Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Saturday, November 6, 2004

19:33 - Best one yet

(top)

What Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is to 1939, The Incredibles is to 1962.

By which I mean this: for each movie's respective time period, it shows a world composed entirely of all the best archetypical visual styles that anyone imagines about that era in their most nostalgic flights of fancy. Whereas Sky Captain has giant Fleischer-esque robots and flying islands full of sleek prop-driven fighter planes, this latest Pixar outing�their best yet, I have to say�is packed full of the kinds of buildings, automobiles, monorails with egg-shaped cars, suburban houses with super-stretched horizontal layered-stone fascia and space-age slants, and plutocratic drawing rooms sparsely furnished with sweeping pointy tables and chairs and suspended staircases that have by now gone so far out of style that they look sharp as hell once again. As Kris and I watched it, all we could think was: Boy, is Lileks ever going to have a field day with this. Every time the camera panned to another hillside building in what the International Style was supposed to look like, or an ornithopter straight out of the NASA glory days, or a swoopy jet from the days before they became flying buses, or one of those Mercedes-300SL-lookalike sportscars that someone had just better build for the next concept-car expo, I felt a shiver go through me that must have been exactly what those guys inventing the look of the new world back in the post-war glory days must have felt every time they tacked up another Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired sketch of some new concert hall or skyscraper. In a word, incredible.

It's also Pixar's most mature movie, by far. Which is small wonder: they got Brad Bird to do it, he of the golden touch when it comes to writing rip-roaring convoluted stories with giant robots and subtle emotions and true-to-life dialogue and human interactions and gobsmacking humor and political motivations that we can all relate to, like in the nearly universally recognized masterpiece The Iron Giant. This one is a lot more frenetic, but it's all as carefully orchestrated and intricately woven as a Mozart opera: it hits the ground running, barely pauses to introduce any of the characters, and quite frankly leaves any kids unfamiliar with the intricacies of today's litigious society and our mistrust of pure and honest motives completely in the dust. But for them there's the slam-bang visual fun, and for all the adults in the audience there's a message of startling boldness in all its masked subtlety: some people have certain roles to play. We're not all alike, all equally special. Some people are heroes, and some people are villains who won't spare your life because you're a kid or pause to deliver a monologue before killing you. The recurring theme is: If everybody is super... then nobody is. It's an affirmation of a basic tenet of human life that is seldom echoed in today's media or movies, and it couldn't have come at a more opportune time as far as I'm concerned.

Word is that The Incredibles is expected to break $600 million, starting with another record-breaking opening weekend; I wholeheartedly hope it does. I was never very impressed with Finding Nemo, frankly; its plodding, linear storyline recalled episodic pap like The Jungle Book more than Pixar's accustomed crisscrossing plotlines from films like Monsters, Inc. and Toy Story 2, whose storytelling sleight-of-hand kept the viewer engaged and surprised with every shot. I was worried that Pixar had taken a discouraging turn into the world of fart jokes and "one disaster after another... underwater!" tales with Finding Nemo, and that they'd stick with such formluae encouraged by that movie's gargantuan profits. But if there's one thing I ought to know by now, it's that Pixar never follows the same formula twice. Especially not an underwhelming one.

Thoroughly exhilarating. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Oh, and awesome character concepts. Frozone is the best-executed new superhero in years.

UPDATE: Cox and Forkum's The Uncredibles. Via Steven Den Beste.