Pixar

Inside Out 2: She’s Crossed That Loving Feeling

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Inside Out 2

Could Pixar be growing up? The idea seems odd; from the moment Woody and Buzz debated flying versus “falling with style,” the animation laureate has exhibited a fully formed sensibility—a rich blend of buoyant imagination and piercing insight, conveyed via painstaking computerized craft. But because Disney’s most celebrated cartoon arm remains a commercial enterprise, many of their works still center on wide-eyed children and (more directly) their anxious parents. In recent years, however, the studio has gently expanded its heroes’ ages and preoccupations, telling stories about childless adults (Soul), lovestruck twentysomethings (Elemental), awkward high schoolers (Onward), and angsty kids straddling adolescence (Luca, Turning Red). Now comes Inside Out 2, a movie about a 13-year-old grappling with the chilling prospect (perceived or actual) that her actions in the present will determine the course of her future. It might not be a coming-of-age story in all respects—the notion of sexual attraction stays safely outside its youthful boundaries—but it’s not for nothing that it features a literal alarm blaring the arrival of one of life’s most horrifying rites of passage: puberty.

Creatively speaking, Inside Out 2 attempts to accomplish a similar sort of maturation, expanding the original’s vibrantly detailed universe and complicating its themes. At the same time, it suffers from a certain, inevitable stasis. The first Inside Out, which landed on this critic’s list of the best movies of the 2010s, was remarkable above all for its conceptual innovation—its vision of emotions as anthropomorphized beings that guide our thoughts and behavior while collaborating and bickering in the fashion of a workplace sitcom. Inside Out 2, by virtue of being a sequel, can’t hope to replicate that sense of unprecedented wonder. Instead, it builds upon its predecessor with intelligence and variety, even as it traffics in a degree of repetition that is slightly dispiriting. Read More

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Quick Hits: No Hard Feelings; Elemental; Extraction 2

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chris Hemsworth in Extraction 2; Leah Lewis in Elemental; Jennifer Lawrence in No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings. Like most movie stars, Jennifer Lawrence tends to play the hero. She’s showcased plenty of range in her leading roles—as a resourceful vagrant (Winter’s Bone), as an intrepid messiah (the Hunger Games pictures), as a striving innovator (the underrated Joy), as a frantic parent (mother!)—but she invariably lays claim to your sympathy, wielding a winning combination of innocence and resolve. So what’s intriguing about No Hard Feelings, the new comedy from Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys), is that it finds Lawrence playing a woman who’s selfish, vengeful, and kind of mean. Her character, Maddie, isn’t exactly a villain, but the closest she gets to traditional heroism comes when she’s outracing the cops who are primed to suspend her license, all while a teenager is clinging to the hood of her car.

Maddie’s acrimony isn’t entirely without cause. She’s behind on the property taxes for her beloved Montauk home, and her primary source of income (driving for Uber) vaporizes after her ex-boyfriend, scorned from her prior ghosting, repos her car. She also resents the seasonal influx of wealthy tourists and the creep of gentrification they represent. But Maddie’s bitterness runs deeper than circumstantial irritation, and the trick of Lawrence’s performance is that she has the courage to make the character unlikable while simultaneously depicting her as a figure of nigh-mythical desirability. Read More

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From the Vault: Finding Nemo, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

My does this movie have a pulse. This is filmmaking at its most vibrant, an indefatigable romp of breathtaking splendor. Every meticulously constructed frame is teeming with detail, so much so that our eyes despair futilely in a hopeless attempt to digest everything on screen. This visual magnificence is somehow equaled by dialogue that is delightfully droll, and a storyline that is perfect in its simplicity. Adults, check your cynicism at the door; the experience of watching Finding Nemo – the fifth full-length feature from Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios – is one of pure joy. Read More

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Lightyear, Turning Red, and the Two Pixars

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Chris Evans as Buzz in Lightyear; Rosalie Chiang as a panda in Turning Red

In 2013, six days after the release of Monsters University, then-Pixar president Ed Catmull said in an interview that the animation juggernaut was newly committed to making an original picture every year, and to correspondingly limit its sequels to biennial productions. The announcement came in the wake of a widely perceived (if relative) creative drought for the studio, whose prior two movies, the misbegotten Cars 2 and the pleasant but familiar Brave, hadn’t lived up to the legacy of greatness established during its inaugural 15-year run—a run that concluded, ironically, with a sequel (the stupendous Toy Story 3). Mathematically speaking, Pixar didn’t quite make good on its promise—of the next 10 films it released, four were sequels—but the wunderkinds of computer-drawn fantasy have for the most part threaded a delicate needle over the past decade, simultaneously making risky original movies and cranking out commercially safe follow-ups.

This “original vs. sequel” framing perpetuates a false dichotomy—the idea that original films are inherently works of boisterous ingenuity, whereas sequels are lazy and mercenary. (For this writer’s money, the existential crises conjured in Toy Story 4 are far more thought-provoking than the recognizable road-trip hijinks of Onward.) Still, in an era where Pixar’s parent company Disney continues to gobble up market share thanks to its ownership of mighty franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe—and where the apparent antidote to Mouse-House supremacy involves a competitor sequelizing a hit from 1986—it’s understandable for critics to prize the production of original screenplays as an independent good. Given that, it’s fascinating to examine Pixar’s two releases in 2022: one a science-fiction adventure that spins off from beloved intellectual property, the other a tender coming-of-age story whose only tie to the Pixar brand is its embrace of innovative storytelling. Read More

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Luca: Summer Loving, Glazed by the Past

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Pixar's Luca

Luca is a shape-shifting sea monster, and Luca itself is something of a transformer. It is by turns (and sometimes all at once) a coming-of-age story, an underdog sports movie, an ode to canonical Italian cinema, and a heartfelt fable of tolerance. That it ably fulfills all of these roles without succumbing to chaos or incongruity is a testament to the dexterity of its storytelling and the fluidity of its construction. It doesn’t so much offer something for everyone as it provides everything for someones—namely, for those audiences who hunger for art that is simultaneously funny, kinetic, sweet, and affirming.

It is not—and with every new Pixar release, the conversation tends to focus on what it isn’t rather than what it is—terribly imaginative. Small in scale and gentle in heart, Luca lacks the bold ingenuity that has (ahem) animated some of the studio’s more impressive recent works: the metaphysical philosophizing of Soul, the existential angst of Toy Story 4, the triumphant razzle-dazzle of Incredibles 2, the anthropomorphized emotions of Inside Out. But not every Pixar picture can be expected to stretch or redefine an entire genre, and besides, lamenting Luca’s familiarity risks diminishing some of its considerable charm. Here is a playful, gorgeous, heart-warming adventure that tells its tender story with craft and conviction. That it occasionally resembles other movies seems a small price to pay. Read More

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