Sparks Fly: ELEMENTAL

Pixar’s Elemental takes the animation studio’s formula and narrows its focus until it’s something more, well, elemental. It reminds us that, for all the high-concept world-building their films have done—from the secret life of toys, to the various monster, fish, superhero, and car societies they’ve revealed—the studio’s best at making clear, clean metaphors to explore surprisingly nuanced human emotion. Sure, they have the impressively detailed and technically accomplished animation brightly and bouncily deployed for hurry-scurry high-energy kid-friendly plots. But underneath, and driving the action, can be sadness, loneliness, longing. They find vivid, broad expressions of complicated feelings—family therapy in the guise of rip-roaring entertainments. This latest picture is in a fantasyland where earth and water and wind beings live alongside each other. Their gleaming, towering metropolis is built for their comfort, and thus the immigrant fire people must eke out a living in this space that’s literally not built for them. These beings are made of the elements, little flickering flame folks and sloshing water drops and big burly clouds animated with fuzzy lines and indistinct boundaries that drift and blur. It’s an odd sight that quick settles into sense, a shifting cartoony delight, always in flickering, bubbling, flowing motion. Director and co-writer Peter Sohn finds quick-witted detail in the background, and lets the artifice of the place just be. The movie spends next to no time world-building, and instead spends its time situating a smaller character piece in the larger whole. This isn’t as robustly imagined on the macro level as top tier Pixar, but it gets so many little details right that the overall picture is engaging throughout.

Rather than expanding its immigrant story metaphor out into a Zootopia-esque disquisition on racist implications of infrastructure planning, it’s a small family story about a struggling store, and the fiery daughter who might take over, but for an unexpected romance burgeoning. Is this the stuff of a kids’ movie? It has the sparkle and dazzle and quick wit and zippy colors of one. But these emotions are tougher, and appeal to a complicated worldview. The marriage is pure picture book metaphor—not enough to take the world of its fiction as a real place, but as a whimsical outgrowth of something real. Pixar knows how to put the ordinary in extraordinary. And so the movie rests on a daughter hoping to make her father proud, and the tension between keeping the home fires burning and finding a new path. That’s represented by a cute water guy with whom she just might have chemistry. This grounds the movie in a romantic comedy formula that plays neatly off the dovetailing of stereotypes between the characters and their elements. The fire girl has a hot temper and smoky looks that make her beau boil. The water boy is a transparently guileless fellow, and is quick to find tears in his eyes. They’re told they shouldn’t be together—it might extinguish her potential, or cause him to evaporate. But, somehow, opposites just might attract, and Pixar’s once again good at letting consequences play out, both in their families’ emotional lives, and in the way bright light sparkles through water.

A Buzz Flight: LIGHTYEAR

I should not have doubted the good folks at Pixar’s ability to go beyond. I walked into Lightyear, sold as a high-flying sci-fi adventure, fully prepared for a cynical brand extension. They’ve hyped it up as Andy’s favorite movie, a story of the real Buzz Lightyear character behind the figure he had in Toy Story. (That some entertainment writers have performed confusion about what that might mean is a sorry state of affairs. Anyone with half a thought can tell it’s an excuse to spin off in a new storytelling world as a separate action franchise.) If that makes it a bit of a prefab conception, well, so be it. The result is a clever and concise sci-fi spectacle with a big heart and a clockwork sense of story. Set in a distant future on the far-flung wilds of the galaxy, the movie finds Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Chris Evans in full white-bread hero mode) responsible for an accident that maroons an enormous exploration vessel on an alien planet. He doggedly sets out to right that wrong by test-piloting fuels that will get them home, but each failed jump that takes only minutes for him is years for the people for whom he keeps trying. That’s a compelling emotional core, and the story team uses it well as grist for the gears of a tightly-constructed tale. By the time he’s reluctantly assembling a ragtag team to save them all from the evil Zurg and find their way to a new normal, it soars with the sputtering engines of experimental spaceships and whirring steps of robots, and zip-zap of laser guns.

The fun new crew of characters—Space Rangers and rookies, scientists and commanders, a villain with a surprising backstory, and an incredibly cute and helpful robot cat—are immediately lovable creations, imbued with some humanity in their stock positions. And the hurrying-around, getting-supplies, and making-plans of the story dovetails sweetly with the emotional journey on which it sends Buzz. It also manages to make a new character out of one we already loved. He’s the same but different. Buzz the toy’s identity crisis naturally isn’t present here. But director Angus MacLane and team manage to retain his sense of self-doubt mixed with loyalty and determination to protect his found family of friends. Although there are some subtle reuses of lines the toy speaks in the first Story—moviegoers of my generation and younger, who’ve surely memorized its script, will spot them—in new contexts, it’s entirely a new character journey to get involved in here. As Buzz grows in his ability, and responsibility, it’s exciting to see him become the hero he’s meant to be, a team player and a man who can make up for his mistakes. The others, too, learn and grow at just the right pace, as well. Somehow it feels familiar and fresh at the same time.

So, too, the look, which has a glossy fantasy sheen and whirring tech love in its pulp-paperback Cinemascope aesthetics. The animation is full of the typical expert textures and contours, sparkle and sparks, and something like soulful expressions behind the eyes. And in the vehicles and suits, every button and tool is expertly deployed and explained so we can understand the stakes and mechanics of the characters’ plans and problems. That makes it all the more enjoyable when turned loose to work, or not, in enjoyable action sequences that continue to inform character throughout. It’s altogether a skillful deployment of Pixar’s practically patented airtight plotting, where every bit is a logistical or emotional setup or payoff that clicks into perfect place at precisely the proper time for maximum audience satisfaction. It works because we care—quickly, easily, and fully—for the cast, and can get involved in the pleasing jumble of genre tropes expertly mixed and remixed for a new sensation. That may not end up the most moving or complicated of this studios’ insights, but it’s such bustling blockbuster fun, with nary a moment to waste, that it’s all the more enjoyable for being sharply done. If we’re going to have recapitulations and re-imaginations of brands we already know and love by heart, it might as well be this much fun, and actually reward our interest this well. By the time the end credits popped up, I was feeling like when David Letterman was blown away by his Late Show musical guest, saying, “I’ll take all of that you got.”

Face the Change: TURNING RED

Pixar’s Turning Red is a fast-paced, heartfelt, adorable computer-animated cartoon about the emotional intensity of eighth graders. It does so with one of the bubbliest lead characters in recent memory—13-year-old Meilin. She’s a relentlessly chipper, totally type-A student with all the goofy jokes, funny friends, pop culture addictions, and passionate crushes of many girls her age. The movie—all rounded edges and cartoony colors—brightly and bouncily opens with her interior monologue, teeming with loose and silly and exuberantly positive self-talk. She’s confidently herself, navigating her classes and friends and family obligations with ease. That is, until adolescence really starts to sink in, and with it its attendant embarrassments of self—bodily and socially. One associates that time with fleeting passions, roiling interior lives, and explosively convulsive stretches of upset and excitement. It’s only natural. And so here’s a movie about what it means to grow up into a state of crippling self-awareness and have to readjust to find one’s sense of self again. In her case, though, this isn’t just about embarrassment. The blushing implied by the title does double duty, for when she’s overwhelmed and overstimulated, she turns into a big red panda.

This unexpected side-effect of puberty is a family curse. The first time it happens, her mother patiently explains how this happens to every woman in their family, and there’s a ritual they can do once a lunar cycle to suppress it. (There’s the ticking clock Pixar loves so much.) This makes the movie overtly a metaphor for the onset of menstruation—and adolescent urges of all kinds, what with this 2002-set middle-school friend group innocently lusting after a boy band (crooning catchy new period-appropriate music by Billie Eilish and bro). Writer-director Domee Shi, whose short Bao’s motherly affection for a personified dumpling is a similarly fantastical approach to raw familial feelings, and her co-writers approach these facts of teen girl life with frank symbolism, breezily and naturally. There’s none of the tortured hand-wringing one might associate with more timid filmmakers of any sort, let alone the Hollywood animated family picture. As the movie quickly and agreeably develops its fantasy conceit, Meilin learns that being a grown-up doesn’t mean independence, or cheap rebellion from family traditions, or even any pat be-yourself rebellion. Instead, Shi draws out a lesson of complicated self-knowledge and personal growth, that to be yourself draws upon your influences from family, friends, and cultures past and present. Now that’s getting older. And maybe a little wiser.

So it has a slightly more mature premise than the usual kids’ picture, and is so warmly welcoming to its young teen mindset that it carries off lightly what other Pixar efforts wear more tearfully. That’s not to say it’s any less earnest, or doesn’t earn its climactic sentimental moments. But it’s so cheerfully of its time and place, animated with such personality and so particular to the giddy extremes of its character’s age, that it’s a total charmer. This fantastical comedy takes its main character’s mindset seriously—who among us, after all, didn’t sometimes view the changes of teen years as something unusual, or even monstrous—and yet is told with just enough sense of perspective for a wry adult distance to be amused at the young teen’s lack of it. That’s what also makes the movie enchantingly real in its portrayal of mother/daughter relationships, finding a generational intermingling of matrilineal tension and compassion that feels true in the midst of the fanciful scampering. It is, per Pixar’s latest run of originals’ thematic preoccupations, a story about the gulfs of misunderstanding that even good intentions can open up between parents and children, and the bittersweet magic it takes to repair that bond. No surprise that it’s also about a journey of self-discovery, the new friendships one makes along the way, and the old friendships that can sustain one throughout. It’s there in Luca, Soul, Onward, Coco, The Good Dinosaur, Inside Out, Brave. But none of those, great as some can be, are this poppy and funny and glittery, or build to a lovely moment where ancient family magic and the tunes of a dreamy boy band harmonize—and point the way to a fuller expression of self.

Human Boys from the Deep: LUCA

As gentle and lovely as a seaside breeze, and as fragile and fleeting as a summer friendship, Pixar’s Luca is a magical animated movie. So many American animators claim Miyazaki as an inspiration, but here’s the rare film that proves it in action. In ways reminiscent of the Japanese master, director Enrico Casarosa (of the short La Luna) and his talented team have made a film aware to subtle shifts in character dynamics, legible to even a small child, but stirring in the detail, compassion, and earnest emotion, with which it’s carried out. And it’s one with nature, keyed into the dappling sunshine and soft tides, the waves lapping the beach and the drops of dew and rain slowly dropping on cobblestone streets. Within these sights, the story follows a timid young sea monster (Jacob Tremblay) who is curious about land. He falls into a quick companionship with a slightly older sea monster boy (Jack Dylan Grazer) who, shockingly to our young protagonist, lives in an abandoned lighthouse in a bay overlooking a charming cliffside Italian village. When out of water, these sea creatures look human, and the boys have fun learning to play like people do. Flipping their fins got them this far. Sure, the villagers in a small-town mid-century Italian paradise — with exquisite rustic architecture and period detail from crackling radios to apt movie posters — hate the mythical beasts of the sea, but they have gelato and bikes and plenty of pasta. The boys are going to like it here, if they can stay. Dazzling Pixar craft makes the movie a consistent stunner of light and movement as the boys try on life in this new place. The look of the film is a soft cartoony embellishment that’s rounded and cozy, befitting the swooning picturesque setting and sophisticated simple wackiness motoring the plot.

The picture remains causal and loose as far as these types of stories go, with the goals and stakes relatively small, but oh-so-big for those involved. The boys think they want a Vespa. They must avoid the younger boy’s parents (Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan), who figure out blessedly quickly what’s happened. They all must hide their identities and thus even the tiniest splash of water, no small feat by the beach. With Pixar’s typical clockwork plotting and mad-scramble climaxes done up here in a beautifully underplayed mood, the movie navigates a sweet whimsy. There’s strong melancholy in swift and impactful moments that never loses the overall childlike wonder, with soft but strong laughs and rubbery cartoony gags stretching the adorable character designs in fancifully well-designed slapstick. When a daydream finds a herd of wild Vespas roaming the countryside, or a bike crash ends with a halo of fish swimming around one’s head, or an eccentric uncle from the deep goes on about whale carcasses, the movie shows off its fantasy with quick shorthand strokes. And it has good fun watching the boys scramble around water to avoid capture, though of course the surly cat named Machiavelli smells something fishy. A fast friendship with a sweet underdog girl (Emma Berman) is a good sign; that her dad is a one-armed fisherman is maybe less so.

The consistent charming invention on display always returns to the boys’ shifting emotions, plugged into their perspective to an attentive and sensitive degree. Despite potential dangers and disappointments, the movie keeps things in perspective. This sunny and well-paced movie is always tenderly attuned to the dynamics of friendships, with the boys’ giddy good-natured playfulness, brash inquisitiveness, and nervous energies making for a fizzy boyish chemistry. And their evolving understanding of themselves and those around them makes this the rare coming of age story that understands such a process happens not all at once, in one momentous summer, but by testing and attempting, by forging new connections, stepping safely out of your comfort zone, discovering new talents, and learning how to be yourself. That Luca arrives at the same well-earned bittersweet teary-eyed character beats by the end that you’d expect of Pixar’s best should be no surprise. But it’s all the more impactful for slipping in naturally and honestly as an outgrowth of getting to know these characters, springing out of their smallest shifts of mood and maturation. The result is as bittersweet, sunny, and satisfying as a perfect summer day.

Family Quest: ONWARD

Pixar spent the last decade mostly turning out sequels, some good (Incredibles 2) and many middling. Now the once great factory of fresh computer animated classics has given us its new standalone feature: Onward. Like the best of its recent original works — Coco, Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur — it’s a film about growing up, a coming-of-age scramble nestled inside a melancholy metaphor that pushes on the emotional pressure points of its audience. Here’s a movie about an elf-boy in a world that imagines the fantasy pasts of cheap paperbacks and roleplaying games is now our modern day — the wilds of wizards and castles and enchanted forests now suburbs and gas stations and highways, the magic of staffs and spells now smartphones and minivans. (As you might expect, the widescreen visual look of the world has its little delights and storybook charm.) The boy is missing his long-dead father acutely on this, his sixteenth birthday. Luckily, his dad left a present to be opened on this day: a spell that’ll bring him back for just one day. It goes slightly wrong, leaving only a pair of legs in father-fashion khakis and loafers. (There are some good gags made out of this, and the more upsetting details are assiduously ignored.) Now the son must find a phoenix jewel (rebirth and all) with the help of his oafish Dungeons & Dragons-style fanboy older brother, a quest that takes them out into the magic on the edges of society, while testing their prickly fraternal bond. So it’s also the vintage Pixar special: the buddy comedy. It’s as sprightly a chase as it is a jab in the tear ducts, somehow giving the audience something that’s at once overfamiliar and unexpected, warmly funny, easily appealing, and comforting even in its rougher edges.

The film is full of typical Pixar touches, though more modest in its effect and depth. Writer-director Dan Scanlon (of the strangely forgotten Monsters University) brings to the picture genre play that is featherlight, a gentle needling of fantasy tropes while wholeheartedly embracing the fetch quest construction. But for however simple the plot, the emotions do run deep and true. It may have the shape of a machine-tooled moving response machine — all levers and buttons flipped and pushed to shape the necessary payoffs — but the warm vocal performances of Tom Holland and Chris Pratt are loveably believable cartoonish brothers, and the ache of their need to connect with a father they barley knew is sometimes palpable. The ultimate conclusion is surprising and satisfying, though I wish the movie was better equipped to dig deeper and more cleverly into its premise. (What, exactly, is the relationship between the very real magic and the rest of society? No underground support group like the shark’s in Finding Nemo? And why doesn’t the boy’s mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) get to spend time with her husband’s legs?) Pixar of yore would’ve wrung every drop of wonder and delight out of its conceit, its premise, and its world. Imagine the airtight structure of Toy Story or the swooning accumulated details of WALL-E. Alas. Onward nonetheless points a way forward, reaffirming the studio’s commitment to new stories to tell in its typically detailed style and earnest emotive effort. The characters are just too sympathetic and the quest too pure to deny. A sequence where the lad prepares to step out over a bottomless pit is as good — suspenseful and charming — as any I’ve seen of late, and a fine metaphor for the company itself. I’d rather Pixar be taking that leap of faith than retreading past successes any day. Onward and upward.

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.

Back to School: MONSTERS UNIVERSITY

The biggest problem Pixar has is an imbalance of expectations. Back five or ten years ago, when they were in the middle of a string of masterpieces – Wall-E, Up, Ratatouille, The Incredibles, among others – they seemed like a studio that could do little wrong. They released one gorgeously animated, surprisingly moving, and hugely satisfying movie after the next and for a while it seemed like that would always be the case. Now, after a string of merely enjoyable entertainments that not only weren’t heartbreaking works of visual inventiveness, but also rarely were working towards that goal, some have started shrugging off Pixar films as somehow less than adequate. As if expertly calibrated mass appeal crowd-pleasers are a thing of which we have an overabundance these days. 

Pixar’s latest is Monsters University, a prequel to their 2001 hit Monsters, Inc. This setting, a world of monsters in which all energy comes from scream power generated by sending creatures through portals in the shape of children’s closet doors, is Pixar’s most colorful and cartoonish. The design features an appealing bunch of candy-colored monsters, likable and vaguely frightening in the right light with the right sound design. They’re more cute than creepy, like smoothly animated Harryhausen characters inspired by one part Hieronymus Bosch, three parts Hanna-Barbera. The first film introduced us to the exceedingly endearing pair of Mike, a one-eyed green ball with the voice of Billy Crystal, and Sully, a furry blue bear with the voice of John Goodman. Together they were the best scarers in the business. Rather than attempting to build further narrative after the events of that film, which has a story that tidily fixes all that world’s major problems, we’ve wandered back in time with a charming prequel. This new film rewinds to find them college freshman.

This proves to be a fruitful move. Though their emotional arc from competitors to best friends is obvious, doubly so by knowing where they must end up, there’s plenty of bright, funny detail to fill up a film that uses the setting to great effect. The simple design details that go into fitting a college campus into this world alone provides plenty of delight. There are all the typical sights, from dorm rooms to classrooms and parties to parks, that you’d find in any college town, which makes the monsters roaming the halls and down the quad so appealingly strange and oddly familiar. They may have tentacles or three heads or breathe fire and are training to burst through your closet door roaring for a scream, but they still have to pass their exams and wonder if they’re cool enough to go to the party down the street. Monsters: they’re just like us.

Intimidating Dean Hardscrabble, Helen Mirren voicing a huge centipede with bat wings and a lizard face, introduces the annual Scare Games, a campus wide competition to prove who is the best student scarer. Mike and Sully both throw themselves into the competition with much to prove. The screenplay from Robert L. Baird, Daniel Gerson, and Dan Scanlon (who also directs) smartly makes Mike an underdog who has studiously worked his way into the University while Sully got in on a family name and big expectations. You can see their academic approaches in their postures, a nice subtle flourish of animation. There’s an interesting tension between them, but they also both have a lot to lose. To win is to remain in the scaring program. That makes it hard to be saddled with a team of adorable goofballs, the kind of ragtag group that fills out an instantly loveable ensemble: a pudgy middle-aged student with nerdy glasses and a Ron Swanson mustache (Joel Murray), a nice guy (Peter Sohn), a two-headed dance major (Sean Hayes and Dave Foley), and a hairy weirdo (Charlie Day). Why, they’re not as scary as the overconfident frat guys or the hissing sorority sisters. What hope does Team Oozma Kappa (great name) have? Even their team chant - "We're OK!" - leaves something to be desired.

With the competition, a sort of Triwizard Tournament for monsters, effectively turning the whole film into Pixar’s typical mad-scramble racing, chasing climax, the whole thing speeds right along. Through various challenges and obstacles that are cause for fun visual gags and impressive creature design, the zippy energy rarely flags. The film seems to take its cue from the rousing rat-a-tat drumline-driven fight song that Randy Newman has cooked up for the film’s setting, an expert clack of moving percussion parts playing in perfect, driving syncopation that powers the score. Monsters University is a lot of appealing parts played with great skill and falling into place with great precision. It’s a lively, funny G-rated campus comedy that’s been executed with beautifully detailed animation and a great deal of energetic momentum. It’s frame for frame the best-looking American animation since, well, the last Pixar film, and deals lightly and generously with some nice themes about being yourself, studying hard, and remaining honest and kind. The talented team behind the film has cooked up something special, harmonizing with the tone of the earlier film without relying solely upon our memories of it and filling the screen with plenty of visual whimsy to admire.

Monsters University may not match the emotional heights Pixar has proven capable of reaching. It doesn’t even come up with one sequence as good as its predecessor’s madcap chase through a rollercoaster of magic doors, but it’s still a film filled with delights. It has so many moving parts, endearing characters and visual pleasures – and pulls them all off so effortlessly – that it could be easy to scoff, as if such proficiency were easy to come by, as if other family films didn’t struggle to pull off even one of these goals. When a whispering librarian becomes a looming monstrosity when provoked by the slightest noise or an eager monster reveals the scaring techniques he’s studied are what we’d recognize as standard haunted-house horror movie tropes, there’s undeniable appeal. This film’s a two-hour smile and a likable echo of one of the studio’s earliest triumphs. Who’d want to turn down that offer? Even when working with a smaller emotional range and simpler plot, in a film that isn’t necessarily calibrated to make adults cry, Pixar is working with a whole different palate than their closest competitor. I wouldn’t trade one so-called minor Pixar effort for all the Ice Age and Madagascar movies in the world.

Mother and Child: BRAVE

Unlike previous Pixar films that started from a relatively small premise (the secret world of toys, an old man who wants to fly his house to South America, a rat who wants to become a chef, robots in love) and expanded to greater thematic and emotional import (dealing with change, dealing with disappointment, dealing with art, dealing with the fate of humanity), Brave starts with big sweeping vistas and finds in them a wee little fable about deeply relatable issues. Set against wide landscapes of forest and lake and a towering castle, the film finds not epic fantasy, but a small family drama. It’s an inversion of the Pixar formula and as such occasionally comes across as thinner and less ambitious than their usual output. (That’s the downside of putting out nearly a dozen masterpieces in less than twenty years.) It may be a quieter and less immediately gripping film than audiences might be expecting, but it works convincingly and entertainingly on its own terms.

The family at the center of Brave leads a vaguely Scottish kingdom made up of four clans. There’s a good-natured, bulky, muscular king (Billy Connolly) and his conscientious, compassionate queen (Emma Thompson). Their youngest kids, little, scampering redheaded triplet boys, are darling troublemakers, but their chief concern is their oldest child, a daughter named Merida (Kelly Macdonald). The other three clans are on their way to present their first-born sons in a competition for Merida’s hand, but the princess has no desire to be forced into anything as dull as marriage. She’s an adventurous, independent spirit who suffers through her mother’s lessons in poise and respectability in order to saddle up her trusty horse and gallop away from the castle on her days off to let her long, curly red hair flow in the wind as she enjoys archery, rock-climbing, and wilderness exploration. She’s talented and spirited, but not the proper lady that her mother hopes for her to become.

The plot of the movie involves the way Merida’s desires for her future conflict with her mother’s. This draws in all sorts of traditional fairy tale elements, from wispy forest spirits that just might lead you to your destiny, a daffy witch (Julie Walters) and her bubbling cauldron of spells destined to go wrong, ancient curses, powerful legends, and potential turmoil in the kingdom egged on by the outsized egos of the three proud men (Robbie Coltrane, Kevin McKidd, and Craig Ferguson) who would rather the princess marry one of their sons as generations of princesses have before them. But all of this is only background for the main focus on a mother-daughter relationship and the way deeply felt disagreements could escalate past exasperation and hurt feelings into situations where real harm can be done. Words are said and actions are taken that are quickly regretted and leave both mother and daughter in tears. Their problems feel irresolvable, but the moving through line of emotional truth here is the way the movie is built around this mother and daughter learning to understand and love each other more fully, differing points of view and all.

This tight focus turns the film into what is essentially a two-character show. All of the others – from the adorable, dialogue-free, triplets, to the raucous clan leaders and their sons, to the forest witch and her talking bird – are there mostly to move things along and provide background interest. Functionally, this strong de-emphasis on the ensemble heightens a fable-like simplicity of tone and emotion. There’s no real villain here, only the ticking-clock of a curse that falls on mother and daughter in the aftermath of a particularly wounding argument. They have to learn to work together, empower each other to take advantage of their individual and collective strengths and weaknesses in order to pull through, mending the powerfully expressed rift in their relationship as they go. What a wonderful female-centric plot that gives full weight to their emotions and decisions and pushes most else to the side. The central metaphor here is potent and the resolution is drawn-out to a deeply moving emotional punch.

But I can’t quite figure out why, with such an effective centerpiece, the movie as a whole feels somewhat slight. A factor could be the humor, which occasionally rings too broad for the more serious plot, especially when said humor involves men losing their kilts. Other times, though, the humor, especially warm, subtle physical moments and sweet dialogue, is nicely amusing. Perhaps the biggest problem is simply that it has to fight against the perception of Pixar perfection. The fact of the matter is that, even though it can’t live up to the highest highs Pixar has had, it’s still a remarkably solid piece of work that moves with great energy and great feeling with a nicely nuanced portrayal of mother-daughter relationships. There are moments where characters just look at each other, times where scenes are held just a beat longer than expected. In them we find lovely little moments that help sell the emotion behind it all.

If it weren’t a Pixar movie, especially a Pixar movie following up the studio’s first perceived creative misstep, the sometimes-fun, but awfully minor Cars 2, it could be easier to see Brave for what it is: a better-than-average family movie that’s a touch simplistic and with a few misguided jokes, but with emotionality so strong, main characters so compelling, and a core conflict so well-observed. It’s also an animated film with a gorgeously rendered environment beautifully animated in inviting and wondrous ways. Here the lush green fields and forest, the deep blue sea, and the warm castle of flickering flame on cobblestone are a wonderfully comfortable setting imbued with just enough magic and possibility to pull off the more fantastical elements of the story. (It’s one of the best-looking films of the year, though if you see it in weirdly dark and muddy 3D you might not know it.) And in the center of it all there’s Merida and her family, the real focus of the film and the film’s strongest element by far. They’re well cast with actors who have lovely musical accents and are charmingly animated so that they feel so lovable, so warm and funny and real, that they ground the whole thing with a very strong rooting interest.

But this is a Pixar movie and it is not a total masterpiece. And that’s too bad, but it’s hardly a deal breaker and no good reason to feel disappointed. The behind the scenes shuffling, which has resulted in a movie with director’s credits for Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman and a co-director's credit for Steve Purcell (all first-time Pixar directors, though Chapman’s the only one who has directed previously with Dreamworks Animation’s first feature, The Prince of Egypt), may explain some of the diffuse vision and the reliance on more convention than the brightly inventive studio is usually up to. But whoever is responsible for the moments between Merida and her mother deserves much praise, for those moments of great feeling and nuance, more than anything else, are what set this movie comfortably above its immediate competition from other American animation studios. After all, this is a film that tells a fresh legend, no small feat. And, like all good legends, this one rings with truth.

Downshift: CARS 2

It is a testament to Pixar’s consistent level of excellence that their Cars 2, a movie I more or less enjoyed watching, feels like a disappointment. It’s a movie that’s fast, colorful, frenetic, and funny, but gone is the deeper feeling we’ve come to expect of productions from this company. This is all surface level whiz-bang silliness, highly watchable and fairly entertaining but also Pixar’s worst effort thus far.

It’s all in what you compare it to, I suppose. After an impressive string of masterworks (Toy Story, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up among them), broken only by some relatively weaker entries that were merely pretty great (A Bug’s Life, Cars), Pixar has built a reputation for consummate craftsmanship, movies that entertain with great flair and originality while also managing to emote with a precision built on surprising grace and beauty. They’re gorgeously animated and layered films with heavy emotional content – a post-apocalyptic romance, a widower fighting the march of time, abandonment – handled tactfully and powerfully.

The first Cars wasn’t one of Pixar’s crowning achievements but it sure was fun. It takes place in a world much like our own but instead of a human populace there are fleets of vehicles with wide eyes staring out of clear windshields and bumpers twisting about like lips. It’s odd and off-putting at first, but in motion and in an involving plot, it all seems so natural. When I pushed toy cars across my childhood bedroom did I ever imagine people inside them? I don’t think so. For all I know, the cars themselves were racing each other all on their own. Cars has an egotistical racecar Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) zoom into Radiator Springs, a crumbling small town, and discover the slower pleasures of roadside Americana. It’s a movie about nostalgia versus modernity that comes down on the side of progress while still arguing for embracing what got us there.

Cars 2 has no deeper ambitions. If anything, it works to refute the stop-and-smell-the-roses relaxed pace of its predecessor. This film is proudly childish as it slams cars around in zippy action sequences driven by a silly round-the-world spy story. Surprisingly satisfying in its dizzying tangles of plot, events are kicked off by British secret agent car Finn McMissile (Michael Caine) dangerously and daringly discovering something of grave import aboard a menacing oil rig in the middle of the ocean. Soon enough, we learn that an eccentric billionaire (Eddie Izzard) has decided to promote his new alternative fuel by throwing a World Grand Prix, inviting the best racers from around the world. The race is on, which gets Lightning McQueen and his best friend, hick tow-truck Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), out of town and circling the globe.

Stops in Japan, France, Italy, and England provide the backbone of the plot, which is mostly an excuse for a diversity of deeply detailed backgrounds. Japan’s Tokyo is rendered as a world of little Hondas zipping around a bustling neon metropolis. A coastal village in Italy is a lush town where a little car speaks with the big voice of legendary Italian actor Franco Nero (!) and the boats in the harbor sit there pleasantly bobbing and blinking. In Paris, Notre Dame is encrusted with winged cars for saints and gargoyles, while in London the royal car family rolls up with their Land Rover bodyguards. It’s so very weird. Unlike the first film, during which I found myself unquestioningly accepting vehicular anthropomorphism, this time around I found myself wondering how cars managed to do just about anything, from building cathedrals to writing with pencils. And why would cars have to go through a metal detector in an airport? It’s a tribute to the nutty mise en scène, the total commitment to a truly strange concept, that endless unanswerable questions encroach every shot from all angles.

At each stop on the world tour, antics and action are around every corner. McQueen deals with his competition, like a hotshot Italian racecar (with a zooming, motor-mouth patter from a crazed and goofy John Turturro) in what ultimately becomes a glorified subplot. Meanwhile, in the main plot McMissile and his curvy assistant Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer) mistake sweet, dumb Mater for a fellow spy. The plot’s strictly pro forma, not much more or less than an adequate Bond picture when you get down too it, though I liked the evil cabal made up of, well, I guess I won’t spoil it, but the makes and models of the villains are a fun concept. As the story zooms along, the spies take precedence over the racers.

Mater, with his deep accent and unfortunate misunderstandings, gets increasingly wearing the more the film gets tied to his character and sidelines the infinitely more charming McQueen for far too long. Good in small doses, like his moments of comic relief in the first Cars, Mater is overused here. As much fun as the detail and speed of the humor, the action, and the locations are, less enjoyable are the few attempts to make it all mean something. We’re supposed to laugh at Mater and feel bad about it too. There’s a Life Lesson here, but it feels forced and unconvincing. Nevertheless, Cars 2 has a fast pace and it goes down smoothly. It’s a pleasant diversion. Lots of gags hit their marks, though countless others miss entirely, and the gun-toting, bomb-throwing cars make for unlikely, but often awfully satisfying, action heroes.

After churning out so many outstanding movies it’s a shame to see that here Pixar has slipped in overall quality, but it’s clear from what’s seen on screen that it’s not for lack of trying. It’s incredibly detailed animation with meticulous sound design and mostly fantastic voice work; in typical Pixar fashion it looks and sounds absolutely wonderful. It’s light, inconsequential fun. It feels somewhat difficult to criticize Pixar’s team for trying something different, using their technical skills for something less meaningful. If it seems like I’m holding Pixar to a higher standard than I would any other animated company, it’s only because they’ve conditioned me to expect so much more than they offer here. And yet Cars 2 feels very much like exactly the kind of movie that they wanted to make, a broad, silly, punny, busy kids’ movie. I simply had a passably fun time, is that so bad? In this case, it almost feels that way.

Up (2009)

Much has been made about the lack of merchandising appeal in Pixar’s recent movies. I fail to see why that should be so. From where I’m sitting, I can spot on my desk a WALL-E figurine and a stuffed Anton Ego (the food critic from Ratatouille). These aren’t conventionally appealing characters – they aren’t cute with pretty colors and soft edges – but they work on a better, deeper level. They’re characters to care about, to identify with, and they come from really good movies. With Up the kind folks at Pixar Animation have continued their uninterrupted run of greatness by once again giving us a beautiful, funny, heartbreaking work of visual splendor (I can’t wait to see the toys). I don’t like it quite as much as WALL-E (my favorite movie from last year), but that’s a tough act to follow for anyone, and doesn’t make Up any less of a masterpiece. There are moments so evocative, so moving, that I found myself with tears in my eyes; there are also moments so fresh with visual inventiveness and whimsy that I nearly whooped in joy. This is an exhilarating, uplifting film.

I purposely tried to stay away from plot details before my viewing, so I won’t discuss any here. After all, everyone now knows the basic premise: an elderly man lifts his house with hundreds of balloons and takes off for South America, along with a little scout stowing away. The surprise comes from how the plot kicks in and the direction it goes from there, a direction that is both more and less predictable than you might suspect. The film unspools in surprising and delightful ways. Pixar is still working at a different level than their computer-animation competition. Watch the ways colors bounce and shift through the mass of balloons, sending dapples of primary colors across the sides of buildings. Note the realistic gut-flipping depth to the heights. See how director Pete Docter and his team have created characters that are immensely appealing and have real emotional heft.

Ed Asner plays the old man, who is harboring a long dormant spirit of adventure, and mourning a deeply affecting loss. Asner brings the right amount of hidden charm to the man who’s not merely a grumpy-old-man caricature; he’s an understandable man with doubts, fears, regrets and vast reservoirs genuine human emotion. This character has more weight than many live action characters. His sighs pierce the soul as he shuffles about, the weight of his loneliness causing him to drag his feet as he clutches his cane, drooping ever closer to the ground. But watch how his adventure puts a new spring in his step as Asner gives his voice a bit more of a bounce and the animators slowly straighten his posture.

And what an adventure this is. There are thrilling chase scenes that soar through the frame with graet energy and color mixed with a confident sense of weight and place. Pete Docter also directed Monsters Inc, with its great climactic roller-coaster sequence that takes the characters through a vast warehouse of closet doors that zoom by at incredible speeds while the characters go through disorienting loops and drops. Here, every chase is like that virtuoso sequence. The characters are literally tethered to this floating house (some subtle in-your-face symbolism) during these chases, and there is great inventiveness in the way they flip, dip, fly, and fall but (hopefully) catch themselves at the last second. The action is perfectly paced and elegant in its cartoony construction. There are great moments of generous whimsy as the movie plays out like a vast expanse of the imagination, but the whimsy is focused and controlled, playing perfectly within the rules the movie sets forth. This is a movie giddy with the act of creation. The filmmakers know they have a great story to tell and trust the audience will go along with them on the incredible ride they’ve designed. It’s not as tight a plot as Pixar has had in the past. In fact, the movie feels unpredictably adrift in the specifics, but always, oddly, comfortably predictable in the arc of the ride.

This is certainly no mindless ride. Unlike Monsters vs. Aliens, which used its high-concept plot to merely plug in a couple sequences of high-speed – but bland – visual frenzy, Up unfolds with patience and care, hitting character moments both big and small with ease and subtlety that allows the action pieces additional stakes. We care about these people; we care about their dreams and goals, their hopes and fears. Above all, we want them to succeed. I could indentify equally with the old man and the little boy. They reminded me of people I knew, people I know; they are who I was, am, and could be. The opening scenes of the film introduce us to the old man as a little boy (looking a bit like a young Roger Ebert) then reveal his entire life to date (until he looks vaguely like Spencer Tracy), and are heartbreaking and beautiful, simultaneously, in their immediacy and potency. In fact, Pixar expertly shows in minutes the impermanence, the fleetingness, of life that some films can barely show in hours. It’s not often that family films tackle these feelings, along with feelings of regret, loneliness, and the awful and sweet unpredictability of life. Even rarer, the family film that tackles them well.

Up is beautifully rendered in picture and perfectly controlled in tone. There are shots that rival Miyazaki for pure artful beauty, but this is also, like Miyazaki’s films, a blast, as signaled by (the always great) Michael Giacchino’s excellent score that bleats with childlike glee at the humor with a deep, soaring, undercurrent of respect. It’s a fun and exciting movie. There have been other movies so far this summer that have made my inner child happy, but only Up pleases the inner child and the outer adult in equal, even overlapping, ways. (Only Star Trek's come close). This is a nimble, mature, complex film of deep emotion and huge creativity. In other words, Pixar’s done it again, with a film that lands on the heart with a feeling of permanence.

Note: Pixar’s tradition of including a pre-feature short is intact with the inclusion of the delightful Partly Cloudy, a work of quick visual humor that expertly manipulates emotions. Also, the use of 3D in Up is fairly unnecessary. Feel free to save yourself a few bucks by seeing it in 2D.