Film writer extraordinaire, James Rocchi — this time wearing the hat of resident film blogger for Redbox — has penned a passionate open letter to Pixar Animation Studios that is a must-read for fans and non-fans alike. I think both of his concerns are valid points.
Here is the meat of the piece (mind you, Rocchi never met a period he liked):
I’m worried about two things that seem a lot more institutional, and a lot harder to shake. The first is, bluntly, why can’t you guys seem to write strong female characters? With the notable exception of The Incredibles’ Mrs. Incredible (who was voiced by Holly Hunter) and Violet (Sarah Vowell), your female characters are ether dead, irrelevant, under-written or absent. And all your directors are male, too. Both those things are going to change with your upcoming The Bear and the Bow — about a young woman in a fairy-tale take on Scotland, directed by Brenda Chapman — but you’ve got to do more than that – up the bench strength for women on both sides of the camera, with more opportunities for characters and more opportunities for female writers and directors.
The other problem, I have to be just as blunt about, and it’s inspired by the Up press conference where I watched Up’s director Pete Docter express faith in the limitless possibilities of animation: “Animation’s a medium, not a genre.” Well, that’s a nice thing to say; it would be a more interesting thing for you to really follow up on. And right now, all you at Pixar seem to be doing is churning out PG- and G-rated family-friendly adventures over and over again. Which is great — there’s a need for well-made children’s entertainment — but I wonder if anyone at Pixar ever dreams of pitching people in charge an amazing computer-animated Western of mythic proportions or a stunning hard-knock science-fiction action film full of things you simply couldn’t do in live action, or a horror film that involves the scarier version of the kinds of creatures your animators showed they could create with the cute, cuddly Monsters, Inc.
The bit about a Pixar “Western of mythic proportions” strikes me as brilliant. Get on it. Please.
Comments
14 responses to “Taking Pixar to task”
Those ideas sound brilliant. But I think a lot of it has to do with Disney, something he is completely forgetting about. CGI horror from Pixar sounds awesome, but how profitable would that be? Half of me wishes Pixar had the freedom to do whatever they wanted.
He’s not forgetting about that, MJ. Actually if you go to the full post, he expresses that point toward the end.
I’d like to chalk up 1 for Eve, who was 1 of the most powerful characters in the movies last year. She went from being an indifferent snob to being completely love-struck. The 2nd 1/2 of Wall-e after Wall-E is broken completely focuses on Eve’s horrified desperation to get him back together.
There’s this problem with animation that if you have something that could have been done in live-action, people are always gonna say why not just make it in live-action. That’s why they cant have normal human dramas, there has to be some sort of fantastical element in the story that justifies the use of animation as the tool for making it. That sort of does limit them to animals and inanimate objects but they did try something ground-breaking with Wall-E but those ideas are hard to come by.
Come on, Eve is hardly a strong female character. She’s a robot used as a device to get the main character from point A to point B.
Yes. That would be the first Western I’d literally clamor to see.
I’d say Eve is a strong female character too.
Pixar is a family studio, but they(‘re) making PG-13 stronger fare at the studio, with their team, and just releasing them under one of the other Disney subsidaries. Both 1908 and John Carter are being worked on at Pixar, but Pixar’s name won’t be on either. So Pixar is expanding, just not in an obvious way.
My biggest Pixar complaint so far is that all their people look the same – the style from movie to movie is never THAT different, and I think they could broaden it up.
Personally I felt Eve was a very strong character, plus Dory was the funniest character in Finding Nemo. And while she didn’t have a lot of screentime, I felt Ellie was an deep character and her presence had a huge impact in Up.
Agreed about the female characters bit, but computer animation is terribly expensive (the budgets of these movies keeps going “up” – zing!) and a computer generated horror movie or western would just not be viable.
Shame, cause that’d be damned interesting.
Ben: You’re describing characters as emotional currents in films, not necessarily individuals with fleshed out characteristics.
I can’t imagine Pixar being Pixar if they branched out into pg 13 or R films.
How about letting Pixar do what they want and be happy they even exist.
Heaven forbid a little criticism for the untouchable Pixar.
A well written and very profound opinion. I think there’s definitely something there BUT as long as none of the other animation studios manage to get even close to Pixar and Pixar releases one film a year that is guaranteed to be the best animated film of the year and at least one of the critics favorites they shouldn’t change a thing.
Let them first be an inspiration to others, because that is the real problem here. No one even tries to achieve their level of brilliance.
As much as I would like to see Pixar take a risk, other filmmakers have taken that risk with unique animation. Most notably, A Scanner Darkly and Waltz with Bashir.