Child's Play: TOY STORY 5

Toy Story 5 could’ve been a smartly updated retelling of the original’s replacement anxieties. You'd think being directed and co-written by WALL-E's Andrew Stanton, who has a writing credit on the whole series so far, would help. Pitched as toys versus tech, it starts with the dolls and figurines in Bonnie’s room freaking out about a new addition: a tablet. The Leapfrog knockoff Lilypad instantly captures the 8-year-old’s days, leaving the toys in the dust. Unfortunately, Lilypad (Greta Lee) never becomes much of a distinct character, with little personality and a character arc that’s foreshortened in two quick reversals late in the game. So, instead of the inciting incident kicking off jostling egos among the familiar faces of returning characters facing off against the interloper, cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack, a delight and given all the best moments) takes it upon herself to get Bonnie better friends than the mean girl cyberbullies the tablet attracts. This sends her off hither and yon in an attempt to save their kid’s feelings, and of course Buzz (Tim Allen) and Woody (Tom Hanks) give chase. But the whole thing feels much more cramped and less detailed than the series usually manages. It’s a bland working-over of over-worked tech fears that ends up being more of a pat on the head for harried millennial parents—saying it’s okay to give them tech as long as you check in on their social media messages once in great while. It never takes off into a clever kids’ adventure or engaging object lesson that it could be. 

There is a neat distinction drawn between gaming and playing and the greater social benefit of the latter—it’s nice to see Bonnie make a real friend—but the movie is so focused on the kids’ emotional well-being that it forgets to be much of a toy story. The classic ensemble doesn't even get much in the way of dialogue, punchlines, or story, and the new characters are one-note jokes. My struggling interest finally gave up sometime between Jessie using web-connected toys to manipulate two kids into a play date and a fleet of drones carrying the main cast of plastic beings off to the rescue. I guess I just don’t think toys should be doing all that. This entry in the venerable series—hitherto Pixar’s best!—takes it too far away from neurotic playthings and pushes well past the suspension of disbelief into making them meddling Defenders of Real Childhood. I missed the interest in the frictions and eccentricities of the toy’s personalities and the existential questions about one’s purpose. Here there’s just too little room for interest in their toy society when there’s more time spent on didactically weighing in on ours. Even attempts to connect to the series’ most moving moments—consciously echoing lines and scenes from earlier pictures’ highlights—plays as hollow repetition instead of enriching the emotional texture. Compared to the aesthetic and thematic complications of the previous sequels, which somehow manage to push the detail of the animation and psychology of the characters while maintaining a consistent look and tone in the childish whimsy, this one is all too thin and simple.

Fishy Story: FINDING DORY

A lot can change in 13 years, as evidenced by Finding Dory, the sequel to 2003’s smash hit computer animated Finding Nemo. Back then Pixar was a pioneering new studio, telling clever stories with cutting-edge technology and quietly astonishing heart. Now, though, their plot structures and thematic interests, once the source of boundless inspiration, can calcify into formula. It’s a bit overfamiliar to see returning writer-director Andrew Stanton and immensely talented teams of technicians breathe life into sea creatures and fall into an easy pattern of conflict and resolution wrapped up in funny incident, zippy action, and dramatic stings. Rinse and repeat. This isn’t just sequel-itis. It’s a studio staying in its comfort zone, ironic for a movie about how you need to get out and explore in order to more fully enjoy the comforts of home. So it may not hit the high water mark for the studio’s ingenuity. But Pixar has a higher baseline competence than just about anyone, bringing a vibrant and charming world to life in a simple plot bolstered by smart vocal performances, gorgeous images, and bouncy adventure.

Their best decision in making a sequel to Nemo is pivoting away from that film’s protagonist while still echoing its interest in memories and family reconciliation. Marlin (Albert Brooks) and his son Nemo (young Hayden Rolence taking over for the now-too-old Alexander Gould) are still significant factors in the story, but the main focus is almost entirely on Dory (Ellen DeGeneres, continuing her best performance). Last time, the forgetful blue tang was the comic relief. Although her short-term memory problems had a tragic underpinning – she lost her family long ago, or at least she thinks she did – the previous movie had her making hilarious and heartwarming comments from the sidelines. Now Stanton, with co-director Angus MacLane and co-writer Victoria Strouse, decides to take her plight more seriously, to dig into her flawed memory as an engine for conflict, a loose plot thread that needs to be tied back for satisfying resolution.

And so Dory, excited by a fleeting flash of remembrance, sets off with her friends, travelling across the ocean looking for her long-lost parents (Diane Keaton and Eugene Levy). There’s merciless heart-tugging appeal in seeing a cognitively impaired little fish desperately searching for her family, hoping she’ll get there before she forgets about them again. Unlike its predecessor’s eventful journey, Dory gets it over with quickly, arriving in no time at a massive aquarium park on California’s coast. Dory’s parents are in there, or at least she thinks she remembers them there. The plot is far and away Pixar’s simplest. Where their other films found good reasons to burst forth in climactic madcap chases, this is all chase. Dory gets almost immediately separated from Marlin and Nemo, leaving her scatterbrained self to scurry tank to tank, through pipes, and over obstacles to reconnect with her new friends and her old family. It’s curiously small, but sufficiently busy.

Along the way the characters encounter another of Pixar’s trademark eclectic ensembles of cartoony creations. There’s a grumpy seven-tentacled octopus (Ed O’Neill) planning an escape, a beluga whale (Ty Burrell) too nervous about his tender head to echolocate, a whale shark (Kaitlin Olson) with bad eyesight, a couple of barking territorial sea lions (Idris Elba and Dominic West), and a ruffled, squawking, speechless loon. It’s fun to encounter the variety of wildlife, hearing the energetic, committed, and perfectly cast voice work, and seeing their differing responses to having strange fish swim into their space. As you might suspect, the animals have to learn to embrace their differences and work together to accomplish their goals. That’s no surprise. But it’s nice to see the pieces fall into place as the loveable creatures banter and become buddies.

There’s no villain here, just a race against a slipping memory, and narrow escapes from the simple facts of life in a giant aquatic zoo. That’s sweetly low-key; no mean dentist with a cruel office fish bowl from which to rescue a lost fish boy means no fight against a bag guy. There are merely good fish who want to see each other succeed, which makes for a core kindness that allows the zipping around to feel safe. There is also a matter-of-fact, relaxed message about diversity and acceptance for the differently abled. The core goal for Dory to be reunited with her parents is the story of a fish who learns valuable skills to cope with her capabilities, to make an asset out of the things she does remember rather than dwelling on all she doesn’t. The menagerie of marine life floating through the story only amplifies this message. Everyone has their limitations, but by learning to help one another, and allowing one’s skills to complement other’s deficiencies, can build better lives alone and together.

It may not be anything approaching Pixar’s best, most complex, and emotional efforts, but Dory takes advantage of the studio’s great skill with locations and character. It builds a complete and convincing aquarium through which to run its formulaic plot, and populates it with typically lovely character work. Each little zone of the massive complex finds new lovable beings and designs, either benign or dangerous as they contribute to pushing the episodic scramble along. The whole thing then comes to vivid life with gorgeous interplays of textures and light, layers of depth sparkling in the schmutz suspended in ocean currents and Plexiglas cages. The result is a pleasing visual experience, and a fun diversion. What it lacks in novelty, it makes up for in entertainment tied to a strong, simple, easily digestible appeal. I’d rather see the people at Pixar push themselves. Last year, with Inside Out and The Good Dinosaur, was a fantastic one-two punch of finding new visual ideas to explore within their cozy template, so it’s natural to find Dory a comedown. At least Pixar in its comfort zone is still an enjoyable time at the movies.

The Man Who Fell to Barsoom: JOHN CARTER

John Carter begins three times. First, there’s a sequence that begins with a splash of expository narration before joining a conflict in media res with solar-powered flying vessels clashing in the skies above the planet Barsoom. Next, a young man (Daryl Sabara) arrives at the home of his recently departed uncle and, as a condition of the man’s will, is given a journal to read. Now, through his own words, we are properly introduced to that uncle, John Carter (Taylor Kitsch), a Civil War veteran looking for gold out west while trying to avoid capture. And then, he’s mysteriously, accidentally transported to Barsoom. These three beginnings do more than place the narrative in framing devices like so many nesting dolls. It’s a narrative technique that emphasizes the protagonist’s status as a man out of time and space.

So too is the film’s source material. John Carter first appeared in print from the author Edgar Rice Burroughs, he of Tarzan fame, in the year 1912, exactly 100 years ago. Consequently, bits and pieces of the story can be traced through much of the previous century’s popular science fiction from Flash Gordon and Robinson Crusoe on Mars to Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, and Avatar. The trick of adapting John Carter after all these years is to make new what is old, to make fresh what has already been thoroughly chewed, to reconstitute a story, the DNA of which has permeated the genre in ways big and small these many years.

Up to the task is director Andrew Stanton, whose animation work for Pixar includes WALL-E, a favorite of mine and one of the very best sci-fi films of recent years. He makes his live action debut with John Carter and, much like his colleague Brad Bird proved with Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, there’s definitely something to be said for the animator’s eye applied to live action. Here is a film so wonderfully composed, so imbued with visual energy of a sturdy, meticulous kind that this becomes no mere studio programmer and rarely feels old-fashioned or stuffy in any way. No, this is a film that slides into its timeless qualities in a grand Hollywood style, with spectacle and pageantry so lush, so vivid and sweeping, that oftentimes it feels like what Cecil B. DeMille or David Lean would have done with space opera.

The film finds John Carter unexpectedly displaced to Barsoom, a dusty rust-tinged desert planet with regal red humanoids clashing for control of the planet while the tall, green, four-armed tribe of Tharks remains neutral and isolated in the barren wilderness. Barsoom, Carter soon learns, is what he knows as Mars. Its atmosphere and gravity give him extraordinary powers of strength and speed; he can cross vast distances in a single leap, kill a Thark with a single blow. This impresses the leader of the Tharks, the first beings of Barsoom to stumble upon this strange creature they first refer to as a “white worm” before finding ways to communicate with him, though they mistake “Virginia” as his species name rather than his homeland.

The Tharks clash over what to do with the man. One grumbling tribal leader (Thomas Haden Church) believes Carter should be put to the test against fearsome beasts in their punishing arena. But the Tharks’ leader (Willem Dafoe) is inquisitive and hopeful. He believes they’ve found a super-powered champion for their people. This is also the belief of the beautiful and tough princess Dejah (Lynn Collins), who crash-lands while fleeing a marriage to her nemesis (Dominic West) that was arranged by her father (Ciarán Hinds) as a peace treaty. For his part, Carter just wants to go home, but his curiosity and his desire to somehow help these strange people compels him to learn more about these warring tribes. After all, to return to Earth he will need all the help he can get learning about mysterious alien shape-shifters who were involved in getting him into this predicament and whose leader (Mark Strong), unbeknownst to Carter, is the true catalyst for the war on Barsoom.

This is a richly imagined world brought to life with strong filmmaking that, wonder of wonders, trusts an audience to understand aspects of plot without too much of a fuss. Powerful moments, like when an alien battle is crosscut with an Earth-bound burial flashback, sketch in backstory and juxtapose it with an exciting forward pace to draw a fuller picture of Carter’s mental state with incredible ease. The script by Stanton with Mark Andrews and the great novelist Michael Chabon has a wonderful flow, slipping through its narrative loops with a minimum of fuss and delivering big action setpieces without seeming to strain over much towards preordained plot points. The dialogue, so often a sticking point in these earnest throwback blockbusters, is nicely polished. The regal dialogue of the royal Barsoomian people comes off not as stiff fantasy gobbledygook, but vivid pseudo-historical regality whereas the Tharks have a nice tribal feeling and Carter himself has a nice rascally Southern drawl. The actors seem grateful for the chance to do more than pose for effects; they have a world to inhabit and characters to play.

Stanton exhibits a helpful curiosity in the workings of this fantasy world that match the bewildered Carter. The long middle section of the film in which we are introduced to various technologies, traditions, legends, villages, cities, vehicles, heroes, villains, and creatures (including Woola, a squishy, speedy monster-dog who I found more adorable than the dogs in The Artist, Beginners, and Hugo combined) is simply wonderful filmmaking. The effects are wonderful, but Stanton grounds them and makes them work as a cohesive whole. They’re neither confusing, nor overly explained. The costumes, all loose, flowing, ancient-alien chic, and the sets, from humble huts to towering castles, are just as lovingly designed and executed. It all just simply works together as a terrific example of world building while still telling a compelling, exciting, and, yes, even moving story.

It’s by nature a somewhat predictable story, seeing as it has arrived pre-recycled by its genre peers over so many decades, and the film is not without its rough patches, to be sure. But it’s a film told with such energy and a high entertainment factor that I found it especially irresistible. Like the best films of its genre, John Carter is a film that draws upon archetypes – here it’s a crypto-western that shakes off the “crypto” by more or less starting as one – and extrapolates, reinterpreting visceral, primeval stories into a form that expands the imagination. Here’s a satisfying film that, with a flourish of its sweeping Michael Giacchino score, opens up a new world before your very eyes and, whatever its influences, whatever its source material has influenced, manages to become something entirely its own.