Disney Renaissance 2/Disney Revival

[LargeItalianEyebrows]

Definitely not too early to say that. I'd say it all started with Tangled. When that movie came out I was like... "FINALLY!"

[ShyViolet]

Interesting article, though can't say I really agree with all of it, especially since he doesn't mention Inside Out or Coco...


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ay/524484/

[EricJ]

Interesting article, though can't say I really agree with all of it, especially since he doesn't mention Inside Out or Coco...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ay/524484/

Yeah, it doesn't, does it?:
Seems to be another "All Pixar makes is stupid sequels"--having never heard of the Circle 7 troubles--because they just saw the new full trailer to Cars 3.
And, of course, "Oh no, they're making another Cars film, didn't they learn their lesson with Cars 2?" Despite the fact that the new Cars 3 full-trailer (the one that premiered with Guardians 2, and shows us some actual plot BESIDES Lightning being smashed to smithereenies) looks, if not good, like a fairly not-bad Apology-Sequel that tries to fix the story by taking it back to (racing) formula and making Lightning the main character again.
Which is what Lasseter wanted Cars 2 to be all along, before it lost its way.

The specific article question, though, is "Did Disney (ie. Bob Iger) ruin Pixar?", and while Dory, TS3 and Monsters U were EIsner's fault, if Cars 3 and TS4 underachieve, well, yes, we can put the blame on Iger's head for forcing it on them. Inside Out, Coco and Incredibles 2 were house brews.

...But he didn't force it on them! They said they really wanted to make it!

They did, once they had an actual story in place that they got excited about. But there first had to be that strong motivation to write that story in the first place, whether or not they had been planning to.

[Ben]

Strange piece, fairly poorly written and researched, which keeps contradicting itself. Sequels bad...Toy Story 3 good. Disney owned the Oscars...Dory shut out, but no mention that it itself was a sequel and, as you say, they don't mention the original titles the studio is putting out.

Disney co-financed Toy Story? Think you'll find they financed the entire thing and basically set Pixar up with the proceeds. And, of course, they've inadvertently been financing them ever since (my feeling being that there would BE no Pixar features without Disney's initial cash and - most specifically - that awesome marketing machine).

And I love how all the movies after when Disney bought Pixar are "bad", as if they didn't take four or more years to make and just happened the next month after. Sheesh. This piece seemingly slams DisneyToons but appears to praise the Planes films with a positive Lasseter quote, but then takes a cynical swipe at him too!

"Would Pixar even bother making those pictures anymore?" Well, yes. As well as Coco, you can bet whatever Pete Docter comes up with next will blow this kind of lazy writing out of the water.

(Eisner had *nothing* to do with any of the Toy, Nemo or Monsters sequels.)

[EricJ]

(Eisner had *nothing* to do with any of the Toy, Nemo or Monsters sequels.)

Well, Circle 7 was still Eisner's "fault", and certainly added to the list of grievances from the board for his departure.
Lasseter may have insisted that TS3, Dory and Monsters U be completely new in-house scripts for legal purposes, but the idea of making them certainly wasn't their own.

(And at least Good Dinosaur only got a passing offscreen reference to "other" films that hadn't done well--
For a second there, thought the nutty author was going to blame THAT one on them too, instead of the patched-together script.)

[Ben]

Toy Story 3 had been talked about at Pixar long before C7 came along. When C7's TS3 was mooted, Lasseter was even vocal about saying how he had envisioned the series ending (in a daycare center as we eventually saw).

Dory wasn't a consideration until well after Eisner, and even then still arguably more about giving Stanton back some cred. Monsters? Docter said he had an idea where to go (which we still might see one day?) but the prequel idea also came along much later.

As for the almost Good Dino miss, that author clearly didn't do any real research. It's a biased piece bending facts and dropping others to make the narrative work. Quite why they have this view is beyond me, like a fanboy throwing a tantrum because there's one or two too many sequels coming down the pipe.

Fact: Pixar's third film was a sequel. They've been doing it since the start and will keep playing the Hollywood game. On the flipside, if they *didn't* commit to an Incredibles 2, then this guy would equally bemoan the fact that "we've been promised a Brad Bird follow up since the first came out...wah, wah, waaaaah......"

I haven't checked (someone more pedantic please do!) but I'd guess the originals outweigh the number of sequels Pixar have released, even if it's a pretty even number. And they still only really do have two longterm franchises in Toy Story and Cars (nothing else has made it past two as far as I can recall), proving that even the mighty Pixar isn't infallible or beyond chasing the easy buck.

And let's not even get into the fact that the original TS pitch was to reuse Tinny from the Tin Toy short, which would have made their first film, technically, a (whisper it) s-e-q-u-e-l...!

[EricJ]

As for the almost Good Dino miss, that author clearly didn't do any real research. It's a biased piece bending facts and dropping others to make the narrative work. Quite why they have this view is beyond me, like a fanboy throwing a tantrum because there's one or two too many sequels coming down the pipe.

The reason: It's Cars 2. Beginning, end, period.
Like a Star Wars fan ranting against Eps. VII & VIII because he just can't let Phantom Menace go, any sequel that Pixar ever makes, good (Monsters U) or bad (Dory) will utterly guilt-by-association remind them that if Pixar had never, ever made sequels at all, we would never have gotten Cars 2.
That's why audiences came with the kerosene ready to burn Toon's two Planes movies at the stake (1 was okay, 2 was pretty darn good), because they still needed their thirst for justice quenched against the crimes of vehicles-with-eyes.
(Might also be the jilted-at-the-altar feeling of seeing the first Pixar that broke Up/TS3's string of Best Picture nominations, even for those who thought Brave was a good movie, but blamed the bad one for "betraying us"...Hmm, article didn't mention Brave either.)

And for those who didn't see last week's final Cars 3 trailer that suddenly pushed the columnist's traumatized panic button, said the S-word and set him off again:

[Ben]

Though better than either of those two, Brave, Pixar’s 2012 foray into princessdom, was a disappointment as well.

Yeah...it did mention Brave, but went out of the way to lump it in as a sequel just because the author didn't like it. Like I said, lazy viewpoints, poorly written.

[ShyViolet]

Inside The Magic has a piece countering the one in The Atlantic:


http://www.insidethemagic.net/2017/05/p ... -lost-way/

(Oh watch out for those ads! Lol.)

[ShyViolet]

Quite interesting article on why modern animated films often display better storytelling than current live-action blockbusters: (in this case, storyboarding)


https://www.vox.com/culture/2018/11/20/ ... e-internet

[ShyViolet]

Wow, very interesting, but I’m not completely surprised. Don’t get me wrong, Steve Jobs was a BRILLIANT, BRILLIANT man and we really owe him a lot; but yeah, no surprise that originally he wanted to completely shut WDFA down after the merger.

https://www.slashfilm.com/walt-disney-a ... shut-down/

This piece of info comes from Bob Iger himself in his new memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company.


From article:

During the time of the Pixar Animation acquisition in 2006, Walt Disney Animation was floundering. Bob Iger says in his new book, “I didn’t yet have a complete sense of just how broken Disney Animation was.” That’s largely thanks to a series of “expensive failures” like the 2D animated Hercules and the computer animated Chicken Little. And while movies like Mulan and Lilo & Stitch were considered to be better, their success with critics and at the box office was nothing compared to Disney’s success in their animated renaissance of the 1990s.

All four of those films were actually very profitable, as well as generally well received by audiences and critics (ok barring Chicken Little, which despite mostly bad reviews did end up making a decent profit.).

I’d hardly call that “broken.”

[Randall]

Now, if he'd mentioned Treasure Planet, that would have made more sense.

[Ben]

Hey! TP is a rip-roaring, gorgeously animated adventure ride. No, it isn’t a perfect classic by any means, but it’s not Ron 'n' John's fault it was continuously meddled with from even before production began. Creativity and technically, there’s a lot more in there than it’s given credit for, and it sticks pretty faithfully to the structure of the book, so anyone with story issues might want to take that up with Mr Stevenson...!

[EricJ]

And just TRY and tell audiences grown up on 90's Disney movies on disc when they were kids--who now literally believe Lion King is next to Shawshank Redemption as one of the 10 Greatest Movies of the Decade--how Hercules was originally the flop that nearly destroyed the studio in '97, as Jobs believed, and brought the 90's Renaissance to a screeching halt.
Go ahead, just see if they believe you. ("Wait, somebody didn't like Hades??") Heck, even I remember it, and I've now got it on Blu-ray.

But back in '01, when WDFA was making (yeesh) Atlantis and Pixar was making Monsters Inc., I can guarantee Steve wasn't the ONLY one thinking that Disney should just roll over and let Pixar make the entire studio output.
It was the general mainstream opinion of non-Disney fans at the time. (And the reason that box-office analysts were trying to make Paramount's cable-bubble "fit" Katzenberg's "2D is Dead" script, and praising Finding Nemo in holy awe.)

[Ben]

Except that Disney didn’t buy Pixar until many years later...