There's a good video on YT about it - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhXJe8ANws8
(e.g. "Oh BooBoo, how did you get on the shelf you silly cat?")
If an actor instead said "No, the cat wasn't on the shelf, the cat wasn't even in the room" the skit ends awkwardly.
“Let’s change everything” - depending on context - can be a no to the premise. It’s the same as the Pixar idea - improv is about making your scene partners look good by supporting their choices, and building on them in turn.
Having the ability to be in a situation or see something that is just okay and go, "Okay well it's not perfect but that is okay. Can I make it a little better?" is really helpful. It also makes life a lot less frustrating.
They lack a singular vision in their films, there are no auteurs at Pixar: just art by committee. This isn’t to say that their stories are bad, though they are sometimes lukewarm. Except for the Pixar level of excellence in the visuals and animation, which to be clear are admirable on their own, I feel that their movies lack identity. I wouldn’t want their model to become adopted by everyone.
They love and study Miyazaki but don’t seem to trust any one person to direct a film. Everything must be put through a committee.
I would very much prefer a CG animation course by them. Or a full overview of their pipeline, asset management, USD implementation. Their technical chops are probably best in the world.
Maybe they could do something like release a public version of Presto. Or help out with animation and rigging code with the blender foundation.
I feel e.g. Cars franchise has limited vision. They're "allright", but not spectacular. I'm OK never seeing any of them again, even the first one.
On the other hand, I find Monsters Inc. a unique movie with a unique premise, and I can rewatch it regularly - with or without the kids 0:-). I also don't find it particularly sad. Inside out does indeed have a large dose of melancholy, but again I feel is a unique idea taken quite far without dilution.
(there are absolutely movies that are way more avant garde or quirky or surreal or even "creative" inasmuch as that can be objectively compared - but Pixar has two distinct audiences to cater to and they HAVE to be entertaining and attention-occupying to children; while inserting content that also keeps adults interested and even thoughtful - that's a specific set of constraints that e.g. "Love Death + Robots" does not have)
And if we look at their entire portfolio, the Pixar Shorts again have some absolutely brilliant, touching, "single idea executed to perfection" entries.
Before they sold to Disney, they were going to start making more mature films alongside their children’s entertainment. I was very curious about Ray Gunn. I think if Disney wanted it then Pixar could definitely make an incredibly compelling animated movie with mature themes. I mostly find myself disappointed with them these days.
(I find whenever I bring this up online quite a few people come at me with this idea that they are making mature films, and that the line between children’s entertainment and adult is imaginary, as though most kids could sit through something like The Rules of the Game or Tokyo Story.)
But to be clear, I’m still mostly a fan of their work but mostly for their technical mastery.
me too. the incredibles was pixar's high point of storytelling imho. of the first six films, i liked the toy stories the least. a bug's life, monsters, inc., finding nemo to the incredibles was like a crescendo of animation, reaching a satisfying zenith of art. cars, which came next, was ok (but unoriginal for storytelling, the characters were mostly great!), but then ratatouille through inside out were all groping for relevance while nakedly harvesting their reputation. of the last 8 movies, only coco has been worth watching so far (i haven't seen the good dinosaur or soul yet). so perhaps a quarter of their 23 films have been good enough to watch again for me; contrast that with the studio ghibli collection, nearly all of which are imminently re-watchable (spirited away is an absolute masterpiece).
And thus doesn't that mean that the stories are merely vehicles, like mechanical means to transport.
Most of the other nodes are more technical in nature. Might be closer to what you were hoping to find.
Up's primary theme was the importance of letting go of the past to focus on the future. Soul was that you don't have a divinely foretold purpose in life other than living your best life. Inside out was about recognizing the importance of negative emotions- and that while joy is good, sadness is not bad. A lot of these are heavier and more mature than you'll find in a randomly chosen piece of fiction intended for adults, but I wouldn't say they're sad so much as thought provoking.
Some of it is really bleak. I mean, a fair bit of soul is a guy realizing he wasted his life, and then died right before doing the thing he thought would give his life meaning. But like... Grappling with that feels like a really meaningful conversation to have.
edit: although I don't feel as strongly for their sequels. To some extent I find they phone some of them in...
- some sort of "buddy" movie
- some sort of "we only have x amount of time to solve our crisis we got into"
- the two buddies have some sort of big fight
- the two buddies make up
- stronger than ever, they overcome this crisis right just before the buzzer.
Maybe its because they don't do it in their shorts (or its because they can explore ideas more), but I think their shorts they have are really some of their best story telling.
Buddies fight and, having acknowledged their primary character fault, reconcile, is one that is everywhere in children's fiction. I also find it boring.
These tropes aren’t new inventions, they go back into thousand year old myths, so it does seem like they really do appeal to the human brain, ie the Campbell monomyth/hero’s journey.
Letting go is a unifying theme in Up but my problem with the movie isn’t that it’s bad but that you had a table of all the guys at Pixar spitballing scene ideas and then glueing them all together. The result just feels episodic, in a bad way, and commercially manufactured. Up is a really good movie but I don’t want every CG film to have the Pixar preproduction process. (And I still think they are a bit overrated and that the technical side of their creative teams are doing most of the heavy lifting.)
That's the impact that I recognize with Pixar, a movie a like Soul and an Auteur like Pete Doctor.
You can write a lot of good stories that way, but you’ll never produce, say, Aguirre.
A heavily structural approach is also better suited to teaching in a video series. Much easier to teach craft than vision.
The original pitch might have been absolutely groundbreaking, but for what ever reason one of the producers didn't like a character, and pushed for it to change.
All movies are a collaboration. there is no such thing a single "author" on a movie, its always team work. Sometimes that team is aligned to the same vision, other times not, and a compromise has to be hashed out.
> Their technical chops are probably best in the world.
They were ground breaking, but up until recently they insisted on making their own version of everything. This was fine in the early 90s when there was no other option. But now there are better tools out there. Thats not to say that all their tools suck, far from it.
I've got a book i ended up getting in a free box of books. It's some fantasy novel.
It's probably the worst book i've ever seen in print. Everything from the description on the back to the font choices, sometimes four or five in different sizes on one page, to the actual writing reads like something a child would write.
Curious about how such a thing could exist, i looked into it more. Turns out it was a self published book edited by the author's wife.
Now this next part is speculation...
But you can almost picture his wife trying to edit this thing and the author just being like, nope we'll keep it my way.
Like, basic spelling and grammar mistakes, terribly worded sentences, a story that made absolutely no sense.
The thing is, getting past it all, there were some good ideas in there and likely, in the hands of a good editor and publisher, it could maybe have been turned into an alright, if still not that great of a book rather than, i'm not actually exaggerating here, literally the worst book i've ever seen.
Another example that just kind of popped into my head while writing this, the original drafts of star wars.
https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWarsCantina/comments/afvlzk/lin...
I've read some of them and honestly, they were pretty bad, like scyfy movie bad. Without the team of screenwriters and editors that worked through those drafts, we'd probably have no idea what 'Star Killers' was other than some weird cult scifi b-movie with a dedicated fan base of a few hundred people that get together once a year, get drunk, dress up as their favourite characters and complain about how nobody understands just how great George Lucas and Star Killers is.
And then Spaceballs would never have been made and that just woulda sucked a whole lot.
Except when their stories end up not being very good at all. There's a lot of variability in what they produce, to be honest, so I am not sure if their "process" is a robust as they would like us to believe.
Edit: Added "original"; some of the sequels are not great
It's ironic because The Good Dinosaur would be a good example of them taking a bet on a somewhat unique vision (a dinosaur spaghetti western?) with a more mature outlook, and then getting shit on by reviewers because it wasn't as funny or charming as Inside Out.
Worst for me would be Cars 2 and in the context of general films, it's still okay.
TBH I keep forgetting that movie exists. It was such a weird moment for them.
I also will say I went to watch it without having seen the original Cars, so perhaps I really had no expectations for the film (other than it was a Pixar film)?
The weird thing is that Cars has this emotional center around facades and regret and abandonment and the differences between the journey and the destination and it's this beautiful look into a town that got bypassed. And more to the point it has this emotional weight that was still really accessible to a young me that a lot of other kids studios didn't really trust kids with (except for like Miyazaki films and stuff).
And then Cars 2 was a mistaken-identity spy movie a la Johnny English or Get Smart. I don't doubt it was an entertaining movie or something, but it felt so outside the Pixar brand, like something Disney or Dreamworks or any other studio would make.
It was also the first sequel outside of the Toy Story series, from a studio that somewhat famously refused to do sequels if the world didn't have more story to tell.
Like I said, it was just such a weird departure to do seemingly do a sequel just because the world was popular enough.
Maybe that's why they wanted to do it, to try something different?
I have always found the Pixar Shorts to be some of their best story telling. They don't have a lot of time, and don't seem to be afraid of trying new ways to tell a story, or a different type of story.
This course looks lovely. It's great for KA to have this kind of material and not just calculus tutorials (as much as I personally appreciated the calculus).