I'm going to get around to my regularly scheduled Early Edition review in a bit, but first, I just have share a few words of squee regarding Pixar. You see, I have just come home from watching Toy Story 3, and I am once again marveling at how Pixar can consistently blend honest and poignant emotion with imaginative (and often goofy) concepts (What if there was this whole family of superheroes who had to hide their gifts and live normal, suburban lives? What do you suppose our toys do when we're not watching them? What if one robot was left all alone on an abandoned Earth? Do you think, if we had enough balloons, we could make a house fly? Etc.). Who would've thought that a bunch of animators making movies for kids would reveal so much more about the human condition than any other studio in the business?
Consider, for example, these four minutes from Up:
That is four minutes of concentrated brilliance. Without a single word of dialogue, they manage to cover all of the joys and vicissitudes of married life. Can you think of any recent live action film that has portrayed marriage in such a realistic and touching fashion? At the moment, I certainly can't. And what's amazing is that all of Pixar's best movies are like that. There is more romance in Wall-E than there is in most supposedly "romantic" comedies - and the families in Finding Nemo and The Incredibles are more relatable than most of the families conjured up in today's Tinseltown. Pixar can make fish, robots, and toys more recognizably human than a lot of the actual humans who "grace" our silver screen. That takes a first class creative team, and it is my dear and fervent hope that said team can continue to make magic happen for years to come.
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