Next batch of Pixar films after the Monsters Inc. prequel

for pixar, this is a crazy low metascore
http://www.metacritic.com/movie/the-good-dinosaur

I asked my kids today if they wanted to see it, and they responded with a firm and resounding "no."

The opening cartoon, Sanjay's Superteam, is 1000x better than the movie.

I hadn't heard about this short. It does look pretty cool.

However, this is how I first heard about it - from Facebook:

My mom and I (& J___) just walked out of "The Good Dinosaur." It was too scary and kinda gross for J___'s age in our opinion and even if he wasn't there we wouldn't have liked it. Wish we would have seen the chipmunk movie or something instead. AND there was a horrible short film beforehand that we were subjected to...this dad is bowing and praying to Allah, then then there's all these scary gods...some three headed monster looking thing...then ultimately the little boy draws these gods as his superheroes. It was demonic honestly and had it been a Christian short film I bet people would complain...

Well thank heavens it wasn't Christian, otherwise, I'd have to listen to dimwitted people complain.

My kid and I really enjoyed the movie. I mean, if you've got a 5-year-old or something and they like dinosaurs, there's really no reason not to go. The opening cartoon (about a hindu, not muslim, father and son) was amazing as well.

there is a scene with a stegasaurus that seems to be left over from some other, more fun version of the script; he has different animals on his horns and names each one and explains why they are there, and it is a rare moment of real humor;

This was a styracosaurus.

Gotta watch out for any of those religions that worship three-headed deities, I mean....

http://i.imgur.com/TFKVtSR.jpg

Oh wait, nevermind.

Chaw's review couches this as an existentialist western. Fun read, at least.

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2015/12/the-good-dinosaur-the-revenant-the-hateful-eight.html

just saw Inside Out, cried a fair bit, beautiful little film in my eyes

yeah it's wonderful. good dinosaur on the other hand

What's going on? Some message board invasion type thing?

it's just relentless, 1-star review after 1-star review:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673/reviews?ref_=tt_urv

but they're only 0.9% of the ratings:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673/ratings

took the kid to see Inside Out at her school's movie night and can't say I enjoyed it's Inception-meets-Herman's Head claptrap. Kind of a bad idea to have your characters be one-dimensional by their very nature, since it means they can't change or be interesting over the course of the movie. and the central conflict was so arbitrary (here let's make up a bunch of rules about how the inside of a brain works!) it felt like nothing was at stake.

idg why people like Pixar movies I guess

Characters not changing over the course of the movie doesn't really describe any Pixar film? I mean, it's usually really obvious from the first ten minutes: "Mike / Nemo's Dad / Joy is going to learn to loosen up and enjoy life more", but it's pretty much always there.

I was referring specifically to Inside Out, where the main characters are all literally one dimensional emotions

you're meant to put the glasses on

But . . . they do change by the end of the movie. The whole movie is Joy's character arc!

She comes to understand why Sadness is important! And Sadness gets more integrated into the spectrum of emotions!

she realizes that Sadness has a role to play in like the last 10 minutes and that's it, hardly a ton of depth there

xp

#neverforget

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyPdW4kxVZA

but as characters in their own right I did not gaf about Sadness, Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust - they were all more or less one-note jokes, with Joy simply a narrative focus necessary to move the (again, almost totally arbitrary) action along.

xp

shakey i 100% agree with you abt inside out and the desperate situations they put the characters in became tiring... one toy story 3 inferno scene after another it basically became self parody

xxxp wow you mean a movie's plot was resolved in the closing minutes rather than at the beginning or somewhere in the middle? What kind of screenplay sorcery is this?

but as characters in their own right I did not gaf about Sadness, Joy, Anger, Fear, Disgust - they were all more or less one-note jokes, with Joy simply a narrative focus necessary to move the (again, almost totally arbitrary) action along.

Maybe they should have expanded those characters, perhaps by looking inside their heads at what makes them tick...

I found it charming and quite an unusual 'story' (less so the main adventure; I do have less time for 'we go here, then we go here' journeys).
Realising the role of Sadness is the main thrust of that story!

it is the main thrust of the plot resolution but it is not a particularly interesting character development or character trait for Joy. Joy's character traits are a) she wants Riley to experience joy and b)... nope that's it. at the end she realizes its necessary for Riley to experience other emotions. So her one identifiable trait shifts. real quality character conception/arc there.

idk maybe you guys don't care about characters being relatable or interesting or nuanced. it is possible to have those things in a children's film, and this film didn't have them, because the underlying concept of the film was so literally pursued and constraining.

the conclusion to the "exciting" adventure at the end of inside out was a totally out of nowhere deus ex machina type bullshit ending. like they obviously wrote themselves into a corner and just threw it in there. it sucks. i mean its for babies and babies probably like it so thats fine.

I was referring specifically to Inside Out, where the main characters are all literally one dimensional emotions

Yeah that's why I specifically mentioned one of the characters from the film. Were you drunk when you saw it? I mean, it's fine if you were drunk, but maybe check the wiki page before the post button.

Like, none of this is complicated? Joy focuses too much on the importance of being joyful, like you know a lot of the prevailing culture, but painting all your memories with joy is not really how people work, sometimes sadness has a purpose, particularly in relating to other people who are sad - teenagers can lose access to joy and sadness when they feel fucked up by life? Nothing here is really that complicated to follow?

its ok to be drunk for baby movies.

xp okay I see you posted a bunch while I was writing that - I don't think I disagree with you as such, but I dunno, have you seen a bunch of Pixar films, that you don't get why people like? It's not Ibsen, it's generally a straightforward "bad things happen, it'll be okay" with characters designed to be relatable to kids, and subtext that keeps adults up at night. The subtext here is a lot closer to text - Hey your kids will grow up and have their own emotions - but the characters are literally designed to be one emotion each: was that shocking?

it's not exactly shocking that a bunch of shitty screenwriters would ignore the fact that they're writing themselves into a corner with that premise, no.

I've seen a handful of these movies, not a ton. As far as CGI kids movies go, I liked the first couple Toy Story movies. Wall-E was terrible. Saw Zootopia (yes I know that's not Pixar) last week and that was much better than Inside Out. I liked the Lego movie. I can't think of any others I've seen off the top of my head.

I love Pixar films and a huge number of the better lauded animated films, but I could not get into Inside Out at all, and can't imagine sitting through it again. Don't even think my two kids have ever brought it again, either, and in fact actively forbade me from taking them to see "Good Dinosaur." But the Pixar adjunct team behind "Ralph," "Tangled," "Zootopia," 'Frozen" and "Big Hero" have been killing it even as Pixar descends into sequel hell. Didn't like Monsters Inc 2, didn't like Toy Story 3, trailer for Finding Nemo 2 looks like nothing but callbacks (and, more importantly, the animation doesn't look better than the original, which is 13 years old and still looks stunning).

Inside Out is the new "on loop" movie at our house (5yo girl) having succeeded Fantastic Mr. Fox and Frozen. I'm pretty happy with this although now she asks "Why did Bing Bong fall back out of the rocket and fall back down?" and neither of us can really answer it because it's too hard to explain while trying not to cry.

Little kids get this movie on a straight comedy level, apparently. When we first saw it and were evangelizing it to some of our friends I learned that kids Riley's age and up (into the twenties) all seem to take it along the lines of "yeah, seems about right" but as noted in that one review, parents take it somewhere between a gut punch, a good (but not great) stand-up routine and a roller coaster, and in all cases, you know what's coming and you still cry/laugh/scream despite how rote all the elements might be.

Finally saw The Good Dinosaur. I approve!
It's a great children's film, less aimed at adults than most of Pixar's movies. Some of the photorealistic nature animation is incredible - interesting contrast with the character designs, which are as cartoonish as you can get (often too much). Probably a third of the movie has no dialogue, or one character talking effectively to a dog, and there's a well-created sense of loneliness and longing I found touching. Was afraid this would be another Cars or something, glad to report it was not, and willfully misadvertised as such.

And as others have said, the Sanjay's Super Team short is very good

finally saw inside out..it was so dreary to take the infinite possibilities of this concept and just make it the same adventure park theme ride as wreck-it ralph. endless urgency and conflict. jumping. falling. big things tumbling.

like when joy and sadness were clinging to the ledge at the climax and the other emotions were trying to figure out how to break the glass and they used the flames from anger’s head to melt a hole in the glass. like..why was there glass? and why would anger have actual flame? which do they have to cling to a ledge to climb back in? why does this imaginary world have earth gravity and physics and chemistry besides lazy screenwriting?

it’s depressing to imagine a kid imagining their subconscious like this. “i’m gonna be late for the train!”

also the character models were hideous and charmless and just looked like fungus and mucus commercial mascots.
http://www.depirrogarrone.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/lamisil__0001_Layer-1-480x360.jpg
https://d6u22qyv3ngwz.cloudfront.net/ad/7LH8/childrens-mucinex-bad-cold-forecast-small-5.jpg
https://rwalck.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/jublia.jpeg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a15jJgt6wE8/ViJ75euKxCI/AAAAAAAAKm4/tWCxn72BGn4/s1600/Myrbetriq-bladder.jpg
https://www.healthyoffers.com/sites/default/files/products/Rapaflo%20image3_0.png

what is that last thing, a testicle?

His name is Deez.

More like Dis

No thoughts yet on Finding Dory? Took my little one to see it at the weekend, think I enjoyed it more than she did.

There's a bit here - Pixar to Disney: Drop Dead - I liked the movie overall, but there was a scene at the end of Finding Nemo where they've lost Dory, and she's terrified and bewildered, and then they find her hooray the end. And I found that scene very affecting, and the ghost of that scene haunts the movie for me.

I'm aware that I dodged the main concerns of FN by neither being or having a kid.

Also wandering around Sydney Aquarium yesterday, the kids are having none of the idea that those fish are called Clownfish and Blue Tang.

So going back to the original post we've known about this for years:

UNTITLED DÍA DE LOS MUERTOS

Director: Lee Unkrich
Producer: Darla K. Anderson

From director Lee Unkrich and producer Darla K. Anderson, the filmmaking team behind the Academy Award®-winning "Toy Story 3," comes a wholly original Pixar Animation Studios film that delves into the vibrant holiday of Día de los Muertos.

...and we finally have some details:

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/12/06/pixar-coco-cast-plot

First, the voice cast: Benjamin Bratt and Gael García Bernal will lead Coco alongside newcomer Anthony Gonzalez, who will voice the film’s main character, a 12-year-old Mexican boy named Miguel. Gonzalez was hired after serving as Miguel’s scratch voice during early development, proving himself indispensable to both the filmmakers and the character. Character actress Renée Victor also joins the cast as Abuelita, Miguel’s grandmother.

However, to understand whom Bratt and Bernal are voicing, it helps to get a little context. What’s Coco even about?

Coco follows the secret musical ambitions of Miguel, who resides in a lively, loud Mexican village but comes from a family of shoemakers that may be the town’s only music-hating household. For generations, the Riveras have banned music because they believe they’ve been cursed by it; as their family history goes, Miguel’s great-great-grandfather abandoned his wife decades earlier to follow his own dreams of performing, leaving Imelda (Miguel’s great-great-grandmother) to take control as the matriarch of the now-thriving Rivera line and declare music dead to the family forever.

But Miguel harbors a secret desire to seize his musical moment, inspired by his favorite singer of all time, the late Ernesto de la Cruz (Bratt). It’s only after Miguel discovers an amazing link between himself and De la Cruz that he takes action to emulate the famous singer and, in doing so, accidentally enters the Land of the Dead.

Abuelita, Miguel’s grandmother
Miguel, who resides in a lively, loud Mexican village
Abuelita, Miguel’s grandmother
Miguel, who resides in a lively, loud Mexican village
Abuelita, Miguel’s grandmother
Miguel, who resides in a lively, loud Mexican village
Abuelita, Miguel’s grandmother
Miguel, who resides in a lively, loud Mexican village

The next Pixar movie after that will focus on a streetwise East London paperboy Guvnor and his grandpa Old Geezer, and their comical attempts to avoid the Morris Dancing festival in Shoreditch.

dude we're already used to Hollywood documentaries about Real England

I'm so confused. Half of this sounds like a really lame version of The Book Of Life without the crazy supernatural stuff & framing devices that made that movie awesome

The other half just sounds really stupid and terrible

... how is this thing actually getting made? it sounds like a total rip off of Book of Life (which was great)