Pixar to Disney: Drop Dead

I'm more of a Wallace and Grommit man.

speaking of jack black... "skidoosh!"

I love pixar but I couldn't make it past the first 10 minutes of Cars...

i got high hopes for wall-e.

Why did they decide to make a sequel out of one of their poorer efforts? I mean, it is not like they don't have enough amazing movies that you really wish there was more of.

I'm guessing it's for the money.

has anyone read the pixar touch? is it good?

http://www.amazon.com/Pixar-Touch-Vintage-David-Price/dp/0307278298/

So I guess Pixar's hand was forced to do sequels, but surely they could have come up with something more inspired than Monsters U.

Pretty long article here
http://www.wired.com/2014/10/big-hero-6/
Thing I had to notice was that chart comparing Pixar to Disney film grosses - notice how Pixar's have gone down while Disney's have increased. Not coincidentally since Pixar has been doing lackluster sequels...

Didn't know about this:

But it wasn't all bad: While at Disney, Lasseter saw an early computer-animation test for Tron and it blew him away. “It was very simplistic, but a door opened up in my head and there was this incredible world beyond it,” he says. “I kept thinking, ‘This was what Walt was waiting for.’” Lasseter started an animation test—hand-drawn characters in computer-generated backgrounds—and began developing an idea for a computer-animated feature about forgotten appliances at a summer cabin waiting for their owner to return. Lasseter pitched the idea to the top brass. It was rejected. “The only reason we'd do computer animation,” Lasseter was told, “is if it was cheaper or faster.” Immediately after the meeting, he was summoned to the office of the manager of the animation department and told he was out of a job.

Lasseter was mortified. “My entire self-identity, even as a little kid, was based on this dream of working at Disney,” he says. “It just was so crushing to be fired from the place of your dreams.” He didn't tell anyone that he'd been let go—not even his wife, Nancy. Instead, he said that he'd quit to pursue computer animation. (It wasn't until Disney bought Pixar, more than 20 years later, that Lasseter finally admitted the truth.)

With Lasseter in charge of the entire animation division now, it seems like there's been a slow transformation of the main studio into the new Pixar.

Exactly - this article's the first time I'm hearing it explictly

assumed this was about this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/29947502

Toy Story 4 is a go....if they do it well I suppose that's fine (and I have a hard time believing Lasseter would let anyone fuck this particular franchise up) but still.

but still what?

I wish all film series would replicate the Toy Story formula re: increasing qualitative returns.

Haha, nice scare quotes - 'exciting' new film
man, maybe Pixar is just getting stretched too thin - Lasseter actually directing TS4 himself too

TS 2 was poor though.

Discounting TS3, Pixar's last great film was Ratatouille, 2007.

This run of Cars 2, Brave, Monsters U and Nemo 2 has been terrible in comparison to Disney's very good run of Tangled, Wreck it Ralph, Frozen.

...nobody take the bait there

I liked Finding Nemo 2, myself. The characters were much more thoroughly developed this time around and, although I thought all of the hardcore fucking was going to put me off, it really worked in context.

This run of Cars 2, Brave, Monsters U and Nemo 2 has been terrible in comparison to Disney's very good run of Tangled, Wreck it Ralph, Frozen.

I actually agree! Ralph and Tangles are great, seeing the new one tonight. I still think Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc and Toy Story 2 were peaks. Rest sort of a scramble, save Nemo 2, which was amazing and surprisingly hot, for fish.

Anyway, it's not a coincidence that as soon as Lasseter ported over from Pixar to Disney proper, Disney movies starting getting better and Pixar started getting shaky. It's telling that Pixar postponed a bunch of stuff; I believe we are in the middle of the longest gap with no Pixar films.

What is Brad Bird up to?

his neck in lawsuits

(j/k)

a reboot of a disney theme park area starring george clooney

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrowland_(film)

In November 2013, scenes of the film were also shot at New Smyrna Beach, and the Carousel of Progress attraction at Walt Disney World in Florida.

On February 5, 2014, additional filming took place at the It's a Small World attraction at Disneyland in California.

it was originally named 1952 but why promote something you don't already own

"This run of Cars 2, Brave, Monsters U and Nemo 2 has been terrible"

Nemo 2 isn't even out yet!

Brave is good and I liked Monsters U fine.

Monsters U was so lazy. Hey, it's a slobs vs snobs comedy! For kids!

Premise

Frank (George Clooney) and Casey (Britt Robertson) travel to a place somewhere in time and space only known as Tomorrowland where their actions directly affect the world and themselves.

Imagine, if you will, a land where your actions directly affect the world and yourself. Did I blow your mind?

Did I mention that this land is somewhere in both time and space? Yeah. Wrap your head around that one.

i want that exact description to be the standard form for all wiki "plot" sections for films w unconfirmed plots

Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) travel to a place somewhere in time and space only known as Captain America: Civil War where their actions directly affect the world and themselves.

wistful lol btw @ ned upthread calling the unreleased incredibles "the closest we'll ever get to a watchmen-style film"

the grim thing i guess is the idea of an escapist fantasy about your actions affecting the world

Clickhole is fast these days: http://www.clickhole.com/article/toy-story-coming-back-and-time-andy-toy-1374

"Mr. Potato Head is now a real-life 4-foot-tall potato man who’s constantly ripping off parts of his face and moving them around"

apparently rashida jones is writing

Just saw Tomorowland teaser! Looked good, for kids.

Big Hero 6 was beautifully designed and executed boilerplate. Given the amount of work that goes into these things, it's a wonder the scripts are not tighter and less lazy before they hit go. It felt a bit like an ambitious movie that had gone through several destabilizing reshoots, which is ironic.

Lasseter started an animation test—hand-drawn characters in computer-generated backgrounds—and began developing an idea for a computer-animated feature about forgotten appliances at a summer cabin waiting for their owner to return.

This is actually Thomas Disch's story The Brave Little Toaster. Disch later sold it to Disney.

Big Hero 6 was good stuff! I think I still have low expectations for Disney features, because I thought it was pretty great - some wonderful animation showpieces and generally solid character development and story for the main two characters (less so for the rest of the team, but they were amusing enough sidekicks).

I wish they had cast Sam Waterston for the professor though because COME ON, he looks and sounds JUST LIKE HIM! I guess James Cromwell is good enough.

The thing that I guess really bugged me was how easily they did basically ... everything. Quick montage: tada, cybernetic microbots by the millions! Another montage: tada, super battle suits! Another montage: Wall-e gets a kung fu upgrade! When things come that easy, there's really no drama, and it makes you ask things like: why doesn't he just make more microbots to battle the bad guy? Or a headband that negates the other headband? Or a robot designed to fight microbot man? And so on. These are minor compared to the glorious animation, but there was just so much of it it all added up.

And speaking of which, lots of just showing off the animation flash at the expense of story. Hey, we've finally got battle suits, let's get the bad guy who killed my brother, but first ... let's fly around and have fun! The fun aspect of it over-dominated the stuff about grief and mourning, imo. Sort of the way "Up" begins with such real heartbreak but ends with flying talking dogs.

Also can't figure out why they had to make the surfer dude a secret billionaire. Hero was financing himself just fine, so it's not like the revelation did anything but give them a location to do another training montage.

Liked the update of the ET gets drunk sequence a lot. And the "Feast" short was beautiful to watch.

Did anyone else know that "Tangled" is apparently (at least) the second most expensive movie ever made?

That's weird. What the hell is up with that?

cgi catering costs

CGI hair costs, more like. Still, that's nuts.

the animation style was supposed to be novel (cgi + traditional), and the film was in development for six years. the development thing in and of itself isn't noteworthy (the concept for wreck-it ralph first came in the 80s), but in this case it might have included some false starts in production as they worked out the animation style.

I saw snippets of the unfinished movie at Disney World maybe a year or so before it was released and it looked completely wretched. Like sub-direct-to-video animation. So I'd say that's a fair guess.

some anecdotal info here

http://wagthemovie.net/2012/04/21/tangled-the-most-expensive-animated-film-ever-made-part-2/

i'm not super informed about how they do accounting in animation, but it seems possible that if there was some experimental tech they were never going to use on another film, it could have been expensed entirely on the budget for this, rather than amortized over several