Hacker CinemaRise of the Great Wall: Emperor Qin Shi Huang
Rise of the Great Wall: Emperor Qin Shi Huang
Rise of the Great Wall
TV series
Rise of the Great Wall is a 1986 Hong Kong television series based on the biography of Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China and founder of the Qin Dynasty. The series is one of the biggest productions by ATV.
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176 comments on Hacker News
It still should be. Any educator worth their salt should be able to connect the dots on where all of this leads.
I always joke with my wife and invoke a line from this [1] Art Bell episode "the disasters that are coming..."
People really don't seem to consider that our civilization is remarkably fragile and dependent on humans. Any given system can just fail at a moment's notice and you need people around who know how not to panic and what to do.
We seem to be adamant at disproving this reality for some weird reason (money, duh), but life isn't going to be fun when a large portion of the population needs a chat bot to do any form of work. And it's worth asking: what population will be left if we submit all of our faculties to LLMs? My guess is one that's either limited in size or practically inert.
An outright idiocracy doesn't have to happen, but we sure as hell seem to be speed-running our way there. It's actually worth watching Idiocracy and Wall-E and just contemplating "do I really want to live in this world?" Because, at least right now, we're charting course directly toward that.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkPHMEvp-Tk
Wow, some people really dislike any inconvenience in your lives, don't you?
What will you do pray tell with that extra time? I doubt it will be spent on loftier pursuits. In fact I'm quite certain that for the vast majority it won't be.
Wall-E was a documentary - just shot in the past.
I am of course impressed by the model and the robot. Great stuff,
But the downside is that won't we all just turn into the obese, stupid humans at the start of the WALL-E film?
Mindfulness teaches us that we can enjoy the washing up, the laundry, planting seeds, tending the garden. It connects us to something. Without this will we end up with a rise in mental health issues, because for one thing people will just end up on social media in the time they save.
Just a thought.
Refusing to question the notion that the overclass exists because their productivity and cultural contribution makes them a necessity so hard that I reinvent the premise of the Pixar movie Wall-E from first principles and pitch it to people as an ontology
I guess the people in Wall-E didn't really seem unhappy so perhaps you're right. My gut instinct though, is that there is a qualitative difference in the level of abundance and concentration of wealth, power, and influence we have today that needs to be taken seriously on its merits and not hand-waved away with tenuous historical analogies.
Yes, two hundred years ago, many people thought reading was a dangerous distraction for young people, just as film, radio, TV and the internet became later. But there is a qualitative difference to having social media in your pocket with vibrating notifications. Pretending its just more of the same honestly feels like slightly willful blindness at this point.
Sci-fi movies often act like thought experiments. They imagine a world and quietly ask: what if things really went this way? So for the next few weeks, I’ll be revisiting a few films and looking at them from a slightly different angle: What parts of the science could actually work, and what parts are pure imagination? Starting with WALL-E — a lonely robot, a planet buried under trash, and a future where humans have forgotten how to live on Earth. It turns out the science behind the story is a lot more interesting than it first appears.
Movie: Wall-E -> showing what you are saying :-D
The standard of living in China is bad for most people. IMHO, they need to expand in order to provide the same lifestyle as offered in the USA.
This has the energy of "Why are we building rockets to the moon, when there are homeless people in San Francisco"-vibes?"
> give generous UBI to each and every person
Have you seen the movie Wall-e? I don't think society should strive to outsource all labor to AI and robots, nor is that the final end-state of building robots and AI.
Nietzsche and his whole philosophy are stupid, wrong, and ontologically evil. His whole philosophy is poorly reacting to the great ideas of Philipp Mainlanders “the philosophy of redemption”. Philip mainlander and Aruther Schopenhauer were correct in their philosophical pessimism and actual nihilism and nietzschian radical optimism is what motivates nearly all modern totalitarian, fascist, and authoritarian movements.
The only good thing nietzsche produced was the “Wall-E” movie from Pixar, which is a radically nietzschian film.
AI is kind of more interesting than screwdrivers though. Three AI movies in the IMDB top 100 vs zero screwdriver movies (The Matrix, Terminator 2, Wall-E).
>If all the characters in games were people that you couldn't relate to and that you don't feel represented by, you wouldn't like that, no?
Games are a visual medium, like movies, which is why games with attractive characters are generally more popular, and just to be clear simple graphics like in Schedule I are not unattractive or ugly.
More importantly how a character looks has nothing to do with how relatable a character actually is - it an absurd premise. What you are basically saying is that people won't enjoy playing Stray because they are not cats, which obviously isn't true and doesn't make sense. It's the same in movies, when watching Wall-E people don't go "well I'm not a trash compactor so I can't relate at all".
>Embracing that people are different is something that is good for everyone.
And I would agree except that in reality it isn't include non-attractive looking characters along side attractive ones, it's always to exclude what you call "standard beauty standard".
As an example of this if would really is about just giving options to player then why is the breast slider in Dragonage Veilguard limited so that players can create only characters with small breasts? Where did the "representation", "inclusivity", "player choice" go to with regards to large breasts?
A lot of cultures have some sort of starving relic.
Maybe a simple national dish made with very cheap ingredients, or an old story around a very important staple crop. Some deep, deep memory that persists for a long time.
These are the opposite of thanksgiving, or other harvest and abundance cultural relics.
I don't think the USA has that starving myth. This cold war episode is as close as they get, and it is from the perspective of "the other". Maybe the dust bowl?
Cinema is not shy exploring ideas adjacent to this concept (Wall-E, Idiocracy, Demolition Man, Interstellar, to name a few). It, somehow, self-acknowledges that absense of a starving myth by reversing what their abundance means. Almost as if it wanted to have it, and it's ashamed of being spoiled.
> it's apparently not at all uncommon for autistic folks to have this sort of extremely strong empathy response in some cases, while a totally flat empathy response in others
to add another datapoint to this, the only movie that's ever made me cry is Wall-E. I felt so sad for him at the beginning of it, all alone and trying to complete an impossible, unappreciated task.
I'm sure there are objectively sadder movies out there, but not for me.
This reminds me of how humans live in the movie Wall-E.
They will not rest until humanity has become as depicted in WALL-E: the ultimate brainless consumers. Unable to concentrate or focus or form an original thought. WALL-E might be the most prescient sci-fi movie ever made.
If data integrity is assured, and thus there is no change in the data to store/transfer, then that's the opposite of computationally transforming the data?
How do we see robot and AI and helping interactions in film and tv and games?
A curated list of films for consideration:
Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" or "The Modern Prometheus" (1818), Metropolis (1927), I\, Robot (1940-1950; Three Laws of Robotics, robopsychology), Macy Conferences (1941-1960; Cybernetics), Tobor the Great (1954), Here Comes Tobor (1956), Jetsons' maid's name: Rosie (1962), Lost in Space (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), THX 1138 (1971), Star Wars (1977), Terminator (1984), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Flubber (1997, 1961), Futurama (TV, 1999-), Star Wars: Phantom Menace (1999), The Iron Giant (1999), Bicentennial Man (1999), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Minority Report (2003), I\, Robot (2004), Team America: World Police (2004), Wall-E (2008), Iron Man (2008), Eagle Eye (2008), Moon (2009), Surrogates (2009), Tron: Legacy (2010), Hugo (2011), Django Unchained (2012), Her (2013), Transcendence (2014), Chappie (2015), Tomorrowland (2015), The Wild Robot (2016, 2024), Ghost in the Shell (2017),
Giant f robots: Gundam (1979), Transformers (TV: 1984-1987, 2007-), Voltron (1984-1985), MechWarrior (1989), Matrix II: Revolutions (2003), Avatar (2009, 2022, 2025), Pacific Rim (2013-), RoboCop (1987, 2014), Edge of Tomorrow (2014),
~AI vehicle: Herbie, The Love Bug (1968-), Knight Rider (TV, 1982-1986), Thunder in Paradise (TV, 1993-95), Heat Vision and Jack (1999), Transformers (2007), Bumblebee (2018)
Games: Portal (2007), LEGO Bricktales (2022), While True: learn() (2018), "NPC" Non-Player Character
Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_artificial_intelligence
List of artificial intelligence films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_intelligence_films
Category:Films_about_robots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Films_about_robots
Category:American_robot_films: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_robot_films
All of fiction is a distortion of sorts. Consider Wall-E movie fat people. The AI advancements shown in the movie should transitively imply that biotech, biomedical progress would be so high that we would have solved perfect health by then.
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.
Actually reckoning with this stuff leads people into believing in anti-natalism, negative utilitarinism, Scopenhaur/Philipp Mainlander (Mainlander btw was not just pro-suicide, he actually killed himself!), and the voluntary extinction movement. This terrified other philosophers like Nietzsche, who spends most of his work defending reality even if it's absolute shit. "Amor Fati", "Infinite Regress/Eternal Recurrence", "Übermensch" vs the literal "Last Man". "Wall-E" of all films was the modern quintessential nietzschian fable, with maybe "Children of Men" being the previous good one before that.
You're literally not allowed to acknowledge that this stuff is bad and adopt one of the religions that see this and try to remove suffering - i.e. Jainism, because at least historically doing so meant you couldn't use violence in any circumstances, which also meant that your neighbor would murder you. There's a reason that Jain's population are in the low millions
Reality is actually bad, and it should be far more intuitive to folks. The fact that positive experience is felt "quickly" and negative experience is felt "slowly" was all the evidence I needed that I wouldn't just press the "instantly and painlessly and without warning destroy reality" (benevolent world-exploder) button, I'd smash it!
> This reveals the real problem: it is about jobs, not data.
I think you're selling "it is about jobs, not data" a little short here.
Let me start off by saying I work on AI for healthcare, my first IRB protocol that contemplated computer vision is from 2012. I'm not an OG, but I've been working on this stuff for a while, and I'm very bullish.
On the flipside, my wife is a pediatric occupational therapist, she works with autistic kids. Kids in the Bay Area. Her clients are Google machine learning engineers. The major issue with jobs is not so much the monetary value of the work, although that's an important secondary outcome.
Humans need an occupation. Occupation is the purpose of life. Long before money was a thing, we needed purpose. Even kings and their courtiers, before money, needed occupations. We need to be doing something. People change their occupations from time to time. It doesn't have to be a job. It could be a hobby, in some cases. Even kids want to contribute. Even infants, as soon as they understand and can, will reach out to console or delight their caregiver. But we need to feel like we are giving back. Our minds and muscles atrophy if we are not occupied.
If we attach everything to solar power and let the machines run the world, we'll end up some version of the blob people in Wall-E's Buy n Large spaceships. The reward at the end of the movie was the people getting off the space ship, thanking the robots for giving them back purpose, mainly to restore their planet.
Purpose and occupation are about so much more than money.
What a stupid meme. "The last men" is most closely seen in that movie Wall-E, with the humans who are on that spaceship.
HNs userbase builds far too much for that. Nietzsche was so garbage, he was just buttmad that Philipp Mainlander and Schopenhauer were 1. much more correct and 2. more famous than he ever was in their own eras.
It's also telling that Nietzsche is the foundation behind all of the garbage from the french post-modern neomarxist/critical theorist/situational international folks. You are the thing you hate.
The movies visible in the photos in the article, and their runtimes in minutes, are:
94 The Good Dinosaur 92 Trolls 98 Wall-E 88 The Lion King 103 Moana 81 Toy Story 91 Trolls World Tour 95 Inside Out 103 Frozen II 95 A Bug's Life > We have two boys, and the eldest is permitted a 30-minute TV session in the morning and another in the evening.
So...if one of them wants to watch The Lion King or Toy Story they have to split it over at least 3 viewing sessions split over at least 2 days? And for anything else on that list they need to split it over at least 4 viewing sessions?
That seems overly restrictive. Yes, limiting kid's TV time is probably a good idea, but would it really hurt to have some flexibility so that they can finish a movie in one session? Maybe let them bank sessions, so they can say skip morning TV for 3 days, and apply that time to the 4th day's evening to get a slot for a whole movie.
For non native English speakers it means "the font used in Wall-E".
I was quite surprised by the first comment because I did not expect that a font was so emotional (especially that I do not remember any particular fonts in the movie)
Surely you'd do the Star Trek computer if you were real nerds rather than a single 2013 film. I can't even visualise (audiolise?) Johansson's voice, it's not particularly special to me. Yet I'd recognise Majel Barrett before end of the first word.
Though it would probably be more accurate if they used the autopilot voice from Wall-E but Apple would really stomp them for that.
On the contrary. Unless some AI armageddon happens, humans will be nurtured by AIs like in the movie Wall-E. Totally dependent by it, but a true utopia.
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.
Messaging _FIRST_ Disney and Pixar stuff has had _a_ message for a long time. Before they didn't feel the need to tackle every single issue from LGBTQIA+ representation to racism in a single movie. They just focused on the environment.
If Wall-E was made today, it'd have a gay/queer/nonbinary character in it, every major race and culture would be represented possibly as other bots with distinct accents etc. The full DEI checklist.
Wall-E was made in the pre-messaging-first age.
There is a message, but the main focus is between Wall-E and EVE. They didn't add any LGBTQIA+ themes or racial issues in there, because it didn't make sense for the message - which was "take care of the environment"
Strong leading women aren't the problem either. We've had those ages ago. I think the first major one for Pixar was Brave (2012). For Disney we had Ariel, Pocahontas and Mulan in the late 1900s.
Disney's problem is that they forgot that story and characters come first, a movie doesn't have to have an overt agenda. I'd prefer the 80's tv cartoon style where they always had The Lesson in the end of the episode after He-Man spent 20 minutes beating up bad guys in the toy ad disguised as entertainment.
I'm not sure I agree.
I love how recent movies feature a broader range of characters. I was watching the Super Mario Bros Movie yesterday (not Disney) and it was so refreshing to see a strong, leading princess. Likewise I absolutely love seeing different kinds of people featured in Disney movies. It feels like they finally started putting a bit of everyone into their movies. It does not feel forced at all.
And why is messaging a problem? Wasn't Wall-E great? And what about The Wind Rises (not Disney)? Did Soul suffer from its messaging?
In my opinion, Disney's problem is not messaging, but phoning it on with tried-and-true recipes, and playing it safe instead of exploring what the medium can offer.
> We still have a bit of time before we're all the humanoids from Wall-E
Obligatory reminder that the movie itself explains that people are what they are not because of their lifestyle, but because of the time spent in low-gravity environment.
Edit: Movies, unsorted, from the top of my mind:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_of_Control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_East_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter%27s_Bone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contagion_(2011_film) , seen before Covid, deemed to be realistic, and therefore better than stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning_Sign_(film) somewhere in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_IV_(1974_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizards_(film) The remakes of the Planet of the Apes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Days_Later , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28_Weeks_Later a little less so, though it had some great scenes of flying into London City Airport and the modern parts around that. Bladerunner in the original versions, the remake not so much. 2001: A Space Odyssey, the intro and first parts, spaceflight to the moon and such, the rest not. Too boring. I liked the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two better, actually. Avatar. Part one only. All of this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_(franchise) with the exception of the crossover stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elysium_(film) for the almost cyberpunkish fuckedupness of it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracula_Untold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beach_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Island_(2005_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/THX_1138 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropia_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollerball_(1975_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_Dealer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Tales https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Live https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendence_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puppet_Masters_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Survivalist_(2015_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernova_(2000_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_(2007_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hidden_(1987_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Zero_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capricorn_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangar_18_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_(2001_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timecop Ron Silverman Badass! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(2014_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_Blonde https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Night_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(1997_American_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colombiana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Zone_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_(1998_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adjustment_Bureau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrival_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeforce_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Protocol_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_(2013_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Final_Countdown_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypher_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigger_Point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echelon_Conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anderson_Tapes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Parallax_View https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Seduction
TV-Series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series) and the remake linked from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Train_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jericho_(2006_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Strain_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayward_Pines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_(American_TV_series) and its prequel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1883_(TV_series)
WESTWORLD!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_100_(TV_series) Praimfaya! Yeehaa! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counterpart_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altered_Carbon_(TV_series) All of Black Mirror! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Experiments_Lain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelers_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_Skies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devs_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peripheral_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorporated_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raised_by_Wolves_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/See_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_Loop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutschland_83 and sequels. ÄXZÄLLÄNNT! JAWOLLJA! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humans_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_the_Night_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Worlds_(2019_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_Nova_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gods_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_in_the_High_Castle_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascension_(miniseries) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_Interest_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_One https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resurrection_(American_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvation_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Dome_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_(2009_TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica
This all began about 2006 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(2004_TV_series) after having abstained from possessing a TV, or watching that by other means (with some exceptions for news and documentaries) since 1996, and mostly no cinema either.
That stuff rehooked me in a binge-watching session. Shit happens :-)
Do yoo vanna häff fries wiff thät?
/nerdsnipe off
On a RPG tangent, and related to the dialogue "Elon Musk tells Rishi Sunak AI will put an end to work" (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-67302048) I catch myself wondering..
I used to play VikingMUD (like A LOT). I have read the book Halftime (by Bob Buford). Then I consider a UBI. Also adding to the mix the "humans" in the movie Wall-E (all obese, sitting on floating chairs drinking soda all day wearing their VR devices). Now add a little of "Ready Player One" in that mix.
Now, adding all these to the mix (for for the future generation), will we become something like that? Will we be 'producing' 1h per day, sleeping 8h per day, and consuming the remaining 15h? (let's assume single or married person, but without any kids or pets)
Will I be able in my 80s to play VikingMUD again for 12h straight? (boot-run for those unique +3str iron gaunts, etc) Will I be able to play again Midnight Sun? (oh I have forgotten 99% of it).
Will someone revive Spellfire (oh how I miss this game.. I still have my cards in dossiers organized) and we will be able to scan & play with our cards from all over the world?
Or will we simply be playing Fortnite (or whatever 3d game will be the 'cool one') in 20-30 years when the above criteria are fulfilled?
“Photorealistic cat” or “photo of a cat”
They all look like characters from the WALL-E movie. None of them would be mistaken for an actual photo of a cat.
Have you ever seen Idiocracy? I first watched this movie only because of the 10 minute intro (How did we get to this point?), which I thought was pretty brilliant. The rest of the movie I felt was pretty gross, and one of the chief problems in the fictional future world was the inability of humankind to dispose of their garbage properly. What about WALL-E? Not exactly the same, but it's still there. As I get older and I observe the world around me, (and also accumulate junk myself), it seems I was wrong. We do have a junk problem, big time, already.
My armchair version of the main driver of this phenomenon is very simple: we just acquire too much junk. We produce too much junk, we buy too much junk, we throw away too much junk. Or we throw away not enough junk?! It's in the best interests of most companies and their marketing departments for us to want to do this.
One other human psychological effect I've observed: Trying to get people to recycle for the last 50 years or so has left us with a breed of "Garbage-averse" (my term) individuals. These people do completely irrational things like set half-empty bottles of water beside the trash can, because there's no recycling bin nearby. Now it's somebody else's problem. I understand this, because I was brought up this way as well. For now, I mostly overcome the aversion. Hoarding by older people is the same. "I'll just keep this until it becomes someone else's problem." It will always happen eventually.
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.
I think there’s a bit to this and also a bit where he gets it wrong. What’s right:
1. A Bug’s life was underwhelming after Toy Story. I grew to like it more after having entered the workforce.
2. Luca is understated.
3. Kids love Cars way more than adults.
4. Coco is a real diamond in a whole lot of (relative) rough.
5. The second half of Wall-E is quite good.
6. People aren’t unkind enough regarding Toy Story 4. Not amount of unkindness will be enough enough.
There’s lots more wrong but I want to zero in on one thing, Up.
De Boer says that without the first 10 minutes the movie is awful… but that’s the point of the movie. It’s about a miserable grieving man… the scene sets up the rest of the movie. Of course the movie sucks without it. It tells the story on the basis that you have just watched that scene.
Maybe I don’t know what you mean by ESG messaging I’d assume it’s related to some environmental stuff and/or diversity. Strong stories just work - Wall-E was excellent with a back drop of its environmental messaging and non Disney into the spider verse / across the spiderverse are excellent movies with diversity and a great stories.
After 2006 they were still knocking out an extremely high rate of absolutely impressive films:
Wall-E -- if you don't love this film you are possibly dead inside. It's not only absolutely beautiful and emotionally communicative, it's a deeply clever pastiche.
Up, as observed below.
Toy Story 3 came out after Up. And it is a work of acutely well-observed cinema. A staggeringly good film that should have won the Best Picture Oscar. [0]
Brave (2012) is critically neglected, too -- that is a beautiful, subtle, yes quite elusive film, despite what the article says.
And then there are films I have not seen yet but I am told are clever, inventive and beautiful -- Coco, Inside Out, Soul.
They are by any measure still a masterpiece factory. This article is lazy, toxic and cynical.
[0] edit: when I say this, I say it in the sense that surely everyone knows now that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial should have won Best Picture, not Gandhi. Even Richard Attenborough thought this.
Movies like Wall-E, Finding Nemo have strong ESG themes and were acclaimed successes.
You seem more obsessed with finding any excuse to be anti-ESG rather than having a specific issue with recent Pixar films which have issues unrelated to specific themes.
I don't really see how the story in Wall-E is any more subtle than the one in Strange World by your measure:
> The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels.
They lived on the back of a creature that was dying as a result of an infection and they had unknowingly been using the result of the infection as their power source. It's exactly the same kind of parallel and solution in fantastic terms. Stripped down these movies have a very similar storyline and message (things are broken, we can't just fix it without transforming ourselves, and some force or people will oppose that transformation).
Now, I prefer Wall-E. I think the cinematics are better. The emptiness and stillness of Earth, the serenity of space, the scene where the spacecraft docks with the Aurora and is cleaned. Films of that era and before gave you some breathing space with the spectacle without so much shit going on constantly. That said, I think if Strange World came out at the time Wall-E did instead of it then it would have been better received, I personally feel like I'm pretty tired of the style.
Weird as it sounds, I would still describe the political message in Wall-E as more subtle than in Elemental, or even Strange World - another recent flop. Why is that?
Wall-E, although clearly and one sidedly in favor of environmentalist or conservationist causes, still describes the problem and the solution in fantastic terms. The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels. The message you can take away from Wall-E is not a literal solution (planting plants to rejuvenate things ignores the complexity of real life ecosystems - just consider invasive species!). Instead, the message must be more abstract - something like "Care more about the environment."
The political situation in Elemental, by contrast, is barely abstract at all. There is a city, there are immigrants, and the elemental toothpaste commercial aesthetic is a thin veneer over real life racial and ethnic tensions. So any solution the movie suggests would be something that maps very closely to the real world.
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.
"shoved" was also included. And I don't even think there's a DreamWorks movie as heavy handed as Wall-E, which we considered part of the "Renaissance"
Were they ever? One of their most acclaimed movies featured a scenario about a society that litigated superheroes out of the public eye. Another featured a society powered through fear, and a lie to induce and justify said fear. And I can't even describe Wall-E as a metaphor so much as a blunderbuss shooting straight into it's audience.
> 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.
This is the new Godwin's law: the longer a thread about AI grows, the higher the probability of a comparison to Skynet, Matrix, HAL etc popping up.
I would also like to add Wall-e to this memetic set of movies. In Wall-e, AI is an enabler of our own destructiveness, humans are enslaved by AI willfully, AI is empowered so that humans can graze away on nihilistic screens.
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.
Art isn't a quantitative but qualitative activity. Just consuming more media cheaply is hardly a good thing. If anything we already waste too much time on forgettable, generic media as passive consumers at the expense of health or social life. Wall-E wasn't supposed to be a utopia, and being trapped for 15 hours per day in Zuckerbergs AI Metaverse is not the kind of 'content' we ought to be looking forward to, even if it costs zero dollars.
This was also true for past media like the TV and the criticism of the medium in many ways was correct. TV remains, despite uptick in quality, more generic, intentionally addictive, attention grabbing than say, film. We're now discovering the negative effect algorithmic social media has on the mental health of teens. Critics of automatically produced mass media tend to be right locking backwards.
There's a lot of great picks here, such as Gattaca, Man from Earth, Contact, The Matrix, Wall-E, Children of Men, The Fifth Element, 12 Monkeys. I would add Truman Show.
Depending on the individual and their patience, Primer (2004) might also be a great fit. The pace is a bid subdued but thematically, it's mind bending. I don't think it includes anything particularly awkward as an early scifi movie to watch together with your own child. I would probably start with one of the spectacles from the above picks, though.
> In the DVD commentary, Stanton said that he has been asked if it was his intention to make a movie about consumerism. His answer was it was not; it was a way to answer the question of how would the Earth get to the state where one robot would be left to continue the cleanup by itself. Nevertheless, some critics have noted an incongruity between the perceived pro-environmental and anti-consumerist messaging of the film, and the environmental impacts in the production and merchandising of the film [1]
[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E#Themes)
To me the downfall of humanity is wall-e was just there to make the movie about robots. I don’t think it had any deeper meaning. I guess at the end they return to earth but only because it’s the logical end of the robot story.
A slightly more nuanced take from Mark Fisher's brilliant Capitalist Realism:
> A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.
The milestones (from the source code):
//<10 seconds 'A single frame of a film': 100ms, 'It would take light to go around the Earth': 133ms, 'A blink of an eye': 400ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the moon': 1255ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 pit stop': 1820ms, 'The fastest 1/4 mile drag race time': 3580ms, 'The fastest Rubik\'s cube solve': 4221ms, 'The fastest 40-yard time at the NFL Combine': 4240ms, 'The fastest 1 liter beer chug': 4370ms, 'A skippable Youtube ad': 5000ms, 'A full bull ride': 8000ms, 'The fastest 100m sprint': 9580ms, //10 Seconds 'The Wright Brothers first flight': 12000ms, 'The fastest 200m sprint': 19190ms, 'The fastest 50m freestyle swim lap': 21300ms, 'The Westminster Kennel Club dog agility record': 28440ms, 'A typical television ad': 30000ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Daytona': 40364ms, 'The fastest 400m sprint': 43030ms, 'The fastest NASCAR lap at Talladega': 44270ms, 'The fastest 100m freestyle swim lap': 47050ms, //1 Minute '"Just a minute"': 60000ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monaco': 74260ms, 'The fastest Formula 1 lap at Monza': 81046ms, 'The fastest 800m sprint': 100910ms, 'The fastest 200m freestyle swim lap': 102960ms, 'The fastest Kentucky Derby time': 119400ms, 'An NHL penalty box time for slashing, tripping, or holding': 120000ms, 'How long it takes to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge (without traffic)': 135000ms, 'The duration of the "Millenium Force" roller coaster': 140000ms, 'The longest Super Bowl national anthem': 156000ms, 'One round of a boxing match': 180000ms, 'The average song length on Spotify': 183000ms, 'The fastest 1,500m run': 206000ms, 'The song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley': 215000ms, 'The fastest 400m freestyle swim lap': 220140ms, 'The fastest 1 mile run': 223130ms, 'The duration of the "Steel Dragon" roller coaster': 240000ms, 'The duration of "The Beast" roller coaster': 250000ms, 'The song "4:33" by John Cage': 273000ms, 'The longest sky diving freefall': 276000ms, 'The Any% speedrun of Super Mario Bros for NES': 294948ms, //5 Minutes 'An NHL penalty box time for fighting': 300000ms, 'The average duration of a typical sky dive': 330000ms, 'The average time for a drive-thru order': 356800ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $1 million': 402000ms, 'The fastest race car lap around the Nurburgring': 403300ms, 'The time it takes light to reach Earth from the sun': 500000ms, 'The time it takes a rocket ship to reach outer space': 510000ms, 'A typical marching band show': 515000ms, //10 Minutes 'The length of the first space walk': 600000ms, 'The longest a human has held their breath (non-oxygen assisted)': 695000ms, 'The average duration of popular Youtube videos': 702000ms, 'The time it takes an average human to walk 1km': 710000ms, 'The fastest 5K run': 757350ms, 'The average time to bake a pizza': 810000ms, '1% of the entire day': 864000ms, //15 Minutes 'A typical commute in the United States': 960000ms, 'The fastest superbike lap of the Isle of Man TT': 1002778ms, "MLK's \"I Have A Dream\" Speech": 1020000ms, 'An average baseball inning': 1200000ms, 'The song "2112" by Rush': 1233000ms, 'The first angels to appear in the movie "Angels in the Outfield" (1994)': 1275000ms, 'An episode of The Office, Seinfeld, or Rick & Morty': 1320000ms, 'The time it takes to drive the entire Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel': 1380000ms, 'The song "Octavarium" by Dream Theater': 1440000ms, 'A typical Super Bowl halftime show': 1500000ms, 'The fastest 10K run': 1584000ms, 'It takes for Bobby Boucher to get his first game snap in the movie "The Waterboy" (1998)': 1719000ms, //30 Minutes 'The average time to bake a cake': 1950000ms, 'The time it takes until the launch in the movie Apollo 13 (1995)': 2081000ms, 'It takes WALL-E to arrive at the Axiom in the movie "WALL-E" (2008)': 2164000ms, 'The shortest war in history (Anglo-Zanzibar War)': 2280000ms, 'It takes Harry Potter to arrive at Hogwarts in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer\'s Stone" (2001)': 2381000ms, 'The album "Thriller" by Michael Jackson': 2539000ms, 'The album "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd': 2589000ms, 'An episode of Breaking Bad, House, or Firefly': 2640000ms, 'The boot camp sequence in the movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987)': 2730000ms, 'The album "Abbey Road" by The Beatles': 2823000ms, 'It takes Simba to become an adult in the movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 2849000ms, '10% of a typical work day in the United States': 2880000ms, 'The album "Kid A" by Radiohead': 2996000ms, 'The time limit for the essay portion of the SATs': 3000000ms, 'The time it takes a standard ice cube to melt at room temperature': 3150000ms, '0.01% of an entire year': 3155692ms, 'The album "Fearless" by Taylor Swift': 3221000ms, 'The time it takes for the basketball game to start in the movie "Space Jam"': 3222000ms, 'An episode of Game of Thrones, True Detective, or The Sopranos': 3300000ms, 'It takes Harry and Lloyd arrive in Aspen in the movie "Dumb and Dumber" (1994)': 3394000ms, 'The album "Jagged Little Pill" by Alanis Morissette': 3443000ms, 'The fastest half-marathon': 3451000ms, //1 Hour 'An episode of Top Gear': 3600000ms, 'The inception of Robert Fischer begins in the movie "Inception" (2010)': 3847000ms, 'Riding the longest subway line in NYC from Queens to Inwood': 3900000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $10 million': 4017600ms, 'It takes before Sean Connery says "Welcome to the Rock" in the movie "The Rock" (1996)': 4022000ms, 'A flight from Syracuse to New York City': 4140000ms, '5% of the entire day': 4320000ms, 'The album "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" by Elton John': 4580000ms, 'The album "Scenes From A Memory" by Dream Theater': 4626000ms, 'The movie "Primer" (2004)': 4740000ms, 'It takes to fully charge a Tesla (at 440V)': 4788000ms, 'The ferry duration from Long Island, NY to New London, CT': 4800000ms, 'The movie "Toy Story" (1995)': 4860000ms, 'A drive from Syracuse, NY to Rochester, NY (87.5 miles)': 4920000ms, 'The movie "The Lion King" (1994)': 5280000ms, 'The longest State of the Union address': 5280000, //Duplicate time... //1.5 Hours 'The movie "Mony Python and the Holy Grail" (1975)': 5460000ms, 'The movie "Monsters, Inc." (2001)': 5520000ms, 'An average duration of a soccer game': 5700000ms, 'The movie "Reservoir Dogs" (1992)': 5940000ms, 'The longest Innaugural address': 6300000ms, 'A drive from Orlando, FL to Tampa, FL (84.6 miles)': 6660000ms, 'An SR-71 flight from New York City to London': 6896400ms, 'The movie "Alien" (1979)': 7020000ms, //2 Hours //'25% of a typical work day in the United States': 7200000ms, 'The average duration of an NCAA basketball game': 7200000ms, 'The movie "Star Wars: A New Hope" (1977)': 7260000ms, 'The fastest marathon time ever ran': 7299000ms, 'The time it takes to listen to every studio album by Nirvana': 7667000ms, 'The movie "Dogma" (1999)': 7680000ms, 'The average duration of an NBA basketball game': 7860000ms, 'The movie "The Matrix" (1999)': 8160000ms, 'The movie "Fight Club" (1999)': 8340000ms, 'The movie "The Shawshank Redemption" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'The movie "Forrest Gump" (1994)': 8520000ms, 'A drive from New York City to Philadelphia (94.6 miles)': 8520000ms, '10% of the entire day': 8640000ms, 'The movie "Inception" (2010)': 8880000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Infinity War" (2018)': 8940000ms, 'The movie "Pulp Fiction" (1994)': 9240000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 100,000 miles': 9360000ms, 'The movie "Avatar" (2009)': 9720000ms, 'The average duration of an NHL hockey game': 9750000ms, 'The movie "Saving Private Ryan" (1998)': 10140000ms, 'The movie "The Godfather" (1972)': 10500000ms, 'The movie "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring" (2001)': 10680000ms, //3 Hours 'The average duration of an NFL football game': 10800000ms, 'The total time limit of the SATs': 10800000ms, 'The movie "Avengers: Endgame" (2019)': 10860000ms, 'The average duration of an MLB baseball game': 11280000ms, 'The time it takes for a standard ice cube to freeze in a freezer': 11700000ms, 'The movie "Titanic" (1997)': 12600000ms, 'A drive from Boston to New York City (215.9 miles)': 13560000ms, 'Alex Honnold\'s free solo climb of El Capitan': 14160000ms, //4 Hours 'Half of a typical work day in the United States': 14400000ms, 'The flight time from New York City to Los Angeles': 19800000ms, 'The time limit of one session of the Bar exam': 21600000ms, 'It takes Voyager 1 to travel 250,000 miles': 23400000ms, 'The fastest swimmer to cross the English Channel': 24900000ms, //>8 Hours 'A full typical work day in the United States': 28800000ms, '0.1% of an entire year': 31536000ms, 'The time it takes Jeff Bezos to make $100 million': 40173000ms, 'The time it takes to assemble a car': 57600000ms, '1% of an entire year': 315360000ms, 'It takes for the Lōʻihi volcano to rise above the surface of the ocean becoming a new Hawaiian island': Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER //285,616 years
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.
Fair point on the posted laundry basket being a win. But it is undeniable that it's so inexpensive because of all the plastic that was disposed. We also didn't see all the identical laundry baskets that went straight into landfill. I do understand real life landfills aren't like Wall-E, but in that film they certainly didn't run out of landfill space and it wasn't a utopia.
On the second point, I don't find it too convincing that I don't have to worry about plastics in my blood because we don't understand it very well yet. And on the ocean plastic, that's just the tip of the iceberg that we can see and talk about easily. The real thing that's killing ecosystems en masse is not at the output end of the system, but on the input end. Global reliance on petrochemicals, industrial pesticides derived thereby, etc. I'm a scuba diver and I've watched reefs die with my own eyes.
I just can't shake the feeling we will strip the planet of biodiversity and in 1000 years whoever is left will regard the decisions of our time as catastrophically stupid. But I do acknowledge how this is idealogical and emotionally based.
Even when they do release physical media, they often don’t have the best version of a show available. For example, Disney 4k UHD physical discs offer HDR10 but Dolby Vision is limited to Disney+ for the same films as are the IMAX enhanced cuts (expanded aspect ratios).
A small exception to this is the newly announced Criterion edition of Wall-E, which includes Dolby Vision.
> 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
This is like saying Wall-E or Inside Out are dumb movies because they need to hook young audiences.
It's not an either or situation here. Shows can be written to target many, many groups of audiences. They can be "smart" while still appealing to the masses.
Also, it's not so much dumbed down as just terrible acting and terrible writing. Cinematics are great, but cinematics are the only thing that's great.
Reminds me of the Pixar movie Wall-E
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).
For the movie WALL-E, Pixar commissioned a space cinematographer to advise on how they might render aberration, lens flare, and other optical artifacts for the space scenes. The cinematographer remarked that Pixar wanted to replicate the very things he spent a career trying to get rid of.
The amount of creativity here is astounding. Just imagine all the decisions the AI made in incorporating Kermit into the movies: the clothing it's chosen, how the character wears the clothing, the facial expressions, how to make Kermit himself look similar to the other movies characters. Should he be lanky? pudgy? Even simple decisions like obliviously Kermit in Wall-E is going to be a robot, it has to figure out what he looks like as a robot, what his mouth looks like, that his eyes should be enlarged.
It gets a lot of things wrong, like I'm not sure why kermit has a plastic texture in many of the pictures. If you showed me ten pictures of Kermit and ten frames of total recall, and for some reason 8 of your pictures had a plastic Kermit, and asked me to combine them in my head, I'd probably imagine something on-par or worse than what Dalle has managed to do. But I wouldn't be able to show anyone what I'd made!
> (yikes dude)
Bruh, get real. TikTok is filled with women complaining about dating. Why not just admit what is staring you in the face? There is an entire segment of the universe that just responds to those videos.
And there is plenty on TikTok that is good.
But even if you can "train" it, the problem is that it's scientifically engineered to keep your scrolling. I think that part you missed.
Watch Wall-E where everyone sits in special "TikTok" chairs, have food delivered to them and the screen continually scrolls. That movie was before its time man.
Watch here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw7WAq_GZY8]
Unfortunately, you will not get the message until you have to go out with friends that are tuned out to you because they're constantly scrolling TikTok on their phones.
(And yes, I have installed TikTok for weeks and months at a time and always ended up deleting it and washing down my phone. Even after "Training" it.)
in the sense that some corporation is turning into the real world equivalent of the fictional Buy N Large from the movie Wall-E
Sure, kids do enjoy them but Pixar movies aren't kids's movies, far from it. Have you seen Wall-E? That's a thinly veiled social critic and it's getting more relevant everyday. Toy Story has a darker side, considering Sid's troubled mental health. You only to take a _little_ distance from the stories being told to realize what they're really about. Without being "deep", they're layered movies. They can be re-watched many times with renewed enjoyment and they age well.
Plus, the constant technical excellence exhibited by every Pixar movie puts them in a league well above all the crap produced by Disney.
Yes it's more, getting such a magical piece of artwork created, with everything that goes into it. To me, the "story" of the Pixar movie is perhaps the least interesting part (except for something like Wall-E which is pretty novel)... stories like "what if an animal got separated from his dad and got lost?" is not a very novel idea but Pixar made it to 100% perfection.
Wall-E is by far my favorite Pixar movie, and IMO one of the best in any genre made in the last couple of decades. Really speaks to Pixar's creative genius that they can strike gold from even the most random premise. It is literally about a romantic trash compactor living in a post-apocalyptic Earth.
Fun fact - the film took so long to produce because Andrew Stanton knew Pixar couldn't realistically animate space when he conceived of the idea. Good thing they waited too, as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPW3mvAN0Rc was the final result.
I will say though that after decades of Pixar basically defining the standards of what computer generated animation should be, studios are starting to catch up to and even leapfrog their style. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Arcane are two notable examples of this.
Now the Movie Wall-E[1] came to my mind, where humans couldn't even walk and all the job was done by robots.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E
Compassion — not compression — is a big part of design and creativity; coming up with original and unexpected results. What we see in these explorations is that AI is, I think, good at generating a bunch of novel yet visually repetitive and nonsensical outputs. The helpful-looking-elf-santa-hat-robot iterations from AI all look like variations of 1 concept with their monotonous use of gradients and brush stroke styling. Good for brainstorming? A good human designer, based on these same instructions, would ideate and generate a wider range of concepts. And we see that in the results from humans, which are actually much more interesting and diverse in terms of contrasting styles, their use of form, colour and negative space in my opinion.
Curious, was the inspiration for the Labelf AI logo the Wall-E animated movie character Eva?
Facebook is becoming "Buy-n-Large" from "Wall-e". The prescience of that movie is more evident every year since it was made.
I'm reminded of Earth orbit from the film Wall-E for some reason.
Limiting my complain to recent Pixar movies: I think Coco, Soul and Inside Out are fairly obvious and not multi-layer. Definitely they talk of "difficult" subjects to kids: death, depression, regrets about ones life. They are not much fun either and the story is rather weak: often predictable, déjà-vu moments (Soul and Inside Out are strangely very similarly built with a meta-world in both), repetitive loop of slow and fast action scenes.
Japanese anime also talks about difficult subjects and IMO does it much better. Thinking of "Okko's Inn": much less predictable, some funny and tense scenes, and yet not shocking for children and quite emotional for parents (OK maybe our smallest daughter woke up and came in her parents bed the following night but she has not been traumatized for life :)
Since I am engaged in a reckless defense of Frozen in other posts: I think this movie is multi-layered. It talks of women and power, femicide, love vs friendship, sisterhood, although it is packaged in a story suitable for the smallest children as its success showed. The story is definitely not predictable from the start and has the power of myths. Of course Disney is well known for its ability to adapt old myths and tales.
As for older Pixar: The Incredibles was fun and multi-layered, Ratatouille was fun, Wall-E was great ...
Around the time of Wall-E and The Incredibles, I was very much a fan of their work and felt like they could do no wrong. Now I’m not so sure- I did love Coco but they have been absorbed by Disney at this point and are satisfying investors. Also, I find the low key arrogance about having mastered storytelling more than a little obnoxious. You can see a bit of this in Andrew Stanton’s Ted talk.
Before they sold to Disney, they were going to start making more mature films alongside their children’s entertainment. I was very curious about Ray Gunn. I think if Disney wanted it then Pixar could definitely make an incredibly compelling animated movie with mature themes. I mostly find myself disappointed with them these days.
(I find whenever I bring this up online quite a few people come at me with this idea that they are making mature films, and that the line between children’s entertainment and adult is imaginary, as though most kids could sit through something like The Rules of the Game or Tokyo Story.)
But to be clear, I’m still mostly a fan of their work but mostly for their technical mastery.
I would be curious to see your list of movies, primarily aimed at children, where there are two protagonists who disagree in the beginning and don't end up reconciling in the end.
("Up", which you cited as the last Pixar movie that was 'worth it', is in fact largely a conflicted parent/child relationship)
It reads as if what causes you 'grief' is actually the intended format of the content you are consuming. Yes, it's nice that Wall-E had a layer of critique of rampant consumerism (among other things), but it also had a joke about an unkillable roach too.
My hunch is that the -primary- intended audience for these films spends a lot of time dealing with "conflicted parent/child relationships", and that you are simply not the intended audience.
I don't mean to be overly critical of you here, I think if you take two steps back what you're saying is "the majority of these kids movies don't speak to me."
A movie being "worth it" is pretty different from a movie "speaking to me", which is so subjective that it is hard extract actionable insights from. It's a hop, skip, and a jump from saying "I don't know why you like this flavor of ice cream, because I don't like it."
I suppose "art" is meant as "technique" here. Modern large productions are so standardized today it is not an uncommon feeling one is watching the same movie ever end ever. I think the last Pixar movie that was worth is "Up" (OK I have not seen them all).
My main grief is that surprise is only obtained with a combination of visual effects, fast rhythm and loud sounds, and no more with the story. Relationships between characters is déjà-vu, so many times a conflicting parent/children relationship, where the parent is reflective but wrong and the child impulsive but right and they end up reconciling and admitting they were both partly right in the end. In "Soul" they play a bit with this pattern although I would hardly call this creativity.
And finally many animation movies are also shameless green washing (here thinking of Wolfwalkers). Remember the critical tone of Wall-E?
This is the back story of the film Wall-E: https://pixar.fandom.com/wiki/Buy_n_Large
I thought they did this for the Pixar movie, Wall-E.
This makes me think of the chairs from the movie Wall-E. It's hard to imagine that posture is great for productivity or development. Yes, I know it's a "Gaming" chair.
I mean sure, in a sense, but a significant portion of Wall-E's personal plot is focused primarily on his relationship with Eve with very little specific focus on Earth. There's a shift about midway through the movie that radically changes this focus, and I didn't love the way it happened.
I wish I liked Wall-E more.
The last time I watched it, I felt like there was a narrative disconnect about midway through the movie where the primary plot just changes. (One is Wall-E's relationship with EVE, the other is the saving of humanity.) It's not that I can't deal with both plots being in the movie, but it seemed to me that there was kind of an overt switch between them, and it really brought me out of my enjoyment.
Maybe I'll give it another go sometime, though. There's a lot of great stuff in there! I just wish it all flowed better for me.
Wall-E.
The first like 15 minutes have no dialog. The rest of the movie is a profound commentary on modern life told as a children’s story
I tested your search term and had similar experience. I have, however, had positive experience with other categories, such as philosophy. Searching Wittgenstein with the top million sites removed, I found some gems: a play, a disney character that was a supercomputer named after Wittgenstein on a direct to video movie which I learned was later partly inspiration for Wall-E, Wittgenstein-oriented societies, awards, and general philosophy references I had never heard of.
I suppose it depends on the category.
> even though anime characters more closely resemble aliens than actual human beings
The typical characteristics of child-like appearances is proportionally large head compared to the rest of the body, round head, and large eyes.
It also happens that having a large head with large eyes is a common method to make it easier to express emotion for objects which we know is fake. For example, the two main robots in the movie wall-e utilize this a lot, and yes, one can interpret that as if both robots are children as they do have more human child like proportions than human adult proportions.
The only real way to know the age of non-photo non-realistic image of a character is in context or if the author spells it out. If we were to guess the age of Donald duck we would base it on that he has a job, has nephews, and wear a time appropriate hat for adults, but also that his head is slightly less round compared to Huey, Dewey, and Louie.
Speaking of popularity over accuracy:
> Instead, Google has become like the pampering robots in WALL-E, giving us what we want at the expense of what we need.
I'm guessing this is referring to "WALL-E shows how the technology will make us lazy and fat" meme. I've watched WALL-E for the first time quite recently, and I notice little details, and I can say that WALL-E is not showing that message. It's actually explained quite explicitly in the movie that the fatness of people is the side effect of prolonged stay in space, and not of their dependence on technology.
I don't buy this article's premise (that there is too much recycled, unoriginal content).
You could make this same argument for all forms of art (music, TV, theater). They can all be explained the same way: the barrier for entry has decreased.
Anyone can upload music to Soundcloud or a video to Youtube. Now there are whole albums/TV series/movies being produced on these content networks as a result of a kind of indie discovery that never existed before. This is wonderful!
The benefit of all of that discovery is the same drawback: that anyone (good or bad) can enter the market. That means in order to capture the "average" audience you have to water down and dilute what is popular to appease everyone. Most pop music is unmemorable. Most pop movies are unmemorable. BUT, they are good enough to capture a wide enough audience to convince them to pay for it.
That doesn't mean there isn't great film to be found. Or music. It just requires a bit more discovery than your local pop Top 40 radio station or whatever they're peddling in the box office.
There have been so many great films in the last 20 years with original stories. Here's a bunch that I just rattled off the top of my head without much thought:
Boyhood, Interstellar, Inception, Spirited Away, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Wall-E, The Intouchables (now called The Upside), Pan's Labyrinth, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Amelie, Slumdog Millionaire
"The day the world ended," and Wall-E are about global warming.
Google Global warming movies and you'll find a bunch of high profile movies.
There is something that makes me a little sad inside that running on the treadmill while being on the computer and working is even a possibility. It's like in the movie WALL-E where people are shuffled around on lazy-boy like chairs while eating ice cream. It just feels wrong. There is much to be appreciated with being with your thoughts, music, and running.
How old are you?
In the 80s and early 90s, prior to "climate change" pushing out every other environmental concern, there was a big push to recycle due to the "landfills filling up". Accompanying video would be of a bulldozer maneuvering over a field of garbage that extended as far as the eye could see, which wasn't all that far since there were so many piles of garbage. You'd get videos of cities filled with garbage (garbage service strikes were particularly helpful here), footage from the famous Gar-barge [1], and vague intimations that we're all going to be in garbage up to our knees if we didn't recycle more. Random dumping was also quite a bit more prevalent back then, and I recall walking through state forests and just coming across an impromptu trash dump by the locals, so that helped make it feel more pressing. In more modern times, see the movie Idiocracy or the beginning of Wall-E, both of which were at least visually pulling from images floating around in the 80s and 90s, albeit exaggerated.
It made for good rhetoric, but ultimately, it was pushed out in favor of the other things you may be familiar with because it's basically ludicrous nonsense. Yes, there are absolutely some tricks to building a safe landfill and it's not free, and the risks need to be accounted for and taken care of, but it's essentially inconceivable that the world could run out of landfill space. (By the time that could happen, the technological landscape must have changed so thoroughly that your other predictions about what could happen are just useless.) The threats basically abused people's inability to think volumetrically, which anybody who has done a pool-building project, or a significant concrete project, or significant landscaping project, or anything else that involves trying to think volumetrically. You learn there's always more volume than you think there is. It's true that if we had to store trash areally, we'd be in some trouble, but landfills are volumetric, and society needs a lot less than you might think as a result. Yes, we have some impressive trash piles here and there, but there isn't all that many of them, and there can't be, because even if we tried to generate enough trash to become a problem with landfills, we'd long since have strangled ourselves on the other problems that would produce. (That is, you think we've got a CO2 problem now, wait until we try to produce 1000x more "stuff". We wouldn't get far enough into that process for the landfills to be our biggest problem.)
Energy usage and the corresponding pollution, care about contamination of groundwater and such, and simply straight-up the economic advantages of efficiency are all much better reasons to take good care of our trash and try to extract as much value from every unit of resource we take from the ground via reduce, reuse, recycle before getting the next resource.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000
A five point racing harness is more secure. And a roll cage will help in rollovers. Not mandatory either, but would mitigate a lot of harm. There are a lot of other things they can do as well.
If you hold peoples hands on stuff they start slacking, they become dependent and cannot do something without assistance. My kid plays a FPS online on his xbox one, he started off doing ok and getting better. He found out you can turn on aim assist and got really good. If he turns off the aim assistance, he is worse than he ever was.
I am not disagreeing with you that lane assist, now that is exists, might not be useful. I just feel we are moving to a world like the people on the ship in the movie Wall-e.
Cue the WALL-E movie.
I had to stop and ponder the number of layers of humor intended when, in the movie WALL-E, the captain’s interface to the ship is a robot that resembles a ship’s helm. Yes, there’s a naval metaphor... but it’s also an example of a root user acting not through root privilege, but through wheel privilege. :)
No, I hope they don't do this. I hope the concept of personal responsibility gets cleaned up a bit and served in a new, cool jacket which makes it the thing to do for those who want to be part of the new wave. Not just as a fad but for real, the idea that the individual is responsible for his or her approach to all those life & love & happiness-sucking lures out there on the wild, wild net.
Most people will be able to learn, some will not and they'll get hooked, just like most people learn to handle alcohol or marijuana or exercise or food or... well, all those other things which - when taken to extremes - can ruin lives.
The scenario of the AI-equipped device which tells you it is time for bed reminds me of the space ship in the WALL-E movie where humanoid slugs zipped around on powered chairs from entertainment to entertainment. This is not a future I want to be part of.
When I first saw the movie Wall-E, I assumed the mega-corporation Buy-N-Large was a thinly disguised Amazon. Every year that goes by reinforces that assumption.
12 Monkeys - Travelling back in time to try and track the outbreak of a virus that wipes out most of humanity.
The Abyss - Survival and discovery on a deep water mining platform.
Apollo 13 - Look at the rescue efforts of this historical NASA moon mission. (Does it count as sci-fi?)
The Dish - Also not quite sci-fi, but a comedy about Australia's involvement in the first moon landing.
Battle for Terra - Surprisingly good animated movie about invading aliens.
District 9 - Alien refugee camp in Johannesburg.
Gravity - Astronaut stranded in orbit, trying to get back to Earth.
The Martian - Survival and rescue of a lone astronaut stranded on Mars.
Moon - After a serious accident, a solitary worker on the Moon discovers a conspiracy.
Oblivion - A veteran assigned to extract Earth's remaining resources begins to question what he knows about his mission and himself.
Predator - The classic that launched the franchise.
Predestination - Faithful adaptation of Heinlein's short story, "All You Zombies."
The Prestige - Some minor sci-fi elements. At the end of the Nineteenth Century in London, two stage magicians engage in a battle to create the ultimate illusion whilst sacrificing everything they have to outwit the other.
Source Code - Using limited time-travel to try and get information to stop a second, larger terrorist attack.
WALL E - In the distant future, a small waste-collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.
This totally makes sense to me. Entertainment is taking so many different forms these days, and it's increasingly on-demand and more personal. People are getting used to getting whatever they want, whenever they want it, wherever they are at the time.
I always go back to Wall-E and think about the people riding around in their floating chairs with their personal TV screens and constant flow of food and drink. It was funny at the time, and perhaps a little too real, but every single day since Wall-E, that future looks more and more realistic.
I've noticed a tone of more boutique theaters opening up, offering more than popcorn and soda. You get recliners, quality dining, a full bar, etc. I definitely see this trend continuing. All I hope for is that the culture and community around movies and genres doesn't die out due to the increasing reality of everyone staying home to watch movies.
I love big premiers, and I love IMax, and I love going to the theaters, but the movies need to be worth my time and money. It needs to be an experience.
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?
"Short range travel should be by foot and losing that will just make our obesity epidemic worse."
Yes -- the people in Wall-E. It has already begun without yet having autonomous shoes. That movie is frighteningly predictive.
Is it just me... or is the movie "Wall-E" one of the premiere sci-fi movies of our time? This walmart robot could easily be in that movie along with all of the other little robots doing menial tasks for fat humans.
The game industry definitely follows inward looking trends. For a long time every game was grey or brown and lacked contrast. More recently they all seem to use the same look/LUTs.
I worked in animated feature films and had similar critiques about the lighting and look. I felt like they lit everything like a well exposed photograph and were afraid of letting things fall off into dark or light (part of that could have been poor simulation of the toe or head of the film curve).
Then, when Pixar did Wall-e (2008) they hired a well known cinematographer, Roger Deakins, as a consultant. DreamWorks also hired him for How to Train Your Dragon (2010). I think that was a big change and both of their studios approached how CG movies look.
Movies lately:
* Generic Super-Hero Movie A.
* Generic Super-Hero Movie B. Different title from A, yet actually identical plot and sometimes actors.
* A new CG cartoon "for the whole family". They haven't had an original idea since Wall-E.
* Generic block-buster action movie with robots and/or ninjas or ninja-robots, explosions, Chevrolet placement ads, and at least 2 pairs of extremely shapely female breasts.
* Generic ultra-patriotic military-hero-worship action flick where rugged, muscly bearded Alpha-Macho super-bros kill brown people, usually has the word "American" in the title, and a scene-that-lasts-too-long where Rick tearfully tells Sam to tell his wife he loves her as his guts slowly (all too slowly) fall out of his torn-up torso.
* Generic coming-of-age and beating-all-odds story about a lovable but bullied lonely/introverted/gay/black/Muslim kid from the streets/ghetto/Pakistan who overcomes all odds to be his neighborhood's/high-school's/country's star juggler/drummer/dancer/stripper/singer/refugee-turned-Nobel-laureate and gets the girl/boy at the end.
* A documentary telling me I'm fat, living in a banana republic Orwellian surveillance police-state dystopia with horrible health-care and a deteriorating environment.
* Girl-Squad/Bro-team Buddy Comedy with a bunch of 45-year-olds acting like rich, spoiled, immature 18-year-olds at friend X's wedding. Hilarity ensues.
Basically, I'm either being bored out of my mind for the whole duration, or sad/frustrated that this world is so horrible/unjust, or watching a 120-minute commercial for Pepsi/Chevrolet/Sex, or being actively recruited for the Marines.
TV is much better, with lots more variety.
I had a friend who posited that the Wall-E/Inception scenario would have been a far more interesting prequel backstory for The Matrix than what was actually presented in Reloaded and Revolutions.
Basically, that the remaining "real world" humans were deluding themselves with this grand narrative of a lost war against the machines, when in fact it was humanity's own environmental screwups that blotted out the sky, and most people willingly submitted themselves to a simulated fantasy world that was set right before the collapse of civilization. And if there were multiple "one" persons or matrices or whatever, it was only to keep resetting the simulation and re-playing that golden period. Basically, you would turn the first movie on its head, where Morpheus becomes the character who has to question his world and assumptions, and break free from a tyranny of lies.
It is almost like you have to disconnect from reality to make good decisions. Like, just sit down and make a food list with only your brain, and only buy that stuff.
I know it is just a kids movie, but the world in Wall-E a Disney movie from 2008, is terrifyingly realistic now, and I thought it was at least sort of a joke.(For anyone not familiar, Wall-E is an animated movie portraying a "kid friendly" dystopian future where the humans are all really fat, can barely move, have abandoned earth for a space station, and robots do everything for them. They have hovering chairs and perform no physical exercise and earth is basically a wasteland full of trash. The protagonist is a trash collecting robot on earth that accidentally brings a plant, of which there previously were none, onto the spaceship the humans live on causing the plot to drive forward)
I now think the autonomous car, ultra marketed, consumer society we are building actually ends up very close to this.
But I think we can agree that Alien 3 is a pretty mediocre film, while Wall-E, Up, or Inside Out are superb film making that at least I would recommend to just about anyone.
The thing I think everyone should be most worried about is not robots deciding to kill us, it's the economic upheaval that could result from robots that can do jobs better than their human counterparts.
There's been studies done on this type of thing (https://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/jobs/robots-at-work-the-economics-effects-of-workplace-automation) and so far use of robots has mostly focused on helping human workers become more productive, and not replacing them entirely. However, for lower skilled workers this isn't always true, and if robots were able to replace even the most skilled workers... that could cause problems for human employment. To quote the article on current status:
"Robots had no effect on the hours worked by high-skilled workers. While the authors found that industrial robots had no significant effect on overall employment, there was some evidence that they crowded out low-skilled and, to a lesser extent, middle-skilled workers."
Now continue that line of thinking and imagine a world where a robot could do any job better than a human...
We could end up with a "is that American made?" or "is that free range chicken?" type of scenario where companies that refuse to replace human workers with robots are competing against other companies that will do anything to lower costs, even if ethically questionable.
So then we potentially end up in a situation where the rich (Executives and stock holders) get richer by replacing costly human workers with cheaper, more efficient robots, and the wealth of the average family declines as people struggle to find work. Alright, well maybe we give all humans an allowance to live off of, food to eat, a home to live in, etc. Except...
Human beings need work. They need to feel a sense of purpose. I don't think the humans from the movie Wall-E hold much appeal. Let's not go there.
Ok, so maybe we pass laws against replacing many human jobs with robots. Well, if the robots are truly intelligent, aren't we then discriminating against a group of sentient beings solely because they are too good at their job? Isn't this just going to be a techno world version of the civil rights and lgbt rights movements?
These are the things I worry about. Not robots killing me.
As a side note, I hope cyborg and other bio tech improves at some point, at lot of these concerns could be mitigated if humans had the potential to improve themselves beyond any normal evolutionary rates.
I guess future viewers of Wall-E won't get the joke now. (for those who didn't see the film, the robot main character made the Mac startup chime when he finished charging)
As an early movie recommendation, I suggest WALL-E. We started with it at ~2ish, and every time we watch it together, there's more depth revealed (currently at 5.5years old).
At first, it's about a robot and another robot doing stuff. Then they're on a journey. Then the desire for friendship. And hospital. Then (gradually) the idea of different motivations comes in. Perhaps some ecology. Then conflict, etc.
All the while, my daughter is delightfully more interested in robots and space travel than standard 'pink princess' fare.
Of course, YMMV.
WALL-E is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the last few survivors who escape to space become lazy and ignorant. When they return to Earth at the end of the movie, they finally realize how much they had lost, such as the ability to dance.
For such a magic pill to exist would be wonderful and I'd love to have that option, but WALL-E as an example undermines your argument...
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.
The depiction of humans in the movie WALL-E was one of the scariest and most poignant bits of storytelling I have ever seen, and seems to become more true as apathy grows.
Do you mean the movie as in Wall-E? Because those were just lazy, fat and unhealthy people. They walk at the end of the movie.
I'm going to dumb it down a bit, and say that I like to think of two movies with different visions of a technologically advanced future: WALL-E and Elysium (aka that Matt Damon movie where all the rich people live on the space station). In WALL-E, nobody works and everybody (well, everybody that survived the initial apocalypse anyway) lives the literal fat life while robots serve them all equally. In Elysium, the abundance of health and life that comes from technological advances are hoarded away for exclusive use by the wealthy.
Of the 2 visions, I always found the Elysium model to be much more likely...actually I would argue inevitable. Given human nature, I just can't foresee a world where everyone lounges around in equally-served harmony. No...there will always be an elite, and the elite will find a way to procure and consume a vastly disproportionate amount of resources. Even in the movie Elysium, after the proletariat storm the space castle at the end, any "victory" will be short-lived and will just produce a new elite.
So I guess I'm suggesting that the proclaimed political/economic system is irrelevant. The reality ends up looking pretty much the same in either case. And that reality will probably not be pretty once human labor is fully commoditized through technology.
I'm not sure how I would classify Toy Story 3 under any recycled "kids movie" plots. The ending (the real ending, not the climax, as described in the article) is one of the most poignant moments in film I can recall. Similarly, Wall-E does a good job illustrating the human need for companionship. And the need for purpose within our lives. And at the very shallowest and most obvious level, over-consumption. Pixar often makes very "smart" animated movies, and they generally work at quite a few levels, in my opinion.
> Especially considering as kids movies they cannot explore adult topics and will always be fairly limited in scope.
I disagree. I've seen many masterful "childrens" movies that have done masterful jobs at exploring adult concepts, as long as by "adult" you don't just mean sexuality. While childrens' movies may be constrained on some axis, they are often freer on others. Additionally, there is the chance to speak to people that wouldn't normally go to a movie about some of these adult messages, or to reach them when they aren't expecting it and are less cynical. Who goes to see an animated film about a family of super heroes to see a touching rendition of mid-life crisis?
The trailer completely turned me off seeing the movie. I don't think I'm going to bother watching it, or showing it to my kids. Especially after "Up!" and "Wall-e" failed to deliver.
The trailer was ridiculously sexist in a way I don't think is helpful to anyone. The sexism was extremely negative IMHO. Surely you'd agree that the level of sexism shown isn't really necessary?
While we're at it, can hollywood please stop using "they've drunk too much coffee and are now 'wired'" as a joke in kids movies. Overdosing on drugs isn't all that funny...
edit: Downvote me? Why not respond instead.
I can't think of that many movies with sexualised female robots, either - although I suppose if you have a "female robot" it will probably sexy/attractive to begin with, otherwise what makes it female? (Does male/female even make sense for robots???).
I think you exaggerate the problem. Also, even if a female robot is sexualized, it doesn't mean that it can't explore "a larger philosophical world" at the same time. For example WALL-E was in love with the female robot, but the female robot was still cool sampling worlds for ecological recovery etc.
I'm not a huge fan of Pixar either, they're always so by-the-book -- just like these storytelling rules here. Even Disney in the '60s was taking much larger risks in feature animation.
The weird thing about some of Pixar's better movies is that there seems to be a lovely short film at the core, and then it's wrapped into a forgettable Saturday-morning plot to pad out the feature length. Wall-E and Up come to mind as particular examples.
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 ......
Good point. The thought actually actually popped into my mind after I wrote the post : "Wall E" and many more films/books have suggested this accelerated learning path.
However this is information only, not interaction, I suspect this will have a serious distorsion effect on how the AI "perceives". It's a wild guess, but I believe interaction is at the root of understanding.
Edit : yes you also mention interaction through video games, which I skipped when I scanned your comment. But then again video games might be still far from the depth of real world interaction, more of a learning enforcer than the source of it - like books are for us....
Wow, this is the same guy that did the sound-effects for Wall-E. I mention that because I watched a documentary/interview a while back about the sounds used for that movie. Turns out, it's the same guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSf8Er2gV_Q
The nice thing about that interview is that it had a few "demonstrations" of Ben making sounds from mundane objects. E.g. a slinky making "pew pew" sounds. Or objects making sounds for some of the old Disney cartoons. It's quite amazing what they were able to accomplish with relatively small constructions/gadgets.
Wall-E is absolutely amazing in that way. My little ones have a total crush on him and I must have seen the movie about 400 times or so. I think I know the dialogue by heart and I still like to look at it every now and then to appreciate the skill of the animators.
> which for whatever reason doesn't seem to have had the problems other films have.
By not CGI-ing humans. That's enough for you to stop judging what you're seeing by the same criteria as you do real life. They wisely chose to stay well to the left-side of uncanny valley instead of trying to jump over to the right-side.
Look it up. It's also why Wall-E feels so human.
I think Wall-E was the pinnacle, and was apparently the last of the original ideas they brainstormed up in the beginning. After that was Cars 2 and Brave, which I think were perceived as ok, but not at the level of their previous films.
From http://2001.wikia.com/wiki/HAL_9000 :
In the 2008 Pixar animated film WALL-E, the starship Axiom's Autopilot ("Auto"), which is also the main villain of the film, has a glowing red camera, a low electronic voice and a hidden directive - deliberately reminiscent of HAL. WALL-E's pet cockroach is also named Hal, but it is also a reference to Hal Roach.
The hardware is great but the developers don't care about the platform for games. Many of the games you'll see for Mac are from films that Pixar did (Wall-E, the Incredibles).
And Homeworld 2, but only on OLD OLD systems. This makes me sad.
People would make their own entertainment if sports and Hollywood were not available: games, stories, conversation, crafts, and so on. Our lives might even be a bit richer for it.
And in that sense, the entertainment industry captures value that we would be making anyhow. Yes their entertainment is better somehow, better in the sense that people will pay for it, so this is the bottom-line "better", inclusive of demand generators (eg, movie trailers, team rivalries, etc), and not necessarily a general-welfare "better".
You might even argue that this is welfare-capture: once you have seen the movie trailer (for free), or acquired team-loyalty (for free), your welfare becomes dependent on seeing what happens (not free). My son saw a trailer for WALL-E last night. Now he wants to see it. Having seen it, will his net welfare have increased? I don't know. He seems happy enough with his blocks and pencils and such.
Who do you think you're kidding? You obviously know about the obligation to pay; you've just decided that if the product you want access to has been laundered through at least one 3rd party, you've never had to look any of the producers in the eye, and therefore you have no obligation to them. If anything, you're even worse than the person who originally published the content you're taking: they're at least accountable to the original relationship that gave them access to the product.
That first sentence sounds outraged and pointed, but it's not; it's a serious question. Every time this issue comes up, I feel like I read people making similar points, as if they were remotely convincing. I really want to know who, among all the people who are not already on your side on this issue, you think would be persuaded by the logic that "I didn't have a contract with the producer of _Wall-E_, and so I'm not obligated to pay them before downloading and watching their movie." It seems to me that a child can see where the obligation to pay comes from.
Other movies on the way toward coming to pass: - Brazil? - Wall-E?
Noting that the domain byandlarge.com was registered in 1998 by a "domainer".
Interesting. The movie came out in 2008.
But the film concept dates to the mid 90's so most likely that concept was the first use of that name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WALL-E
> It's the 21st century.
So? I am me. Like some web frameworks I am opinionated, and unlike them I am not made of sugar, able to carry luggage, and able to carry cash around.
> I don't want to think about whether I should get 20 or 30 Euro from an ATM, let alone carry 100 Euro in my wallet. In fact, I find you reasoning quite weird: technology exists to make mundane and boring tasks unnecessary.
That's good for you, but I don't have to really think about that much. Of course I always want to have a few tenners in my wallet, no thought required, I just do that when I pass by the bank. I also would have no problem with carrying 100€ in my wallet, since I tend to carry 1000€ worth of stuff in my DSLR bag anyway, which I take anywhere except shopping and places after dark (not because I'm afraid I might get robbed, but because I can't be bothered to carry around a flash/tripod). So another 100€ means nothing, and the real hassle of having your wallet stolen isn't really the cash, it's all the other stuff in it, no?
> In fact, I find you reasoning quite weird: technology exists to make mundane and boring tasks unnecessary.
First off, technology is made by "me" for "me", I don't exist for it. It's not my purpose to give a specific technology a reason to exist - if I don't need it, and neither do others, it can just go shrivel up and die when the reference counter hits zero.
Secondly, wildly varying technology exists for wildly varying reasons: to make live easier for yourself and/or everyone, and to make life harder for yourself and/or others; to exploit people, for escapism, and so on. What "mundane and boring task" do Farmville or heroin make unnecessary? How is it desirable to make the task of, say, mass murder or putting people in internment camps, easier?
Doing simple calculations in my head, or knowing that I'll be making a bigger purchase soonish isn't "boring and mundane" to me, neither is rain or carrying luggage, which I find rather sublime and fun respectively, at least to a degree (heavy rain every day, or weights attached to my shoes, wouldn't be fun).
Do you know the movie "Wall-E"? I could barely stand it for all the kitsch, but that stuff about the fat human blobs zipping around on trays seems slightly relevant. Walking is boring, eating is boring, defecating is boring, washing yourself is boring, taking care of friendships is boring... no wait, all that is in the brain of the beholder, and personally I think life is made up of little things, and the supposedly big things are for the most part just big delusions. Which seems to be confirmed by the fact that most people I see around seem kinda unhappy or hysterical in their happiness, and to never notice things like sparrows or clouds. I pity them, and I fully expect them to consider me "weird", with their digital watches and sneakers with lights in the heels.
> That's because the checkout process in Germany is not optimized for bank card payments.
Which is where I am, and which is also a place built above sea level, so that's where I'll stay :P Truth be told, the Netherlands aren't exactly the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of the opposite of hobbitdom. I'm not saying that to be mean or snarky, but because that's what I honestly think. Seeing how this is about the reasons for Germans not using credit cards, and how I am one, here's my opinion, arrogant as it is. To be honest, I expected downvotes instead of upvotes, I think I would deserve them... wouldn't make me change my opinion though. Many people are already quite lame and getting lamer by the month, and like George Carlin I'm over here with this weird mixture of popcorn and hatred.
> Thank god, they have counters these days where they only allow bank cards.
Yeah, thank God for wall-to-wall tracking of every single expense I make, which happens every single time, while negative effects of carrying cash around are rather hypothetical.
Also the movie Wall-E
Reviewing your portfolio at a level which would show prowess in technical detail requires a lot of time. Answering a few bit twiddling questions dosen't, and they're almost always required to be asked to all candidates as a matter of policy. That said, if your portfolio very very easy to browse it'll definitely score you some points. Just make sure you've got the average person from the movie Wall-e in mind when you're considering how to make it "easy to browse."
I'm responsible for a lot of technical interviews where I work. I think we've got a good process down. We have a simple "walk me through your resume" phone screen, then we send them two programming problems that take a few hours to complete, and then we bring them in for an on-site. If you pass the first phone screen and if you submit good-faith solutions to the problems, you're pretty much guaranteed an on-site.
The first of the two problems is more of an infrastructure type problem with an extensibility requirement. It involves looking for files in a directory and carrying out some simple pluggable actions on them. The second one involves writing a custom, optimized data structure. The naïve solution is very quick and easy to implement, but our performance threshold for the sample dataset requires a more advanced solution.
Almost everybody gets the infrastructure one w/o any problems. We mostly use it to look at their code style and how they'd structure an extensible program. Almost nobody submits a solution to the second problem that comes in below the maximum time specified in the performance threshold. This is okay, as the goal of the second interview is to discuss these solutions and the problem solving process that went into them in depth.
We hire a bunch of people who've gone on to perform well who didn't submit optimal solutions, and although it's rare, we've declined to hire people who did submit an optimal solution. It's the conversation we have that's important, not the code.
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.
It's like human will become the typical "wall-e" movie humans consuming content, becoming fat and no time for interaction at all. I dread the future where no one talks to anyone by looking into eye , since their eyes are already preoccupied with "glass".
Lets do a quick back of the envelope guesstimate. Around 450 people worked on WALL-E. These movies take years to make, but I'd guess that many of those people are only in on part of it, so I'll guess that at any given time, only 1/4 of those people are working on it. Figure that an employee costs $100k per year in pay, benefits, and overhead (I expect that is a low estimate on average). That gives $11 million per year, just for having the necessary employees. I believe these movies take about 4 years, so that brings WALL-E to an estimated $44 million, just for employees.
I suspect I underestimated pay, but I may have overestimated the fraction of that 450 working at any given time. Anyone in the industry reading this who can give better data?
Now throw in equipment, facilities, promotion, and so on, and it is not hard to believe pretty big legitimate budgets.
> I agree (for now), but i'm not sure this would be a bad thing. You might not be able to make Transformers 3, but you could make most (all?) of Hitchcock's movies.
In addition to "Transformers 3", we also might not have:
WALL-E: $180 million
Toy Story 3: $200 million
Up: $175 million
How to Train Your Dragon: $165 million
Could these same stories be told more cheaply? Sure...but I think they would have just been good stories then, not masterpieces.
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
Ever see the film Wall-E? Cause that's where we are headed.
Although not an Apple fan, I can relate to their purchasing behaviour through an analogy of my own:
I am a massive Pixar fan. I think almost everything they touch turns to gold and I haven't seen a Pixar movie that I dont' like (to be fair, the last new release I saw was Toy Story 3). When I saw the ad for WALL-E, I thought it sounded like a stupid idea for a movie, but I still forked out the $10 to go see it at the cinema. This decision was purely on their past record, nothing to do with my perception of WALL-E. Sure enough, I loved it.
Perhaps this is a similar way Apple fans make decisions.
Thousands overall maybe, but the number of mass market films is in the hundreds.
I, personally, have a familiar definition of "mass market film". I grew up in a small town with about nine total screens, usually one movie per screen and one screen per movie. Figure they turn over 4 screens per week for new releases. That's 208 movies per year. You'd need 3-4 more doublings to get it over 1000, so it's pretty clear that "hundreds" is the better order of magnitude.
I picked a year at random: 2008. The following movies were all released in 2008: The Dark Knight, Wall-E, Iron Man, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, In Bruges, Kung Fu Panda, Gran Torino, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, and Quantum of Solace. Your average moviegoer will easily remember more than "one or two" of those (though not necessarily the same ones).
So the proportion goes from two in a thousand to maybe five in 250, or from 1 in 500 to 1 in 50.
You are critizing Pixar films for having something in common? In animation we have different styles, Akira, Wall-E, Cindarella, Mononoke, Belleville, Grave of the Fireflies all very different, from different studios and directors. All Pixar productions have a certain common feel and common themes, just like eg. all Tarantino films.
While I will grant that Tim Burton can be clever I have never seen anything of his that carries the same emotional weight of Pixar's best works. Toy Story 3 was an amazing success and pulled off being a very emotional film while being a comedy/adventure. I know many people who cried or nearly cried toward the end who are parents with kids leaving their childhood behind. The first several minutes of UP are amazingly melancholy. The "dance" in space from Wall-E is downright beautiful and Wall-E's devotion to the girl robot when she is broken is rather heartwarming.
Incidentally according to BoxOffice Mojo Wall-E made 521 Million dollars.
I think they have highs and lows. Wall-E was pretty much everything I would want in a big budget movie, but it wasn't a megahit. Then I see the previews for Brave, which looks dreadfully bad, and I can't help but think the company is changing.
Wall-E was pretty atypical for Pixar, and I believe their least successful movie.
Inception was hardly a 'risky' movie, plenty of explosions, cool visuals, and a simple but slightly ambiguous plot. Think of the way 'total recall' ends, is this just the vacation he had paid for? If you think about it they are fairly similar movies, and fairly well liked. If anything, I think suggests that a good movie can also have mass appeal.
WALL-E lacks dialog for 1/2 the movie, but because Pixar could test it out ahead of time they knew it was worth making vary early in the process. Pixar's string of hits has a lot to do with constant refinement and feedback. Saying Hollywood needs to put out more Toy Story 3's is not a terrible thing when their done well. There is something to be said for the old script + 6 weeks of frantic shooting + cutting room floor style of movies, but it's a style that showed up when film was expensive and budgets where tight.
"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.
Completely agree that the questions should be asked honestly and with an eye on social benefits and costs. I'm no fan of the copyright system as-is precisely because I think those tradeoffs are poorly balanced given modern technology.
As for whether it is "bad" to lose capacity to do things like "Lost" I think (for my value system) it's clearly very bad even if 9/10 such projects are not of lasting value. These kinds of mega-projects allow us to push the frontier of what is possible as entertainment and human expression. If you don't particularly like "Lost" for artistic reasons (fair enough ;-), then perhaps substitute anything by Pixar; losing society's ability to make "Wall-E" or "Up" means a duller, less inspiring world.
Of course, you could similarly disagree with the artistic merits of Pixar films as being a worthwhile tradeoff. But at some point that line of reasoning just becomes "I'm personally happy with art made on the cheap by a small group and no marketing or distribution costs; I'm ok sacrificing everything else."
"To the Swiss government, the people of the country (or, the impact to the people of the country) are/is considered before an external interest."
How would you consider the American music industry an "external interest" in the USA? While the RIAA and the labels aren't citizens, they're generally comprised of citizens. That is, when a music label gets special treatment, that means those citizens who work for that label get special treatment.
I'm not advocating the craziness that is current copyright law in the USA by any means, and while the above statement might sound like justification for all the evil the RIAA and the like have done over the years, the issue is hardly black-and-white.
"Artists will continue making movies and music because that's what artists do – with or without the entertainment industry."
I think this is a very broad, gross generalization. Sure, musically-inclined folks will probably still continue to play instruments or write songs as a hobby, even if there weren't a financial incentive -- but I hardly think the thousands (hundreds of thousands? millions?) of people currently involved in the entertainment industry would all be starving artists/producers/technicians/special effects artists/movie theater operators/etc. purely out of some all-overriding drive to create/produce/engineer/operate.
Let's say we flipped the law and made it illegal to sell music & movies. On the plus side, we'd probably have relatively little low-quality "pop" music & remakes of remakes in the theaters. On the negatives, we'd almost certainly never have, say, the Beatles White album, 2001: A Space Odyssey, WALL-E, etc.. It's not because without a financial incentive the Beatles wouldn't have made music, they just wouldn't have been able to devote the time and resources that they did. Kubrick might have still made a film like 2001, but how possible is it he would have been able to make it of the same quality?
Again, I'm not saying I agree with our current system of basically entertainment industry-by-fiat, but it's not nearly as simple as "we'll always have art regardless of if there's an industry to support it!"
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).
May be the future will be like Wall-e movie. Where humans do no work at all (even walking).
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.
I think the point is that Wall-E and Up! weren't movies targeted at kids. Any entertainment value kids can derive from such a movie is purely coincidental. Any entertainment value the target market of such a movie can derive from such a movie is brilliant success.
Once again, they were not kids movies. Stop criticizing them for not being fun for kids.
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.
There are a significant number of people without children, such as myself. The entire world doesn't revolve around kids and its nice to see movies and other entertainment options that cater to adults. Besides, we're the ones that have money to spend, not the little wee ones.
Both Wall-e and Up! were excellent movies. In particular, Up! was one of the few movies in many years that actually emotionally moved me in serious ways. Wall-e was also a great movie that deserves the many accolades it received.
I liked Cars. I absolutely hated Up! and Wall-e with a passion.
Cars is obviously a reasonably simple storyline, but it's a good movie with good characters. Kids like cars shrug it's a movie about toy cars... what's not to like?
Better than an obese highly irritating boy scout kid hitching a lift on a house with an old guy :/
I really worried they'd lost the plot after Wall-e and Up! (The 2 worst releases imho). So Toy Story 3 was great to see.
Story outlines usually sound rubbish IMHO. So I'll give cars 2 the benefit of the doubt. Glad there's a new movie with characters my kids love in it.
Wall-e and Up! catered mainly to parents/intellectuals so it's nice to see some good fun movies in the pipeline.
When the robot Wall-E, from the movie by pixar, wakes up in the morning he makes the Macintosh PowerBook sound: http://titan08.free.fr/Boot%20Sounds/PowerMac%20PCI%20-%20Boot.wav
BTW, the MacinTalk software is listed as the voice of the villain robot in the same movie.
> I've always liked to imagine Jobs had some influence on WALL-E's EVE. It was a Pixar movie, after all…
Close. Jonathan Ive (Apple's chief designer) helped design EVE: http://gizmodo.com/389772/wall+e-movie-is-jonathan-ives-latest-design-job
I've always liked to imagine Jobs had some influence on WALL-E's EVE. It was a Pixar movie, after all...
At some part in the move WALL-E reboots. Guess what sound did it make then ;)
You've got the right idea but the wrong influence.
Jobs doesn't do the actual industrial design - he knows what he likes, and he has a great eye for it (or so I hear) but the man behind Apple's design aesthetic is Jonathan Ive. And he did design Eve.
http://gizmodo.com/389772/wall+e-movie-is-jonathan-ives-latest-design-job
I think it may be Pixars influence... Up! and Wall-e were both pretty adult intellectual movies (yawn).
Hopefully Toy Story 3 has something for the kids as well (Haven't seen it yet).
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.
It's interesting to see how the animation/film industry has approached the uncanny valley not by crossing it, but by avoiding it altogether. One of the reasons I love the movie WALL-E is that Pixar has imbued WALL-E (the robot) with so many human nuances and characteristics that you empathize with him quite quickly, even though he looks nothing like a person.
There are very few animated television shows/films that I can think of that attempt to depict humans with as much realism as possible. The ones that have tried (off the top my head, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within comes to mind) still have unconvincing depictions.
This can only make the fast food industry even faster and more inhumane. And how do you suppose such a machine is supposed to handle meats and vegetables? Even more processed food here we come. I'm usually not one to be anti-tech, but this is one big step towards the goo-drinkers of Wall-E and the fine dining from the film Brazil.
This reminds me of the Wall-E movie where everyone is fully emersed in their personal digital device and totally oblivious to the world around them.
Instead of staring at a screen while walking down the street I'd rather ask someone for directions. But who knows in the future they may be too busy with their own augmented reality app to notice...
There's a bit of the whole Dreamworks vs Pixar thing.
Ok here we go...
Pixar consistently produces a form of the art that is simply higher than Dreamworks can even approach.
The thing about that is, that the two studios produce films for completely different markets. Dreamworks focusses directly on producing films for children (with a few outliers) and Pixar focusses on producing films for everyone (with a few outliers)
Pixar's process is more story focussed than other studios, A typical Pixar film usually has a 4 year production cycle in which the first two of those are spent primarily on writing and rewriting the story to get the "feel" right. Even then, they have no problem with changing the story at the 11th hour.
Case in point - WALL-E's ending was originally very different with WALL-E originally saving EVE from the trash compactors (essentially larger versions of WALL-E for irony). After the film was complete and was screened in Portland, Andrew Stanton changed the ending to what it is today. The story flows better.
Compare that to something Dreamworks. Dreamworks focusses on making films which are more technically proficient and aimed at children (Kung Fu Panda was astounding from a technical standpoint and dominated the "Annies" last year, which is the animation industries version of the Emmys).
Dreamworks are more focussed on the business side, rather than the entertainment side of the process.
That's also why Dreamworks films are typically heavily backed by merchandising and advertising blitzes, because of this focus.
So it's difficult to compare the two, it would be like saying a Michael Bay film is comparable to a Tarantino film. The fact is, they have different markets and so approach the filmmaking process in different ways.
Nobody in their right mind would try and compare the two film styles.
Lastly, before you try and judge Dreamworks' animation pedigree, Jeffrey Katzenberg co-founded the studio and he was responsible for the classic Disney franchsies between 88 and 94 like The Lion King, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast (which I might add is the ONLY animation film EVER to be nominated for best film at the Oscars).
Well, Pirates of the Caribbean has been a Disneyland staple attraction since the 1950's, so they've got nearly 50 years of data to go on, on whether they should continue it or not - it's exactly why they made the first film.
When you consider how much the first film made, given it's actual cost (and the acclaim Depp got for his character) - the 2nd and 3rd weren't really that much of a gamble, but one that ultimately paid off.
The film industry isn't entirely an exact science, WALL-E for example had an entirely different ending which Pixar redid after it's first screening, after Andrew Stanton realised he had made an error in the way the story flows.
You also have major blunders - Waterworld anyone? It cost nearly double the budget that was set aside for it and it's gross revenue was barely more than that. The budget doesn't take into account the marketing costs, so money was lost on that film.
It looks like the cruise ship chairs used by all the obese people in WALL-E. I really hope that movie's futuristic scenarios aren't fulfilled.
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
They did this with WALL-E first, with the juxtaposition between the two main characters.
WALL-E was a square, while Eve was essentially a circle (Andrew Stanton's words, not mine).
Same thing is happening in UP, Carl Fredrickson (the old guy) represents the square, while Russel (boy scout) represents the circle and it is really more prevalent, even with Carl's finger's having a rough rectangular shape.
Pixar used to be lauded for its originality and commitment to high quality.
A little anecdote on just how committed they are.
During the production of Finding Nemo, a couple of Pixar artists climbed inside the mouth of a dead beached whale in California just to get a good idea of the textures inside of it for the scene between Dory and Marlin when they were inside the mouth of a whale.
That's commitment to quality.
I think that the biggest difference between the two companies is that Dreamworks doesn't attempt to make lovable characters. Shrek in the original movie is an exception. They make identifiable characters, but rarely are their characters deep and human. Froo and I argued Kung Fu Panda versus Wall-E on IRC, if I recall correctly, and while I'm not nearly as knowledgeable about the animation world as he is, it's pretty hard to say that Jack Black in KFP is a more relatable character than Wall-E. Pixar makes people that you really feel like you know. Dreamworks is willing to make caricatures and as a result, their movies feel shallower from a story point of view. Even if Pixar follows a formula, it's a complex formula with deep permutations so that Mr. Incredible and Woody and Nemo's father and Wall-E are all very different people, even if the one recurring thread is that they all feel real to us.
This is actually the one problem I had with Annie Hall, which I saw recently for the first time: Woody Allen has a brilliant style, but the characters he made all seemed like caricatures, and so despite being a genius movie, I didn't love it. (I thought of this because back when I was a kid and there were two camps of children, the Ants kids and the Bug's Life kids, I was an Ants kid, thought Woody Allen in that was terrific, and thought the movie was stylistically and conceptually beyond Bug's Life, but going back to them I realize that Bug's Life, for all that, still has the more realistic characters, the ones that feel real, and so Ants's clever and detailed world falls apart at that one big seam.)
I think that can be said about most stories with a non-tragic hero.
Except that it's relatively unique to the animation field.
The thing is, Pixar's process is more story focussed than other studios, A typical Pixar film usually has a 4 year production cycle in which the first two of those are spent primarily on writing and rewriting the story to get the "feel" right. Even then, they have no problem with changing the story at the 11th hour.
Case in point - WALL-E's ending was originally very different with WALL-E originally saving EVE from the trash compactors (essentially larger versions of WALL-E for irony). After the film was complete and was screened in Portland, Andrew Stanton changed the ending to what it is today. The story flows better.
Compare that to something like Dreamworks or Blue Sky Studios. Dreamworks focusses on making films which are more technically proficient and aimed at children (Kung Fu Panda was astounding from a technical standpoint) and something like Horton Hears a Who or Ice Age are heavily stylised films.
Dreamworks are more focussed on the business side, rather than the entertainment side of the process.
I first saw Toy Story as a child. Looking back on it as an adult, I remembered that I had a pretty good grasp on the plot and characters as a kid, so I was assuming it had been a simplistic film. When I watched it again, I saw lots of things I didn't notice as a kid.
That's Lasseter's influence as one of the Pixar co-founders. This style has permeated throughout the whole studio. Creativity comes first at Pixar. Ironically, he was actually fired from Disney in the 80's for trying to introduce 3D to their production pipeline and Disney ended up buying Pixar for billions...
They've built up a pretty solid momentum now, and it would take a series of bombs (like Disney after the mid-90s) to shake it.
Funnily enough that's a result of Katzenberg leaving Disney after a disagreement with Michael Eisner (then CEO of Disney) and he ended up co-founding Dreamworks.
(Though I'm kind of on the fence about Cars.)
Yeah, each of the studios has those little outliers. Monsters vs Aliens has very many adult jokes in it that children just wont get. If you haven't yet seen it, go see it.
For example: This is a quote from one of the US Military Advisors says to the President in a secret strategic meeting to deal with a giant alien robot.
"We need our top scientific minds on this project... Get India on the phone!"
I absolutely laughed my ass off at that joke and I'm sure most people didn't "get it".
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...
I experience this already with my six year old when he plays with the neighborhood kids. We have a TV, but we don't have cable, nor do we have bunny ears to get the local stations (not that we could get them in the future anyway). We don't bar them from watching TV (much like the friends and grandparents exception someone else mentioned), and we do all watch kids' movies at home once a week or so. The only bits of kids' culture that they know are Sesame Street (because of a few videos) and the various Pixar movies (Cars, Wall-E, etc).
I don't know why you think animation means you don't need actors.
I'm not saying it doesn't - it obviously does.. what I'm saying is that not all animation has to be film scale, nor does it have to have proper actors as draw cards for voice talent.
My argument was that WALL-E was a smash hit and the use of big name actors as voice talent to sell the film wasn't part of the equation.
You completely missed the point.
But you seem to be saying that since its animation, you can have lower standards. No: you need higher ones.
No, I'm not saying that at all - Going up against a studio like Pixar/Disney or Dreamworks Animations thats entirely the case, but there are plenty of films out there that you don't even hear about that are plenty profitable - if you were to target the film industry that is.
You just don't need to scale it up (in terms of budget) for it to work, that's my whole argument
Not only that, but Pixar type animation is extremely expensive in terms of non-talent expenses. I won't say that you won't ever be able to produce a Wall-E type film on a Woody Allen budget, but we're very far from that now, even if you were to use unknowns for voice actors (which the top ones rarely do).
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.
I know I'm biased towards 3D animation, but I can give you examples where thats simply not the case.
Take Pixar, It's the highest profile of the 3D animation studios and can you name any of the voice talent for WALL-E? There was no "top talent" there in any notable role, in fact, apart from one of Pixar's 4 main directors (Andrew Stanton of Finding Nemo fame) I'm pretty sure anyone would be hard pressed to name anyone of note in a major role.
Now lets look at Dreamworks Animation, Arguably number 2 (even though they are more profitable than Pixar and also have the highest grossing animation film of all time in Shrek 2...)
Apart from voice talent in their films, can you name any of the talent in the films? Its a difficult task. The talent is shared among the many people that work there.
The reality is that voice talent is the "draw card" for 3D animation and is one of the minor expenditures for any 3D film.
So let's go back to Pixar, when Pixar was first producing their films, their distribution deals with Disney had them giving up 50% of the profits for the film.... They do all the hard work and only get back 50% of the money.
On that same business model, If you figure out a way to only monetise your film 50% of the the time and not care about it being pirated (even welcoming the filesharers as pseudo distribution/marketing) - you're off to a good start.
If you start reducing the workload on your animators/modellers (using limited cast/sets, animating more with mocap, scripting "extras"... essentially adopting a sitcom format) you can get away with doing episodic content with a significantly smaller team. Keep voice acting internal (even Pixar directors do voices on their films occasionally)... you're reducing costs further.
This I think is one of the ways out to cheaper productions and since online video has been notoriously hard to monetise - its a start.
I've also got a couple other ideas on ways to continue monetising off the model I'm proposing, but yeah, there is potential there.
"Heat" and "WALL-E" have a shorter edit distance between them than any Indiana Jones movies.