Animated

dir: Phil Tippet

2022

I’ll be honest with you – sometimes I have no fucking idea what’s going on in life or in movies.

Watching Mad God, allegedly a labour of love or a magnum opus or something that this stop motion animator has been working on for 30 years, I honestly had not the faintest idea as to what I was watching.

I know I was watching stop motion animation, which is a trip in and of itself. And I guess it’s ‘good’ stop motion animation? I don’t really know. When I watch something with stop motion, like Henry Selick’s stuff or the stuff put out by Laika Studios, I don’t judge whether I like the movie or not based on whether the stop motion animation is “good” or not.

It just “is”. It’s more the story I’m concerned with. As in, I love Coraline or Nightmare Before Christmas, but that’s not because it’s stop motion animation, anymore that I love certain Pixar flicks just for being digitally animated.

The medium versus the message. Phil Tippet’s deep love of stop motion animation I guess is meant to be the one and only attraction here, because it’s definitely not the dialogue. Just to be clear, there’s no fucking dialogue.

Not a word. There is only two things maybe that give an inkling as to what (maybe?) the story is kind-of about. It starts with an image I’m pretty sure is the Tower of Babel being destroyed, or at least covered in dark smoke clouds, and then a quote from Leviticus saying someone pissed off Old Testament God, so he was going to destroy them and everyone in their tribe.

And then a whole bunch of other things happen. I think they follow some kind of concept or whatever, as if it’s a series of film clips from someone’s concept album – some horrid prog rock band from the 80s or 90s, something with a portentous and pretentious name like Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness.

dir: Domee Shi

2022

I may be about the furthest thing away from a teenaged Chinese-Canadian girl on the cusp of maturity who finds herself turning into a giant red panda whenever she’s emotional or overwhelmed, but I still found a lot to enjoy and relate to in Pixar’s latest foray into the minds and hearts of confused kids and patient, slightly baffled adults.

It feels like such a cop out to say “it’s no Inside Out”, but Inside Out was so great, and this flick is trying to tell a different kind of story in a different kind of way, though no less entertaining, and that’s great too.

It’s working in a different emotional register, and yet it’s also something of a period piece. I didn’t realise the triple meaning of what I just wrote in the last sentence, but I’m not deleting it, not just yet.

Mei (Rosalie Chieng) is a thirteen year old dork living in Toronto, I guess(?) She’s a high achiever academically, has a group of friends, but her first and only loyalty seems to be to her parents, specifically her mother (Sandra Oh). The mum is very much the “tiger mom” stereotype popularised by Amy Chua in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and has been a well-worn cliché in American and even Australian comedy and drama for decades.

In the depiction of multicultural societies and cities, it’s really easy (and lazy) to single out families from Asian backgrounds as exemplifying this idea that migrant parents torment their children into becoming violin prodigies or maths geniuses, because without the threats of violence or the withholding of love / approval / affection, then no kid would ever succeed at anything.

What these stories often leave out in these narratives, whether they’re personal ones or not, is that all sorts of families, migrant or otherwise, have parents with expectations, who range from over-involved and threatening to barely there if at all, and that the kids (who survive) end up as normal people, or geniuses who become fuckups, or fuckups who still go on to live meaningful lives, because not everyone ends up first chair in the orchestra or the Head of Complicated Surgery at Most Expensive Hospital. There’s lots of us in between, and that’s okay.

dir: Peter Docter

2020

You don’t know how much of a relief this was. A good Pixar movie. Again. It’s been a while.

I did not love Onward, I guess because I’m not American, and the sight of grown people being obsessed with playing catch as the be and end all of parenting and fatherhood has never resonated with me the way I guess it resonates with Americans. And it was a very elaborate and colourful way to spend millions in the service of a story so simplistic and mundane that it should have been half an hour long, and delivered by a generic episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, or Two and a Half Men or something suitably banal. And in truth Soul is probably the Pixar flicked I’ve liked the most since Inside Out, which still holds up, but which was six long and lonely years ago.

At first it seemed surprising that anyone would devote Pixar / Disney levels of resources to telling a story with a middle-aged African American protagonist, this being the world we live in, but then I guess you remember that Pixar previously had an 80-year-old pensioner as the protagonist of Up. So they can basically do whatever the fuck they want. When work on this started as well, it would have been long before the coronavirus changed everything, but it is more than likely that it was finished with people working remotely or distanced at least, which I guess is less of a problem for an animated movie than one where crews and casts have to cluster together in a studio or on a set. And doubtless Disney never would have wanted to release this only on their streaming service, though I’m sure it’s playing in a bunch of cinemas where brave souls don’t fear the virus.

I wasn’t going to see this in a cinema. No way, no day. Too risky until enough of us have the vaccine in our sweaty, desperate clutches, and lord Satan knows when that will be. But I am happy to watch it streamed through that most diabolical of streaming services, being Disney +.

So even if Disney loses a bundle on this, I think Soul is a triumph, because it’s a very enjoyable and entertaining movie, its story isn’t completely familiar and overdone, even if there are elements recognisable from other Pixar flicks, but it’s also in the service of a pretty good message about Life, you know, that thing many of us take for granted because the reality of our daily existence can vary from excruciating to staggeringly mundane even when the plague apocalypse isn’t happening around us.

dirs: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, Phil Lord & Christopher Miller

2018

Arguing about which of the Spider-Man movies are the ‘best’ is pointless, fruitless, demeaning, creepy and needlessly nerdy. After all, everyone knows Spider-Man 2 was the okayest, if not the best.

So it’s a settled argument. Phew. Now we can go back to arguing whether Nazis are really Nazis anymore or whether people need that much oxygen to breathe and whether Australia Day should be celebrated on April Fool’s Day or not.

And after that’s settled, maybe we get back to the new, real argument, which is: Which is the second-best Spider-Man flick?

Well, that argument has now also been settled with the release of this hilarious and utterly transcendent animated Spider-Man movie that artfully combines so many elements from the long and storied Spider-Man backstory, while also looking forward in gleeful and energetic ways.

Yes, okay, everything is superheroes these days and I’ve pretty much given up arguing against it, so now we’re just looking at the nuances and the ebbs and flows within the broader genre to see where the latest entries stack up. That’s all you can do. Twenty years ago the movies were mostly drama, a lot of action, some comedies and the occasional animated movie. Now it’s 90% superheroes, 5% shit blowing up, 4% people screaming at each other in place of drama and 1% whatever the hell is streaming on Netflix, mostly weak stand-up comedy. And most of that is older comics blaming the world for why we don't think they’re that funny anymore.

There’s something undeniably exuberant about this flick, something which this hero and his extended family is best known for, despite the dark turns the story might take. Visually it’s sublime and nuts, and it’s all in service of the story, insane as the story might be. But whoever Spider-Man is, the hero is always more like an actual person outside of the suit, brilliant but working class, highly functioning but ground down by life.

Miles Morales is a young teenager who really isn’t struggling with that much other than feelings of insecurity and imposter syndrome at the elitist school his hardworking parents have squirreled him into. There he is, existing quietly in his own universe, minding his own business, when he gets bitten by a genetically-engineered radioactive magic spider, don't you know.