Hacker Cinema
Monsters, Inc.
2001 · Film · 92 min
Part of Monsters, Inc. Collection
Directed by Pete Docter
Lovable Sulley and his wisecracking sidekick Mike Wazowski are the top scare team at Monsters, Inc., the scream-processing factory in Monstropolis. When a little girl named Boo wanders into their world, it's the monsters who are scared silly, and it's up to Sulley and Mike to keep her out of sight and get her back home.
13 positive3 negative26 neutralfrom 42 commenters
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43 comments on Hacker News
Anti-corporate attitudes were completely normalized in the 2000s and arguably only really lulled during the mid-2010s. There were several films from that period that featured countercultural messaging:
Disney’s Incredibles had allusions to Kafka
Monster’s Inc. is a commentary on corporate vampirism.
Kingdom of Heaven was if not a commentary on the Global War on Terror at least a bold film to have released 4 years after 9/11.
The second Pirates of the Caribbean film was a (childish) commentary on global empire and rationalization eliminating places for the human person to live freely.
The Corporation, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Supersize Me were all released post-9/11. They screened Supersize Me in elementary and high schools when it was released.
Anti-globalization as a movement completely collapsed during the Occupy Wall Street protests. These movements had attitudes towards international mobility rights that completely undermined organized labor. Most of them recognized what impacts illegals were having on these industries but took the position that labor solidarity would somehow make everyone better off. This could have worked in theory except that they had no operational plan to enact this solidarity and the illegals were never interested in it to begin with.
Once the bankers realized that they could just pay off the OWS leadership with fake email jobs, you started to see the conventional partisan divide on globalism that we observe today, with liberals being in favor of it and conservatives opposed to it.
Just saying "Pixar movies" was probably not a great example. They can be deliberately location ambiguous (Monsters Inc., Toy Story - though it's clearly _somewhere_ in America, The Incredibles - a generic "metropolis"/50's futuristic city, lightyear, Elemental) or very specifically somewhere (cars - mashup of Route 66 towns, Finding Nemo - Sydney when on land, Ratatouille - Paris, etc...)
It makes sense to "translate" locale cultural indicators in say Wall·E which was very location agnostic but not so much for say Turning red which is very culturally specific.
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.
I would be careful about Hollywood loss numbers. Disney is in it for the merch. That said, I wonder how those movies stack up to older greats like Cars, Toy Story, or Monsters Inc. They are only true failures if they fail to sell toys. Which considering I’ve never seen merch for any of these movies on the street tells me they probably have failed.
Right, I meant to suggest there might be some "culture" bleed. Another commenter suggested it had more to do with key Pixar figures leaving for Disney, at which point Disney's own offerings improved and Pixar's suffered.
I'm not very good at articulating "feelings" so bear with me: Early Pixar movies (to me) are timeless, positive, almost fairy-tale like. They're centrist, middle-of-the-road films that don't offend or validate anyone, just faithfully follow the Hero's Journey as they try to resolve some issue in the ideal world where we're all in this together. Toy Story is the best example-- literally every single toy could not be more different, but the entire point of the movie is about all of them finding ways to leverage their differences to advance the journey for all of them, not exploiting their shortcomings to hold everyone else back. Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, all are the same pattern. Pixar's money printer used to be endless asset-swaps of "Diversity: The Movie" (the secret to Sesame Street as well), and it was a beautiful thing before the concept was perverted by the same children who grew up watching these movies.
I don't have kids' show equivalents to name from AppleTV, but I do get the same feeling ("Diversity: The Show") from their regular shows. Ted Lasso is the obvious frontrunner. For All Mankind, Invasion, Foundation (caveat: I was really high when I watched this one). All of these beautifully weave together the themes of diversity and unity into a shared journey.
I have a three year old and I can barely stand watching the Monsters University movie but Monsters Inc is easy to rewatch.
I'm astonished by this opinion, I think Monsters Inc. is a wildly better movie. University is fine but frankly nothing special - although the plot points involving Mike realizing he's just not scary, and the ultimate resolution where he realizes he makes an awesome director/manager for Sulley, is a pretty good moral.
I was surprised to see Cars listed as one of the ones that people generally hate. I’m a little biased because my son absolutely adored that movie, and I have fond memories of him taking his Lightning McQueen toy around with him everywhere. But over many repeated watchings both my wife and I agreed it was a quality production.
It has a good cast with Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt, Paul Newman, and even Larry the Cable Guy puts in a pretty decent performance. The minor characters are charming, too (including George Carlin and Cheech Marin).
The story is fairly timeless and reminiscent of Doc Hollywood. I don’t know how they manage to make it work so well with anthropomorphic cars, but somehow they do. The main character has a good arc, and there’s a good amount of nostalgia. I don’t think I ever cried, but I definitely felt something - which is more than I can say for the Cars sequels.
Would I go and watch it now without kids? No. But Pixar put out a movie that entertained kids and adults alike. Earned $462 million at the box office. Made an absolute killing in merchandise sales (and I thought the toys were pretty high quality, especially the die cast Tomica cars here in Japan). I have a lot of respect for what they were able to do with Cars. Not so much for the sequels, though.
They also call Monsters University a mediocre sequel, but I tend to prefer it over Monsters Inc. Pretty much for the same reasons as Cars - good cast, timeless story reminiscent of Revenge of the Nerds, and my kids loved it.
Yeah, it kinda blew my mind how people I knew insisted the whole movie was great.
It's like, sure, it's OK if you like dogs flying in airplanes, but the first few minutes of the movie is the only thing that has any staying power. I'm pretty sure most people at this point who haven't watched the movie in a long time don't even remember what the rest of it was about. In contrast, I haven't seen Toy Story in 15+ years, and I can still describe to you roughly what happens act for act. Granted, I watched Toy Story as a young boy, so I'm biased.
As much as I think Wall-E was an excellent film, I consider The Incredibles to be Pixar's peak. It was a great story with a perfect balance of humor, child characters actually in peril, subtle mature themes (infidelity, "you didn't save my life; you ruined my death"), well stylized humanoid character models, a father character who isn't a deadbeat, a theme around having to hide who you are, etc. Lots of great stuff in there. Wall-E might have had a grander message and an artsier vision, but The Incredibles IMO has way more rewatch value.
Monsters Inc. was pretty great, too! For me, Pixar failed to make another film that came even close to Monsters or The Incredibles.
> a selfish way of milking poor people for emotions in order to generate income.
Monsters, Inc. comes to mind! In that movie they are scaring children, bottling their screams as energy and selling it as a commodity. The happy ending is our protagonists stumbling upon the fact that laughter is a much better source of energy than screams, and so the staff of monsters become slapstick comedians for children everywhere.
YouTube managed to become the boring-dystopia middle-ground where they make money off both.
> You can look at all the Disney movies for kids: all men are stupid, liars, stealer, and when you hit them it’s funny. On the opposite the feminine is often perfect, manage it all on the first try.
A few counterexamples: Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Zootopia, Raya and the Last Dragon, Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatoullie, Up, The Good Dinosaur, Onward, Soul, and Luca.
Almost all of their best movies have had heavy involvement in the writing / directing role by a couple of key players and most of those individuals have either graduated to a producer role or have moved on from Pixar.
Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Up, Inside Out, and Soul were all written and/or Directed by Pete Doctor.
Finding Nemo, Finding Dory, and Wall-E were written and directed by Andrew Stanton.
There are multiple writing and directing credits on all of their films, but these two have writing and directing credits on almost all of the great original ones.
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. Have to wonder if Disney has been asserting too much influence on the company.
> the culture that made those days happen
Literally one movie, that was an unexpected hit is your contender for better culture?
In 2001 the highest grossing movie was Harry potter, and right below lord of the rings was monsters inc and jurasic park.
In 2002 Lord of the rings, Harry potter, Spiderman
in 2003 lord of the rings, matrix,nemo and pirates of the caribean.
Like how is that any different to now when you have pirates, spiderman, some children disney movie and fantastic beats which is just more harry potter?
> the old skills are no longer there.
Dune had more practical effects than lord of the rings. In 2001 the TV golden age had not started. Shows like the sopranos and the wire where struggling to find an audience. Friends and CSI reigned. Nowadays House of the Dragon and Last of US two high quality shows, with good use of practical effects are doing better than comparable mediocre daytime tv.
Even blockbusters are in many ways better. Andor is a million times better than anything from the 2000s prequels.
The milestones (from the source code):
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>Before this, monetization attempts focused on positive endorsements: "promote" a post, "sponsor" a submission, super-upvote with "Reddit Gold". Positive, like the advertising industry. But these were rooted in outdated ideas of what social media is or how it works. Misery is the most powerful force. If you're a FAANG, you have to monetize on the negative engagement to profit on a grand scale.
I don't have anything real to add, I just want to point out that the movie Monsters, Inc had a redemption arc for the monsters, and it was the opposite of this.
Yup. Even if you only look within a relatively small category of films one per year can miss a bunch. For example, consider the category of animated feature length films released after 2000 in the US, and pick one per year by picking the winner of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
In 2001 you'd miss Monsters, Inc. because of Shrek.
In 2002 you'd miss Lilo & Stitch because of Spirited Away.
In 2004 you'd miss Shrek 2 because of The Incredibles.
In 2005 you'd miss Howl's Moving Castle and Corpse Bride because of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
In 2008, no Kung Fu Panda because of WALL-E.
In 2009, no Coraline or Fantastic Mr. Fox because of Up.
In 2010 you'd miss How to Train Your Dragon because of Toy Story 3.
In 2011 no Kung Fu Panda 2 because of Rango.
In 2012 no Frankenweenie, ParaNorman, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, or Wreck-it Ralph because of Brave.
In 2014 no How to Train Your Dragon 2 because of Big Hero 6.
2015 no Shaun the Sheep Movie because of Inside Out.
2016 you miss Kubo and the Two Strings and Moana because of Zootopia.
2019 No How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World because of Toy Story 4.
2021 you'd miss Raya and the Last Dragon and Luca because of Encanto.
Most of the winners are good...but if you just put all the above mentioned films in a pool and asked most people to pick their top 14, most would have a lot of films on their list that were not among the winners of the aforementioned years.
> They're still making good ones: Frozen, Moana, Encanto. Just watch those and pretend the rest doesn't exist.
Probably the most objective way to view this is to actually look at the list of films from any given decade and see how many flops they had [1]. There's a bias at play here: the only movies we remember Disney making a decade+ ago are the hits. We don't often remember the misses.
Apparently Disney's "Renaissance" ended with Tarzan in 1999; but here are a list of movies that have come out since the end of this golden era:
- Monsters, Inc.
- Lilo and Stitch
- Treasure Planet (a personal favorite)
- Finding Nemo
- Pirates of the Caribbean
- The Incredibles
- Ratatouille
- WALL-E
- Up
- Tangled
- Brave
- Wreck-It Ralph
- Frozen
- Inside Out
- Encanto
I'm sure there's many great ones that you might love that I'm missing. But I'd say this lineup is potentially better than the list of movies spanning The Little Mermaid to Tarzan. To the author's credit, I will say there's part of me that's nostalgic for the traditional style of 2d character animation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Walt_Disney_Pictures_films
I hope one day we are able to simply walk/drive/fly around the worlds created for movies like Monsters, Inc., Secret Life of Pets, Luca, Turning Red, etc. The artists and modellers have done such a fabulous job of creating these insanely detailed worlds, and I would love to be able to actually explore them at my own pace. For me, this would be a great use of VR, though I think we're probably at least several years away from having the hardware necessary to render that all in real-time at a quality that I'm hoping for.
> Monsters Inc however showed us there's more power in laughter than screams. It's a shame nobody on FB's board ever watched a movie.
To be fair, everything in Monsters, Inc. was made up.
FB went with jacking people's emotion with rage, fear, and other scare tactics. Monsters Inc however showed us there's more power in laughter than screams. It's a shame nobody on FB's board ever watched a movie.
Pete Docter has always been my favourite Pixar director. I feel like he doesn't get the limelight as often as the others, but his movies (Monsters Inc, Up, Inside Out, and Soul) I think go considerably deeper than the rest of the Pixar catalogue as far as offering tender and humanizing insights about people and relationships.
> Your nemesis is not your enemy. Or, put differently, your nemesis is more than just an enemy. Rather, the nemesis is an adversary is who is like your dark twin. Even as you battle with the nemesis, you share a kind of DNA. The gaze at your nemesis is like looking into a mirror, but one of those fun house mirrors at the carnival, where everything is both recognizable and distorted. In every way, this relationship is more powerful and volatile than a battle between enemies.
I have worked with people who fit this description, and I have certainly felt as if my desire to beat them, or at least not be beaten by them, has pushed me to do my best work.
But it's fundamentally an adversarial relationship, and it reminds me a bit of my kids' favorite movie, "Monsters, Inc." You can become so convinced that you need fear to excel that you fail to realize there's a better way.
The people who have TRULY led me to be my best have not been adversaries. They have been supportive mentors. They do everything that the nemeses do, in terms of bringing out the best work in me, but they do it through building up rather than tearing down.
And when I say they do everything the nemeses do, I really mean that. I can't think of any way that a nemesis has led me to grow that couldn't have been also achieved by a strong, encouraging mentor or manager.
Thank you for pointing this out. I wish more people thought like this instead of instantly reacting. It turns out the Internet in the real-world is opposite of Monsters Inc. The crux of the movie was that children's laughter had more power than their frightful screams. Publishers have discovered that rage-inducing click-bait is more profitable than in-depth stories that help us resolve issues.
It doesn't matter if I wholeheartedly agree with an article that causes me to have negative emotions. Yes, the climate is getting worse. Yes, a few power plants and containers ships are responsible for a significant fraction of the pollutants. Yes, humans are not working to fix it fast enough. Yes, politician X supports horrible thing Y.
Nevertheless, I don't recall giving a push notification the right to trigger my emotions.
Interestingly, SF's Fort Mason Drive-in during the pandemic was all old movies https://www.eventbrite.com/o/fort-mason-center-for-arts-amp-culture-20246696685
I think I watched like Monsters Inc there. That's two decades old haha!
> "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).
Interesting; I feel it depends on the movie - they have a large portfolio now so some sort of averaging is inevitable.
I feel e.g. Cars franchise has limited vision. They're "allright", but not spectacular. I'm OK never seeing any of them again, even the first one.
On the other hand, I find Monsters Inc. a unique movie with a unique premise, and I can rewatch it regularly - with or without the kids 0:-). I also don't find it particularly sad. Inside out does indeed have a large dose of melancholy, but again I feel is a unique idea taken quite far without dilution.
(there are absolutely movies that are way more avant garde or quirky or surreal or even "creative" inasmuch as that can be objectively compared - but Pixar has two distinct audiences to cater to and they HAVE to be entertaining and attention-occupying to children; while inserting content that also keeps adults interested and even thoughtful - that's a specific set of constraints that e.g. "Love Death + Robots" does not have)
And if we look at their entire portfolio, the Pixar Shorts again have some absolutely brilliant, touching, "single idea executed to perfection" entries.
I quickly read through this and then read a pretty random selection of the author's Substack posts back to October.
I'm not sure I'm prepared to read a critique of the information environment from someone who believes Qanon is a useful expression of a general problem with modernism. "Satanism", you see, is really just a digestible expression of the unmooring of American society from any ethical framework. "Pedophilia" is in fact really a critique of the sexualization of our culture. Perhaps we should be more accommodating of the ravings of a subculture that believes Monsters, Inc. was really a roman à clef.
Was the election fraudulent? Who's to say? Certainly not hand audits conducted by conservative state governments and adjudicated by Trump-appointed judges. No, where there's smoke, who's to say there isn't fire? And after all, no modern political system has any legitimacy to begin with. What does "legitimate" even mean?
You know what really is problematic, though: the "post-truth" story of Rudy Giuliani with his hands down his pants in a Borat movie. Wouldn't you know, this story, L'affaire "Cohen", actually confronts us with the question, hrm, what does it really mean to have been a "Nazi"? The "contemporary conception", as it turns out, is completely detached from its original conception, a "rhetorical banality meticulously constructed to conjure up the most loathsome imagery". Good note. Perhaps that explains why the author so often and fondly cites Carl Schmitt? I stopped counting, and then stopped reading.
At any rate, the rhetorical engine of this article's argument is pretty basic. People have a general distrust for the federal government, surprise surprise. And the public health establishment was, in fact, indefensibly dishonest about mask wearing. As a result, why trust anything? Your Moderna vaccine, my HCQ, the guy living in his basement wrapped in grounding wires to avoid the cell tower radiation, it's all the same. Except the stuff about Hunter Biden. That's real.
It's funny. We just showed our kids the Pixar movie "Monsters Inc", which I hadn't realized was also 20 years old until the movie ended and the info screen came up. I think of it as a contemporary movie, "not that old".
But I think of Wikipedia as having always existed.
Funny how memory works.
Also, I've lived longer with Wikipedia than without.
I guess I'm getting old.
I've always wished Pixar would do what Id software did, releasing an Open Source version of some small portion of their movies for analysis, like this Moana scene.
Because the question on my mind is, given the improvements in rendering, there's some year in which we can now render in real time, what took a long time for Pixar to render.
So, what is it? I believe I read that creating the 3D version of Toy Story ran at 24 fps, averaged across the entire film. So, basically, we already crossed the threshold for Toy Story. (But maybe that was only if you have a rendering farm?)
So, where are we at? Could we render a plausible Toy Story in real time now? Bug's Life? Monsters Inc?
Seriously? ANY pixar film puts those to shame in terms of depth. The entire back story of UP was about a widower; Finding Nemo, same story - talk about darkness and light. How about The Incredibles, Wall-E, Monsters Inc, all fantastic story telling and incredible depth. It even goes further back than 80s, to movies like The Sound of Music with the Nazis.
Again, your biases are only fuzzy nostalgia and it seemed bigger to you then cause your brain couldn't contextualize it as well.
Yeah, one of my favorite reasons why I like Pixar films is that their central conflicts are inspired by some deep-seated adult fear: fear of being replaced or forgotten (TS1-TS3), of children growing up and leaving (Nemo), midlife crisis (Incredibles), the fragility of newborn children (Monsters Inc), of change (Inside Out).
That said, I do think there are a lot of creative frontiers to be explored with material suitable for older audiences only. If they wanted, Pixar could make the most terrifying psychological horror known to Man, or a tragedy so heart-wrenching that everyone heads to the bars afterward.
Every movie Pixar makes tries to push the bounds of animation in some way. Monsters, Inc. was specifically focusing on animating hair properly.
You also have to consider that Monsters Inc. was one of the earlier Pixar movies.
The contrast to Brave isn't that extreme.
Their movies are great as a computer person and moviegoer, since each usually contains at least one "wow, that must be really hard with computers" moment. Like the fur simulation in Monsters, Inc. or the crowd physics(ish) simulation in WALL-E, or Merida's hair as you mention. Not to mention the incredible render quality progression from Toy Story to Toy Story 3.
Playings devil's advocate: There are many ways to incentivise even complex, large scale investment absent copyright. From project finance to Kickstarter, it is well beyond self-evident. On the flip-side, the cost of supressing academic and sciendific knowledge through academic publishers dwarfs whatever entertainment value might come from their library (~12 films)[1]. I think your comments on this are too simplistic.
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[1] Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Ratatouille; WALL-E; Brave; A Bug's Life; Cars, Cars 2
Truly. My enjoyment of Monsters, Inc. takes nothing away from my awe of Akira.
Different movies, songs, activities for different moods, wants, desires.
It's been a tough year. So the partner and I have been watching a lot of romantic comedies. As a caveman, I'm surprised by how much I've been enjoying them.
Cars and Cars 2 suffer from some of the same problems that Shrek 2 & 3 suffered from: creating a self-consistent universe based on adult puns based on characters of modern society.Unless it is done with restraint and real skill it soon behinds to feel insincere and contrived (see Sharks Tail, Chicken Run).
Toy Story & Shrek did something far cleverer. Shrek especially is smart, sophisticated humour for smart, sophisticated kids. The references are all from children's literature and culture. Kids know the references and are able to understand the clever puns.
Shreks 2&3 are dumb adult humour forced into the Shrek world. Many of the puns are above children's heads and are not sophisticated enough for the adult audience. Adding plot-lines about lawyers, unions etc just confuse small kids and leave adults slightly cringing.
Pixar and Dreamworks are at their best when they choose their target audience and focus on it. Toy Story & Nemo are for smart young kids; Ratatouille & The Incredibles are for smart older kids. Then enough is added for the rest of the family: everyone gets a clever joke every few minutes; the stories are understandable by all. Wall-E and Up are very adult in the big story (but full of great fun in the small story) I thought they were wonderful but I do understand your point (although they are I no way 'awful'—even if you are 5).
I'm not convinced that Pixar have mad a bad film yet. Cars grows on me the more I see it (and believe me if you have kids you end up seeing these films any times). Nemo (by far the funniest film Pixar have made) still makes me laugh despite having seen it 20+ times.
{I'm told that Cars 2 is relentless: too fast and too complicated for young kids, but as I haven't seen it I can't judge. The fact that I haven't seen it says something: I normally see every Pixar film the week it comes out.}
The problem that Pixar has had is that we have had to judge Pixar by Pixar standards as until recently no-one was making anything as good. This has now changed. Wonderfully for us Pixar now has serious competition. Dreamworks has made a number of films that are as good as Pixar's. Some of them are as good as Pixar's best: How to Train Your Dragon, Megamind, Kung Fu Panda. Walt Disney Animation Studios is back on form with Tangled (Monsters v Aliens wasn't bad either).
How to Train Your Dragon & Tangled are thankfully free of transfer-modern-society-into-cartoon-world puns. Instead you are given a detailed, self-consistent world that complements the story (rather than being the story). This is a very good thing—something I hope that Pixar will move back towards (although I don't hold out much hope for Monsters Inc 2).
Liked Cars at least better than Monsters Inc. Cars 2, meh. I keep going to see these under the guise that I'm seeing what Pixar technology is capable of, but I think it's at least as much that I like the films.
Fair point, there's a market for adult animated movies. But I think it's small.
The scene in Up! which showed the old couples life story was well done, but I doubt any child would really remember it or rate it. It was for sentimental adults and critical acclaim from adults.
Again, the scenes in Wall-E where the robot does boring things for ages without saying anything seemed to be there for adults, and to get oscar nominations, rather than to entertain children.
Just my opinion, but I'm really glad to see them revisiting Cars and Monsters Inc which are favorites with my kids, whilst Up! and Wall-E barely registered with them.
From the end of the article:
As I was writing this, Daniel, my two-year-old son, walked into my office, climbed on my lap, and said "Monsters, Inc. movie please."
So, here we are, I'm finishing this piece on the left side of my computer screen while Daniel is on my lap watching a movie on the right side of my computer screen.
I can quote you 'monsters inc.' line by line, it is my sons favorite movie...
It's still the only movie my 3-yr-old daughter will sit through. The first 30 minutes is some of the best storytelling ever put to film, IMHO. So much told with so little.
Other Pixar movies like Monsters, Inc. or Cars are either too scary or too talky. Wall-E is the perfect balance, and such a well told story that I never tire of it, either.
Ratatouille: Peter O'Toole, Brad Garrett, Janeane Garofalo, Ian Holm, Brian Dennehey
Cars: Owen Wilson, Paul Newman, Bonnie Hunt, Cheech, George Carlin
Incredibles: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Samuel L. Jackson
Finding Nemo: Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe, Allison Janney,
Monsters, Inc.: John Goodman, Billy Crystal, Steve Buscemi
I don't know why you think animation means you don't need actors.
And your 'argument' on WALL-E is HUGELY flawed: Ben Burtt (who 'voiced' WALL-E) is literally the go-to guy when you need incredible sound effects. Not only would that movie have failed without him, he got the job because he's THE best sound fx guy in the business. For something like WALL-E, you need even more exacting quality, not less. And the few voices they did have went to John Ratzenberger (of "Cheers" fame: he has 95 acing credits on IMDB), Kathy Najimy, and Sigourney Weaver.
Making good content requires good content producers. I'm not trying to discourage you: there are good people out there. But you seem to be saying that since its animation, you can have lower standards. No: you need higher ones.