A-113?

A friend on Facebook pointed out this article: 

DISNEY HAS BEEN HIDING A SECRET RIGHT IN FRONT OF OUR FACES.  IF YOU'VE NEVER NOTICED IT, HERE'S PROOF.

It's far more innocent than we might like it to be (especially if you've just read Leonard Kinsey's new book, which will be the subject of the next blog post...)

Take a look!

*****

Disney Has Been Hiding A Secret Right In Front Of Our Faces. If You’ve Never Noticed It, Here’s Proof.
Read more at http://www.viralnova.com/disney-a113-secret/#hK3k6YgY4FGd0EmF.99

Disney Has Been Hiding A Secret Right In Front Of Our Faces. If You’ve Never Noticed It, Here’s Proof.
Read more at http://www.viralnova.com/disney-a113-secret/#hK3k6YgY4FGd0EmF.99

Disney Has Been Hiding A Secret Right In Front Of Our Faces. If You’ve Never Noticed It, Here’s Proof.
Read more at http://www.viralnova.com/disney-a113-secret/#hK3k6YgY4FGd0EmF.99

Disney Has Been Hiding A Secret Right In Front Of Our Faces. If You’ve Never Noticed It, Here’s Proof.
Read more at http://www.viralnova.com/disney-a113-secret/#hK3k6YgY4FGd0EmF.99

The Pixar Theory - blog on Pixar Universe

Blogger Jon Negroni has a theory - all Pixar films exist in the same Pixar universe.  He has written a pretty cool piece detailing how every film is connected to the other films.  There are some stretches in there, but it still makes for some interesting reading.

Here's the link to his piece: The Pixar Theory

There's also this piece that shows that FROZEN and TANGLED take place in the same universe, but you probably already knew that.  

And this one that suggests who Andy's mom (from TOY STORY) is.

It is a fun blog, pointed out to me by my sons and it has already given me a bunch of entertainment reading over his posts.

*****
Please take a look at my book DOING DISNEY, available for Amazon Kindle at $2.99.  Thanks!

*****

Old WALL-E review/commentary

I don't usually do this, but I was scanning back-posts at my Journalscape blog and found this long-ish review of the Pixar movie WALL-E that I wrote on July 9, 2008 and thought I'd repost it here in its entirety.  So go ahead and read on if you're interested in my take on that movie back when it came out...

I took my two boys to see the newest Disney-Pixar movie, WALL-E, yesterday afternoon. I was expecting to be as charmed by it as I have been by most of the previous Pixar films, including such offerings as CARS, FINDING NEMO, TOY STORY (1 and 2), and RATATOUILLE.

And I think WALL-E was as good as those movies (and maybe better in a lot of ways), but not nearly as charming. I don't know how to explain it...I think those other stories all take the Disney formula (if you don't know that formula, no sense in trying to explain it) and used it with their own unique twists. And they've worked, so much so that they are really the class of Disney animation currently, and have been for a long time, since the days of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ALADDIN.

But - it's a much more complicated story than any of those. It's FAR less happy than any of them, far less funny, and more touching in a lot of ways. It's also more of a dystopian SF adventure than anything I've seen previously done by Disney. (I wonder what that will mean to repeat business for this film - while I liked it, I can't see going back to the theater to see it with the kids like we have done for other Pixar films...)

(THIS SYNOPSIS LIKELY CONTAINS SPOILERS - READ AT YOUR OWN RISK...)

In case you don't know, Wall-E is a little robot whose name is an acronym (exactly for what, I can't remember-waste allocation something something - Earth). He's the last one of his kind to still be operational, to still be functioning in his task to clean up the waste and garbage left on the planet by humans as they've abandoned their planet for a life in space. He's a fairly low-tech looking thing, yet he has intelligence and self-awareness. He is lonely, as you might expect, with only a cockroach as company for who knows how many of the last 700 years. Yet he goes about his tasks diligently, compacting and stacking trash into skyscraper sized piles all around the city.

Into this world comes EVE, a sleek "female" robot whose "directive" is classified. Fortunately for Wall-E, she doesn't vaporize him immediately (I wondered about her defensive responses - was she programmed to find monsters on Earth? Why is she so quick to shoot first at anything that moves?) and after he follows her around for a long time, the pair of robots fall in "love", or something like love at least.

When Wall-E is showing her his treasures, artifacts from humanity's past that he's collected in his day to day toils, he presents her with something different - something he hasn't come across in a long time. A small living plant. EVE's response is dramatic. She seizes the small plant, places it inside of her metallic body, and goes into a sort of catatonia. On her body a green leaf flashes over and over. And sure enough, soon the ship that left her comes to collect her, and she is being delivered to wherever she came from originally. And of course, Wall-E can't let her go like that; he chases her down and ends up going on a trip through outer space to her final destination: the star cruiser Axiom with its cargo of humanity.

And herein lies more dystopian elements. Humanity has changed - low gravity and a life of leisure has turned them into a bunch of lazy blobs who are content to be waited on hand and foot by their robot tenders and don't even think about life or interaction with each other. Their captain is a pleasant but seemingly not too "bright" blob voiced by John Goodman. (John Ratzenberger makes his usual appearance as a passenger who is forced to interact with others by Wall-E's intrusion into their daily existence.) The Buy-N-Large Corporation is the benefactor in all of this - the corporation is the entity that built the robots, that sent humans into space to live while Earth is supposedly being cleaned up, and that promoted this lifestyle in the first place - a sort of bad guy who isn't really even there anymore.

Of course, Wall-E and EVE save the day, getting the plant to the proper place which results in the ship returning to Earth, against heavy resistance from the robots who now seem to embody the Corporation. It's a touching conclusion at times, watching the humans get back on their feet, literally and figuratively, and relearn the joys of living, as the captain watches Wall-E and EVE dance through the space around the ship, and as the passengers are forced to interact with each other and simply act to save themselves. The captain outwits his robot overseer in the end, and humans return to Earth, which is not really "ready" to receive them but which needs their attention to be reborn. All very optimistic, at the end, and positive.

It's a cautionary tale, however, warning against a lot of things - not the least of which is excessive consumption, corporate greed and a trend toward indoor (computers, video games, big screen tvs, etc.) entertainment vs outdoor activity. It seems to warn against technological achievement just for the sake of achievement, with no attention to the good or bad results of such achievement. Maybe most of all it warns against the current trend of not looking beyond tomorrow. I think there are some heavy social and political themes buried in the cartoon medium within which director Andrew Stanton and Pixar work best. Probably a lot more of them than I'm getting to here...I think someone could expand on a lot of these things and dig far deeper into this story than I've done.

And that, by itself, is very unusual for a Disney or a Pixar type story. So, while WALL-E is not nearly as charming or uplifting as other Disney fare, it is certainly deeper and more socially aware than almost anything they've done in this medium to date.

I probably won't see it again in the theater, but will likely buy it when it finally comes out on DVD, and I'm thinking I'll enjoy it then, too. Meanwhile...I'll just have to content myself with playing the Wall-E video game with my sons...;-)

*****
Please take a look at my book DOING DISNEY, available for Amazon Kindle at $2.99.  Thanks!

*****

Disney Film: FROZEN

Finally, a couple months after its theatrical release, we made our way to go see the Disney animated feature, FROZEN.  The impetus behind getting to see it this past weekend was that both of my sons will be playing selections from the film in their respective school bands.  Both wanted to see the movie, hear the songs, and get a feel for what was coming. 

I expected to like it.  And I did.  I have to say that I liked it a lot, more than TANGLED, or WRECK-IT RALPH, or any other recent Disney animated film.  I liked it more than I liked BRAVE, actually, and that's saying a lot.  More than MONSTERS U, also.  Disney Animation has finally outdone Pixar, or at least outdone some of Pixar's efforts. 

The film had a lot of heart.  But then again, Disney's never been bad at tugging at the heartstrings.  They know how to do this movie.  They know how to do the humor, the sympathetic characters, the villains, the plot twists...

This movie has all of those things along with a plot that isn't one hundred percent about having the girl end up with the prince.  Deservingly, it took home the Oscar for best Animated Feature last night. 

The short, featuring a vintage Mickey Mouse, was fun, if a bit repetitive by the end.  (It didn't win in the animated short category, I noted.)

I'll be buying it on DVD/BluRay, and I may even download some of the music.  A couple of the songs were among the best from Disney animation.

*****

Please take a look at my book DOING DISNEY, available for Amazon Kindle at $2.99.  Thanks!


*****

Disney Film: MONSTERS U

Took the boys to see this one a couple of weekends ago, and I (and they) thought it lived up to its billing.  As good as the first?  Not quite.  But pretty darned good, with a fun, interesting story to tell.

And yes, John Ratzenberger does his scene reprising his character of the Yeti, who is a mailroom guy.  Funny, huh?

Pixar doesn't stumble too much on this prequel to MONSTERS INC. 

The short film (the name escapes me) with the umbrella love story was very well done as well. 

*****

Disney Film: Pixar's BRAVE

I went to see this one over the 4th of July holiday, when the temps in Chicago were hitting 100 degrees.  Didn't know what to expect; the previews really didn't get me that excited about the story, but after Up I vowed to never doubt Pixar again.  (Still, some bits of doubt were creeping in.  Cars 2 was good but didn't knock me out.)

What I found was a movie with the same "heart" as Up, to go along with the same degree of humor and the same great story.  The story of Merida, a headstrong teenaged princess in feudal Scotland, seemed to me to be brimming with true-to-life, if exaggerated, qualities of teens and parents everywhere.  Merida wants to determine her own path, and her mother wants her to do what she is required by law to do.  Merida's wishes (like many a teen in real life) that her mother treat her more like a person and less like an object or a slave (from the teen's point of view) are taken a bit too literally by the overzealous witch in the woods (or is she just evil?  Not sure!) and Merida's desire to "change" her mother does not work out the way she wants it to. 

I read a review, just before seeing the film, that Merida was Pixar's first attempt at a female heroine, and in creating her they fall into the trap of making her too like other Disney princesses.  Could she be Rapunzel?  Tiana?  Belle?  Jasmine?  I don't know.  She didn't "feel" like those others to me.  This wasn't a classic fairy tale to me.  It was more a story about the evolution of a daughter's (or even a son's) relationship with her mother (or parents in general).  I felt there was some depth to it, especially for my pre-teen kids, who loved the movie. 

The three little brothers provided much welcome comic relief, and they were my kids' favorite characters.  The caricatures that served as the men of the other clans were also quite humorous, maybe more to me.  There weren't a lot of jokes aimed over the heads of the kids to the adults in the audience (like there are in a lot of Dreamworks' pictures - and I do appreciate that about Dreamworks products). 

I think it was a worthwhile addition to the Pixar collection of movies, and while not quite reaching the heights that I felt Up reached, it was a nice way to spend an afternoon in the hot city!

*****

Disney Film: Experiencing TOY STORY (the first) again

Last night, the Disney channel was showing Toy Story in prime time, and when I got home from work, my boys were planted in front of the TV watching intently. I sat down across from my wife at the island in the kitchen, and I noticed that she continually shifted her attention to the action on the screen.

Finally I sat down between the boys and let myself get pulled into the movie again. It is far from my first time watching it, and it is not my kids' first time either. But the film is simply entrancing. It grabs you and you can't not watch!

I came in too close to the end, really. Buzz and Woody were in Sid's room, trying to escape before he awoke. Then there is the scene where the toys break the rules, and then the frantic chase to get onto the moving truck. Finally, the happy ending and the arrival of the puppy.

If I were to relate the story to someone totally unfamiliar with the movie, they'd probably say, "well, that's a nice story" or something like that. But the movie transcends the simplicity of the tale. It becomes something so much more, even today, after seeing Pixar's digital magic worked over and over, and seeing digital special effects that blow your mind! When it came out, the technology to create such a film was new, but Pixar infused it with something more than tech savvy - they gave it heart - the same heart that we see in so many Disney releases.

*****

Steve Jobs: The Walt Disney of Technology

As everyone probably knows, Steve Jobs passed away yesterday, October 5th, 2011, at the age of 56. He's been battling cancer for at least 10 years, and though I haven't seen anything yet about the exact cause of his death (not because it isn't out there, I just haven't had time to look that much), I'd assume it was cancer-related.

I have read commentaries and seen news reports suggesting that Jobs is the Einstein of his generation. I don't know. There are different types of genius. Einstein was a genius with physics. He could see through the equations to the extension of our reality that we call "special relativity" today. But I don't really think he was a genius in terms of people skills.

A more apt comparison is probably to the 'raison d'etre' for my and many other blogs, Walt Disney himself. Walt was a genius, not because of his great artistic skills, not because of his intellect in academics, but because of his feel for what people wanted. Walt gave people animated feature films when the prevailing wisdom held that no one would ever go sit through a cartoon of that length. Then he built these things called "theme parks" that the experts felt would never succeed. They did succeed, beyond anyone's wildest expectations, because of Walt's special genius - a gift for knowing what people liked and wanted.

Steve Jobs had this same type of genius. He didn't invent the first Apple computer; according to what I've heard, Steve Wozniak was the one who built it. He didn't invent mp3 players, or cell phones, or tablet computers. But his genius was in recognizing the potential of these devices, and how they would relate to what people actually wanted and needed. He led in shaping the direction of these implements, and others have followed, but Steve Jobs' genius has placed Apple firmly at the forefront of their development, a step ahead of their competitors.

He also exhibited his genius when he saw Pixar for what it could be. George Lucas HAD Pixar in his pocket, but didn't recognize the potential there. Jobs did. Jobs let those boys work in the direction they wanted to go, recognizing the quality of what they were doing, and gave them enough time to succeed beyond their wildest expectations - eventually being bought by Disney and making Steve Jobs one of Disney's largest (if not THE largest) shareholders.

To Steve Jobs, the Walt Disney of Technology and one of those rare folks who are legitimately known as a genius, rest in peace.

*****

Disney Film: CARS 2

We made it to the theater to see Cars 2 in 2D over the weekend, and as usual, Pixar produces a winner. Lots of laughs, good plot, and great animation. The scenes from Europe (Paris and Rome) made us want to book our flights to that destination right now!

All of the familiar voices returned, as far as I could tell, to voice their characters again, except, of course, the departed Paul Newman, who voiced Doc Hudson. I was happy to see the way they handled the character - with respect and reverence, almost, and I knew it was an homage to the incredible actor who voiced Doc. Michael Caine was perfect as the British super-spy car Finn McMissile.

I can't say I loved it as much as I loved the original Cars movie, which almost took me by surprise with how good it was. That was back when I was still capable of doubting Pixar, and now I just say "it'll be a good one," when I hear they have a new release coming down the pipe.

It's perhaps a bit of a departure for Pixar as they tackle the classic spy story in their own way, and perhaps this story is a bit more of a Dreamworks-style "ensemble" movie and less a buddy movie than some of their previous outings. Mater takes the lead in this one, with Lightning McQueen being a bit of a supporting character, as so many characters play important parts in the story. Lightning, Finn, Holly and the rest of the gang all are important to Mater's adventure. It's sort of like one of the shorts rather than a typical Pixar movie.

Still, a very enjoyable box office experience.

*****

THE LOST HERO and TOY STORY 2

We popped Toy Story 2 into the DVD player on Saturday night and I watched it with my two sons. I was sort of surprised; it was like watching a new movie for me. I was certain I had seen it before but I guess I must have stopped watching at some point, for some reason. The ending was unfamiliar. I mean, I sorta knew what was going to happen but I don't remember ever seeing any of it.

I know, from reading THE PIXAR TOUCH and from reading comments about the movies, that a lot of people thought that the second of these movies was better than the first. If I'm not mistaken, one reviewer, back when it came out, stated that this was the "rare sequel that surpasses the first film," or something to that effect. I can't say I agree with that. I'd say it was my least favorite of the three. But it was still an excellent film, and ranks right up there with all the other Pixar movies.

*****

A while back I wrote a couple of posts about "Should have been Disney" or something like that. We picked up The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan last week; it's a continuation of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. It's published by Disney Hyperion Books, like the rest of the series were. And it's a really interesting, well done continuation to this point. (I'm about 200 pages into it now.) I suppose I could call this part of the post "Probably can't be Disney" since I'm sure that whichever studio it was that made the first Percy Jackson movie has the rights to sequels and characters. But I'll repeat: This series would have made an excellent addition to Disney's movies and to the parks, too!

*****

That's all for this Monday.

*****

Pixar vs. Disney

I've been thinking a lot about what I learned as I read THE PIXAR TOUCH, and was amused to consider the origins of both businesses. Disney's origins are in a far flung past, when things were different. Pixar's origins are more rooted in a near-past from which things have not changed all that much up until today.

Walt started the Disney Brothers Studios on a shoestring - he had virtually no money, except for a few hundred dollars from his uncle and whatever he and his brother could plow into the business. He had arrived in Los Angeles with virtually no money, but he did have a mostly finished print of his Alice film. Using this print, he was able to get a contract to deliver short films to a New York distributor and, as part of the contract, get some advance money to allow him to hire a few people and finish the one he had and film and produce more of them.

Walt struggled to keep things afloat in those early days, but it was the newness of the medium that really allowed him to begin. There was not a lot of competition in what he was producing at the time. Yes, there were places doing some animation, but not too many of them were trying to combine story and animation as Walt was doing. He sold his productions as he made them, and was paid for them as he sold them. He took chances, gambled on animation being capable of far more than anyone thought it could ever be. Later he gambled that an amusement park could be far more than anyone thought it could ever be, too. Both gambles paid off big time - SNOW WHITE and Disneyland resulted in huge successes for his company.

By contrast, Pixar really began in college laboratories - first at the University of Utah, where computer graphics were being developed, then at NYIT, where the administration (in the person of wealthy entrepreneur Alexander Shure) shared Pixar's founders' filmmaking aspirations.

While it seems that both companies started with something "new" (animation, more or less, with Disney and 3D computer graphics/animation with Pixar), it also seems that the computer 3D graphics takes a LOT more money to get started. Hence the private origins of Disney, while Pixar had to exist as a division of something first. The hardware needed for the research that eventually made Pixar's products possible was cost-prohibitive except to a larger organization. So Pixar by necessity had to start under the auspices of a institute of higher learning, then continue its existence as part of Industrial Light and Magic. It finally earned its independence when Steve Jobs bought them for around 5 million dollars. And even that was not true independence - because Catmull, Lasseter, et al, still had to pretend that their hearts were in the hardware side of things.

So what is analogous today, or in the near future? I don't really know - I'm not an avid reader of those tech magazines that might be writing about the next big thing - but I wonder if it will be something that we can all do on our laptops, or is it going to require even greater technology than 3D computer graphics did at their inception? Walt needed a camera, but he could get cameras at pawn shops and in equipment liquidations by photo houses and such, and while it may have been a struggle, he could swing it. No way could Pixar have afforded the computers that the first digital projects were done on - the Cray computer system that Pixar "borrowed" time on to make Lasseter's The Adventures of Andre and Wally B. costed 10 million dollars at the time.

Most of the computers we take for granted today have greater computing power than the Pixar Imaging Computer that was so powerful (and expensive!) in its day. While I'm sure there is a "next step" to be taken, and probably to be taken by someone outside of the major studios, I'm not at all sure when it will happen or what direction it will take.

Thoughts?

*****

Book - THE PIXAR TOUCH by David A. Price

THE PIXAR TOUCH: THE MAKING OF A COMPANY, by David A. Price, was a fascinating look at the history of Pixar, who we all know is making animated feature films for the Walt Disney Company these days after Robert Iger and Steve Jobs were able to come to an agreement that made Jobs the largest Disney shareholder by a wide margin, made Ed Catmull the president of both Disney and Pixar Animation, and made John Lasseter the CEO of both organizations, as well as principle creative advisor to Walt Disney Imagineering.

But that merger/acquisition is the culmination of a much longer story, and really is nowhere near as interesting as Pixar's history as a company. For example, I had read that Pixar started their existence as a hardware company, but I really didn't know what that meant. The more accurate way of portraying things, according to Price, is that Pixar was always a company, from the moment Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith joined together in New York at the New York Institute of Technology with Alexander Shure as their wealthy patron, that was primarily focused on using 3D computer animation to make a feature film. It was Catmull's interest and it was Shure's interest as well.

The company ended up at Lucasfilm when that organization hired Catmull to head its new computer division. The only trouble with LucasFilm was that George Lucas did not see computers or 3D computer graphics as the future of filmmaking; he saw computers as a tool that could make film production easier, faster, and of higher quality.

The technologies that Lucas was looking for - digital film compositing, digital audio mixing and editing, and digital film editing - existed, for the most part, only in Lucas's own fertile imagination. Catmull would just have to dive in and cope.

Their breakthrough came in 1981 when they were contracted to make a short sequence for the STAR TREK film, THE WRATH OF KHAN. The scene where Kirk, Spock and McCoy watch a simulation of the so-called "Genesis Device" - an animation of a world being consumed by the device and finally coming to life anew as the device worked its magic - that was the one of the first real scenes in a movie that was computer animated entirely, and it was done by Industrial Light and Magic - or more specifically, by the computer division of ILM. The first Pixar film, really.

In late 1983 the group had an opportunity to hire a Disney animator, someone who had just been let go by Disney. You can guess who this was - of course it was John Lasseter. The trouble was that George Lucas did not see his computer division as a filmmaking unit, he saw them as a computer group. Lasseter, an animator and a born storyteller, didn't really fit in. But it didn't stop Catmull and Smith from getting him on their payroll; they gave him the title of "Interface Designer" and they were off to the races.

Can you tell by reading, so far, that I was fascinated by the company's history? The author does a fine job of detailing that history, through Steve Jobs' purchase of the company from LucasFilm, from Jobs' own reservations about the company's ambitions as filmmakers, from the money they lost for Jobs, and finally, for the money they made for him, and for themselves.

But Pixar was never about money, and doesn't seem to be about money today - they are about artistic achievement in 3D computer animation. The book details the progression of their skills and their technology from the first TOY STORY movie, through CARS and RATATOUILLE. The epilogue talks about WALL*E and about the state of the principle characters since the Disney merger/acquisition.

I couldn't put this book down - it rivaled some of the best fiction I've been reading lately. A must read for anyone interested in animation history, in business, in filmmaking, or in Disney.

*****

Book Post - THE PIXAR TOUCH by David A. Price

*****

Really, I don't have much to say about this today, except that I purchased this title yesterday at my local Borders (33% off coupon and some money left of a gift card offset the $16.00 cover price) and just barely started it last night.

It promises, I think, to be a very interesting portrait of the personalities at Pixar as well as at the company itself.

I'll be posting more about the book when I finish it...

******