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




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Friday, July 6, 2007
23:15 - So we're told this is the golden age

(top)
The iPhone wasn't the only thing that landed on the 29th. Another notable contender for the public's attention is Ratatouille, heralded in sidelong winking preview-reviews as Pixar's best effort to date, and already covered ably by Lileks, discussion with whom prodded me to write down some disjointed thoughts about my own reactions to it.

In short, it's awesome. I think it easily lives up to the hype, better than the iPhone does, in fact. To preface this with a pointless list of my Pixar bona fides: I've never been particularly fond of Finding Nemo; and Cars, while I appreciate a lot about it, didn't exactly spur me to a second viewing (something about Owen Wilson just pisses me off, I guess—and re-reading Lileks' post on the subject, I think it may simply be that he has too much preexisting "celebrityness" and typecast-baggage as a quirky smirking ironic pastiche of misremembered cowboy memes for his voice to sound like it's coming from a character other than Wilson himself—that drawling, open-R'ed languor kept Lightning McQueen from feeling like a real character to me, and in a movie where the conceptual stretch at perceiving "objects" as "people" was longer even than in shorts like Luxo Jr., that was a strike against it from the outset). On the other hand, The Incredibles was pure gold, and more ambitious and genre-crossing than my next favorite, Monsters, Inc., to say nothing of being the first to really dip into Pixar's well of teachable themes, what with its importance-of-family and not-being-ashamed-to-excel-in-a-world-of-mediocrity notes and oaky finish. The Toy Story movies will always occupy a certain spot in my heart as demonstrations that even at its most primitive, Pixar's work looked better and had more pitch-perfect storytelling than most other CG studios' stuff does more than ten years later, and A Bug's Life introduced the tradition of the prelude short film and the mad notion of fully rendered "outtakes" over the credits, a conceit that lasted through Monsters, Inc.—there to flower into an entire stage re-enactment of the whole movie by the kids of the cast—before evolving into the more subdued but still marvelous 2D animated credits sequences that we've seen in the last couple of outings. In short, a Pixar movie is less a weekend evening at the popcorn stadium, and more an event that merits being marked on calendars. It hardly seems fair to judge their movies against others working in the same genre, and invites comparisons only against its own past work. Pixar just seems to pour so much of itself, so unreservedly, into every one of its films—it's like they're bubbling over with so much excess talent and enthusiasm that they just can't resist overachieving, even if—like Dash in The Incredibles effortlessly outpacing the rest of the contestants on the track—it makes everyone else look ridiculously bad by comparison. Yes, it's Pixar's own lesson one might apply to this, but I consider such an insane pursuit of excellence to be all to the good, as long as they can sustain it and don't lose their footing.

From the look of it, that's no danger. Ratatouille is a feast for the eyes, as one might expect from the masters of the CG feature—and yet even more so for the ears and the imagination that loves a good story. It's not a particularly complex one this time around; none of the criss-crossing twists and shifting allegiances of Monsters, Inc. or Toy Story 2, but still a good deal more involving than the linear trundle of Finding Nemo. This is no bad thing, because in this case there's just so much texture everywhere—in the dialogue (of which there is just a ton), in the background art, in the gastronomic premise (I wonder if all Pixar movies are going to revolve around some pet obsession of one of the filmmakers from now on?), and in the characters' own movements and gestures and purely physical acting.

Lileks says:

There’s a scene in which Remy is trying to escape the kitchen; he passes a pot of soup, and can’t help go back a few times to add more ingredients. You see him think; you see his decisions in his posture and gestures. Not for a second do you think you’re watching a texture-wrapped wireframe. You buy it absolutely, and it has nothing to do with the voice, and if you think it would be better if Eddie Murphy or Jack Black voiced the character and the movie had more fart jokes and winking pop-culture references and ended with everyone singing “Mr. Roboto” or some other so-bad-it’s-even-worse song over the credits, fine.

There's something about Pixar movies that I think I only grasp in the five minutes after the movie's over, and afterwards it slips out of mind. That something is all the little "bits" of physical comedy that I store up during the watching, after which I want to turn to my friends in the still-darkened theater and say "Hey, remember that one bit where...?" These are places where the particular form of acting or movement or visual gaggery was memorable in its own right. Not the big plot points or the showstopping scenes, but the moments of pure concentrated insight into how people act and interact with the world around them, stuff that brings out my inner Chris Farley, like: "You know when they're back in the meat locker and he rips off his smock and he's all covered in rat bites, and the way he goes AAaahhghhh! AAAAAHHHGGH! And the way he waves his arms around, and expression on his face—remember? ...That was awesome!" Or "Hey, remember the way the spaghetti shakes out of the box?" Or "Did you see that little Well, you know... acquiescent shrug and eye-roll, when he asks Remy whether he can cook?" And you sit there in the aisle blocking traffic for the next five minutes just reliving the moments that you want to keep yourself from forgetting, even though you know you will by the time you get home. No reviewer can capture that kind of feeling, that enthusiasm for a craft brought so exuberantly to life that describing it in the same space you'd last week used for Wild Hogs or Evan Almighty just seems, well, wrong.

I keep noticing one of the aspects of modern humor being the "funny because it's so realistic" thing. You know, the stuff you see in Family Guy all the time, and other vehicles of the post-Space Ghost let's exhume the 80s landscape... where someone will rattle off some line that's crafted to sound soooo very casual and true-to-life, like what happens when you share an apartment with Superman. I mean, we've all been there, right? It's the realism that's allegedly so funny about stuff like this—just the cognitive dissonance inherent in the fact that people just don't talk like this on TV. Whether that's because traditional dialogue is usually better written than the way you talk when arguing about whose turn it is to buy the Mr. Pibb, well, that's sort of an open question, as is the efficacy of the comedic device after it's become a cliché in the circles that birthed it.

But Pixar doesn't have to worry about such things, because while realism is their stock-in-trade, for them it's not about irony or the clash of genres like pontificating superheroes versus passive-aggressive apartment roommates; it's sincere. Pixar's realism is primary-source. It's funny and engaging because it's stuff we relate to directly, stuff we've all done and heard and said—but that's because we share the experience of humanity with the characters on the screen, and their motivations are our motivations. We recognize Remy's semi-committal shrug or Linguini's incredulous arm-flailing wail of rat-bitten pain because that's exactly what we'd do in such a situation. Somehow, Pixar is able to translate these impulses of shared humanity right through the stilting barrier of artful script-writing, to the other side into a universe of specific acting that parallels the lives we live day to day. It's impossible to describe these movements and emotions in words—I sure can't, anyway—and I'll bet you they didn't try to capture them in stage directions on the script. But the animators get it. They understand life, or the fabled illusion thereof. They bring it all back to the screen through animation richer and more immersive than anyone else is doing today, more so than any live-action film, even—Jim Carrey or Robin Williams notwithstanding. This is the stuff that John Kricfalusi is always rattling on about, but let's be honest: Pixar does it better than he does.

It's hard to say much about Ratatouille that isn't redundant or so focused on trivialities like plot and premise that it ends up reading like a fourth-grade book report, entirely missing what's so significant about the movie as the craft of the master at the top of his game. I can only say that every Pixar movie to date, during its preview process, has left me scratching my head over trailers and sneak peeks that seemed to hint at a movie that I wasn't particularly interested in seeing. For some reason, the trailers always seem to undersell the movie, to paint it in unflattering light. Yet somehow—or perhaps this is part of the intentional scheme—the movie itself always seems to come together into something that surpasses all my expectations. By the same token, I'm not sure what to make of Wall-E, next year's follow-up feature. It looks (and sounds) odd. I can't say I'm itching to see the movie it slimly describes. But I will, and I'm quite sure that it will blow my face off. It's all part of the master plan, apparently, of a studio run like an orchestra full of virtuosos, where people feel the sincerity of what they're doing, where nobody is just going through the motions, where everyone believes in his character and his effects animation and the Platonic ideal of the background art he's constructing. Plus they know what 2D animation principles underpin everything they do, and they're 2D animators at heart; they can't resist a little dip into it, like when the cookbook image of Chef Gusteau comes to on-ones life to dispense advice. And when a film like this ends with a tagline like this in the credits:

Our Quality Assurance Guaratee: 100% Genuine Animation! No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film.

... You know you're dealing with the kind of people they'll be writing books about in ten years, and studying books about in twenty.

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© Brian Tiemann