Hacker Cinema
Coco
2017 · Film · 105 min
Directed by Lee Unkrich
Despite his family’s baffling generations-old ban on music, Miguel dreams of becoming an accomplished musician like his idol, Ernesto de la Cruz. Desperate to prove his talent, Miguel finds himself in the stunning and colorful Land of the Dead following a mysterious chain of events. Along the way, he meets charming trickster Hector, and together, they set off on an extraordinary journey to unlock the real story behind Miguel's family history.
19 positive4 negative3 mixed15 neutralfrom 41 commenters
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51 comments on Hacker News
Thank you my friend.
Did you ever see the Pixar movie Coco? I have a feeling you will really enjoy it.
I cry every time I see the movie Coco. I've found that things that have to do with grand parents makes me cry the most. I've losed my grandfather on covid's because they stopped treating him to focus on younger people.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Pixar does not have a monopoly on attention to detail. They're flush with cash and their leadership has decent taste.
There are so many creators putting in intense work, and doing it on low budgets. You can't claim these folks don't have attention to detail. Check out A24, low and mid and low budget films, or independent films and you'll see a wide assortment of highly meticulous storytellers.
Pixar, on the other hand, isn't low or mid budget:
Toy Story - $30 Million A Bug’s Life - $120 Million Toy Story 2 - $90 Million Monsters, Inc. - $115 Million Finding Nemo - $94 Million The Incredibles - $92 Million Cars - $120 Million Ratatouille - $150 Million WALL-E - $180 Million Up - $175 Million Toy Story 3 - $200 Million Cars 2 - $200 Million Brave - $185 Million Monsters University - $200 Million Inside Out - $175 Million The Good Dinosaur - $200 Million Finding Dory - $200 Million Cars 3 - $175 Million Coco - $175 Million Incredibles 2 - $200 Million Toy Story 4 - $200 Million Onward - $175 Million Soul - $150 Million Luca - Unknown but probably around $150 Million Turning Red - $175 Million Lightyear - $200 Million For that amount of money, they had better pay attention to detail.
Miyazaki is doing way more with much less.
Voices of a Distant Star was one person -- Shinkai. That's the kind of thing we'll see more and more of. Small creators reaching audiences and building studios. Gooseworx, psychicpebbles, Vivienne Medrano. That's the algorithm of tomorrow.
AI, as a tool, makes this more possible. One of the first people to do it successfully was Joel Haver, and he's just the first of many to come.
Just last month I bought a Blu-ray 4K player and several discs because of the extra features you get on the disc that don't seem to be available on streaming. For example, the disc for Coco, a movie I love dearly, has a feature about the film's Italian heritage among others.
("Film"? Yes. If anyone objects, I will "dial" my phone so we can discuss.)
It’s much too eccentric for the Pixar formula. They are family movies first and foremost. Characters need to be understandable and relatable to an eight-year-old.
The Pixar movie with similar themes is 2016’s “Coco”. It’s a fine production, but the themes are much less adult than in Grim Fandango.
f me that movie was so great, only to be overshadowed by Coco a year later.
This is the theme of the 2017 Pixar movie "Coco" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coco_(2017_film)
They recently broke YouTube search even more. Go to a channel and do a search within that channel using the search field that is on the far right of the options below the channel information. You may have to click the ">" on the right to make it visible.
What is supposed to happen when you search using that is that it shows you just results for that channel. It still does that for some searches, but for other searches it seems to be doing a normal site wide search.
Whether or not a given search term works correctly seems to be a function of the search term, not a function of the channel being searched.
For example, let's say you are on a channel that reviews movies, and you want to see if they have reviews of some family friendly animated moves.
Search for "zootopia", "trolls", "cars", "coco", "dragon", "stitch", or "panda" and it gives just results from that channel, or tells you the channel has no matching content.
Search for "luca", "soul", "moana", "puss", "megamind", "ratatouille", "rio", "croods", or "lilo" and you get site wide results.
For multi-word searches order matters: "lilo & stitch" gives site wide results and "stitch & lilo" gives results for the channel so it is not the case that certain words trigger the problem.
I assume this is a bug, since I can't see any connection between the words that break out of channel search. They were all movies in my examples, but similar things happen with words from other categories. Example: "soprano", "tenor", "countertenor", "mezzo-soprano", and "bass-baritone" work correctly, and "baritone", "alto", "base", and "contralto" do not.
TLJ was review bombed (movie sucked tho). Critics gave a good score out of fear imo. It's just an outlier for that rule.
Oscar worthy - best picture, best actor, etc. Best original song isn't a top tier category. That year also had weak competition.
The Greatest Showman was nominated in a single category, and it lost to Coco. I don't know where you got that it won. Coco got nominated in two categories, one of which was important, and won both. Coco also within 3% difference on rotten tomatoes.
For Australian fans it's probably easy to import the DVDs and Blurays from some other country - since all have the English sound track.
Personally I'm going to miss to be able to collect current Disney and Pixar animations on Bluray and they are going to miss my money in the long run.
Disney already stopped releasing the films in 3D format. First in the US (no Frozen 3D there) then in Europe as well. I had to import the last one from Japan for a price of 1 year of Disney +
Compared to collecting Blurays and DVDs, Disney+ is currently cheap and good value. But that's unlikely to stay that way. They will at some point raise prices a lot and/or introduce ads.
Also even now: There's the problem with the picture quality (and internet connectivity) compared to Bluray. You also don't get to import out-of-area versions. Want to watch Pixar's Coco in the Mexican Spanish Dub? Not possible here.
Want to watch a film without "Skip Intro", Age & flicker warning or the complete end credits? Want to easily pause a film to analyse a scene, without some overlay covering the picture?
With Disney's track record on annoying logos and other distractions, I don't trust them to keep their user interface clean or not suddenly force ads and trailers on their paying audience.
Though if you watch Coco I think you should also watch Book of Life. Book of Life got somewhat ignored in the box office because it wasn't Pixar, but of the two had far more Mexican/Mexican-American creative talent involved behind the scenes (not that I'm accusing Pixar of appropriation, but there are some questions to be had there if you are feeling cynical), tells the more complete cultural story, and I think is very much the better movie.
I don't know why is this downvoted, I thought that the general consensus was that Soul is not even close to Coco? Coco is one of the best cartoon in this millennia[0], while Soul is not.
[0] see for example the IMBD toplist : https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?num_votes=200000,&genres=animation&sort=user_rating,desc Coco is 12-15, on 8.4, while Soul is 29-33 on 8.0. (Okay, I tweaked the number of votes value, until the ranking matched my personal toplist. Lower numbers cause a lot of not that good shows to occupy the top, and higher numbers filter out a lot of really good shows.)
I cannot cosign this. Coco, for example, which you'd probably describe as an "ESG movie", was released just over 5 years ago and is one of Pixar's best. Luca, Turning Red and Soul were also great.
The real problem with Disney (really, the movie industry in general) over the past couple decades is that it churns out sequels and remakes to wring every cent out of existing franchises.
I respect what the author is getting at -- Pixar movies sometimes favor adult expectations instead of being kids movies and get stuck somewhere between. I can agree to an extent, I felt Soul was really guilty of this.
But the author is a victim of the same mistake. If kids like the movie it's a kids movie. I think Soul is barely for kids at all but if kids like it, it's a kids movie. Letting an adult decide what a kids movie truly is is just ignoring kids in a different way.
They also seem to think producing a handful of some of the most influential movies of all time makes Pixar not a masterpiece factory, as if their weak efforts somehow make their better efforts less valuable. And finally I won't hear Coco disrespected like that, Inside Out is overrated sure, but Coco is the same caliber of film as Ratatouille.
>And then there are films I have not seen yet but I am told are clever, inventive and beautiful -- Coco, Inside Out, Soul.
you should watch both coco and soul.
coco is beautiful. it's a love letter to mexican culture.
soul is not only quite beautiful but the soundtrack... oh! i mean it's trent reznor, atticus ross and jon batiste. it won both a grammy and an oscar!
I think there’s a bit to this and also a bit where he gets it wrong. What’s right:
1. A Bug’s life was underwhelming after Toy Story. I grew to like it more after having entered the workforce.
2. Luca is understated.
3. Kids love Cars way more than adults.
4. Coco is a real diamond in a whole lot of (relative) rough.
5. The second half of Wall-E is quite good.
6. People aren’t unkind enough regarding Toy Story 4. Not amount of unkindness will be enough enough.
There’s lots more wrong but I want to zero in on one thing, Up.
De Boer says that without the first 10 minutes the movie is awful… but that’s the point of the movie. It’s about a miserable grieving man… the scene sets up the rest of the movie. Of course the movie sucks without it. It tells the story on the basis that you have just watched that scene.
After 2006 they were still knocking out an extremely high rate of absolutely impressive films:
Wall-E -- if you don't love this film you are possibly dead inside. It's not only absolutely beautiful and emotionally communicative, it's a deeply clever pastiche.
Up, as observed below.
Toy Story 3 came out after Up. And it is a work of acutely well-observed cinema. A staggeringly good film that should have won the Best Picture Oscar. [0]
Brave (2012) is critically neglected, too -- that is a beautiful, subtle, yes quite elusive film, despite what the article says.
And then there are films I have not seen yet but I am told are clever, inventive and beautiful -- Coco, Inside Out, Soul.
They are by any measure still a masterpiece factory. This article is lazy, toxic and cynical.
[0] edit: when I say this, I say it in the sense that surely everyone knows now that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial should have won Best Picture, not Gandhi. Even Richard Attenborough thought this.
Sorry, Coco is not a musical. It’s a film about music - very different thing.
The fact that the most words that the author can spend on Coco are "it's pretty" says it all for me. With the later rant about Pixar deliberately setting up their beats to make their audience cry, Coco _MUST_ be part of the conversation there and it's conspicuously missing.
Coco is a wonderful film and probably the chief offender of the forced crying thing the author hates. Personally, I can't even think about the damn film without welling up and that's one of the movie's strengths. "Remember Me" is a wonderful, catchy earworm of a song that just refuses to leave my thoughts years later. And it's a fucking musical.
I. HATE. MUSICALS.
But Coco works for me by perfectly contextualizing the songs with the plot of the film. It's not musical numbers for the sake of it.
So yes, for a studio that has put out a masterpiece like that, its lesser efforts should be heavily criticized.
OT: If anyone here is up on Mexican folklore, I've got a question about "Coco" and "The Book of Life". They both are built around the Day of the Dead holiday, so of course are going to have certain similarities.
The stories they tell though are massively different, and they have quite different takes on what the land of the dead is like. For the most part the similarities are mostly what naturally comes from focusing on the same holiday.
Except for one. Both of them feature a boy who wants to be a musician but grows up in a family that has a traditional family business and strongly disapproves of their kids becoming musicians.
I'm wondering if that was just a coincidence, or if "kids wants to be musician, family disapproves" is a theme from Mexican folklore or something like that that both films happened to use.
> Coco and Inside Out did around $800m each, but Luca did very poorly, taking under $50m.
Coco had a domestic theatrical release and was in theaters in over 50 other countries.
Luca did not get a domestic theatrical release (except for one week in one theater). Internationally it was in theaters in 20 countries. Similar for Turning Red except it was only in theaters in 17 countries.
Luca and to a lesser extent Turning Red did reasonably well in those countries where they were actually in theaters considering that it was during a pandemic when attendance was down. If they had been released in theaters in a non-pandemic year and in all the countries Coco was in they would have probably been at least $500m movies.
Luca was the most streamed movie of 2021 (10.6x10^9 minutes of streaming) (and it was #9 in 2022 with another 5x10^9 minutes) , and Turning Red was the second most streamed movie of 2022 (11.4x10^9 minutes) (#1 was Encanto at 27.4x10^9 minutes).
BTW, Encanto did get a domestic theater release and an international theater release in almost as many countries as Coco and yet only pulled in $256m worldwide. I think that's a pretty good illustration of how much the pandemic affected box office.
I'm not convinced you're putting the blame in the right place. Looking at the last decade or so, most of the original films — Inside Out, Coco, Luca, Turning Red, etc — have ranged from "great" to "incredible". It's the sequels and spinoffs like Cars 3, Toy Story 4 and Lightyear that have fallen flat. I don't know where in the Disney org chart people start worrying about revenue, but from where I sit Pixar still has plenty of spark.
> One thing I have noticed is some of the more recent Pixar movies don't feel like Pixar movies at all. They feel like Disney movies: Lot's of musical numbers, a lot more slap stick and silly, more cheap laughs
Which Pixar movies had lots of musical numbers? Of the ones I've seen (all but Lightyear) I only recall zero to three (depending on what counts as a musical number) that I'd count as having musical numbers. Have I forgotten some?
"Turning Red" had a some scenes where characters were singing, but they were singing for in-universe purposes. When I think of musicals what comes to mind is shows where the singing is not for an in-universe purpose.
Similar for "Soul" and "Coco". They had main characters that were struggling musicians and their music played a major part in their lives. All the music I recall in those was in that context (although it has been a long time since I've seen "Coco" so I could have forgotten music that was not in-universe.
> Not sure if they produced anything lately though?
Recently-ish: Coco, Soul, and Inside Out are among my favorite Pixar movies and all compete with the golden-era Pixar classics in terms of being memorable and story-first.
The Disney acquisition seems to have crushed some Pixar magic. You can no longer assume every Pixar movie to be gold, but they can still turn out top-quality content.
I know this is subjective, but I'm not sure I agree. Some of the later Pixar films seem to have plenty of adult themes/moments to me. "Coco" (2017), "Soul" (2020) and "Luca" (2021) have things that strongly resonate with me as an adult, while obviously having appeal to kids. "Turning Red" in contrast feels pretty childish, but that's the exception. (Haven't watched Lightyear as the subject doesn't interest me).
I highly don’t recommend the 2020 film by Pixar: Soul.
Are you excited to get to know all about an aspiring jazz pianist who is trying to make it in nyc?! Well tough luck, that’s not what this film is about. Instead, after getting hooked on a character and his goals, you are instead treated to a 30m-1h sequence of “lessons” (similar to a video game tutorial that’s overstayed its welcome) about how this meta afterlife world works. Everything is explained. But the explanations suck. But I’m not even here to start taking notes on the mechanisms of this after life world (which end up being broken anyway). It’s very… boring.
The best parts of the movie are in the real world. Who is this guy? What’s his life like? What are his dreams, how does he fall short? Those are also the shortest parts of the movie.
The movie is mainly the main guy running and bouncing around trying to get back to the actual interesting part of the film.
The after life world characters are bland. They are mechanical (on purpose), which makes them difficult to connect to. I had no sympathy for their goals and struggles.
Overall Soul is a big miss for Pixar. And I love Pixar. I can see what they were going for, they wanted to make a movie about life, death, purpose, etc. This movie is not that. It’s a weird adaptation of intangible concepts personified but not done well. It’s also way too much like Inside Out, which was better (but also not anything amazing).
If you need your Pixar fix, I recommend: - Ratatouille - Coco - WallE
Or they simply watched everything they were interested in watching on the first service so there was no point in keeping the subscription active. It's not like it takes any effort to cancel. They will come back to it later (it's easy at most to reactivate a dormant subscription) when it has accumulated enough new stuff.
That's what I've been doing for the streaming services that aren't bundled with something else I have for reasons other than video streaming (Prime Video because I have Amazon Prime, Hulu because I have Spotify, Peacock Premium because I have XFinity as my ISP, and Paramount+ because I have Walmart+).
For example a couple months before "Avengers: Endgame" was released I realized that I had to see it in theaters. My previous approach for Marvel movies of waiting until they showed up on some non-premium cable channel like FXX meant I was a couple years behind, and I realized there was no way I'd be able to avoid major spoilers while waiting to see Endgame that way. So I got a month of Netflix (they had all the Marvel movies back then) and caught up on Marvel, and a few other things, then cancelled.
Later I got Disney+ for a week (free trial) and caught up on Disney and Pixar animated movies (Coco, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Frozen II, Onward), watched Captain Marvel, rewatched Endgame to see what I'd missed on my bathroom break when I saw it in theaters, and watched the Star Wars trilogy that starts with The Force Awakens, watched Rogue One, and cancelled.
Right now, a couple years later, I'm back on Disney+, because they sent me on offer for a month for $1.99. I've caught up again on Pixar (Soul, Luca, Turning Red), Disney animation (Ralph Breaks the Internet, Raya and the Last Dragon, Encanto), Marvel (Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, the Loki series), some Simpsons shorts, and am trying to decide if there is any new Star Wars that interests me. When the month is up I will rewatch Luca once or twice, and then cancel.
I'll be back on Netflix for a month probably next year to watch Lucifer.
I'll also probably at some point do a month of HBO Max for South Park.
Encanto is a very bad movie. The plot is weak, it is weirdly monarchist, the third act is a complete mess.
Like many people you fell in love with some aspects of the presentation and music, but the film doesn't hold up and that's why it's going to be a sad, forgotten entry in Disney history.
If you rewatch Encanto and think about royalty, think about Ferdinand Marcos, think about how poor everybody else in this town is and how they jumped to rebuild the house of the richest, most privileged people, you may find you like the movie less.
If you look again at Bruno's strange arc and how weak his predictions are, how little justification there is for exiling him, you might see that every plot development happens because it's time for a plot development now.
Encanto was written backwards, reverse-engineered from successful stories. It is not art. It is garbage imitating art with a thick layer of lyrical frosting on top.
Coco will live forever because it's well-written and means something. Encanto is a direct-to-DVD level production.
Not sure what the "last few years" mean to you. Personally I got to see Pixar's movies in the cinema all the way back since Toy Story. They certainly had an incredible run for about 15 years. Up is the last "Pixar classic" in my view.
However in recent years they actually did have a couple of truly wonderful titles. Luca and Soul are pretty good, and Coco is really one of the best Pixar movies. So perhaps not all hope is lost.
Inside out was good, but not great, IMO.
Counter-counterpoints:
Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Cars 3, Coco, Onward, Luca, Turning Red, Lightyear.
The (not very original) point is: You can no longer count on a Pixar movie being excellent.
i'm feeling that mass production of the last year is making this lees than was before. for example i feel the best looking pixar movie is toystory 4(graphic wise, and coco graphic+art direction), current movies like red, or souls, feel cheaper being a lot less "magic feeling", and look like inside out graphics a movie from 2015(7 years), movies like encanto feel more polished and movies like the spiderverse from 2018 feels more creative and risky.
> Netflix can make a case that content continues to make an impact on subscription revenue over a larger window of time, and so expenses should equally be recognized in relation to the income statement.
How many people are getting Netflix subscriptions to watch Bright (2017 Will Smith+Orc movie) this year?
Or from a Disney perspective, how many people are getting Disney+ to watch Coco (2017 Day of the Dead 3d cartoon)?
> Art is what we teach our kids is the most valuable thing. The Disney movie Coco is about a boy from a family of shoemakers who wants to blow them off and be a musician. Disney will never, ever make a movie about a musician who dreams of making shoes. Even though, well, try going a week without music and then a week without shoes and see which is more necessary.
I'm not sure why you're so offended by remakes of things where the race of a main character has changed (on the grounds that writers should be able to come up with some new stories), but for some reason are ok with remakes where the race of a main character is kept white.
> Or are the beancounters stopping any risks, so they feed us 200+ year old fairytales, that we've seen before?
I mean, yes, I think this should be pretty obviously the case, given all the remakes and reboots we've seen in the past decade or two. This has nothing to do with some diversity conspiracy, though.
To be fair, though, I do think there is at least some creativity in animated movies recently (that don't specifically target a white audience), for example (IMO fantastic) movies like Coco and Soul.
> What argument can one make when the burden of proof is to show cultural regression?
First, you will need to give examples of what kind of movies you find "creative" that were done in the past and there is no current equivalent for that level of creativity.
"Jojo Rabbit", "Parasite", "Blade Runner 2049", "Coco", "Lady Bird", "Arrival", "The Nice Guys", ... that is the past 5 years with one almost missing because the pandemic. Is any of that any good for you?
What do you think that it was so creative in the past and has no comparation today?
> "suddenly we don't talk, suddenly I'm strong, suddenly we're good, suddenly sister powah"
From what I can see as a father: that's basically sisterhood :D
TBH I hardly remember Coco's story although I watched it entirely. I do not remember it was bad though, rather unremarkable story wise. Frozen may look as a kindergarten movie but there is clearly an attempted murder in it (Hans over Anna) which is only prevented by a magical intervention (Olaf). I would say, although I may use too big words here, Disney is closer to naturalism, whereas recent Pixar movies are more transparent and explanatory. You would have guessed I prefer naturalism (in literature at least, I don't know if it actually extends to cinematography ;)
> Truly it has quite a bit of depth and is not predictable from the start.
It... really isn't. There's not much depth or unpredictability. It's the regular Disney hero journey: oh, I'm a misunderstood loner, oh, I've found my own path, oh, I've prevailed. Oh, and comic reliefs.
There are "unexpected" twists as in "wow, these sisters don't need a strong man to save them", and that's as much depth as it gets.
Unlike, say, Coco. Which actually:
- "has harshness". There's an actual murder involved. There's the uncomfortable truth of people losing their memory. People facing death etc. What harshness is there in Frozen that we haven't seen 15000 times before? Most Disney musicals from before 2000 have significantly more harshness than anything Frozen has.
- "complex character relationships". The relationship between Miguel and his relatives, especially grandmother. The ever evolving relationship between Miguel and Hector. In Frozen there's next to zero character development except "suddenly we don't talk, suddenly I'm strong, suddenly we're good, suddenly sister powah".
- "appeals both to adults and children". Coco definitely caters to a more grown up children who understand the concept of getting old, and death. Frozen is for the kindergarteners who will hug an Olaf plushie and sing Letitgo on repeat. The scene where Miguel sings to Mama Coco is such a gut punch to anyone who has relatives with memory loss, Frozen couldn't even approach the depth of it in the wildest dreams.
The same goes for all other movies in my list. Frozen is a flashy loud entertainment for kindergarteners. It's definitely not "the only American animated movie that's worth saving in the last 10 years".
> whereas the best kid movies just tell a great myth.
And Frozen fails to tell that myth. It's flashy, loud, with memorable songs. And the first quality animated musical in a long while. That's why it is memorable. But "the only animated movie in the past 10 years that deserves to be preserved"? Hahaha, no.
> "I feel that Pixar’s mastery of storytelling is overrated."
me too. the incredibles was pixar's high point of storytelling imho. of the first six films, i liked the toy stories the least. a bug's life, monsters, inc., finding nemo to the incredibles was like a crescendo of animation, reaching a satisfying zenith of art. cars, which came next, was ok (but unoriginal for storytelling, the characters were mostly great!), but then ratatouille through inside out were all groping for relevance while nakedly harvesting their reputation. of the last 8 movies, only coco has been worth watching so far (i haven't seen the good dinosaur or soul yet). so perhaps a quarter of their 23 films have been good enough to watch again for me; contrast that with the studio ghibli collection, nearly all of which are imminently re-watchable (spirited away is an absolute masterpiece).
Limiting my complain to recent Pixar movies: I think Coco, Soul and Inside Out are fairly obvious and not multi-layer. Definitely they talk of "difficult" subjects to kids: death, depression, regrets about ones life. They are not much fun either and the story is rather weak: often predictable, déjà-vu moments (Soul and Inside Out are strangely very similarly built with a meta-world in both), repetitive loop of slow and fast action scenes.
Japanese anime also talks about difficult subjects and IMO does it much better. Thinking of "Okko's Inn": much less predictable, some funny and tense scenes, and yet not shocking for children and quite emotional for parents (OK maybe our smallest daughter woke up and came in her parents bed the following night but she has not been traumatized for life :)
Since I am engaged in a reckless defense of Frozen in other posts: I think this movie is multi-layered. It talks of women and power, femicide, love vs friendship, sisterhood, although it is packaged in a story suitable for the smallest children as its success showed. The story is definitely not predictable from the start and has the power of myths. Of course Disney is well known for its ability to adapt old myths and tales.
As for older Pixar: The Incredibles was fun and multi-layered, Ratatouille was fun, Wall-E was great ...
Around the time of Wall-E and The Incredibles, I was very much a fan of their work and felt like they could do no wrong. Now I’m not so sure- I did love Coco but they have been absorbed by Disney at this point and are satisfying investors. Also, I find the low key arrogance about having mastered storytelling more than a little obnoxious. You can see a bit of this in Andrew Stanton’s Ted talk.
Before they sold to Disney, they were going to start making more mature films alongside their children’s entertainment. I was very curious about Ray Gunn. I think if Disney wanted it then Pixar could definitely make an incredibly compelling animated movie with mature themes. I mostly find myself disappointed with them these days.
(I find whenever I bring this up online quite a few people come at me with this idea that they are making mature films, and that the line between children’s entertainment and adult is imaginary, as though most kids could sit through something like The Rules of the Game or Tokyo Story.)
But to be clear, I’m still mostly a fan of their work but mostly for their technical mastery.
I feel that Pixar’s mastery of storytelling is overrated. Coco was lovely but I find their movies to be needlessly sad and curiously episodic in form. In “UP”, each sequence was very well crafted but they fit together randomly as though each scene was brainstormed by a group.
They lack a singular vision in their films, there are no auteurs at Pixar: just art by committee. This isn’t to say that their stories are bad, though they are sometimes lukewarm. Except for the Pixar level of excellence in the visuals and animation, which to be clear are admirable on their own, I feel that their movies lack identity. I wouldn’t want their model to become adopted by everyone.
They love and study Miyazaki but don’t seem to trust any one person to direct a film. Everything must be put through a committee.
I would very much prefer a CG animation course by them. Or a full overview of their pipeline, asset management, USD implementation. Their technical chops are probably best in the world.
Maybe they could do something like release a public version of Presto. Or help out with animation and rigging code with the blender foundation.
I was joking at the time Disney bought LucasArts they did it in part to clear Pixar to sell Coco because of similarity to Grim Fandango.
The flipside is probably accurate now though, at this point Disney would probably be unlikely to greenlight a Grim Fandango film because they already have Coco.
That's great! I'll be sharing that site with my homestay family, who have kids aged 6 and 9. On Monday this week I asked the older one to read a Wikipedia list of Disney films and Dreamworks Animation movies and here's the list she made, which you can compare with the ones on your site:
Alice in Wonderland; Toy Story 3; Incredibles; Pinocchio; Lion King; The Tale of Despereaux; Winnie the Pooh; Maleficent; Cinderella; Frozen; Frozen II; Moana; The Santa Clause; Coco; Pirates of the Caribbean; The Princess and the Frog; Brave 2012; Beauty and the Beast; Born in China; The Boss Baby; Abominable; Trolls World Tour; Gift of the Night Fury; Shrek (all); The Grinch; Book of Dragons; Kung Fu Panda; Puss in Boots; Dawn of the Dragon Racers; Marooned ; Prince of Egypt; Peter Rabbit; Aladdin 1992; Aladdin 2019; Shark Tale; Wallace and Gromit; Chicken Run; Bee Movie; Turbo 2013; Home 2015; Captain Underpants; Tangled 2010; Harry Potter; Despicable Me; Despicable Me 2; Minions; The Secret Life of Pets; The Little Ghost; Waking Sleeping Beauty; Cleopatra in Space; My Neighbour Totoro
That's absolutely not true. It's the reason movies like Coco are still on Netflix and not Disney plus. You can't just renege on a previous contract because you started your own streaming service. These things take time.
Cinema-related, you have CinemaWins (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL8h3ri2WN_-IbviBlWtUcQ) which is probably a spin off of CinemaSins, but you can tell the guy really loves his motion pictures. Take Coco, or take Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse, and you'll see what I mean.
This is completely nonsensical.
Toy Story? Cars? Inside Out? Up? Coco?
None of these follow that template. Sure, some like a Bugs Life and Rattatouille follow this, but in quirky ways. All conventional narrative structure involves an external incident. That sets up the central conflict of the narrative.
Disney movies like Big Hero 6, Moana or Frozen are more likely to follow it, though again, there’s a lot more craft in the story and surrounding context than the base structure suggests.
>We need to stop letting people scare us into giving away our freedoms.
It doesn't seem all that scary if everyone's doing it. Just look at the use of facial recognition in the movie Coco. They could have made up any magic to stop Hector from leaving, but Disney decided to teach kids that having your faced scanned when going through security is totally normal.
https://youtu.be/t9Dn4YrJGak?t=92
The original Coco frame times were 1000hrs/f, thanks to millions of light sources (and coming in at 30GB to 120GB of scene data). But engineers got that down to 50hrs/f over the course of production - light acceleration structures that have now ended up in RenderMan 22. (These numbers are single core benchmarks, so you then need to scale by some factor of numbers of cores you have available). In general, I think it’s the huge scene data size that keeps feature films mostly on the CPU.
https://www.fxguide.com/featured/rendermans-visuals-for-coco/
And this is why I was a little bothered by her inclusion in Coco.
I loved Coco. It's a fantastic movie. But putting Frida in there as a recurring character seemed kind of bandwagon-y for the normally-timeless Pixar.
The result is that the stories of their kovies feel telegraphed in advance. Coco definitely felt that way to me. It was still worth watching for other reasons but there is very little in the way of real suspense or surprise. On the other hand that doesn’t seem to be a problem for kids movies.
I dunno, I think parts of their coverage would seem to demonstrate otherwise.
For instance, consider their Oscars article:
https://www.theknifemedia.com/world-news/how-did-the-oscars-coverage-rate-hint-it-was-biased/
Scroll all the way to the bottom to find their attempt at an "unbiased" article ("the raw data"). Now, maybe Oscars reporting is a special case and you can't do this for other kinds of articles, but isn't it worth a try?
Full article follows:
> The 90th Oscars awards ceremony airs to an estimated 26.5M viewers
> Jimmy Kimmel hosted the 90th Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday night. The “Oscars,” or Academy Awards of Merit, are given annually to “honor outstanding artistic and scientific achievements in theatrically released feature-length motion pictures,” according to the awards’ website.
> This year’s show was aired live from 8 to 11 p.m. eastern on ABC, to an estimated audience of 26.5 million viewers. It is the lowest number since the 1990s when the viewership data began being collected. The 2017 awards had 32.9 million viewers.
> Besides speaking about the nominated films and filmmaking, some presenters and award recipients spoke about other topics. While hosting, Kimmel made jokes about Fox News, President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
> Best actress award winner Frances McDormand spoke about “inclusion riders,” a stipulation that actors can put in their contracts to ensure gender and ethnic diversity among cast and crew members of film projects that they work on. Presenters Kumail Nanjiani and Lupita Nyong’o spoke in support of “Dreamers,” referring to recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Award winner Kristen Anderson-Lopez spoke about diversity and gender representation in the songwriter category.
> Award winners include:
> Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” won for both Best Picture and Best Director. > Frances McDormand earned Best Actress for her role in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” > Gary Oldman won for Best Actor for his role in “Darkest Hour.” > Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez received the Best Original Song award for the track “Remember Me” in “Coco.” > Alexandre Desplat won Best Original Score for “The Shape of Water.”
> Sources: Breitbart, Fox News, The New York Times, The Oscars
One thing in there that has a tiny whiff of bias is mentioning the huge drop in viewership. IF there is some more favorable way of estimating the event's impact or importance, then including that bit would count in their framework as "slant". Did I miss anything else?