Whither Pixar?
Thursday, September 19, 2013 at 11:00PM 
Tim here, with what we might call, to steal a phrase, a burning question. Or at least a terrified, desperate question with rage tears streaming all down my face:
What the hell is happening with Pixar Animation Studios?
By this point, I imagine most of you have heard the news that The Good Dinosaur, the studio’s second film out in the future, has been pushed from May, 2014, to November, 2015. This coming just a few weeks after the announcement that Bob Peterson, a writer and storyboard artist with the studio since forever, had been taken off what was to have been his solo directorial debut with that same project.
This has had all sorts of fun ramifications for the company, including the inexplicable Finding Nemo sequel Finding Dory being pushed to May, 2016, to make room for The Good Dinosaur. 2014, at the moment, will end up as the first calendar year since 2005 without a Pixar feature release, while 2015 will be the first year ever with two (assuming that Disney doesn’t end up announcing that Inside Out is to be rushed out ahead of schedule). The Good Dinosaur doesn’t have an announced director yet, and nobody knows whether or not Peterson is staying with the studio in any capacity.
It will be, of course, two years and change before any of us are actually able to judge whether any of this will be for the good of the film: it’s entirely possible that there really were irreconcilable story problems that needed far too much work and fresh blood than could happen in the initial time frame. One thing that’s almost certain, given how tight-lipped Disney and Pixar are about their internal politics, we’ll never know what Peterson’s The Good Dinosaur was meant to be like. That’s not really what I wanted to rant about, anyway.
The problem is that this isn’t at all new behavior: The Good Dinosaur is at least the fifth Pixar film to have a director changeover midway through production, and the fourth one in a row. 2011’s Cars 2, this year’s Monsters University, and most noisily, 2012’s Brave all went through the same upheaval, and they are all widely, even universally, regarded as being among the worst films in the studio’s output. So if it truly is the case that the executive logic is that those films needed to be “fixed”, the earlier versions must have been problematic indeed – who wants to imagine a version of Cars 2 that was worse than the one released to theaters?
It is very hard, in other words, to give the studio any benefit of the doubt at all. It’s been just a handful of years since the run of movies that ended with Toy Story 3 – the platonic ideal of an apparent cash-in sequel that turns out to have been motivated by real artistry and sensitivity – but the days when a commanding majority of critics and animation fans took the name of Pixar as an ironclad guarantee of quality seem like a distant, naïve memory, and developments like this are exactly the wrong sort of thing to restore that kind of faith. Once a creative haven, Pixar has become mired in safety-tested formulas and groupthink, less invested in protecting its brand name from failure than in insulating it from any kind of unconventional thinking. Would Brenda Chapman’s Brave have been any good? Who knows? What’s certain is that it would have felt less like every other Pixar film, and it’s hard not to want to know what that would be like.
To be fair, this isn’t just Pixar’s problem. Big-budget filmmaking as a whole feels more indebted to safety-conscious decisions that are designed more with an eye to making sure that new movies feel as much as possible like other movies that were already hits (the careful buffering out of individual personalities in the Harry Potter films and the Marvel Cinematic Universe leap to mind), and the biggest budgets only ever go to sequels, or to adaptations of road-tested stories. In the wake of The Lone Ranger, it’s hard to feel like the studios don’t have a reason for this conservatism, but anodyne, one-size-fits-all movies (now obliged to play in cultures as widely different as the American Midwest and urban China) are boring, even the well-made ones.
Until the last couple of years, I’d have never called any Pixar film “boring”. Even Cars 2 can’t be rightfully described that way, though most other negative adjectives fit just fine. And maybe this is all paranoia: maybe The Good Dinosaur really did have huge problems, and the final result is now going to be better than any of us can possibly imagine. But that’s not what Pixar’s rhetoric is saying. Instead, they’re telling us that they needed to beat The Good Dinosaur into a form that everybody could sign off on, admitting in almost so many words that this personal project had to be run through a committee in order to make sure it felt like everything else the studio has made. Maybe the results will be worth it, but it doesn’t sound to me like it’s going to be good for the imagination of the film’s creators or the imagination of its audience, and it’s the continuation of a trend that’s made the former best movie studio of the 2000s feel increasingly industrialized and lifelessly market-driven.
Reader Comments (15)
Jesus wept.
(And by Jesus I mean Whatever God loves the movies.)
"Brave" is amazing and seems to be more underrated by the day. So what if it doesn't feel like a typical Pixar film? If it only had Disney before the title, people wouldn't be complaining. It would be like "Tangled," which it very much is a sibling to.
We're really lumping Brave in with Cars 2 now? The pendulum on Pixar reactions has swung so far the other way - from blind adulation to reflexive negativity - that I wish everyone would just take a step back and relax. The observations about the conservative, movie making-by-committee attitude dominant in Hollywood are correct, but they ignore the fact that Pixar has ALWAYS subjected the personal visions of its artists to group approval - surely we all remember the once vaunted Pixar Brain Trust, no? The problem here is that Pixar has been forced into a more industrial production schedule - a film per year - in a world where animated films take three or four years to make, start to finish, and their top remaining directors - Stanton, Unkrich and Docter - are all between films. The past few years have been a perfect storm, commercial mandates requiring the studio to elevate untested talent to shepherd films through, with deeply inconsistent results.
If The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory and Inside Out are all lousy movies, formulaic and risk averse and drained of any individual spark, I will (un)happily concede the points raised here, but, you know, can we all just take a breath and go watch The Incredibles again and relax?
Is this a function of the Disney acquisition? Surely the 'old hands' like Docter and Bird can still be their best creative selves without living in mortal terror of risking damage to "the brand." Unless I missed something and they are no longer with the firm?
The same thing happened with "Ratatouille" and that turned out very well.
Jonathan -- i think his point is that he worries that Brave is trying too hard to feel like another Pixar film. Who knows what it could have been if they'd let Brenda finish it.
Raul -- yep. But why does it keep happening. Like Tim i worry that something is fundamentally wrong inside if this is now the way it's done, happening more and more. (sigh)
I clarified things at length a bit more in an earlier draft, but allow me to do so now: it's not that I don't like Brave, for in fact I do. But I certainly feel that it's less interesting than it sets out to be, and the changes made to "normalize" it are jarringly obvious as you're watching.
Also, I feel worst about it in the wake of Monsters University; instead of a fine movie with some compromised elements, but hardly worth getting upset over, it's more of a "oh, this is how you're doing things now, huh?" situation.
I'm going to stick up for the general consensus of Brave -- which is that it's pretty lousy. I don't like that the relationship between the mother and daughter, which is the core of the film, is underdeveloped. Or that the mythology is clumsily shoehorned in. Or that the witch issue is never addressed. Or, most egregious, the way every male character was a sophomoric moron and the whole subplot involving them retarded and unnecessary. Or that the character trait of the bow and arrow went fucking nowhere. And now I'm getting more angry...
But back to the issue at hand, it's true that Pixar often start over when they feel something is not working. The problem is that they have never started over this late, where by all accounts the movie was nearly finished. Cars 2 sounded like Lasseter taking back his own baby, which he should have lead from the start. Ratatouille and Monster U had their directors changed very early--that can be blamed on story problems. Story problems, especially at Pixar, are fixed very early on. But replacing a director so close to release sounds like some executives let Bob Peterson do his own thing, then recently saw a rough cut of the film and suddenly realized marketing wasn't going to like it. In other words, it sounds like executive meddling. When the original mastermind behind a project gets taken out, it's very rare that it could ever be construed as a good thing. Remember Bolt?
It could be worse, Pixar could be facing the same problems of DC Comics.
http://comicsalliance.com/dc-comics-new-52-batwoman-harley-quinn-dan-didio-editorial/
I have to agree with some comments that while these problems are worrisome, I do feel as though people have been a little too hard on the latest crop of Pixar films. While certainly not reaching the heights of Up and Toy Story 3, I thought that Brave and Monsters U were perfectly fun films.
I don't think that taking a director is the death knell for a project (Ratatouille is still my favourite Pixar), but as the writer of this post said, the frequency with which it's occurring is troubling. Hope for the best, I guess?
Tim: I'd argue that it's Harry Potter and DC Comics Adaptations that Aren't Batman that suffer from this bizarre over safety, as opposed to the MCU. Remember, their vision of Hal Jordan was, pretty much, a re-skinned Maverick and Superman was twisted to become as close to Batman as possible. No, the MCU isn't going to give us anything approaching Burton's VERY radical and fleet-footed Batman adaptations (though the Guardians of the Galaxy might get close to the amount of darkly hilarious fun in Batman Returns), but they're also not going to give us something as painfully boring as "It's Maverick...IN SPACE."
Tim: And in addition to the Green Lantern movie being "Maverick...IN SPACE", it's also "Maverick...WITHOUT THE HOMOEROTICISM THAT MADE TOP GUN INTERESTING."
Roark, thank you for writing that post so that I don't have to. Everybody needs to chill the eff out until we actually see these movies, then we can judge. I'm starting to get nostalgic for the days when we only learned that the animated films we so loved were born out of major behind-the-scenes drama long after the fact.
By the way, yes I am an unashamed cheerleader for the movie but if "Brave" truly is "widely, even universally, regarded as being among (one of) the worst films in the studio’s output" then I say PIXAR's doing pretty damn good.
I think Pixar has always been a "by committee" place in spite of there being a credited director that takes the helm. This probably has been happening a lot because the committee doesn't agree with the direction of the film. Pixar doesn't view their films as auteur-created but rather a creation of Pixar. Of course there are pros and cons here. One con being that the edges become smoothed over, which seemed to have happened with "Ratatouille" which was supposed to be a little less glossy and cuddly. It does seem troubling that what has happened to "The Good Dinosaur" happened so late in the game. You would have thought that whatever issues they may have had would have been addressed earlier.
at least they didn't scrap it altogether like NEWT. I still wonder what happened with *that* one.
Nathaniel - Supposedly, "Newt" (which, according to the concept art since released, had great potential to be the cutest thing ever) was canned because they didn't want to throw a third "Two animals who are the last of their kind need to mate or they're doomed" animated film into a world that already had "Rio" and "Alpha and Omega" in it. So you can shake your fist at Blue Sky and Richard Rich (what?!?) for that.
As far as "Good Dinosaur", this is going to make me sound like That Person, but I would feel a thousand percent better about this movie if they announced they were dumping the human characters entirely. Because (a) I don't need humans for me to relate to in a dinosaur movie, but more importantly (b) right now it looks an AWFUL lot like "The Croods", "Ice Age", etc.