Stars: Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Helen Mirren, Peter Sohn
Director: Dan Scanlon
Oscar History: Somehow this became the second Pixar film to miss with Oscar, giving it a zero on the Oscar nominations count.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars
So when Cars 2 came around,
and landed their first major misfire, it seemed inevitable. However, Brave, despite an odd critical backlash after everyone initially liked the movie (I blame it
on sexism, and would get into how female-centered entertainment regularly get
trashed by the media regardless of quality and initial reception, but that’s an argument for another
article, and one that I write frequently with the Bechdel Test), seemed to
indicate that there was something of an upswing for the studio.
But now, here come the sequels, and I think it’s dark days ahead for
the studio, and more importantly, its fans (it can’t be so dark for Disney when they’re
still raking in billions). Monsters University received relatively
robust reviews, but I think that’s just because the public and critics were
desperate to applaud Pixar for not making a movie as bad as Cars 2.
The movie, however, leaves much to be desired. The plot, taken from a thousand
interchangeable “enemies before they became friends” movies, has Sulley, a
naturally talented scarer who is too cocky for his own good, and Mike, who is
not a naturally scary character but is desperate to learn, and of course they
butt heads constantly and eventually become the friends we grew to love in Monsters Inc.
What the film is missing, though, is the sense of wonder that all of
the other great Pixar efforts managed to inflect on its audience. Perhaps because it doesn’t deal with
children or children’s related things, but instead on that most cynical of
times (your late teens, an age that even animation can't disguise that both Goodman and Crystal haven't been in in forty years, and it hurts their performances badly), so it loses a lot of the charm of the previous film. The movie is less focused on an overall
plot, which gets muddled as the movie goes along and has far too many twists,
turns, and calamities for its 103 minutes to handle without feeling bloated.
Instead, the movie is too divided between slapstick comedy for the kids
while occasionally winking at the adults with clichés from high school movies
(with the jocks, the nerds, the Goths, and the pretty girls, you almost expect
Simple Minds to start playing over the credits rather than Randy Newman). The movie is tired, and long, and while
occasionally funny and visually arresting (one of the few bright spots was
Helen Mirren’s gargoyle of a Dean, not so much because Mirren is perfect, if
typecast, but because her dragon-lady visual is something you actually
remember longer than two minutes outside the theater), it never overcomes the
fact that it feels so…unnecessary.
The Toy Story films always
felt so linear, and such a beautiful tale of growing up. This movie never escapes the feeling
that it shouldn’t exist-Monsters Inc was
such a fine, complete sentence of a movie. It didn’t need this parentheses attached to the front of it.
So where does that leave us with Pixar? It’s hard to say.
On the one hand, Finding Dory has
me deeply worried, as that film even more than Monsters Inc seems to have been a perfectly solid one-film only
movie that didn’t need something tagged on (if they must create a sequel, why
on God’s green earth didn’t they just go with The Incredibles, which is tailor-made for one?!?). On the other hand, Inside Out, one of their 2015 offerings, sounds to be the most
inventive film they have made since WALL-E. We shall see, but my cinematic fingers
are definitely crossed, even if my hopes continue to be dashed.
What about you-what are your thoughts on the latest sequel from
Pixar? Do you also feel that
they’ve entered “no-win” territory, or could they still sustain a strong level
of excellence? Are you filled
with dread over Finding Dory? And what are your thoughts on Monsters University?
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