the spontaneous nature of the voice work seems to have inspired incredibly natural gestures that defy the obviously meticulous work of the animator's hand. It's irony in motion, and that heightens the humor for me.

About hand-drawn conceptual art for CGI: I think it's natural and good to do it that way. We don't design car bodies by sitting down with pieces of sheet metal and fiberglass to see what we can make of them. It's true that cars could have a nice sort of found-art look to them if we did, but cars need organically conceived bodies (for aerodynamic reasons) and so do most CGI humans (for different reasons). Incidentally, I actually sometimes like the feeling that a stop-motion or CGI film has been laboriously constructed.

You showed a remarkable amount of restraint (which could actually be a sort of super power) in not mentioning some tiny things in The Incredibles that it's true don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things. But as much as I loved the film, I want to at least mention those little compromises to someone. Some of the extras are still so un-cartoony, most glaringly for me in the prologue's b/w shot of angry picketers, and in the school principal (actually a speaking part). In Pixar's last two movies, I was often thinking, "Come on, come on! That could've been so cartoony! I know you guys can do it! I've seen it!"— whether it was a particular background or a character. But that must just be a lot harder in CGI than I realize. It was still a great cartoon movie.

By the way, am I the only one who has thought about Pixar releasing 3D versions of their films? Maybe there are too many "cheats" to make it feasible. But it sure could bring on another 3D craze.

[Posted December 24, 2004]

From Aaron Hazouri: I recently had occasion to see parts of both The Incredibles and SpongeBob SquarePants again. "Parts?" you ask. A group of (presumably) well-meaning fellow art students asked me to join them in viewing the latest Jim Carey flick, of which I could stomach approximately a fourth. So, I wandered in and out of theaters, and I thought I'd send you my slightly revised feelings on SpongeBob and The Incredibles.

SpongeBob is, after all, little more than an expanded television cartoon, thrown up on the big screen (as you noted in your review). While still amusing, SpongeBob is lacking the real wit and cleverness of the best cartoons and relies on fairly easy gags (though I still find many of the drawings entertaining). The Incredibles, on the other hand, did little more to endear itself to me. The emotional conflict between Mr. and Mrs. Incredible, particularly, grated on my nerves; perhaps it reminded me of unhappy memories from childhood, who knows, but their arguments were just a touch too "real," and made the film far less enjoyable to me. That—and Frozone was shamefully wasted! Pixar's films, so far, have been full of wonderful design, great animation, and solid stories, yet still have lacked that certain "spark" that puts my favorite animated films (Pinocchio, Dumbo, and The Iron Giant) a cut above everything else.

[Posted January 9, 2005]

From Bill Benzon: I've seen WALL•E twice and was yawning an hour in, both times. But I managed to get back into the film by the time things ended. I was skeptical about all the pre-release buzz about Pixar taking a risk with a film that goes forty minutes without dialog! The first forty minutes rolled along just fine, surprise surprise. (Remember the pre-Ratatouille hype about eek! a rat?) The film looks good, but I do wonder why they bothered with lens flares in a medium that really doesn't have lenses at all. Well, they're after the look of '70s SF films, that's why. That sort of "realism" seems contrived.

I thought there was a glaring contrast between the realistic textures of the earth-bound scenes and the smooth-bloat of the humans on the spaceship. Some people were bothered by the inclusion of live-action footage; for some reason, that didn't bother me. But the smooth skin of those humans, as though they were blown-up baloons, that was bothersome.

And then there's the ecological message. I understand that there's a problem and it's real real serious; but that understanding is outside the film. I just imported it into the film because the film called for it. Well, that's what I think the filmmakers did as well. This is a boy-girl story about a dorky but lovable boy-robot who scores way above his league in the looks department. That's fine by me. I don't know what that message was supposed to be doing in there, but it didn't articulate with the main action in a way that made in compelling or even all that noticeable in any but an intellectual way. Imagine a Road Runner cartoon in which Wiley Coyote sues Acme Corp. for selling defective merchandise. He looses because the judge is a road runner and thus biased. Road Runner wins again. An effective filmic treatment of corruption in the judicial system? I don't think so.

It's not clear to me exactly what went wrong here. But the complicating action in the WALL•E and EVE story didn't follow from the ecological premise in an interesting way. It was just your standard computer-gone-nuts story. So we've got boy-&-girl vs. the crazy computer for a plot. That ecology stuff is just there clanking around the margins. I mean, the man vs. nature theme of Bambi is far more convincing.

I re-read the Mark Mayerson essay and he's right about the disconnect between the robot plot and the ecological plot. Though perhaps it's even worse than he said it was. After all, WALL•E seems to have benefited from the disaster. As the movie opens the whole world's his sandbox and he gets to spend all his time playing in it. What fun! He's the self-sufficient Robot Caruso and he's doing fine. Yes, he does watch and re-watch the Hello Dolly! tape (and it is a tape, not a DVD), and that, I suppose, indicates that he has a sense of something missing in his life. But it doesn't really grab you; you see that something's missing, but you don't feel it. And you see the lack because you're importing your knowledge of human life into this movie where there are no human beings (so far).

Then EVE arrives. How and why is a mystery. But, as Mayerson notes, it's hard to take his attraction to her seriously. He has no sense of why that plant is important, just that it is. For that matter, neither does EVE. It may be her "prime directive," but she doesn't seem to understand what it's about. It's merely her programming. Neither WALL•E nor EVE have any awareness of what's at stake here. She's just following her directive, and he's following her, mechanically. Without awareness their lives can't intersect with the lives of the humans in a meaningful way. More and more the film looks like an example of what Herbert Marcuse used to call "repressive desublimation." You're allowed to look at the nasty truth just enough to feel that you're doing your duty by the truth, but not so much as to want to actually do something on behalf of that truth, thereby threatening the existing order. "Don't worry, be happy, the cute little robot will save us. Or at any rate, we can feel warm and fuzzy watching him try."

As a cute critter film, this is fine until EVE arrives. That much of the film has no plot, just WALL•E doing his daily rounds. But that's interesting and well done. Once EVE arrives, from that point we have this mechanical plot that just goes through the motions. It's a device from which to hang a bunch of vignettes that just wave in the breeze like wet laundry.

[Posted July 23, 2008]

From Mark Kausler: You came to the same conclusion I did years ago, that this "computer animation" is not animated drawings, but digital puppeteering! Getting a character across or doing really felt-out acting is difficult. It is not to say that it is impossible to make a good picture with the process, but it's more of a hobble than a supercharger. I feel the same way about Flash, it is really puppeteering with drawings.

From Ricardo Cantoral: You were spot on with your review. Pixar is honestly in decline and WALL•E is the sad evidence. The people at Pixar were on the verge of re-energizing the animated feature film, but now they simply are falling into cliches. The WALL-E robot isn't even the least bit animation friendly—it has the stiff limitations of an actual robot. Why would you animate a character with real-life handicaps? In general, none of the film needed to be animated at all, because there isn't a single bit of character animation. The humans simply look like huge beach balls with generic expressions.

The most untentionally hilarious thing about the film is the camera's constantly focusing on WALL-E's and EVE's "eyes." Why? So I can read their emotions? WALL-E's eyes are ere telescopic, reflective lenses. You might as well look at a pair of glasses and wonder what it's thinking. EVE's eyes are simply large, egg-shaped dots.

I guess there's just no hope for feature animation in this country. The future of real art will have to be independent from artists with something to say.

From Thad Komorowski: I want to write up a response about the limitations of CGI, but at the moment, I'd rather just look at some real films rather than subject myself to phoniness.  What CGI will never have is humanity and individuality.  We know it's a Bill Tytla or a Frank Thomas or a Ken Harris or a Rod Scribner scene because their skill, style, and timing is all over it.  I defy anyone to point out individual artists in The Incredibles.  It can't be done.  It's as if a live-action director is using robots rather than actors. Ultimately, it's a form of control that hinders talent and individuality rather than advances it. [Posted July 28, 2008]

From Brian O'Donnell: I haven't seen WALL•E yet. I'll wait for the DVD release but it looks pretty sterile and mechanical to me. I think that the animation of mechanical objects is best left to shorter subjects, like commercials. Cars seemed incredibly long to me. There is something about the suspension of disbelief in animation that lends itself to shorter movies. Seventy-five to 90 minutes seems like a long time in animation, and the two hours of Cars especially wore me out.

From a visitor who prefers to be identified only as "Andy": While I cannot argue with your issues with the plots for WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda (those are opinions), I found the end of your article, "The End of the Line," very interesting—your comment that "What's clear from WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda , as never before, is that computer animation is a dead end, a form of puppetry even more limited than stop motion" When Aladdin, The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast came out, film animation was considered reborn. Faster than you could sharpen a pencil, every major studio executive said, "Animation makes money."  For the next decade, theaters were inundated with unmemorable animated movies.  Slowly, thanks to studio executives, hand-drawn animated films became formulaic. Proof of this lies in Katzenberg's "Ten Commandments of an Animated Movie." Then Toy Story came out.  You can attribute some of Toy Story's success to a fascination with a new medium, but it is a well-made film with a strong story. Pixar followed up Toy Story with A Bug's Life and Toy Story 2.  Studio executives erroneously concluded: "Two-dimensional animation is dead.  Audiences want CG films." As with their attempts to create hand-drawn animation, they felt that the medium would outweigh such things as plot and character. They dismissed strong storytelling and a passion for animation as reasons for Pixar's successful run.

Your comment that I quote above is no less dismissive of the medium of CG animation, even though your list of the shortcomings in the characters and plots of WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda would stand no matter what the medium—hand-drawn animation, stop motion, or another medium. 

You added a comment about Brad Bird: "I wouldn't expect Brad Bird to say so, but perhaps an awareness of the medium's limitations lay behind his decision to move into live action for his next film, 1906."  I wish I could find the quote by him, but to summarize he essentially said that when he has a film he wants to create, he will work in the best medium for that film. That statement summarize what every Hollywood executive and you seem to have forgotten—the medium does not matter. Plot and character do. One more quote stands out from Brad Bird: "It's just happened that the newer, better, fresher stories have been done in CG. If studios idiotically assume that all you need is a computer and someone to control it to get a smash hit, the inevitable headline down the pike will be 'Audiences losing interest in CG films.' Well, no, they won't be, any more than they are particularly interested in them now. Artists make the film, and they either make good decisions or bad decisions, and there’s nothing magical about the equipment. It’s just a tool. And I think the people that will survive are the best storytellers."

MB replies: Actually, where films are concerned, the medium does make a difference, frequently a huge one. Sound versus silence, black and white versus color, hand-drawn animation versus CGI—in all such cases, the filmmaker who thinks "the medium does not matter" is inviting disaster.

A problem with movies, though, has always been that the success of one medium almost invariably forecloses the choice of another, even when it might be best for the subject matter. Would Sweet Smell of Success be better as a color film? Or a noir classic like Out of the Past? Of course not; but in the last few decades color has become a de facto requirement, except when a filmmaker with the clout of a Woody Allen (Manhattan) or a Spielberg (Schindler's List) insists on black and white.

Likewise, CGI is now the default position for animated films. Computer animation is a wonderful tool, and I can readily imagine enjoying both Kung Fu Panda and WALL•E a good deal more if they had been made as hand-drawn films but with a generous and judicious use of CGI, as in Brad Bird's Iron Giant. As I've said more than once, however, I think CGI is severely limited as a tool for animating characters. Perhaps John Lasseter's support for hand-drawn animation at Disney through The Princess and the Frog, combined with his growing reliance on machines as the principal characters in Pixar's films, amounts to his tacit acknowledgment of that limitation.

[Posted August 8, 2008]

From Gordon Kent: I haven't seen Kung Fu Panda. It's more a choice to simply avoid Dreamworks "animation" since I've never been anything more than disappointed—the highest compliment I can give them.

I did seeWALL•E. It is indeed filled with every mistake that's been listed.  It is another Andrew Stanton film, and Finding Nemo was of no interest to me at all.  I didn't care if Nemo's dad found him or if Nemo found his dad...or if anyone found Nemo. I had no interest in him or his problems. There was only one bright spot for me: that was the seagulls saying "Mine!"  I thought that was hilarious. But not quite worth my money or time.

That said, I have to admit that despite all its problem's I was entertained by WALL•E.  I can't explain why. many things about it made me happy in a forgettable sort of way. Not every movie is Citizen Kane. Not every animated movie is Pinocchio.  I like some movies simply because they make me smile.

As to comments written about WALL•E regarding the medium of CG, I had one animation friend point something out to me that may be true—I haven't considered every CG movie to know if it is or not. There has yet to be a truly romantic moment in CG— no kiss like in Snow White or any number of movies. Not even the kindness in the face of the Blue Fairy when she addresses Pinocchio. There is a lot of fun and there are nice character moments—especially in Brad Bird movies—but no real romantic moments. I don't think that real warmth can be achieved—yet—in CG. The moment that I remember coming closest to human emotion is is in Ratatouille, when Anton Ego tastes the ratatouille and is transported back to his childhood

Obviously there is drawing and human control of the CG process.  However, one can't deny that the mechanical part of the process is an intrusion that removes humanity no matter how much care is taken. I'm not sure that one can ever expect machines to understand the peculiar irrationality of human behavior that brings about the intensity of real emotion. Among other things, emotion is what comes about when logic is overwhelmed by whatever life  experience is being lived through at the moment. Can computers ever be overwhelmed during experience? Absolutely. They shut down. You have to turn them off and restart them. A computer can't untangle itself from being overwhelmed like a human being—not even to lash out in anger from overuse.

I don't know if any of that makes any sense at all...but sense is all a computer can make.

MB replies: I think there's some real feeling expressed between the characters in The Incredibles, as when Mr. Incredible reveals to his wife his fear of losing her, and certainly Ego's epiphany is wonderful, but for the most part I agree that the shortage of warmth in most CG movies is undeniable; thus the wisecracking that fills the gap in DreamWorks features, and the sentimentality that serves the same purpose in Pixar features like Andrew Stanton's. And there's also no denying that much of the warmth in The Incredibles is owing not to anything in the animation but to the excellent voice performances (for which Brad Bird's direction deserves much of the credit, of course).

From "Rubi-kun": To be fair, I'm not an expert on the process of animation, so maybe  the animation of machines is simply "effects animation," but if  "effects animation" can create a well-defined character like the bumbling romantic collector-geek that is WALL•E, then I have to say  that it's as powerful as most "character animation." There's a simple explanation for why WALL•E and EVE are more sentient  and, well, human than the humans in the movie. The passage of time  has destroyed the other WALL•E units,so it would make sense that the one  remaining WALL•E would be in the process of breaking down, and part  of that process could be the the breaking down of programming. Since  his programming has become glitchy, he evolves into an individual. As for EVE, well, WALL•E's energy rubbed off on her and activated whatever AI she was capable of.

How does Stanton in the least portray the future setting as  realistic? Grim to some extent, but it's clearly meant as a dark  comedy and not some realistic drama. Right from the beginning the  juxtaposition of "Put on Your Sunday Clothes" to the giant trash skyscrapers was strange enough to be both funny and a bit creepy in  the context of the movie but purely in the realm of comic  exaggeration (though once they get into space, the scenes with the  human globs aren't that far removed from the realm of possibility, which increases both the laughs and the creep factor).

And on the other side of the spectrum of large to small, the videotape WALL•E watches is a Betamax. Have you ever seen a Betamax tape fall apart over the years? Have you ever seen a Betamax? A small detail like  that is clearly just for the sake of humor and not be taken oh-so- seriously like you seemed to think the movie was supposed to be. The  movie is sentimental because WALL•E is a sentimental character, but it's primarily a comedy and a satire.

And a damn good one at that. I have to say I enjoyed WALL•E more than  any Pixar movie to date, with the possible exception of The Incredibles. Rewatching the film might put things in perspective more  for both of us, but still, I think you might have misinterpreted some parts of the movie.

MB replies: Actually, I've owned one or more Betamax VCRS for many years, and I still have one (and a number of Beta tapes with cartoons not yet available in other formats). And then there's the laserdisc player and the shelf full of laserdiscs...

I continue to resist the idea that WALL•E is "primarily a comedy and a satire." I can readily imagine the story as being presented in that way—especially in a hand-drawn film with some resemblance to Futurama—but the prevailing tone in WALL•E, as reinforced most emphatically by the music, is entirely different, dominated by romantic longing. My most serious problem with WALL•E may actually be that, as he did in Finding Nemo, Stanton tries to have it both ways: here's a satirical comedy, if you want it to be one, or a unique love story set in a somber but plausible future, if you want it to be that. For me it succeeded as neither, emerging instead as a very cold contrivance; but I will indeed see it again, when it appears on DVD, and my opinion may change.

From Roberto González: I really did like the 20 first minutes of WALL•E. I agree with you about the animation; those characters are more limited than any others Pixar has used. But they tell the story surprisingly well, and it was actually like watching a Buster Keaton film during the first half hour, even though it was more like a live-action movie with remote-control robots than an animated one.

But there was something about the design of the humans that really didn't work. I like cartooniness, and even the idea of humans being really fat in the future, but these characters didn't work within the realistic textures of WALL•E. Once the human plot started the movie lost most of its interest. It's an odd movie, and I doubt it is one of the best animated movies ever or a sci-fi classic, as some reviewers have said. It's too limited to be the first thing, and too simple in its story to be the second.

I actually enjoyed Kung Fu Panda. Yes, it's not believable at all that Po, the panda, could win the fight with Tai Lung, and that could have been managed a little better. There are actually some things in the fight that are connected to his previous training, and it's kind of believable for a moment, but then they just go "what the heck" and Po seems to know a lot more than he actually should know. It wasn't very logical, but I found it kind of funny. It's an entertaining movie even with its simple plot. And I did like that it didn't become way too serious. For example, I really enjoyed the fact that Po, even after defeating Tai Lung, is still panting when he has to climb the stairs again. He doesn't become a perfect hero at the end of the day.

Also I really did like the visuals. You say there is a lot of talking, and I agree, but in some scenes the film is visually funnier than other CGI efforts, and more cartoony. The comedy style may not differ much from Shrek, but the designs and visual style make the gags a lot funnier to me. And most of the gags are actually related to the characters and the story.

MB replies: To give Kung Fu Panda its due, I did enjoy it a lot more than I enjoyed WALL•E. In Imax especially, it's a very good-looking movie. It's by no means a bad film, just too formulaic in its story, and too predictable in its animation, to be very interesting.

[Posted August 18, 2008]