LA Times (6/30/08): “Pixar defies gravity”
Patrick Goldstein nabs a sit-down with Pixar chief John Lasseter and asks a basic question:
When I asked him [Lasseter] how Pixar had managed to rack up such an astounding streak of hit films, he said simply, “Quality is the best business plan of all.”
We have looked at Pixar here and here, specifically about their newest movie Wall-E, which grossed over $63M its opening weekend and was praised universally by film critics. They really are a remarkable outfit and Lasseter points out several reasons why including this one which really caught my eye:
Pixar is also unique because of its origins. Today’s studios are four generations removed from their original immigrant entrepreneurs. They’re more like banks than movie companies, made up of employees all surrounded by constant reminders that they work for a mega-conglomerate always worried about making back its investment. Though owned by Disney, Pixar is still, creatively, the construct of Steve Jobs, a first-generation technological entrepreneur and visionary.
We’re a studio of pioneers who, if you look at it technically, were the ones who invented much of computer animation” says Lasseter. “Everything we’ve done no one had done before — it was all new. So that creates a group of people who strive to break new ground. It’s addicting. When someone comes in and says, ‘This is something no one has ever done before,’ we all get excited. We have a company culture that celebrates being pioneers.
For decades, the Hollywood movie business was runs by its original founders and their progeny — Mayer, Warner, Zucker, Cohn, Laemmle, Fox. That first generation was comprised of pioneers in their own right and for many years, movies were made by people who had film stock in their blood. While there are still notable family names involved in the business, the people making decisions about what movies get greenlit are much more likely to have MBA’s than a background in movie development and production. You can’t help be aware of Pixar’s sense of self when you screen a movie like Wall-E.
I saw it on Saturday and it is just this side of magic. There have been more interesting Pixar screenplays, such as Toy Story and The Incredibles; in fact, the broad story arc of Wall-E is quite traditional with few plot twists and turns. But they totally nail the single most important component: audience identification with the Protagonist. I defy anyone to not fall in love with Wall-E, one of the most sympathetic lead characters I’ve ever experienced in a movie.
Beyond the script, it’s the look and feel of Wall-E where Pixar really shines this time around. Great camera shots and angles, an interesting mix of animation and live-action, and the overall visual tableau is stunning in every frame of the movie.
By the way, there is a fantastic book called “An Empire of Their Own” by Neal Gabler, who has written a number of books about Hollywood. In “Empire,” Gabler tells the remarkable story of how a group of immigrants from eastern Europe and Russia founded Hollywood and the American movie business.
UPDATE: Well, I guess you can’t please all the people all the time. Despite a current 96% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes, evidently some folks on the right-side of the political spectrum aren’t so enamored of little Wall-E and his robot friends. “Leftist propaganda?” “Liberal nonsense?” “Malthusian fear-mongering?”
UPDATE #2: Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times weighs in today about the underlying ‘message’ of the movie. Let’s just consider the supposed “anti-consumerism” theme. Is Pixar actually preaching that humans should stop buying stuff? Well, that would be pretty damn stupid if your company based a significant percentage of its profits on the sale of, you know, stuff. I take the ‘message’ re this theme to be that we, as consumers, need to be more thoughtful / mindful of how, where, and on what we spend our money, and what we do with it once we own it. Wall-E himself makes that point; whereas humans have thrown away all this junk, the little robot takes time to search for items of meaning to him, hence, his junk collection. So the movie isn’t preaching some sort of nihilistic anti-consumerist message, but rather pushing an idea — wastefulness — to an extreme to create a morality play in order to generate discussion around the family dinner table about what values we should or should not have. And as Goldstein notes with his reference to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), it’s not like this type of pushing an idea to an extreme to create an interesting story setting hasn’t been done before in Hollywood.
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