UP with Details
Jun. 17th, 2009 07:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinEven though I said I didn't need to see it again ... I saw it again. Partly it was to see it not-in-3D, partly it was to see the Frog trailer in a non-Disney* theatre, but mostly it was to write this review.
*well, it was full of Disney employees, but it was not the studio theatre
Generally spoiler-free if you skip the footnotes...
First, the short: Partly Cloudy is very cute, and very pink, and not quite as painfully corny as its summary led me to expect. It was nicely animated (especially the stork) but a lot of the baby animals had that overstuffed jowly look that reminded me of the Poky Little Puppy, which has always repulsed me a little but the folks at Pixar apparently worship Little Golden Books so it was probably intentional. But the main thing that sticks with me about the short was ... for lack of a better term, the dialogue. It's ostensibly 'silent,' that is, there are no words spoken in the entire film, but I swear every shot had some sort of non-verbal vocalization, 75% of which were completely unnecessary. Here's an idea: how about letting the acting portray what the characters are thinking and feeling? Do you really need an 'unh?' with that shrug, or an 'erk!' with that grimace? People don't make that much noise when they're not speaking, in general. The noises are definitely human noises, so with animal characters it feels like dialogue anyway, and the absence of words is more apparent. I suspect a little bit of my impatience with this facet of the film, as with several aspects of Up, stems from my personal problems with The Pixar Method and how I've seen it implemented at Disney, which of course wouldn't bother the average moviegoer, but I think the 'excess vocalization' charge would stand up in an objective court regardless.
On to the feature!
In case anyone was wondering, I felt the movie didn't lose much between 3D and 2D. The 3D was subtle and gave things a nice sense of depth (especially when soaring high above the ground) but the effect is simulated pretty well on a flat plane by these crazy things we like to call 'scale' and 'atmospheric perspective.' It's almost as if the 3D was an afterthought. I wonder what the story behind that is... Anyway, after the Disney screening some people had mentioned the colour being 'greyed-out' by the glasses, and how if you took them off it looked 'like it was supposed to.' I think perhaps the 3D print has the saturation and brightness hiked up to compensate for the effect of the glasses, because there wasn't a noticeable difference in the colours between the two screenings I saw. That said, the theatre where I saw it Saturday was much larger than the theatre at Disney and I was sitting in the back row – everything seemed a lot darker than I was used to, but this may have been a combination of these factors, or just a different projector. Anyway, after the first five minutes or so my brain had compensated for the difference.
Before I go into the meat of this essay I should make full disclosure: when I saw this movie (9 am Saturday ... before ... last?) I had gone 25 hours without sleep, so found myself drifting off during some of the slower expository bits. I can tell you that such a state of mind complements the movie's slightly disconnected and dreamlike tone surprisingly well. Unfortunately this means I can't write up many examples of 'overexplaining' things because that mostly happened at the beginning, and the lack of sleep led to my forgetting to bring a pencil and paper to take notes, but I was coherent enough later on to come to some general conclusions on the other issues.
In discussing the movie afterwards with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bluejeans07 I came to realize that a number of my grievances with the movie, which I had assumed were completely independent of each other, actually grew out of the same fundamental weakness: poor character development. The story sets itself up as a character-driven adventure, but main characters are never really developed past what is necessary to drive the plot, which isn't much. I have two words and a mathematical symbol for the people at Pixar and budding storytellers everywhere:
BACKSTORY ≠ PERSONALITY
Just because you know a lot of facts about someone doesn't mean you know them. If your character has to spend time delivering their personal history in an expository monologue, you're doing it wrong. Looking back, the most engaging characters with the strongest personalities usually didn't have any back story at all, whereas the ones which told us more than we needed to know (cough cough Atlantis cough) were rather poorly established. Now, I'm not getting down on the Carl's Life Story montage at the beginning, because I think that's a wonderfully sweet and poignant way to set up the movie, but Russell, Dug, and even Muntz sit and talk about themselves an awful lot compared to how well we end up knowing them. It's much more efficient and effective to describe who someone is by showing us through their decisions and actions, and it's easier to relate to someone when you can get into their head. If you want to know what it's like to have a certain disease, you learn about the symptoms, not how the person caught it; similarly, if you want to know what it's like to be someone (and all storytelling is vicarious experience via empathic role-playing to some degree), you learn their existing patterns of thought and behaviour rather than what events shaped them in the past.
One of my misgivings upon first seeing the movie was that the gags felt wrong. Everyone said it was a funny movie, and no one can deny there were a lot of gags, but they just didn't ring true for me. This was odd, I thought, because if they had been in a cartoon they would have been really funny, but for some reason in Up they felt ... cheap. It was only upon viewing it a second time that I realised the reason: in this ostensibly character-driven story, all but two* of the gags that I can remember are situational. They don't grow organically out of the characters or plot, but are ornaments tacked on to get a laugh. If it had been a wacky gag-driven cartoon, this would feel perfectly natural, but with its more sentimental tone it felt a bit false. I think this is also why I didn't mind the climactic side-trip into absurdity;** it felt like finally the movie's disparate tones were in sync and I could get into it instead of being distracted by the dissonance.
*1. Carl's fantasy of dropping Russell out the window at the beginning of their adventure
2. Dug at Carl's door when he gets his second wind, saying 'I was hiding under your house because I love you.'
**Everyone cites 'dogs flying biplanes' as the bit that took them out of the movie, but that was one of the few parts I actually enjoyed.
The weak personalities also go some way to explaining why I found it so hard to feel the danger – I don't fear for the safety of a character I don't care about, and it's hard to care for someone I don't know. On top of the lack of sympathy, many of the challenges were solved too easily*, but even if they had been more difficult, would I have felt anxious for the characters as they tried to overcome their obstacle? I don't know if I would, as I hardly cared when they were dangling 1,000 ft over certain death. And I might have feared more for them at the hands of the villain if I'd had any insight into his character, beyond being a puppet of the script. As a whole the emotional peaks and troughs of the film felt carefully sanded down, despite the characters appearing to have quite a roller-coaster ride. Maybe if I could have ridden along in their heads I could have shared the excitement.
*Miraculous amounts of friction between an airship's fin and sneakers! A freak storm, navigated with ease on the first try, that defied meteorological convention and travelled south at ridiculous (and convenient) speed! And the ultimate crime of cliche, a handy man-sized ventilation shaft! On the other hand, a problem that could have been solved very simply (the net getting caught on a rock) was made artificially difficult (they tried to cut it free instead of just lifting the edge over the lip of the rock) in order to stall them enough to facilitate the climax (get them onto the airship for a showdown). Something about that feels amateurish.
This is not to say the movie never plucked my heartstrings; both times I saw it, whenever that darn scrapbook came out I teared up, goodness only knows why. Maybe it was because Ellie was the only character in the movie with a real personality (even if she was basically Jessie). She might have been a good influence on everyone else if she had actually been there to play off. It certainly worked for Carl at the beginning; the lad never said a word but his character was perfectly clear. He grew up and hired a voice actor to say a bunch of unnecessary stuff, but along the way his character sort of turned to playdough. I did feel occasional moments of concern for Kevin but that was more in a 'don't take away my entertaining bird' way than genuine empathy.
Okay, I lied about spoilers. If you wish to avoid any mention of specifics in this movie, skip the grey stuff.
Here are a few specific items that got my personal goat (minus the net incident mentioned above). Some of them relate to the aforementioned 'overexplaining' thing which I will have to get back to later – basically, if so much of the movie had not been so carefully spoonfed to me, it's probable I would not have expected an explanation for everything, but the inconsistency was more disappointing than the mystery would have been.
1. Location. They land on a barren rocky surface, the clouds clear, and they see they are atop a barren rocky plateau. Carl points to the other side of the barren rocky plateau and says 'we need to go there.' Cut to ... jungle? Where did the jungle come from? There was no jungle in that wonderfully expository establishing shot! Maybe they climbed off the plateau? But no, because a few minutes later (as soon as we need another establishing shot, conveniently enough) they're back on barren rock. This happens several times. It is most perplexing.
2. Bloody stupid dog voices. I'm sorry, I cannot take the dogs seriously as a threat when they are knee-height and 'speak' with cartoony stereotype voices. By association, then, I cannot take Muntz seriously because presumably he recorded the voices, which means he spent some embarrassing afternoon doing silly voices into a microphone for no discernible reason. If he had shown some of this inclination for goofiness in contrast to his purportedly villainous side, I wouldn't have a problem believing it, and it might have made him a more interesting well-rounded character, but he's pretty much a one-note song whenever he's onscreen.
3. Speaking of one-note songs, omg Russell shut up. My former roommate had one thing to say about anime, and that was that the kids are ALWAYS YELLING. Well Pixar managed to emulate that effectively. I admit this was less of an annoyance the second time I saw it because the volume was not turned up to 11, but Russell's dramatic range is limited to YELLING and being sheepish in an attempt to drum up sympathy from the audience. I realize this may have been the point, but nevertheless it bothered me that he was a caricature of 'children as adults see them' rather than a character who can call up a viewer's inner child.
There's still more to be said on this movie – for some reason or other it's sparked a talking point on the lack of female leads in Pixar films, and there's all that 'overexplaining' nonsense that will have to wait until the DVD release ... but those are topics for other posts and other days, or (more likely) putting out of sight and then finding it hard to drum up the enthusiasm for. Despite all the negativity in this post I don't believe it was a bad movie, it just does not deserve the unquestioning praise heaped upon it by anyone and everyone. The general background noise of euphoria led me to concentrate on the negative perhaps more than I otherwise might, though since starting to write this review I've talked to more and more people who didn't like the film, so at least I know I'm not alone.
*well, it was full of Disney employees, but it was not the studio theatre
Generally spoiler-free if you skip the footnotes...
First, the short: Partly Cloudy is very cute, and very pink, and not quite as painfully corny as its summary led me to expect. It was nicely animated (especially the stork) but a lot of the baby animals had that overstuffed jowly look that reminded me of the Poky Little Puppy, which has always repulsed me a little but the folks at Pixar apparently worship Little Golden Books so it was probably intentional. But the main thing that sticks with me about the short was ... for lack of a better term, the dialogue. It's ostensibly 'silent,' that is, there are no words spoken in the entire film, but I swear every shot had some sort of non-verbal vocalization, 75% of which were completely unnecessary. Here's an idea: how about letting the acting portray what the characters are thinking and feeling? Do you really need an 'unh?' with that shrug, or an 'erk!' with that grimace? People don't make that much noise when they're not speaking, in general. The noises are definitely human noises, so with animal characters it feels like dialogue anyway, and the absence of words is more apparent. I suspect a little bit of my impatience with this facet of the film, as with several aspects of Up, stems from my personal problems with The Pixar Method and how I've seen it implemented at Disney, which of course wouldn't bother the average moviegoer, but I think the 'excess vocalization' charge would stand up in an objective court regardless.
On to the feature!
In case anyone was wondering, I felt the movie didn't lose much between 3D and 2D. The 3D was subtle and gave things a nice sense of depth (especially when soaring high above the ground) but the effect is simulated pretty well on a flat plane by these crazy things we like to call 'scale' and 'atmospheric perspective.' It's almost as if the 3D was an afterthought. I wonder what the story behind that is... Anyway, after the Disney screening some people had mentioned the colour being 'greyed-out' by the glasses, and how if you took them off it looked 'like it was supposed to.' I think perhaps the 3D print has the saturation and brightness hiked up to compensate for the effect of the glasses, because there wasn't a noticeable difference in the colours between the two screenings I saw. That said, the theatre where I saw it Saturday was much larger than the theatre at Disney and I was sitting in the back row – everything seemed a lot darker than I was used to, but this may have been a combination of these factors, or just a different projector. Anyway, after the first five minutes or so my brain had compensated for the difference.
Before I go into the meat of this essay I should make full disclosure: when I saw this movie (9 am Saturday ... before ... last?) I had gone 25 hours without sleep, so found myself drifting off during some of the slower expository bits. I can tell you that such a state of mind complements the movie's slightly disconnected and dreamlike tone surprisingly well. Unfortunately this means I can't write up many examples of 'overexplaining' things because that mostly happened at the beginning, and the lack of sleep led to my forgetting to bring a pencil and paper to take notes, but I was coherent enough later on to come to some general conclusions on the other issues.
In discussing the movie afterwards with
bluejeans07 I came to realize that a number of my grievances with the movie, which I had assumed were completely independent of each other, actually grew out of the same fundamental weakness: poor character development. The story sets itself up as a character-driven adventure, but main characters are never really developed past what is necessary to drive the plot, which isn't much. I have two words and a mathematical symbol for the people at Pixar and budding storytellers everywhere:Just because you know a lot of facts about someone doesn't mean you know them. If your character has to spend time delivering their personal history in an expository monologue, you're doing it wrong. Looking back, the most engaging characters with the strongest personalities usually didn't have any back story at all, whereas the ones which told us more than we needed to know (cough cough Atlantis cough) were rather poorly established. Now, I'm not getting down on the Carl's Life Story montage at the beginning, because I think that's a wonderfully sweet and poignant way to set up the movie, but Russell, Dug, and even Muntz sit and talk about themselves an awful lot compared to how well we end up knowing them. It's much more efficient and effective to describe who someone is by showing us through their decisions and actions, and it's easier to relate to someone when you can get into their head. If you want to know what it's like to have a certain disease, you learn about the symptoms, not how the person caught it; similarly, if you want to know what it's like to be someone (and all storytelling is vicarious experience via empathic role-playing to some degree), you learn their existing patterns of thought and behaviour rather than what events shaped them in the past.
One of my misgivings upon first seeing the movie was that the gags felt wrong. Everyone said it was a funny movie, and no one can deny there were a lot of gags, but they just didn't ring true for me. This was odd, I thought, because if they had been in a cartoon they would have been really funny, but for some reason in Up they felt ... cheap. It was only upon viewing it a second time that I realised the reason: in this ostensibly character-driven story, all but two* of the gags that I can remember are situational. They don't grow organically out of the characters or plot, but are ornaments tacked on to get a laugh. If it had been a wacky gag-driven cartoon, this would feel perfectly natural, but with its more sentimental tone it felt a bit false. I think this is also why I didn't mind the climactic side-trip into absurdity;** it felt like finally the movie's disparate tones were in sync and I could get into it instead of being distracted by the dissonance.
*1. Carl's fantasy of dropping Russell out the window at the beginning of their adventure
2. Dug at Carl's door when he gets his second wind, saying 'I was hiding under your house because I love you.'
**Everyone cites 'dogs flying biplanes' as the bit that took them out of the movie, but that was one of the few parts I actually enjoyed.
The weak personalities also go some way to explaining why I found it so hard to feel the danger – I don't fear for the safety of a character I don't care about, and it's hard to care for someone I don't know. On top of the lack of sympathy, many of the challenges were solved too easily*, but even if they had been more difficult, would I have felt anxious for the characters as they tried to overcome their obstacle? I don't know if I would, as I hardly cared when they were dangling 1,000 ft over certain death. And I might have feared more for them at the hands of the villain if I'd had any insight into his character, beyond being a puppet of the script. As a whole the emotional peaks and troughs of the film felt carefully sanded down, despite the characters appearing to have quite a roller-coaster ride. Maybe if I could have ridden along in their heads I could have shared the excitement.
*Miraculous amounts of friction between an airship's fin and sneakers! A freak storm, navigated with ease on the first try, that defied meteorological convention and travelled south at ridiculous (and convenient) speed! And the ultimate crime of cliche, a handy man-sized ventilation shaft! On the other hand, a problem that could have been solved very simply (the net getting caught on a rock) was made artificially difficult (they tried to cut it free instead of just lifting the edge over the lip of the rock) in order to stall them enough to facilitate the climax (get them onto the airship for a showdown). Something about that feels amateurish.
This is not to say the movie never plucked my heartstrings; both times I saw it, whenever that darn scrapbook came out I teared up, goodness only knows why. Maybe it was because Ellie was the only character in the movie with a real personality (even if she was basically Jessie). She might have been a good influence on everyone else if she had actually been there to play off. It certainly worked for Carl at the beginning; the lad never said a word but his character was perfectly clear. He grew up and hired a voice actor to say a bunch of unnecessary stuff, but along the way his character sort of turned to playdough. I did feel occasional moments of concern for Kevin but that was more in a 'don't take away my entertaining bird' way than genuine empathy.
Okay, I lied about spoilers. If you wish to avoid any mention of specifics in this movie, skip the grey stuff.
Here are a few specific items that got my personal goat (minus the net incident mentioned above). Some of them relate to the aforementioned 'overexplaining' thing which I will have to get back to later – basically, if so much of the movie had not been so carefully spoonfed to me, it's probable I would not have expected an explanation for everything, but the inconsistency was more disappointing than the mystery would have been.
1. Location. They land on a barren rocky surface, the clouds clear, and they see they are atop a barren rocky plateau. Carl points to the other side of the barren rocky plateau and says 'we need to go there.' Cut to ... jungle? Where did the jungle come from? There was no jungle in that wonderfully expository establishing shot! Maybe they climbed off the plateau? But no, because a few minutes later (as soon as we need another establishing shot, conveniently enough) they're back on barren rock. This happens several times. It is most perplexing.
2. Bloody stupid dog voices. I'm sorry, I cannot take the dogs seriously as a threat when they are knee-height and 'speak' with cartoony stereotype voices. By association, then, I cannot take Muntz seriously because presumably he recorded the voices, which means he spent some embarrassing afternoon doing silly voices into a microphone for no discernible reason. If he had shown some of this inclination for goofiness in contrast to his purportedly villainous side, I wouldn't have a problem believing it, and it might have made him a more interesting well-rounded character, but he's pretty much a one-note song whenever he's onscreen.
3. Speaking of one-note songs, omg Russell shut up. My former roommate had one thing to say about anime, and that was that the kids are ALWAYS YELLING. Well Pixar managed to emulate that effectively. I admit this was less of an annoyance the second time I saw it because the volume was not turned up to 11, but Russell's dramatic range is limited to YELLING and being sheepish in an attempt to drum up sympathy from the audience. I realize this may have been the point, but nevertheless it bothered me that he was a caricature of 'children as adults see them' rather than a character who can call up a viewer's inner child.
There's still more to be said on this movie – for some reason or other it's sparked a talking point on the lack of female leads in Pixar films, and there's all that 'overexplaining' nonsense that will have to wait until the DVD release ... but those are topics for other posts and other days, or (more likely) putting out of sight and then finding it hard to drum up the enthusiasm for. Despite all the negativity in this post I don't believe it was a bad movie, it just does not deserve the unquestioning praise heaped upon it by anyone and everyone. The general background noise of euphoria led me to concentrate on the negative perhaps more than I otherwise might, though since starting to write this review I've talked to more and more people who didn't like the film, so at least I know I'm not alone.
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Date: 2009-06-18 03:29 pm (UTC)