Film is a mysterious thing. It triggers emotional responses in the audience that are as surprising as they are all-encompassing. As a medium, film is capable of painting stunning vistas that feel like they could only come to life behind the silver screen, but many of the most arresting displays on film arise from scenes that are familiar, perhaps even mundanely so. It’s an artform built on rules and guidelines–young film students are probably familiar with principles like the rule of thirds or the Kuleshov effect–but someone tell me the rule that explains why a line like “We’ll always have Paris,” just levels you. There are parts of the film discussion that cannot be anticipated by a formula or a rulebook, and for that we should be grateful.
Arrival (2016) |
With that in mind, let’s dig into
arguably the 21st century’s greatest animated film, or indeed one of its
greatest films in general, Pixar’s 2003 masterwork, Andrew Stanton's Finding Nemo.
Once in a blue moon I will encounter people who admit to not being on the “Nemo” train, but they are also usually quick to identify themselves as contrarians. If I were saddled with the impossible task of identifying a single film that everyone liked, this would probably be the safest bet. Because it’s not just that the film sits on the title of best-selling DVD of all time (and with home media market going the way it is, I don’t see it ever relinquishing that honor), the movie is rightfully celebrated by critics as a hallmark of not just animation but filmmaking in its totality. Mark Caro of The Chicago Tribute declared,
"‘Finding Nemo’ and its Pixar predecessors tap into the
shared gene among the kids and adults that delights in imagination-engaging,
eye-tickling and wit-filled storytelling. You connect to these sea creatures as
you rarely do with humans in big-screen adventures. The result: a true sunken
treasure."
In Pixar’s landscape of filmmaking mastery, Finding Nemo stands out to many as their apex achievement, and I think it is worth asking why that is. There's a surprisingly large swath of the film population that is content to just write it off as some unexplained phenomenon. Yes, I see this with casual filmgoers, but I also see it at work with professional critics who tend to just write-off "Nemo's" success as pure serendipity. "Who would have guessed that a cartoon could be as good as a 'real film'?"
But there are a lot of factors that go into a film's impact. Just in the space of writing, you have to develop the story's conflict and the character arc, and in a way that makes all these story elements feel cohesive and unified. Much of what a film critic does is train themselves in the nuances of how these things develop and manifest in filmmaking. It is a film's job to be mysterious: it is a film critic's job to not only decode the mystery, but to do so in a way that is accessible for the average viewer.
Critics are the first line of defense for new movies entering the arena, and the dialogue they create leaves an impact on the media landscape. And if critics stop expending their goodwill based on a film’s novelty, insight, or general excellence, if studios see that these things no longer matter next to a well-spun takedown, could we really blame them for diverting their efforts into making Toy Story 72?
Big Blue World
Computer animation had only been telling feature-length stories for not even ten years by the time “Nemo” swam into theaters. If you just let yourself sit with the knowledge of just how rapidly the medium evolved, it’s honestly a little baffling.
But the remarkable thing to me about the animation in Finding Nemo isn’t just that the film looks realistic or even “pretty.” That overwhelming visual spectacle is also an active agent in the storytelling. After all, the film rests on this journey that father and son are going to take in discovering that this world full of peril and disaster is also a thing of beauty, and so that is also an experience you need to create for the audience. The clearest way to achieve this is to paint a world that is itself overflowing with serenity and wonder, and Finding Nemo had to straddle a few lines to pull that off.
The Lego Movie (2014), Waking Life (2001) |
“I knew this film would have a balance of reality and
fantasy, but be a little more skewed to reality than Toy Story or A
Bug’s Life. But what that exactly meant would be subtle; I couldn’t lay
down the rule book. In CG there aren’t limits anymore, so it’s always an
artistic choice about how to blend caricature with reality, how exaggerated and
how real to make something …”
Finding Nemo ends up landing in a place that is close to realism, incorporating things like believable fish anatomy and floating ocean speck, while also affording its cast very human-like personality. But this realism only ends up enhancing the film's fantastical feel. With a backdrop as vibrant as the great barrier reef, you can afford to lean realistic and trust that the final product will still look a movie where animals talk.
The prospect of a fish cast was another challenge specific to this film. Character designer Dan Lee explained, “The fish are like floating heads, which was an interesting challenge because normally in traditional animation so many emotions are communicated with shoulders, arms, hand gestures—these features were severely limited to nonexistent in the anatomy of the fish. We basically had to invent some tricks to compensate.” Animation is the ideal medium to anthropomorphize whatever into a human-adjacent figure for the audience to engage with. Disney had done this just the previous decade with lions, crabs, teapots, and the like. But again, CGI filmmaking had only been around for ten or so years. These were untested concepts.
Recall how the very next year, Dreamworks would try its own hand at underwater storytelling with Shark Tale, and you’ll notice that most of the fish characters in that movie are still rigged liked humans, always positioned “standing up” and articulating their fins in basically the exact same way humans use their arms and hands (even wearing clothes …) which makes the ambitions behind “Nemo” that much more daunting. But the pay-offs speak for themselves.
A clownfish specifically is a solid choice for a protagonist for this story for a number of reasons, such that it doesn’t feel like Stanton just picked a fish out of a bowl at random and decided to cast it in his movie. From a visual standpoint, a clownfish’s bright orange coloring forms a perfect contrast against the deep blue of the ocean. (The official term is complementary colors—I see you, Vis Design 101 students.) The image is more striking and also serves a thematic point, constantly highlighting how out of place Marlin is in this big blue world. Dory meanwhile, is defined by her deep blue color palette. This not only makes her look at home in the ocean that Marlin is so afraid of, but it also sets her as a counteragent to Marlin himself, constantly forcing him out of his comfort zone and exposing him to ideas that challenge his limited worldview.
The thrill of building an underwater playground using computer generated animation had teased director Andrew Stanton during the early days of development on Toy Story, nearly ten years before "Nemo" would be ready, while visiting an aquarium with his family. The idea for what to do with this came to him when he landed on the film's central theme during a father-son outing. Stanton recalls an episode taking his son out of the park when he became aware of his own Marlin-like tendencies as he became so preoccupied with keeping his son from getting hurt that both he and his son ended up having a miserable time. He landed on the conclusion that “fear could prevent a good father from being one,” a variation on a theme that had been playing around at Pixar since very early on.
Theme and Influence
So, here's an idea: things have influences. Art especially has influences because artists love drawing upon work that inspires them. Seeing bits of films inside other films is kind of an inevitable byproduct of growing more media literate, and honestly, that's part of the fun.
Singin' in the Rain (1952), Moulin Rouge! (2001) |
If you look at a lot of the early Pixar films, for example, you can get an idea for what the favorite movies were for Pixar’s first directors. Marlin and Dory have a dynamic that feels very Bringing Up Baby, and the tank gang plays like a remix of the cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Those early Pixar films also have a lot of Office Space, seen most prominently in the in-universe workplaces of Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles. And maybe one day we'll take a look at the horror movies that informed Toy Story.
But the movie that seems to have had the most influence on Pixar’s early years is Kramer vs Kramer, a 1979 dramedy directed by Robert Benton starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. The film sees Hoffman playing a marketing executive, and neglectful father and husband, who suddenly becomes the sole caregiver to his young son after his wife (Streep) has a nervous breakdown and leaves him. The story’s tension comes from this business titan being torn as his new responsibility seems to be taking him away from his mission as a man to excel at his career at all costs. This is at times stressful, comedic, and—eventually—heartening. As Hoffman’s character allows himself to embrace his role as a father, he finds a sense of fulfillment that his career world could never offer him. So when his ex-wife reappears demanding custody of their son, he goes to court to fight for the right to be a father.
The idea that dads need to find a
healthy-work-life balance had obviously been around before, but this usually
featured as a backdrop to the larger plot. Kramer vs Kramer was arguably
the first film to really look at where fatherhood fit into this
dichotomy of manhood in a world that tells men that the best thing they can be
is a master in the world of business and career, and to hinge the bulk of the film on this specific throughline. Incidentally, this vantage
point is also what separated much of Pixar’s early work from other animated
fare at the time. Though Pixar could be said to be targeting a young
audience, the adult characters were generally the point of view
characters. Yes, Nemo has his own internal journey, but his storyline is
supplementary to Marlin’s. I was a kid during Pixar’s first golden age, and it
honestly didn’t make a difference to me that “dad” was the main character.
So while Hollywood at large would almost turn this archetype into a cliche, you can definitely see the way this influenced Pixar’s earliest films. Almost all of their films from their first decade somehow centered on fathers or father surrogates navigating their responsibilities as caregivers. This character evolution often put them in direct opposition to that most powerful influence in the male world: the pressure of the workplace and the tease of career celebrity, which is where the Kramer vs Kramer connection really rings loud.
This is similar to what we discussed
when we looked at Clint Eastwood’s A Perfect World which also probes the overlap
between fatherhood and a form of fully realized masculinity. (Finding Nemo
also got a shoutout in that essay, I guess it’s only symmetrical for me to
return the favor.) I noted that said movie forecasted and perhaps even enabled
this renaissance of pop culture hero dads as seen with media like The
Mandalorian. The Pixar dads entered the game even more recently, and we
perhaps owe our critical reevaluation of manhood to them as well.
The somewhat fallacious idea of the older Pixar movies having some secret sauce is one that we’ll dive into more, but if there was one story element that sort of defined those early Pixar masterworks, it was probably their unique interest in exploring the intricacies of a man's capacity for caregiving. (I don’t know, maybe that’s why the lines specifically about ONWARD being somehow a divergence from the Pixar standard read as a very shallow reading of their filmography, but I digress …) Around the time of Ratatouille and Wall-E, Pixar started finding new soil to till, but frankly, I feel like the world is that much better for the attention Pixar gave to this subject.
But while we’re here, though, this
discussion on the Pixar dudes does come with some warts that we need to
acknowledge. On the one hand, Pixar gave male viewers space to explore manhood
with nuance and intricacy, and in a light that is not often represented in
mainstream media. On the other hand, Pixar’s deference to the male
gender for its first fifteen or so years of filmmaking does reveal some blind
spots, particularly for women.
Consider that 2012’s Brave was their first film to center on a female protagonist. This came a full seventeen years into the game, and even that milestone is marred by factors like the treatment of original director Brenda Chapman, including her dismissal from this project that she pioneered herself. The fact that the films were so enthusiastic about the nuances of manhood does kind of betray that these same films did not keep the gates open for women. To be clear, I am not equating Mike and Sulley’s healthy friendship with some form of toxic masculinity—I would in fact argue the opposite. (Credit also needs to be given to those early female characters like Jessie, Princess Atta, Dory, and Helen who even in male-centered stories stood out as fully fleshed out characters on their own.) I just acknowledge that there are two faces to this coin.
I honestly probably wouldn’t even have this hanging question mark if not for the John Lasseter shaped shadow looming over Pixar. The fact that one of the founding members of Pixar is now known to have been guilty of a lot of lecherous behavior, and also encouraged a culture at Pixar that was, in the words of blogger and former Pixar animator Cassandra Smolcic, “a sexist boys’ club,” it does kind of cast a shadow over the first two-thirds of Pixar’s reign and their long line of male-centered stories. (Though apparently, it didn’t cast a long enough shadow that studios like Sky Dance don’t still want to hire Lasseter back into positions of authority, or that prominent outlets like The New York Times won’t report on his “professional redemption.”)
But at the same time, Lasseter wasn’t
the only author in the Pixar story, we don’t need to give him so much credit by
pretending he was. Storytelling is a team effort, and when someone compromises
the integrity of that team, you dispense with them, and then you ask how he got
there in the first place. Moreover, there is a wide gap between the kind of
masculinity embodied by the likes of Marlin and Sulley and what Lasseter was
doing. We can be grateful that players like Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Brad
Bird cared enough to invest in stories about healthy masculinity while also
demanding consequences when men like Lasseter betray that spirit. That's also nothing to say of women like Darla K Andersen, Kori Rae, and Lindsey Collins who also helped carry Pixar during those formative years.
Domee Shi, the queen behind Turning Red |
The patterns of early Pixar storytelling reveal something about the studio that created these stories and the society that received them, and they also make for a fun talking point during the family reunion, but the patterns themselves are not what made Pixar great. Making quality films carries far beyond just the pitch. Not every movie premised on dads learning how to be dads is going to be revelatory or even competent. (Where are the accolades for Eddie Murphy in Daddy Day Care?) What really set Pixar apart wasn’t just the kinds of stories it told, but how it told them. The true secret to Pixar’s success is that they play by the same rules as everyone else: it all comes down to good storytelling.
Writing Nemo
One of the keys to the success of Finding Nemo’s screenplay (for which it received an Oscar nomination, a rare feat for an animated film) is that every element of the story serves the larger themes and destinations of the film. None of the story's moving parts feel like distractions or deviations.
Sharks also carry a specific meaning in pop culture, and the film is certainly leaning on this expectation when Bruce, named for the mechanical shark used in the production of Jaws (itself named for Steven Spielberg’s lawyer), invites these two bite-sized fish to a party. The movie subverts these expectations by planting these killing machines in what adult audiences will recognize as an AA meeting.
The movie traces out the full circle of Marlin’s psychological fears of the worst of what the ocean has to offer, immediately confronting him with the most feared ocean predator only to immediately humanize and demystify him by painting him as a struggling addict who maybe feels bad about his carnivorous reputation. (Of course, the film still gives Bruce an excuse to relapse so we can still have a shark chase.) And the movie does this by smartly playing into concepts and ideas with which the audience is familiar without having to draw the lines explicitly.
You also have to be careful with shorthand and be mindful of what people or class you are invoking and how you are presenting the subject. Shorthand can indulge in and perpetuate stereotypes when done carelessly. “Nemo” does a good job at sidestepping this because it stays away from awkward social dynamics. I think the closest we get to the coding of a marginalized group is Crush the sea turtle as a stand-in for California beach bums, who don’t really fit into the kinds of conversations we usually have about these things.
But the Crush comparison works not only because it's not punching down, but because the connotation is relevant to Marlin’s journey. Crush’s freestyle parenting is a complete contrast to Marlin’s hyper-dictated approach. A chill surfer bro is the exact kind of figure who would believably deliver this idea that sometimes the best thing a parent can do for their kid is go with the flow. Crush also enters the story at a point in Marlin’s story where he is actually finally questioning the truthfulness of his worldview and is finally open to reconsidering how he views his obligation as a parent. Marlin would have needed to encounter Bruce first for the Crush chapter to make sense.
But shorthand doesn’t just pertain to
characters. Something like Marlin and Dory being swallowed by a whale echoes
the story of Jonah and the whale, and stimulating the audience’s cultural
memory like that can lend a story more authority. “Nemo” is full
of this. The story of a clownfish taking on an entire ocean already has a
massive sense of scale to it, but set pieces like sunken World War II ships
carry heavy gravitas without the characters themselves having to remark upon
them because they lean on cultural foreknowledge of these things. (And the
almost biblical scale of this story is part of the reason why Finding
Dory really falls flat as a follow-up. We go from this undersea odyssey to
an afternoon at the aquarium …)
So there’s a lot about this story that works
in the macro, but the genius of the movie also lies in the details.
Of all the rules that go into filmmaking, character arc is arguably the most important to understand because in a character-bound film economy, a strong arc provides an anchor for the entire film. Screenwriter and Professor at Los Angeles University, Linda Cowgill, explains character arcs saying,
Silver Linings Playbook (2012) |
Much of why Marlin’s story is so satisfying is that he has such a strong character arc: his starting and end points are so clearly delineated, and each of his little mini-adventures along the way have direct influence on his development. It's not just that we know exactly where the film wants him to go, but Marlin's journey to getting there feels honest and earned.
At the basis of any character arc is a strong sense of conflict, and this manifests in two ways. The external conflict puts the protagonist in opposition to actual forces or systems that they must defeat to achieve or win something. The internal conflict sees the protagonist wrestling with some moral issue or discrepancy that they must reconcile or overcome. Example, the external conflict in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is between James Stewart and the corrupt U.S. Senators while the internal conflict is whether commitment to principles and virtue can actually overpower the selfish machinations that have taken root in a system like the American government.
We don’t have to look far to find the external and internal conflicts of Finding Nemo. External conflict: Marlin has to face an entire ocean of dangers in order to get his son back from the humans. Internal conflict: Marlin has to reconcile his paralyzing fear of the world with his fatherly responsibilities to a son who must also live in this world.
Dory is the biggest agent in helping Marlin close the gap, basically acting as a cipher for Marlin to understand his relationship with Nemo. At the start, Marlin only sees Dory for all the ways she poses either a distraction or a liability, but Dory’s spiritedness is a large part of what helps Marlin to achieve his goal to rescue his son. The readiness with which she approaches something like sharks inviting her over for dinner is a total contrast to the way Marlin would just retreat at the first sign of trouble or even discomfort, but this tenacity helps catalyze many of the plot pieces that push Marlin out of the reef and into the unknown.
The hanging irony is that Dory should
be the more vulnerable of the two. Her naivete and memory impairment in theory
leave her very at risk in a world that is rife with danger. But both the
audience and Marlin come to see that Dory leans into the world in all its
spontaneity, and that leaves her better suited for the world than Marlin’s
paranoia ever did for him. Marlin recognizing that she has useful abilities and
viewpoints, and learning to emulate them himself, is a key part of his evolution.
But the load needs to be carried not just on the characters themselves, but on the situations they find themselves in. To achieve a character arc for your protagonist, you need to be consistently putting them in scenarios that will challenge them, not just their resolve, but their worldview. Rain Man, for example, sees Tom Cruise playing a self-centered business mogul. When he becomes convinced that effectively kidnapping his newly discovered autistic brother (played by Dustin Hoffman, him again) will force his father’s estate to grant him the money he is believed he is owed, Tom Cruise’s character is suddenly put in a position where he has to be constantly mindful of someone who cannot look after himself, and all his experiences in taking care of his brother start to chip away at his built-in selfishness.
Marlin could have found any number of things to do until he and Dory stumbled into the dentist office, but in order for a story's conclusion to feel earned, the steppingstones have to be actively advancing character development. Let’s quickly review the main sequence of events in Marlin’s quest and look for what lessons Marlin is learning through each chapter:
-The shark encounter confronts Marlin with the idea that the looming threats of the ocean are not always so clear. By design, Bruce and his buddies should want to make Marlin dinner, but Marlin finds out that just because something could hurt him, that doesn’t mean it will.
-Their dive into the abyss is where Dory assures Marlin that even when he is wandering into total darkness, if he “just keeps swimming,” he will eventually find what he’s looking for, even if he has to outrun an anglerfish or two along the way.
-Crush and the turtle pod introduce the idea that when left to their own devices, children will eventually learn how to swim without parents needing to rescue them--and that the children themselves will know when they are ready to make this jump.
-Marlin gets a second chance to prove he’s learned his lesson from the jellyfish when he allows himself to trust Dory to enlist the help of the whale. At first, Marlin thinks he made a mistake when the whale swallows them both, which is why he is hesitant to believe that the whale is not going to digest them, but in choosing to let go and accept the unknown, he sees that the whale has carried them all the way to Sydney Harbor, exactly where he needed to go.
-This is all put to the ultimate test when
Marlin finally has Nemo back but is then faced with the choice of whether to
let his son swim straight into danger if it means saving their friend.
The thing to keep in mind is that
Marlin would have never let Nemo go in the beginning, and that is why this
character beat is so powerful. This trust in Nemo is what Marlin needed to
learn right from the start, and this is also why Finding Nemo as a story
works so well. Marlin spends the entire film not only removing literal
obstacles that are keeping him from his son (external conflict),
but also peeling away at the emotional baggage that drove Nemo away in the
first place (internal conflict). It’s not just that Marlin is a different
person, but it’s also that we have seen him become that different
person–we went on that journey with him.
In some ways, the construction of a solid narrative is almost mathematical. There are universal principles that make narrative as a device function. A filmmaker can be creative with how these are applied, but there is a meter and rhythm to how things like tension and character arcs play out (e.g. set-up should come before the pay-off).
Yet at the same time, good films feel organic, spontaneous, personal. The kind of story that might have struck a dad taking his son to the aquarium or the playground. These tools we discuss all exist in service of creating something emotionally truthful. A scene like Marlin rescuing Nemo's egg and promising that he'll never let anything happen to him obviously has a lot going for it emotionally. But finding these emotional hotspots is the easy part. After the filmmaker has keyed in on these tender parts of the human psyche, the audience spends the rest of the film asking in the back of their mind if those involved have crafted a vessel worthy to house such delicate instruments. A lot of films don't know how make the jump.
Why Nemo? Why Now?
So … why am I talking
about Finding Nemo now?
Well, a part of it is realizing that though I claim to be a huge fan of Pixar’s work, their films have been curiously absent from the list of films I’ve analyzed and celebrated. I've never had trouble tapping into my enthusiasm for Disney animation, but thus far, the Pixar film that has received the most attention from me was Toy Story 4, and you all know how I feel about that movie. Part of this is also my evolving feelings about the observations I made about Pixar as a whole when I released that series a few years back about critics and their deceptively complex relationship to their filmography.
Yes, critics were happy to give Finding
Nemo the thumbs up, but you also had people like Jeff Strickler of the Star
Tribune wedging their praise with caveats about how Finding Nemo wasn’t
as good as Pixar’s best work, saying that the film "proves that even when
Pixar is not at the top of its game, it still produces better animation than
some of its competitors on their best days." These quid pro quos seem
really flimsy in hindsight given that no one really doubts that Finding Nemo
is absolutely Pixar at its peak, though I honestly don’t think we need to dwell
on them except insofar as we remember that critics have always felt nervous
about declaring even Pixar movies “classics” until they’re sure everyone else
feels the same.
This was kind of the basis of my Pixar series, where I was mostly just frustrated with film critics for refusing to acknowledge that, “yes, ONWARD is every bit as good as Pixar’s best films, and you numbskulls can’t even articulate a convincing counterargument!” But I had kind of hoped that time would make a fool of me, and my observations would fall out of relevancy. Like, this would be a specific trial that ONWARD and its awkward release date would have to bear alone. Yet here we are three and a half years later, and we have seen several other solid works from Pixar receive largely lukewarm reactions from critics—critics who claim that Pixar has just lost their way, but can’t for the life of them explain why.
At a glance, the idea of critics somehow turning on Pixar might seem like a bit of a stretch. Luca, ONWARD, Turning Red, and Elemental, were all nominated for best animated picture in their respective years. But take a look, for example, at the opening for Deadline’s review of Elemental:
"What has fallen flat at Pixar? This is the innovative animation studio that pushed all before it in the first decade of this millennium, that invented a way of turning the plastic finish of digital animation to its advantage in the towering Toy Story, that was prepared to start a film with a 20-minute scene with no dialogue in WALL-E – and revealed that kids didn’t care – and that would make an adventure film with a hero aged 78 years young in UP!. Kids didn’t care about that either, as it turned out, because Carl Fredricksen was a grumpy-gramps adventurer who also didn’t care what others thought of him. Pixar always had something new up its collective artistic sleeve. And yet here they are, coming out with a film as dull-witted and syrupy as Elemental."
After sounding off on all these
accolades for the original Pixar films (talking points that were absolutely
tested and proved by older film critics), the review manages to score some
points for itself by calling out the gendered stereotyping of having Wade (a
“transparent sausage of wet love,” exact quote) be an engineer. It bolsters
every observation with the assurance that even the children will be embarrassed to
be served a film that is so heavy-handed in its presentation, a claim that itself could use some supporting. The review even
culminates with a snappy zinger about how “Elemental could, in fact,
simply have been called Sentimental. It would have saved time.”
When you dig into the arguments this
review is making about the film, you find there’s very little in here that
lines up with film criticism. Certainly, an individual critic’s subjectivity is
a part of what makes film analysis so lively, but I don’t read this review
calling out the false advertising of focusing on four literal elements instead
of the entire periodic table and think, “Interesting perspective. I hadn’t
noticed that.” I think, “... that’s honestly what stood out to
you?”
This is very safe criticism. This is exactly the thing that Ratatouille’s Anton Ego calls out in his in-movie review when he talks about critics risking very little while holding the knife over those who are putting their heart and soul on display. This dialogue doesn’t do anything to scout out weak points in Pixar’s storytelling, it’s just using clever rhetoric to show-off to the reader that they’re smarter than a kid’s movie.
It’s been somewhat easy for critics to feel assured that their insights are pure and true seeing how Pixar films have not been performing as strongly at the box office as movies like “Nemo” did. Some critics have tried to piece together a coherent narrative about why these films have been underperforming, like this piece from The New York Times.
"Although not saying so directly, Mr. Docter also indicated that Pixar had perhaps drifted too far from its storytelling roots.
"In recent years, Pixar has allowed filmmakers like Peter Sohn, who made 'Elemental,' to explore stories that are more personal. (Mr. Sohn’s immigrant parents inspired his film.) Yet many of Pixar’s biggest original successes, including 'Toy Story' in 1995 and 'Monsters, Inc.' in 2001, have grown from more universal concepts — 'ideas that we all carried around as kids,' as Mr. Docter put it. What if my toys come to life when I leave the room? What if there are monsters in my closet?"
Well, I guess now we know who that one
guy is who gave Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma the thumbs down for being “too
personal” …
The reasons for why these films have seen fewer immediate financial returns have nothing to do with the Pixar story process somehow failing and more to do with external factors, like the mismanagement of Disney+. These films were also unfortunate victims of the global shutdown with ONWARD literally dropping into theaters five days before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. But with Elemental overcoming the applesauce criticism it faced opening weekend and becoming a genuine box office bounty, you kind of get the idea that all of these films would have found success had they been dealt a fair hand (or really any hand given how many of these films did not premiere theatrically). As far as reasons for why critics are withholding from new Pixar movies, we can perhaps speculate.
#NeverForgetTreasurePlanet |
At some point, it was always going to stop being edgy to declare Pixar as “the good animation studio.” It was only ever a question of whether that jump was going to be matched by any true shift in quality from their filmmakers. (Ironically, the one recent Pixar film to be embraced by critics was 2020’s Soul, which I actually had a very muted reaction to.) We’ve seen Pixar playing around with new subjects and methods of filmmaking, but where it really counts with storytelling, they’re just as committed to their craft. And so in lieu of legitimate issues, critics fall back on vague notions of ONWARD and Turning Red “lacking spark or emotional resonance," or irritations that "we've all seen this before," (a slippery foundation given that all of Pixar's elder films absolutely had influences of their own).
And Luca gave me a hankering for gelato from which I will never recover |
I don’t want to end on such a sour
note, so I’ll just wrap up by saying that Finding Nemo is one of my
favorite movies. A part of why animation is experiencing such a renaissance
today is because of movies like Finding Nemo that helped legitimize the
artform and reaffirmed what most of us had already known, that good stories
will find us in any number of spaces if we are willing to receive
them. Over twenty years out, and I am still grateful that, whatever the prevailing attitudes of critics then or now, the filmmakers at Pixar just threw out the rulebook and made the best film they could.
I found these words (in your essay) thought provoking: “The thing about film–and especially film criticism–is that film critics are not soothsayers. Their means of divining the artistic merit of a movie are not unknowable… It is a film's job to be mysterious: it is a film critic's job to not only decode the mystery, but to do so in a way that is accessible for the average viewer.” Not sure how I feel about this. While I’ve loved reading your essays—and believe you have a remarkable gift for reviewing films in a way that provokes thought; I’ve often found that literary critics and many film critics draw from a text or scene something I don’t see, or something I’m not convinced that the author or producer really intended in the words she wrote (in her novel or screenplay). Part of the magic for me—in reading a book filled with imagery (or “mystery,” as you called it) or watching a movie with the same—is interpreting what it meant to me personally. Now, I don’t want to dismiss the place of a good reviewer. I think they way you review films really connects with how I think. But, generally speaking, I like the experience of being “inspired” by what comes to me from the experience—rather than being told what I should have “experienced” by watching a film (or reading a book). Known what I mean? I realize this is not the focus of your essay on Finding Nemo; but the essay (in your words) “triggered [an] emotional response” and thoughts about what I seek from a film or a book, as opposed to what so many reviewers seek to provide.
ReplyDeleteOn a separate note, I loved this comment—as it is one of my favorite scenes in the move: “Sharks also carry a specific meaning in pop culture, and the film is certainly leaning on this expectation when Bruce, named for the mechanical shark used in the production of Jaws (itself named for Steven Spielberg’s lawyer), invites these two bite-sized fish to a party. The movie subverts these expectations by planting these killing machines in what adult audiences will recognize as an AA meeting.” There are so many scenes in the movie, but I love Bruce, the AA meeting, and the Jaws connections. It is always nice to notice when a writers create a cartoon with the intent of entertaining the kids and also the adults. This scene and its characters did that for me. “Fish are friends, not food!” Love it!
I definitely think there are many valid ways to read a single film, and that many different individuals, professional critic or no, can have varied and even opposite interpretations of that one movie that are still well-founded. While a critic's performance generally has them relay their work by spelling out THEIR reading, I feel like a critic's job is less about converting readers to their specific viewpoint and more about opening doors that may only be readily visible to those who study film in its totality. (Though admittedly, it is REALLY FUN when you do manage to sway someone to your side.) I absolutely know what it's like to have contrary opinions about films from critics I really respect, but when their process is true, I'm still grateful for the extra perspective.
DeleteI think most critics do that, but the landscape being what it is, I've also noticed that within certain circles (e.g. animation) a lot of critics up and down the totem pole feel like they can get away with distorting a film and its intent into something it isn't, something that can be easily dismissed and defeated, to score easy street cred. It can become easy for critics to pass off their laziness or incuriosity as just having a more developed eye. This is where things get disingenuous and where I think a lot of people would do well to train themselves in the basics of how critics work. It helps to be able to distinguish when a critic is coming from a different vantage point and when they're just trying to coast off their laurels.