Hacker Cinema
Ratatouille
2007 · Film · 111 min
Directed by Brad Bird
In one of Paris's finest restaurants, Remy, a determined young rat, dreams of becoming a renowned French chef. Torn between his family's wishes and his true calling, Remy and his pal Linguini set in motion a hilarious chain of events that turns the City of Lights upside down.
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93 comments on Hacker News
>and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality.
Definitely agreed, but at least when talking about experience we've been stuck in this position for most of human history. How do I know what it's like to eat a hamburger? Perhaps, like the cute visual in Ratatouille there is a deep inner experience but (also like in Ratatouille) when I need to communicate that experience with another person I'm stuck relying on language, and the language is found lacking.
I know it's just a kid's cartoon, but interestingly Ratatouille was making this exact same point -- he really lacks any meaningful way to convey his inner experience. It's locked behind language. The film tackles this by showing an Remy's complex and interesting visual, but his friend only gets the fuzziest, dullest visual when he attempts to communicate it.
Remy's immediate rat & family peers actually _never_ get to understand his experience, and instead later help him out of love an allegiance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizttM_Cbuc
One of the bonus features of the movie Ratatouille has a short video-game sequence about it: http://youtube.com/watch?v=-2xD9ShhMZU
I feel like we are talking past each other.
1. I write hobby code all the time. I've basically stopped writing these by hand and now use an LLM for most of these tasks. I don't think anyone is opposed to it. I had zero users before and I still have zero users. And that is ok.
2. There are actual free and open source projects that I use. Sometimes I find a paper cut or something that I think could be done better. I usually have no clue where to begin. I am not sure if it even is a defect most of the time. Could it be intentional? I don't know. Best I can do is reach out and ask. This is where the friction begins. Nobody bangs out perfect code on first attempt but usually maintainers are kind to newcomers because who knows maybe one of those newcomers could become one of the maintainers one day. "Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."
LLM changed that. The newcomers are more like Linguini than Remy. What's the point in mentoring someone who doesn't read what you write and merely feeds it into a text box for a next token predictor to do the work. To continue the analogy from the Disney Pixar movie Ratatouille, we need enthusiastic contributors like Remy, who want to learn how things work and care about the details. Most people are not like that. There is too much going on every day and it is simply not possible to go in depth about everything. We must pick our battles.
I almost forgot what I was trying to say. The bottom line is, if you are doing your own thing like I am, LLM is great. However, I would request everyone to have empathy and not spread our diarrhea into other people's kitchens.
If it wasn't an LLM, you wouldn't simply open a pull request without checking first with the maintainers, right?
It's a good observation, though many of those are also food for poor people. Wealthy food is often a refined version of what everyone else eats, usually requiring a lot of extra effort and time.
Lobster is a famous example (though I am skeptical of the story that prisoners revolted over being forced to eat it too much; I have been unable to find a reliable primary source). A beautiful example is from the film Ratatouille, where the eponymous dish is contrasted between his mother's peasant stew and the $50 a plate Thomas Keller version.
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.
As a related thing, I have sound/vision synesthesia.
It is a little like what was shown in the movie Ratatouille where the mice see colors related to what they smell only for me it is sound related. If you want to know more feel free to ask.
I was thinking the exact same thing! Lucky I searched the page for Ratatouille before commenting.
Ratatouille is one of my all time favorite movies, but if you read it as a metaphor for director Brad Bird's own career, it's hard not to feel like it lets Walt Disney off the hook. Often in real life, the creative genius who founded the enterprise and the sycophant who has taken over it in his absence are both assholes. Though Ratatouille does touch on this by making Gusteau an idealized figment of Remy's imagination, who is shocked when he hears that the real man had a child via an affair.
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
After Cars there’s: - Ratatouille - Up - Inside Out
In your opinion, which movie has a better story than any of those?
If I had a few billion dollars to spare, I'd buy the rights to Tolkien's work.
I'd then spend a bit more collecting all copies of 21st century video versions - and incinerate them in a volcano. I'd end all current licensing deals, pay a team of lawyers, IT staff, and some hackers to destroy every moment of footage on video platforms, in torrents, on obscure FTP sites. I'd pay Peter Jackson to sign an agreement never to discuss Tolkien again.
And then what? I'd find someone with the highest artistic merit, who understood Tolkien's vision of fairy tales and fantasy and mythology. Live action, computer-assisted or not, brings the supernatural Tolkienian settings -- his greatest power as a writer, as vivid today as when I read them: Moria, Lothlorien, Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul, Mordor, Orthanc, Fangorn, the Paths of the Dead, etc. -- to the mundane level of what we can see. The new film(s) would have to be hand-drawn animation, which can imply and leave room for so much more in our imaginations.
But who? Old Pixar, the ones who made Ratatouille and Wall-E, might have been an excellent choice. Miyazaki is much admired; I don't see that style fitting the material, but on the other hand they might have their own vision that, let loose, would set the world on fire. Similarly, the creators of Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse did something uniquely visionary, and possibly could make their own vision of Tolkien.
So to my point: Who? Maybe there's a video game artist? Maybe a different artist for each setting? But whatever we do, it must be art first and formost, without compromise.
My favorite mecha film is Ratatouille.
> OpenAI is the entity redistributing the work
It's difficult to say really.
If I essentially encode knowledge of something then can recall and remix at will, am I redistributing the exact work or the knowledge of it?
Yes, it is capable of producing a close to exact replica, if not the exact same input image byte-for-byte, but I find it difficult to say OpenAI is willfully redistributing copyrighted work in a whole like you would with torrenting a movie or right-click saving an image from Google where you are copying the intellectual property 1:1.
Opening this Pandora's box could have large implications on a lot of creative work that could cause artists to be unable to work if taken to the end conclusion: you cannot create any creative work that has a talking mouse if you have knowledge of Mickey Mouse existing because you have been tainted (similar to whiteroom re-creations but now any sufficiently large copyrighted figure causes a deadlock condition for all derivative ore even similar topics).
Is Ratatouille derative of Mickey Mouse? Ehhh, well they are both talking rodents. They both have cartoon faces. You can certainly draw parallels between them but they aren't the same character. Is Mickey with a chef hat infringing on Ratatouille?
The trademark law, to my knowledge, is asking would someone be tricked or misled into believing you are the other guys. I think that is applicable here where someone drawing a talking mouse isn't infringing as long as it cannot be mistaken for Mickey Mouse, which again would be the fault of the person inducing the creation and not the tool that allowed it to happen.
Where does "inspired by" / derived from the encoded knowledge turn into outright exploitation of copyrighted work? There's certainly _a_ line but I find it difficult to define it at it being encoded into knowledge of it existing.
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.
Most people in this thread blaming Disney are massively overlooking Ratatouille which came out after Disney took over Pixar. The main woman in the film is allowed to have a big nose instead of a button nose, and she also doesn't have the stupidly large "Pixar mom" hips that have become prevalent in animated films from a lot of production companies. I would love to see more female characters like Colette in animated film. And that's just aesthetic things about character design. Ratatouille is one of the most re-watchable films they made. The perspective of seeing the world from a rat's POV is inventive, the score is pleasant, the concept is fun, and the message is soulful.
I agree several of their movies ARE masterpieces. I think the problem is when they tried to get too preachy and sacrificed the "soul" of the plot to the message you're supposed to get out of the movie. Wall-E was a good movie, but it feels preachy. Incredible 2 was a nightmare because all it did was preach. I haven't seen most of the newer ones. Ratatouille came out post-Cars, and I feel like Ratatouille does one of the best jobs balancing the message with the plot, and giving you an aesthetic experience you will not forget: perceiving the world from the point of view of a rodent. Ratatouille genuinely changed my life. And yeah even if you grew up with Pixar, you can watch those movies again and they're still solid, soulful film.
de Boer claims that the trailer for Brave belies the fact that it was stuck in development hell, so much that includes content not in the movie --- but everything in that trailer is in the movie, so much so that the "mountain" Merida is seen climbing was critiqued for being Yosemite geology rather than Scottish.
I'm baffled by the claim that Ratatouille is intentionally hard to love. I think it's a telling statement. de Boer's schtick is, of course, contrarianism for its own sake (it's why so much of his writing ends up here, despite the fact that his writing beat almost never overlaps HN). It's as if he assumes that anything he likes must be an outsider pick. In the world I inhabit, Ratatouille is universally beloved, with a higher gross box office than the allegedly crowd-pleasing Cars movies or any of the Toy Story films.
The whole paragraph really comes across as a parody of the Rick and Morty copypasta, but I don't think that was deliberate.
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.
The answer is not as simple as the analogy suggests, but the principle of the problem is that the conflict resolved by the rat driving the human around is central to the theme and the characters, while the dog flying the airplane is not.
I used to have a high opinion of Up, having originally seen it when it came out in theaters. It was only on a re-watch that I was shocked by how much of that opinion was based on what is essentially only 15 minutes of the total runtime. Ratatouille is fundamentally about a ratty artist overcoming his background and prejudices. Up wants to be about an old man managing to move past his grief, but the climax (and most of the movie) involves a stupid bird and a stupid kid that only detract from the experience.
> …[Up] ends with dogs flying airplanes.
…
>… Pixar's peak at Ratatouille…
The latter is a movie about a rat that drives a human around like a mech, what’s the issue with dogs flying airplanes?
> I've never understood the love given to "Up". Everybody remembers the fantastic opening sequence but seems to forget that it ends with dogs flying airplanes.
The flying house with balloons wasn't too unrealistic? ;)
Up tugs on a lot of heartstrings. It's front-loaded with tremendous loss, but that emotional punch isn't lost as it transforms throughout the film into Carl opening up to protect someone new.
The film is cute and full of emotion. And despite the fantasy, it's well written. It's my favorite Pixar flick by a wide margin. Ratatouille and WALL-E are fantastic, though.
I'm a huge fan of the Disney movies that came out when I was growing up (Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast are my favorites). My kids like those movies a lot too.
But I think some wonderful movies have been made in the last ten years, most notably Encanto and Turning Red. They're both massive successes, and I think they are in many ways better than those movies I grew up with.
Not to mention Frozen, Moana, Inside Out, etc. These are all wonderful movies.
(Ratatouille is also great, btw, don't get me wrong!)
>Pending the Disney acquisition of Pixar, the two companies created a distribution deal for the intended 2007 release of Ratatouille, to ensure that if the acquisition failed, this one film would be released through Disney's distribution channels. In contrast to the earlier Pixar deal, Ratatouille was meant to remain a Pixar property and Disney would have received only a distribution fee. The completion of Disney's Pixar acquisition, however, nullified this distribution arrangement.
Ratatouille was a Pixar movie. "Pixar was responsible for creation and production, while Disney handled marketing and distribution." Ratatouille was released after the merger was complete but I'd imagine the story was largely locked in.
Ratatouille was released in 2007, so would have been in production long before.
I guess, one of the last movies to have Pixar DNA through and through.
Ratatouille is a Pixar movie, not a Disney movie.
As someone with a 2 year old child, I can attest that these movies sucked. Compare them to, say, Ratatouille, which was made using much more primitive rendering/animation, but the story and voice acting are great (and the graphics still very good), and it's no surprise that no one wants to see them. My child would rather watch the older, better movies 10+ times than one of the new ones even once.
It's a reference to the movie Ratatouille.
Ratatouille movie reference.
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
> As Auguste Gusteau (the fictional chef in Ratatouille) puts it, "anyone can cook, but only the fearless can be great."
Is this referencing the movie Ratatouille? I was curious because the movie was released a lot later than this article. I figure it must have been a novel but can't find it, or maybe the article was edited since 1998?
> 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 agree with the parent but I also think Ratatouille stated it best,
“Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere”
Give me some ingredients and I can make something edible. But no one would confuse me with a chef.
https://www.ranker.com/list/best-ratatouille-quotes/movie-and-tv-quotes
Strong disagreement. The acquisition happened in 2006. The last few great Pixar movies were in the pipeline already (Ratatouille - 2007, WALL-E - 2008, Up - 2009).
Sidney Lumet's film "Network" (1976) explores the idea of "hyperreality" in an accessible way, where people model their lives in reaction to relationships shown on television.
>"I think this is odd, at least if over done, as if the constructed media representation is somehow evidence of anything true"
Constructed media representations, like clips of movies, can still be quite useful for introducing an idea where the evidence will be presented later on. For example, some research psychologists use clips from Ratatouille to introduce concepts about memory.
However, I agree that it's unfortunate that people sometimes do uncritically use fictional depictions as evidence of arguments for human nature. For example, Lord of the Flies depicted a highly pessimistic view of how shipwrecked boys would behave over time, and people have formed a cynical worldview from the story. A real-life case of shipwrecked boys in 1965, however, ended with cooperation: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
I find music is a lot like the movie Ratatouille.
I'm a classically trained violinist, and when learning there was a huge sense of "just follow the rules and the sheet music exactly until you get to composing".
In that sense, I think there's a lot of similarities to a lot of engineering practices. There's a straight line to follow on a lot of tasks, adhere to the rules and leave the magic/cleverness to the system architects.
When I switched to guitar, and subsequently discovered the world of prog/math metal, it felt incredibly freeing. However describing that kind of freedom to my friends who adhered to sheet music exclusively was a struggle. Polyrhythms, improvisation, playing by feel were blasphemous to that world.
In that sense I liken it to ratatouille. You must cook the recipe the master chef created exactly, and it's not our place to iterate and experiment.
As a software engineer, I see a lot of the same mindset often. There's a world of engineers who are rigid about sticking to the tried and tested way of doing things. There's nothing wrong with it, in fact it's very valued.
However you need the counterpoint. You need the innovative composers, you need the recipe creators, you need the system designers/architects. Having only one or the other is an imbalance.
I think that's what a lot of engineers get hung up on. Music is taught as rules.
but those rules quickly fall apart when you start having to account for feel, for emotion, for cultural differences etc... Things that aren't able to be captured in rules cleanly.
Which is basically also the ending of the Pixar film Ratatouille. The protagonist wows a critic with a simple dish prepared to perfection. It’s a common trope, but also true. “Simple” food prepared well can be much better than a complex dish with many flavors.
Similarly, I’ve also heard (probably from a show like Top Chef, so YMMV) things like a salad or soup are also quick ways to differentiate chefs. In this case, it’s less about technique and more about identifying and mixing flavors.
It works because there is no place to hide. You either have good flavor or not.
> A taste or smell can unlock a memory you thought you lost forever.
Here for a related personal anecdote and a movie reference.
On a conference trip to Chicago I managed to snag a reservation for a Michelin-starred restaurant (Alinea.) The first appetizer was an unusual-looking canapé sprayed with a white foam, featuring salmon and dill as key flavors. It took me back to my 10-year-old self sitting at my grandparent's Thanksgiving table which included shrimp with grandma-grown dill. The meal tab was pricy, the recall of a grand moment was something akin to priceless.
The movie reference is 'Ratatouille,' where the antagonist restaurant critic has such a moment.
I think two things are going on, everyone remembers movies they watched as a kid/teen and thinks they where unusually good. It’s not that there was a golden age of movies, it’s that you personally had seen fewer movies.
That said, the ratio of original movies to sequels/franchises changed. Fast forward 20 years from Star Wars to 1997 and sure yet another Titanic, Jurassic Park 2, and a James Bond film but also, Men in Black, The Fifth Element, Liar Liar, As Good as It Gets etc so still mostly original movies.
But fast forward to 2017 and the top 10 movies included: Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Harry Potter 5, Spider-Man 3, Shrek 3, National Treasure 2, The Simpsons Movie, and Transformers. I Am Legend based on a book and 300 based on a comic. So only Ratatouille was actually new.
Human actors - Breaking Bad is about the process of a man changing into a monster. It takes great acting to make that story work
Video games will never do drama as well as theatre or film, because we can't see into the actors souls - video game stories are puppet theatre
Edit: thinking about this some more, I think I might be wrong - there are many animated films that I've found emotionally moving and involving that don't have human actors (Ratatouille for example!)
"In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratatouille_(film)
Anyone can cook ≠ everyone can cook. That distinction is the whole point.
(And Ratatouille is one of the best Pixar movies.)
Maybe an internet led edit of Ratatouille can add it to the beginning of the movie.
> "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 ...
It's like in ratatouille movie, everyone can cook doesn't mean everybody can be a great cook, but that a great cook can come from anywhere.
Basically from their parents and their parent's friends. It's kind of funny because I can see the OP's point: on the one hand people are sold this idea of a meritocracy. If you think about "the American dream", anyone no matter what their background can "make it" through hard work. But there is an unspoken implication there: that you can "make it". What happens after you "make it"? Presumably you're on easy street. You don't have to work hard any more. Your family is taken care of. They don't have to work hard any more.
I tend to think of the "American dream" more like a class lottery. Sort of like the movie Ratatouille, it's not that anyone can be in the upper class, but people from the upper class may have come from anywhere. I think of people like basketball players who come out of poverty. Their mother used to clean toilets 14 hours a day and now that her son is a famous basketball player she can spend her days relaxing in a big house and she never has to clean toilets again.
But the OP is correct. No matter how people made it to the upper class, once they are there their family has an advantage. Even if you start with a totally fair meritocracy where people get their just rewards, because they want to provide for their children (and their children's children) you end up with a class of "old money" who own and control most things of importance.
I'm not sure there is a way around it other than massive inheritance taxes and high inflation, which are historically not super popular ;-)
I’m sure Michelin Star chefs don’t always eat that quality of food. How would you ever be full? Beside there are always inspirations for fancy dishes dishes.
Trying to the remember the series but I watched something about the history of Creole/Cajun food with a focus on Shrimp Creole and PoBoys. They took the dish all the way from the early 1900s when it was made by workers to some relatively current dishes being prepared at fine dining places. The dish started as basically ketchup, fresh shrimp, and whatever vegetable scrapes avaiblable.
My point is there is usually some inspiration for a dish that is attached to emotions. Think the movie Ratatouille. You could do something similar with Potato salad.
I know you weren’t trying to be critical of the chef but it cerntainly feels like you are judging him.
It is unclear whether that is due to lack of aptitude, lack of desire, or incorrect expectations.
The qualities of those people who have ever successfully written software programs suggest that there is no magical determinant that would prevent any motivated person from doing it.
Apply the construction from the Pixar film Ratatouille. "Anyone can cook" does not mean that everyone can, just that there's no one who couldn't.
I suppose some kinds of brain defect or brain damage could prevent it, if you really want to pick nits. But in that case the condition would likely also prevent that person from doing much of anything else.
Thanks, that makes sense, the family is the center of love. Good background and perspective. I still think for the sake of storytelling there's a lot to be gained by the inclusion of romantic interests. There was just Hector. Look at wall-e and eve, the couple in Up, Ratatouille, Toy Story; most Pixar movies before they became part of Disney?
It would be a sad day if creative people were forced to consider every person who may find their work or title objectionable. The Pixar film "Ratatouille" was a wonderful script but some people could not get over the fact that a rat was a chef preparing food. The screenwriters had the option of changing a fairly significant feature of their film to appease these critics or just say that some people won't watch it. I'm glad they chose the latter. If you really need a distributed database that supports transactions and don't evaluate CockroachDB because of the name, I think that's more on you than on them.
I'm thinking more of the "You cannot be Mommy!" scene from the movie Ratatouille
The movie Ratatouille captured the sentiment much better, "a great chef can be anyone". Which is not the same as "anyone can be a great chef".
The movie Ratatouille presented that statement without any evidence, and imo it is incredibly misleading, the preponderance of psychological evidence goes against it. This paper is a good starting place: http://cogprints.org/656/1/innate.htm
The author lost me at "Mathematical genius resides within every one of us — most people just don’t know it yet."
The movie Ratatouille captured the sentiment much better, "a great chef can be anyone". Which is not the same as "anyone can be a great chef". It seems the author is mixing up those two.
I fully agree that gender, background, schooling, etc is not the key determination of genius. However, saying anyone could be a genius is disingenuous.
I actually thought it was horrible and lazy. I thought of Eggers as a "literary" author, but the writing quality was low, and the plot unimaginative. It was like reading a thin script for a bad action movie.
I also read Ed Catmull's "Creativity Inc." this year, and one of the things he talked about was research trips for artists. He said that even if the audience of Ratatouille didn't know what the inside of a high end French kitchen looked like, it would come through in the movie that the ARTISTS did know. He emphasized the importance of these trips in the book.
Having worked in Silicon Valley, it felt like Eggers basically read a bunch of newspaper articles about it and then wrote a book, rather than visiting the place and talking to people. If you want to write a dystopian novel, this area is certainly rich with possibility. I remember that 10+ years ago I was astounded at how well "Microserfs" captured the mood and motivations of people... I'll have to go back and read it again.
I was curious and went to look up lamian on Wikipedia. Found a link on the page for chow mein, which I followed out of curiosity. It was fascinating to see the way Minnesota chow mein was singled out as particularly bad. Unfortunately in my experience it's absolutely true. That was my introduction to Chinese food as a kid, so sometimes I'll have a little for nostalgia, but in the end it disappoints. I think if I had some that was well prepared I would be in heaven, as in the movie Ratatouille.
Cars 2 was the only movie with generally mixed reviews (per Metacritic) - everything else was positive, with some (Ratatouille) absolutely phenomenal.
On some Pixar movie (Ratatouille, I think), one of the DVD extras was a set of deleted scenes that happened to be the entire work of individual animators - basically they spent 18 months of their life working on that stubble, and the whole guard was cut because that didn't work with the story.
That's an extreme, but something like that is possible for anyone working on a sufficiently large project. I get how people like that could really feel like their time was wasted - your assumption is that their contribution will be in the final project in a small but interesting way, and that's not an assumption that can always be made.
>I'm not sure that Inside Out was meant to be an accurate depiction of our emotions any more than Finding Nemo is meant as an accurate portrayal of marine ecosystems, or Ratatouille of French cuisine.
And yet the first thing to come to many children's minds when shown a clown fish or French cuisine is Nemo and Ratatouille.
> I don't think that children watching the movie will really grow up believing they have all these little people in their heads.
I've met people who think the movie helped them "understand themselves better" whether or not that is actually true.
>But if we couldn't reduce that complexity into modular, independent pieces then how would we ever communicate?
Not everyone wants to speak the same language, (or even be forced to hear you).
I'm not sure that Inside Out was meant to be an accurate depiction of our emotions any more than Finding Nemo is meant as an accurate portrayal of marine ecosystems, or Ratatouille of French cuisine. While our emotions certainly are complex and misunderstood, I don't think that children watching the movie will really grow up believing they have all these little people in their heads. It's a fun concept that takes some existing cultural trope and runs with it to tell a story. Everything is more complex that the limited linguistic labels that we slice the world into. But if we couldn't reduce that complexity into modular, independent pieces then how would we ever communicate?
Pixar kind of had a chip on their shoulder during that era, they seemed especially mad at Hollywood and the critics. There's a dig at the end of Ratatouille pointed at Happy Feet, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature over Cars:
https://reddit.com/r/movies/comments/35ezkp/til_after_cars_lost_out_on_the_oscar_for_best/
I bet he's a real hoot at parties...
"Hi, Richard."
"Hello, how are things?"
"Great! I'm pretty happy that..."
"Oh, you're not actually happy. You've been indoctrinated to think you need to obtain an artificial mental state labeled 'happiness' by others. What you are really experiencing is resentment for others success and you are projecting your mediocrity as positive achievements."
I found Inside Out wildly entertaining. As did my children and parents. Pixar's storytelling and record of engaging multiple generations is unmatched. They are altogether tragic, dramatic, funny, personal, and universal.
I find nothing wrong with simplifying the rules of a film's universe and requiring filmgoers to suspend disbelief in order to tell a story. Why? Because good films are a catalyst for discussion. As a result, whereas the author is critical of the film itself as damaging for being simplistic, rather, it can be the very context to launch the necessary discussions with children to navigate their myriad of emotions.
Ironically, Pixar's very own Anton Ego of Ratatouille critiques the critics... "In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
That really spends on the movie. I don't feel like Ratatouille is really a kids movie nor is The Incredibles. I'd even argue Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are pretty adult. I could certainly relate to Woody's feeling scared of the shiny new hire (TS1) or his being lured to probably the wrong job (TS2). Up seems like an adult movie with stuff added for kids vs the opposite. So did Wall.E IMO. Lots of parents found Saving Nemo very close to their hearts (not a parent so not one of my favs).
Cars, on the other hand ......
A quote from one of my favorite films sums this up nicely.
"Not everyone can become a great artist; but a great artist can come from anywhere." -Anton Ego from "Ratatouille"[1]
[1] full quote: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382932/quotes?item=qt0465220
To paraphrase the film Ratatouille: "Anyone can program. But not everyone should."
There is a good scene in Pixar's Ratatouille about keeping your station clean. Thomas Keller was a consultant for the film.
I once read that Japanese construction sites would sweep up, clean their tools and put all them away at the end of the day. I don't know if it is true or not. But it got me to shutdown all my apps at the end of the day.
My editor is never left open. I shutdown my VMs. Then in the morning I start fresh and clean.
I didn't down vote your comment, but I think ratatouille is one of Pixar's best films, and you made no attempt to justify your low opinion of it.
> from the film Ratatouille (2007)
Which was, incidentally, not a very good or meaningful Pixar movie whatsoever.
- Anton Ego, a character from the film Ratatouille (2007)
Ugh.
Ratatouille was the first Pixar movie I saw that was an utter disappointment (no, I haven't seen them all, but I've seen a fair number of them). It was so far from "feel-good" cartoon flick for me. Much more "I'll never get that two hours of my life back" movie. Not sure how close to two hours it actually was, but it felt like about 10 hours.
Not sure what they were smoking when they made that one. I realize that tastes in movies vary widely, but I still find it hard to believe that people actually like that movie.
To each his own, I guess.
Getting into YC is not easy - I had applied about two years back, and it's not just me, a LOT of my friends had applied too, individually, either as sole founders or as teams, so I am not making up stuff. Some teams that applied, were composed of some of THE BEST hackers (REAL hackers, not marketers) programmers, and the best designers, with loads of experience running start-ups. But they never got in. Neither did I.
Atleast, I applied as a sole founder, so it's reasonable that I didn't get in. But I was surprised (shocked) to see that even the top hackers/designers never got in. I wondered why. And then I discovered, it was all about credentials. None of us were product managers from Facebook/Google/etc.
Here's the thing - This article is irony at best. I want you to understand that no matter what you do, what skills you have, YC looks into
1) Where you come from.
2) What credentials you have.
YC solves the credentials trap by looking at your credentials on behalf of the rest. YC is not interested if you have a good idea. YC is interested if you are a good executer of ideas. And it's a very fair metric. But, the way they do it is scary at best - Much of the people they select are only top dogs - (ex) product managers from Google, Facebook or someone from a well-known company. NO, they don't select everyone this way, but for the majority of the people they select, this is how it works. And as for the rest that they select, the ones without credentials, its a small percentage, which means you have to really compete hard to get in, if you're not from a well-respected company like Google or Facebook or Twitter.
Worse is the fact that the applications are filtered by the alumnii, hence you never know what metric they use to select people. But eventually post selection, you notice that these people who were selected are from some hot company like Google, Facebook etc.
Paul Graham is a great man, and I have great (enormous) respect for him. It's because of him that this start-up industry is receiving proper attention. But, if someone is going to tell me YC solves the credentials problem, etc. then I'm not stupid enough to buy it. It's simply not true.
If you've watched Ratatouille, you may recall the quote:
"Anyone can cook";
Which means (What it means is what the movie's about):
"Not everyone can become an artist, but, a great artist can come from anywhere.."
It's like the movie Ratatouille: Not everyone can be a good coder, but a good coder can come from anywhere.
While they may receive an impossibly large number of candidates, in the end, they will boil it down to roughly 15 students. That means that as long as their application process is sane, they will have found 15 good candidates who are going to be 'coding for the right reasons', whatever that means.
This is different from codecademy, which says that anyone and everyone should learn to code. Instead, they're claiming that you don't need a CS degree to be a professional programmer. That doesn't mean they're also saying you don't need to be dedicated, and analytical. Ultimately, the people who enter these programs are the kinds of people who would have made it on their own, albeit on a much longer timeline. I don't see any problem with jumpstarting it with careful curation and guidance.
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.
________
[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
This is the only worthwhile article on the iPhone 5/iOS 6 I've read yet.
In a nutshell, Apple now has the "Pixar problem" -- they're so successful that there's no ability for them to actually innovate, because it risks failure.
Pixar handled this (with Jobs still around, sigh) by hiring Brad Bird, who is arguable one of the top directors worldwide now, but at the time, had only one movie to his name that was a huge failure, commercially (still a great film though -- The Iron Giant). Bird brought his own team, his own style, and a whole boatload of organizational change to Pixar -- and was wildly successful. He force Pixar to up their game when they were already at the top.
(Later, when Pixar needed a save on Ratatouille, Bird was there to pick up the pieces. He's easily the best hire Pixar made post-IPO.)
I don't know where Apple is going to go, but I don't see anyone like a Brad Bird on the horizon, and I'm doubtful one even exists to bring in.
Perhaps that's the real problem.
For some reason this reminds me of the movie Ratatouille, and the "Anyone can cook" theme.
For those who haven't (and won't) seen the movie, one of the themes (as I see it) is based around two different interpretations of the phrase "Anyone can cook"
1) The looser interpretation that upsets the "ultimate food critic" would be better phrased as "everyone can cook"
2) The interpretation that the movie guides us to (not quite as heavy handed as I'm phrasing it!) is that a cook can come from any background, we shouldn't think that the best cooks can only be found in the trappings of a well respected multi-Michelin-star restaurant kitchen.
The parallel for coding seems obvious to me, we often have very preconceived notions of what it takes to be a "coder", what background, personality type, etc. and we should reject that. The "suits vs. nerds" concept is a form of deception, because it leads us to think that "coders" must be "nerds" and "suits" can never be "coders", neither of which are true.
We should judge people by their ability and capability, not by the fashionable trappings with which they drape themselves; often suits, or nerdy/geekish behavior is merely a social camouflage with no deep correspondence to skill set.
Just my 5c
From Ratatouille, perhaps Pixar's finest film.
"So what have they done lately?"
Not even counting foreign films, here are some darn good productions from the past five years:
Midnight in Paris, Hugo, Drive, Warrior, Black Swan, Inception, Inglourious Basterds, Up, Whatever Works, The Limits of Control, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Gran Torino, The Wrestler, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, Ratatouille, The Departed, and The Prestige.
As if writing verbose rants (mirroring equivalent rants about movies, radio, books, plays, etc. throughout human history) is somehow a superior activity.
the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.
- Ratatouille
Let me say that in my opinion, Matt DeBoard has certainly earned the title of "programmer." Welcome to the club, Matt, and you have my appreciation for the hard work you put in. It sounds to me like you're going about it in the right way; I encourage you to keep it up, and I encourage others to do the same (that is: find a way that works for them, not necessarily copy your approach). Please pay no attention to the negativity. As spacemanaki and others have pointed out, Matt is not a complete programmer yet, and he has more to learn. But I think he knows that, and remains open to learning, which is the important point. I've got more than 12 weeks under my belt, but I still feel like I'm learning all the time. My thoughts are summed up by the character of chef Gusteau in the movie Ratatouille: "Anyone can cook." This very pointedly does not mean "everyone can cook" -- it takes a combination of interest, aptitude, and long study to become a chef, and most will not make it -- but it does mean that there is no one route to achieving competence, then expertise, then mastery.
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).
I think Ratatouille may in fact be the most productive academic endeavor in 10 years. 7 papers from that film! Did Ratatouille produce more papers than the LHC? I hope so.
Ratatouille just doesn't cut it for me, I don't care if it's a rat cooking food or not, the entire story just leaves me thinking "whateva".
Incredibles on other hand is perfect in every way. BTW, given the premise of this movie it's possible to make good sequel for it without resorting to "international spies in the world of racing cars".
UP was strange. It was like two different movies that never quite came together. I like slapstick, but man, slapstick and cancer doesn't work. It's like there was a great and weird (good) movie in there but it got cheapened by the clowny Disney mascot kid thing.
I couldn't stand the kid and the bizarre dog voice, but I haven't thought enough about it to see a solution.
Wall-E had some nice moments -- mostly when it was trying to be Star Wars. The Eco-story and human characters were ludicrous.
I want to see what Brad Bird makes next. Incredibles and Ratatouille are by far my favourite Pixar movies.
That concern would be valid if Toy Story 3 wasn't the 2nd best Pixar movie ever (in my opinion, a hair behind Ratatouille)
Don't overlook the obvious: The Matrix
Also: Primer, Amadeus, Ratatouille
Older movies: The General and other Buster Keaton movies, Trouble in Paradise and other Lubitsch movies.
Agreed; maybe the point is that Hollywood seems disproportionately interested in explaining the urge to create (especially when the ambitions are grand) as sublimated need for intimacy.
This may be in part because Citizen Kane casts a long shadow on Hollywood film, e.g. over The Social Network & There Will Be Blood.
I do appreciate the rarer films where ambition seems substantially driven by a person's interest in problems, tools, and intrinsic desire to create or innovate: e.g. The Fountainhead (better than the book), Ratatouille.
In the Pixar film "Ratatouille", there is an amazing visual sequence where Remy the cutely digitally-rendered rat runs through the hidden spaces between houses/walls/interior.
I would strongly disagree that 3D in UP can be dismissed as merely a "post-process like VHS." All future Pixar films are going to be in 3D, and Pixar does not make story / layout choices on a whim. Just because the movie is enjoyable in 2D doesn't mean a lot of thought / early planning went into the 3D, it just means the core story was not strongly affected by it. Here's the first part of this interview with the director of UP talks about the use of 3D in the development process:
http://www.movieretriever.com/blog/336/interview-pete-docter-director-of-up
Some choice quotes:
"We just focused on telling as strong of a story as we could and then the 3D group followed up with the 3D. And they did use it creatively. We tried to use it like color or like camera or anything else - to emphasize emotion."
Development is pipelined at Pixar, starting with Story. So this sounds like 3D was integrated as soon as Animation got their hands on it.
"If people really embrace it and feel it's the way to go, then we'll do them all that way. This one, you can see either way, which I think is nice. Some people find it really engaging and interesting but other people are kind of put off by the glasses and whatever. I don't think you're losing anything by seeing it in 2D, it's just a different way to see it."
As an extreme analogy, I bet that watching UP with a black and white filter, I would still laugh / cry while watching the film.
Extensive interview on 3D with some of the people in charge of 3D:
http://www.awn.com/articles/reviews/pixar-goes-3-d
"Yes, the most gratifying thing is that we put a lot of time and energy and thought in our approach to 3-D and we never really knew if people would get it. To see some of the online reviews coming out of Cannes, it seems that people really got our nuanced, subtle approach. We want to pull people into the movie and not push them away from it with a lot of gimmicky stuff coming at ya."
"What was really interesting was, not knowing how 3-D was going to work with editing and with composition, how good camera and staging play really nicely in 3-D. And this turned into a motto for us. We did about eight minutes of Ratatouille as a test and it was really stunning."
Gee, I would really like to see that one... anyways there are a bunch of interesting interviews on this stuff.
http://www.google.com/search?q=bob+whitehill+interview+up+3d
Up is an amazing film. It's funny, endearing, classic, and artistically excellent. The film breaks out of the mold of 3D animated film art direction with stylized characters and it prefers graphic shapes over the hyper-realism so common in the genre (you'll have to trust me).
While the characters are not toys, cars, or fish (which are easily merchandised) they are still cute. It will probably sell (at box office and toy shelves) at the same level as Ratatouille, but that is still a major success for any other studio on the planet.
Pixar used to be lauded for its originality and commitment to high quality. Suddenly, it's being panned for those same things.
Are you saying that you can produce 6 seasons of Frasier with the cost of 1 minute of Pixar animation? Sounds doubtful.
Not cost - number of artifacts within a that timeframe over several shots.
Then again, Let's run some numbers to talk about cost.
WALL-E cost $120 million for 98 minutes, Ratatouille cost $150 million for 111 minutes, so you could infer that Pixar animation costs about $1.3 million per minute (roughly) and each production takes around 3-4 years to make.
The Blender "peach" team produced 10 minutes of animation (Big Buck Bunny) in 3 months with 9 people from concept to delivery using all open source software. (There were only 6 people primarily involved in the production of the animation itself, 2 were actively developing Blender as software and 1 did the music)
Big Buck Bunny - http://www.vimeo.com/1084537
Once all the meshes, sets etc are initially created, it all boils down to production of scripts, storyboarding and then animating more content based off artifacts you've already produced.
Remember, I'm talking a sitcom format, that is you artificially limit yourself with numbers of characters and locations (which includes lighting etc) which allows you to spend more time on animation instead of producing more sets/figures.
In fact, once everything is set up, animation is one of the shortest segments of any film animation project (dont believe me? check Dreamworks Animation's general timeline breakdown from their most recent annual report, page 21, link follows)
http://ir.dreamworksanimation.com/dwa/export/system/modules/com.dreamworks.framfab/resources/downloads/2007_DreamWorks_AR.pdf
So while no, you might not get a full 6 seasons, you could probably do several seasons for the cost of 1 minute of Pixar production.
You seem to be talking about growing an animation studio from the ground up.
Thats exactly what I'm talking about.
The model I've been more or less discussing throughout this thread is for a startup I'll be working on soon, maybe even applying to YC with in the next round of funding.
PG says, make something people want - this year is turning out to be the biggest year on record for Hollywood in terms of ticket sales, people spend more time in front of their TV's now than 5 years ago and now they also spend more time online (and TV/film piracy is on the rise)
Fact is - people want to be entertained...
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.
More than that, in my opinion. Ratatouille is a great movie in itself. Just like "The Incredibles", it is a film where you see fully developed characters and an interesting story without getting pseudo-intelectual over it.
Also, I went to see it with my girlfriend at the time. It was a few weeks past the opening weekend, and I remember that we've noticed how few people were "taking the kids" to the movie. They were going on their own, which I took as a excellent sign that animated movies are no longer just about the cute factor. Computers are just supporting the movie, instead of being the selling point of it.
I liked your post. It reminded me of "anyone can cook" in the movie Ratatouille.
As I replied on the techcrunch post, here's a quote from the recent film Ratatouille, that I believe sums up my opinion on the numerous haters out there (uncov, jay (living in first life) and the rest)
"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."