Hacker Cinema
Soul
2020 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Pete Docter
AnimationFamilyDramaMusicFantasy
Joe Gardner is a middle school teacher with a love for jazz music. After a successful audition at the Half Note Club, he suddenly gets into an accident that separates his soul from his body and is transported to the You Seminar, a center in which souls develop and gain passions before being transported to a newborn child. Joe must enlist help from the other souls-in-training, like 22, a soul who has spent eons in the You Seminar, in order to get back to Earth.
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65 comments on Hacker News
I don't know if Camus and/or people who're very familiar with his essay would approve but maybe the Pixar movie Soul (2020) has something similar to what he was gesturing at. The protagonist finally gets a big break as a performer and says: "It's just I've been waiting on this day for... my entire life. I thought I'd feel different." The woman replies: "I heard this story about a fish. He swims up to this older fish and says, 'I'm trying to find this thing they call the ocean.' 'The ocean?' says the older fish. 'That's what you're in right now.' 'This?' says the young fish. 'This is water. What I want is the ocean.'"
Basically embracing life with full knowledge that there isn't some final transcendent epiphany or rapturous endpoint
Yeah, I often cite Big Hero 6 (from 2014) as the place where as an animation fan I felt Hyperion (Disney's renderer) very visibly in the end product out-paced Renderman (Pixar's more mature renderer). Big Hero 6's wide shots get truly wide and the scale of its San Fransokyo is almost palpable in many sequences, showing off especially Hyperion's focus on being able to do dynamic crowd work and large crowd scenes and plenty of architecture surrounding that. (Zootopia in 2016 further cemented that Hyperion was great at crowd work.) It was one of my complaints with Pixar's Soul in 2020 that its New Orleans felt almost claustrophobic and isolated, no truly wide establishing shots, no real crowds to speak of, mostly just shots of one or two characters in close up on city streets that in the real world New Orleans would be bustling and busy. Real New Orleans has a different kind of claustrophia from big crowds and never feels isolating or as lonely. Some of that may have been the intended vibe for that particular movie, but some of that seems technical at this point from the different focuses Hyperion and Renderman have been given and how much I think Hyperion shows technical improvement and mastery of somethings that Renderman cannot seem to do.
It somewhat suggests that Disney is correct in having the two studios compete in renderers rather than share one (even as they unify other parts of the process, such as this article mentions moving to Pixar's Presto tool as one of the things that happened in Zootopia 2's production).
I have always questioned, are the guys making pizza's, working minimum wage jobs wasting their talent or do they simply have no talent? Then I came across this short video : https://www.youtube.com/shorts/4HnGbQ-vi8s
The line that stuck with me was how you do something is how you do everything.
I follow an indian mystic named Sadhguru who had the same advice. He said if you do not know yet what to get involved in, then do everything with absolute involvement.
This I think was also the core message of the movie Soul from Pixar.
We all might earn different amounts of money in our lives but all of us have the same ability to create a meaningful life for ourselves.
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.
A not insignificant part of human history is retelling the same stories. Stories like the Odyssey and the Iliad were oral traditions refined, refined, and refined, until taken down by a master. Every time Dracula and derivatives get made, something new gets added, changed, improved.
The problem with Disney's remakes is that they are trying to be the original story, reshot, but LESS Disney. The Little Mermaid is a prime example of something that should have been brighter, more colorful, more energetic, more beautiful, and IMPROVED, but instead they chose a least common denominator impersonation.
The concept of going back and retelling a prequel can work. It worked for Rogue One (despite production challenges), it worked for Wicked. What isn't working for the Disney Live Action movies is letting the machine output reduced facsimiles, instead of giving the projects to experimental storytellers, or master storytellers to do their thing.
Id love to see a remake of Bambi that amplified the music/animation connection, using modern technology to sync the movement of elements in the frame to parts of the musical composition, much like a visualizer. Breathing, fluttering, raindrops falling on the beats, quivering with the strings. Imagine a modern Little April Showers by Atticus Ross that looks like Spiderm-Man into the Spiderverse or Puss in Boots 3 or Wild Robot or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Bambi should be a music video like Fantasia. Instead Disney will try and tell a story about a Deer, and forget the rest of what made Bambi so revolutionary.
And yet, Disney still does make things like Soul, which really was innovative in its animation style by how restrained it was. It's simple complexity of its dream world was its strength. Animation can be done well without the hyper speed over indulgences I cited above as good examples.
> The last 5 Pixar films are all flops, and all signs point to leadership at Disney interfering with the creative process.
4 were flops in the sense that their theatrical releases did not cover their budgets, but only 1 of those (Lightyear) was because audiences didn't want to see it (and so could be blamed on the creative process).
The other 3 did not cover their budgets with their theatrical releases because they didn't have domestic theater releases (other than very short runs in a handful of theaters probably to preserve eligibility for awards) and their foreign releases were in a much smaller number of countries than other Pixar movies.
Domestically, and in countries that had Disney+, they went straight to streaming.
In reverse order:
• Elemental made nearly $500 million in its theatrical run. In no universe can that be considered to be a flop.
• Turning Red did not have a domestic theatrical release, and a fairly limited foreign release. It was only in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
In those countries in which both Turning Red and Toy Story 4 (the last Pixar movie before COVID started tanking box office) Turning Red earned about half of what Toy Story 4 did.
If we assume that ratio would have been similar in the countries Toy Story 4 was in that did not get Turning Red (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela) we get that Turning Red should have made around $420 million.
It was the second most watched streaming film of 2022.
• Similar for Luca. It's theatrical release was Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Türkiye, Ukraine, and United Arab Emirates.
In those countries that had both Luca and Toy Story 4, Luca earned $39 million and Toy Story 4 earned $70 million. That extrapolates to a full theatrical release for Luca would have been around $560 million.
It was the most watched streaming film of 2021.
• Soul's theatrical release was Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia/CIS, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
I don't have the Toy Story 4 comparison for that one, but its total foreign box office was about 2.4x that of Luca, suggesting that had it gotten a full theatrical release it would have have done quite a bit north of $600 million.
Soul's release timing made it so its peak streaming straddled the year boundary so it didn't get near top spots on yearly streaming lists but was on top of weekly or monthly lists at the end of 2020 and start of 2021.
Turning Red v Wish Dragon are both kindof Asian-oriented kids movies with pretty decent messages and "mature" topics if you watch them with an adult mindset. Those both kindof felt "cash grabby" but I didn't feel like I wanted my time back after watching them.
Luca (to me) was just so dull I barely remember the plot or message.
Encanto (v Puss in Boots Last Wish) both had a lot of "Soul" (Soul, and Inside Out being other really good animated movies), and I'd happily watch any of them again.
> So your imaginary grace period for covid effects extends until when, end of 2022 it seems like?
Soul, Luca, and Turning Red were not released in theaters in North America except for one week at the El Capitan Theater in Hollywood for Luca and and one day there for Turning Red. They only got international theatrical runs, and then only in countries that did not have Disney+.
Maybe Disney lied when they said they cited COVID as the reason for cancelling the domestic and most of the international theatrical releases of those movies, but the fact remains that those releases were cancelled.
Soul only was in theaters in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia/CIS, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
Luca only was in theaters in Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Türkiye, Ukraine, and United Arab Emirates.
Turning Red only was in theaters in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
Compare to the last Pixar movie whose theater run occurred entirely before COVID. That was Toy Story 4, and here are the countries it was in that Turning Red was not in: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
In the countries that both Toy Story 4 and Turning Red had theatrical releases in Toy Story 4 made $26 million and Turning Red made $11 million. If we assume the performance would have been similar had Turning Red been released in those other countries that comes out to about $420 million, which is indeed easily twice its budget just as I had speculated. Probably higher, but to get a more refined estimate I'd need to look at the countries it was in and see how their theater performance in general was compared to pre and post COVID.
For Luca it had $39 million in the countries it had in common with Toy Story 4. Toy Story 4 had $70 million in those countries. Assuming the same ratio if Luca had been in the other countries Toy Story 4 was in, that gives Luca a projected $560 million.
> Maybe people didn't want to take their kids to watch a movie about panda periods?
It was the second most streamed movie in 2022 (Encanto was #1), which suggests of the theories that (1) people didn't watch it in theaters because they didn't want to watch it, or (2) people didn't watch it in theaters because it was not in theaters, the latter is much more likely. (BTW, Luca was the most streamed movie in 2021).
> It's crazy no one in this thread has suggested a possible drop in quality in the creativity at Disney
That's a defensible argument in general (and since you comment a few have made that general argument), but not as an explanation for why movies that weren't in theaters didn't make a lot of money in theaters.
I'm in the camp that believes Pixar quality has fallen, and I'm not surprised at the recent losses (COVID or not).
Onward -- what a mess. The movie about walking pants. I could feel the churn of many story drafts they went through. It was a cool world and character designs, but the overall story just didn't land.
Soul -- full of emotion and beautiful, but didn't quite nail it. The pre-birth world has echoes of Inside Out, but not nearly as well-conveyed. In fact, the abstract art representations were a bit on the nose, and a rare case where I was too aware that these were ideations from the Pixar story team in the Pixar story room. Overall it had many wonderful sequences. But the main character journey was kind of odd. Joe loved music and it certainly seemed to be his source of happiness. But his lesson was that music wasn't necessarily his purpose and he should focus more on what makes him happy. ?
Luca -- adorable, but unambitious. The undersea world was so empty!
Turning Red -- ugh. What exactly was the character development? She is announced in the very first sequence as a confident individualist, and then her panda-journey teaches her to be... a confident individualist. Did no one notice this? Also, I'm bothered by the hubris of a first-time writer-director making the main character (and locale, and the time period) exactly themselves. I suppose if you need your stories to be biographical you can get away with it once, but it's poor form IMHO.
> Now it’s just more Disney nonsense, the soul has been lost.
Did you see any of them? Soul is probably their best movie; Luca and Turning Red were great. Onward was surprisingly good. Elemental was a new genre for them, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was still really good.
I didn’t see Lightyear, but this is also the Pixar that did Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur, so it’s not like every movie knocked it out of the park.
Have you forgotten COVID already?
When Onward was in theaters COVID had already massively tanked attendance.
Soul, Luca, and Turning Red only had box office releases in countries that did not have Disney+, except possibly for very limited US releases (e.g., Luca had a theatrical release for 1 week in a single US theater).
In the countries where they did get a normal theatrical release if you compare them with Earlier big Pixar hits, they performed comparably.
If any one of them had been a 2019 movie instead of a 20222-2022 movie it would have easily made at least twice its budget and probably more.
Lightyear is the only real flop on your list.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/187076/tickets-sold-at-the-north-american-box-office-since-2001/
US and Canada movie tickets sold in 2019 was approximately 1.2B. In 2020, it was down 80% to 223M, to 499M in 2021, and to 813M in 2022. Onward was the 7th highest grossing film in 2020, Lightyear was 15th in 2022. (https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2020/?grossesOption=totalGrosses&sort=gross, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/2022/?grossesOption=totalGrosses&sort=gross)
Weren't Soul, Luca, and Onward direct to Disney+ because of the covid pandemic?
Your analysis is missing the elephant in the room.
I mean, these numbers are almost dishonesty misleading when looking in a vacuum. Onward released March 6th 2020. It was receiving mid reviews but it was very much on par to st least break even if theatres stayed open for more than 2 weeks.And Soul IMO is one of Pixar's greats completely screwed by circumstance, released in June to Disney+. I'm surprised it even crossed 100m to be honest.
I'm not in charge of business, but the curve of box office seemed to rise back with the waning of the pandemic. Even for the critically panned Lightyear, so it's not like the better movies did better. It's no secret that streaming services make nowhere near the revenue of a theatrical release, but Disney aggressively shifted so it could get its handle in as 2nd in the streaming wars. I figure that unprofitable movies were a price to pay there.
Profitability is the new target in 2024. Not losing so much money on useless underperforming movies. Let's go through the recent Pixar flops in the years before since 2020.
Onward (2020) - Budget: $200 million - Box Office: $142 million (Loss) Soul (2020) - Budget: $150 million - Box Office: $121 million (Loss) Luca (2021) - Budget: >$100+ million - Box Office: $49.8 million (Loss) Turning Red (2022) - Budget: $175 million - Box Office: $20.1 million (Loss) Lightyear (2022) - Budget: $200 million - Box Office: $226.4 million (Tiny profit) Apart from Elemental (2023) which was highly successful, there seems to be a string of more box office failures from Pixar recently and it being turned into a high cost factory. Disney saw the same and decided to let 20% from Pixar go.
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.
They recently broke YouTube search even more. Go to a channel and do a search within that channel using the search field that is on the far right of the options below the channel information. You may have to click the ">" on the right to make it visible.
What is supposed to happen when you search using that is that it shows you just results for that channel. It still does that for some searches, but for other searches it seems to be doing a normal site wide search.
Whether or not a given search term works correctly seems to be a function of the search term, not a function of the channel being searched.
For example, let's say you are on a channel that reviews movies, and you want to see if they have reviews of some family friendly animated moves.
Search for "zootopia", "trolls", "cars", "coco", "dragon", "stitch", or "panda" and it gives just results from that channel, or tells you the channel has no matching content.
Search for "luca", "soul", "moana", "puss", "megamind", "ratatouille", "rio", "croods", or "lilo" and you get site wide results.
For multi-word searches order matters: "lilo & stitch" gives site wide results and "stitch & lilo" gives results for the channel so it is not the case that certain words trigger the problem.
I assume this is a bug, since I can't see any connection between the words that break out of channel search. They were all movies in my examples, but similar things happen with words from other categories. Example: "soprano", "tenor", "countertenor", "mezzo-soprano", and "bass-baritone" work correctly, and "baritone", "alto", "base", and "contralto" do not.
I don't know why is this downvoted, I thought that the general consensus was that Soul is not even close to Coco? Coco is one of the best cartoon in this millennia[0], while Soul is not.
[0] see for example the IMBD toplist : https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?num_votes=200000,&genres=animation&sort=user_rating,desc Coco is 12-15, on 8.4, while Soul is 29-33 on 8.0. (Okay, I tweaked the number of votes value, until the ranking matched my personal toplist. Lower numbers cause a lot of not that good shows to occupy the top, and higher numbers filter out a lot of really good shows.)
At some point in the 2000s Pixar shifted from making movies for everyone to making movies for certain demographics, or people with certain issues in their life. Moving, strained relationship with parent, a purpose in life etc. Not every movie resonates with everyone, but almost every movie has its defenders. Maybe Brave doesn’t work for you if you and your mom don’t have trouble. Maybe Soul doesn’t work for you if aren’t a bit down.
They are also perfectly ok making simpler movies like Luca, that aren’t trying to be some sort of epic treaties.
What Freddie is getting wrong here is projecting his ranking onto everyone else, even when he is calling out the critics as being the wrong audience for the movies. A lot of the movies aren’t made for critics, but because the director or storyteller has something really personal to say to a subset of society.
Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur (which I’m not sure I’ve even ever finished) are their only real true misfires. A lot of their whelming movies (Onward, Lightyear) feel that way because they feel like a waste of premise and opportunity more than actually bringing bad.
I cannot cosign this. Coco, for example, which you'd probably describe as an "ESG movie", was released just over 5 years ago and is one of Pixar's best. Luca, Turning Red and Soul were also great.
The real problem with Disney (really, the movie industry in general) over the past couple decades is that it churns out sequels and remakes to wring every cent out of existing franchises.
I respect what the author is getting at -- Pixar movies sometimes favor adult expectations instead of being kids movies and get stuck somewhere between. I can agree to an extent, I felt Soul was really guilty of this.
But the author is a victim of the same mistake. If kids like the movie it's a kids movie. I think Soul is barely for kids at all but if kids like it, it's a kids movie. Letting an adult decide what a kids movie truly is is just ignoring kids in a different way.
They also seem to think producing a handful of some of the most influential movies of all time makes Pixar not a masterpiece factory, as if their weak efforts somehow make their better efforts less valuable. And finally I won't hear Coco disrespected like that, Inside Out is overrated sure, but Coco is the same caliber of film as Ratatouille.
>And then there are films I have not seen yet but I am told are clever, inventive and beautiful -- Coco, Inside Out, Soul.
you should watch both coco and soul.
coco is beautiful. it's a love letter to mexican culture.
soul is not only quite beautiful but the soundtrack... oh! i mean it's trent reznor, atticus ross and jon batiste. it won both a grammy and an oscar!
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.
Abstract stories about emotions is good though. Soul was a perfectly good movie.
And if you go over to the anime community, the kids are explicitly liking it because of the random emotional tangents (I'm looking at you Demon Slayer).
And a lot of the reason why people liked Puss in Boots: the last wish, was because of the existential crisis the protagonist faces upon confronting his last life.
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I don't think a movie like Elemental would hit very hard after Zootopia locked down the concept near perfectly. It seems ill-timed, we need a few more years to forget Zootopia before giving another rural vs urban different people's city romance with subtle nods to racism story.
Ugh, I really hope the lesson Disney learns isn't more sequels, less original IP.
I thought it was middle of the pack for Pixar, not their worst, far from their best though.
Even worse than the quality of the movie was how they advertised it. The preview seemed so recycled - the story seemed unoriginal the characters so similar to what we've already seen before with Inside Out and Soul. We just went on a whim because its nice to have the excuse to go to the theater
Loss leader for Disney+
They are purposely taking a hit on box office sales, to drive Disney+ subscriptions.
Turning Red, Soul, and Luca were all movies that dropped on Disney+ the same day they hit theaters.
How can you gauge the "success" based solely on box office sales, when Disney's strategy is using this content as a loss leader strategy to drive subscriptions to Disney+?
It used to be that Pixar films regularly got past $1B in revenue.
Most Pixar films don't actually get anywhere close to $1 billion; they tend to reach the $500-600m range worldwide. Only a handful of Pixar's films have breached the $1b threshold: Finding Dory, Toy Story 3 and 4, and Incredibles 2.
Turning Red earned $20m in countries like Poland, the UAE, and Vietnam...i.e., tiny markets, and only for 2 weeks, due to COVID. It was not released theatrically in major markets, but based on comparables to pre-COVID releases, if it had been released theatrically in major markets, it would be looking at over $600m in box office revenue, and online viewership numbers suggest it might have made close to a billion at the box office.
Soul, likewise, was primarily a Disney+ release (it wasn't released theatrically in the U.S.), and $120m in box office gross for a 2020 release is...amazing...considering that 99% of theaters were closed that year.
Onward was released right before the Spring 2022 COVID outbreak, and would have done much better if theaters hadn't closed 2 weeks after it released (though probably not much more than $4xx million worldwide based on tracking, so still underperforming but not a flop).
Lightyear was objectively bad. The story was too convoluted for children, too simplistic for adults, the characters were generic and forgettable, and nothing in the movie suggested it had anything to do with Buzz Lightyear as it was presented in Toy Story except for the name "Lightyear." Preview audiences were so confused about the movie's relationship to Toy Story that Disney had to add a blurb at the beginning claiming that this was Andy's favorite movie (but in the original Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear was an animated show with a movie, a la South Park, not a standalone movie). Lightyear should have been planned, produced, and released as a Disney+ film.
Disney is trying a little too hard and working a little too fast to get every last penny, nothing really is well marketed and the releases are not a big deal. The world moved on to the MCU. The wild part is that I loved Soul. Definitely the most adult-focused movie Pixar ever made.
Pixar is struggling. Unclear how much is related to Disney+ strategy (where they release via Disney+ rather than in theatres) and Covid restrictions, but its recent releases have struggled financially (numbers from Wikipedia):
* Onward - $140M
* Soul - $120M
* Luca - $50M
* Turning Red - $20M
* Lightyear - $226M
It used to be that Pixar films regularly got past $1B in revenue. This new reality where they gross very little is strange. And this new reality likely means that Pixar has to reduce costs.
I'm reminded of a scene from Soul (a Pixar film which I recommend).
> Joe: We never found out what 22's purpose was.
> Jerry: Excuse me? Joe: You know, her spark. Her purpose. Was it music? Biology? Walking?
> Jerry: We don't assign purposes. Where did you get that idea?
> Joe: Because I have piano. It's what I was born to do. That's my spark.
> Jerry: A spark isn't a soul's purpose. Oh, you mentors and your passions. Your "purposes." Your "meanings of life." So basic.
> You can look at all the Disney movies for kids: all men are stupid, liars, stealer, and when you hit them it’s funny. On the opposite the feminine is often perfect, manage it all on the first try.
A few counterexamples: Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Zootopia, Raya and the Last Dragon, Toy Story, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatoullie, Up, The Good Dinosaur, Onward, Soul, and Luca.
> One thing I have noticed is some of the more recent Pixar movies don't feel like Pixar movies at all. They feel like Disney movies: Lot's of musical numbers, a lot more slap stick and silly, more cheap laughs
Which Pixar movies had lots of musical numbers? Of the ones I've seen (all but Lightyear) I only recall zero to three (depending on what counts as a musical number) that I'd count as having musical numbers. Have I forgotten some?
"Turning Red" had a some scenes where characters were singing, but they were singing for in-universe purposes. When I think of musicals what comes to mind is shows where the singing is not for an in-universe purpose.
Similar for "Soul" and "Coco". They had main characters that were struggling musicians and their music played a major part in their lives. All the music I recall in those was in that context (although it has been a long time since I've seen "Coco" so I could have forgotten music that was not in-universe.
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.
I'm sure Disney was disappointed in Lightyear's performance given its marketing push and brand appeal, but I don't think you're listing the movies that are central to Disney's strategy anymore. Ever since COVID, Disney has pretty much banished Pixar to Disney+, not as "premium" releases that cost extra, but just included day one on the service. If they had theater runs, they were limited or international-only. That includes such films as Soul, Luca and Turning Red, whereas Encanto from their other animation company (Walt Disney Animation Studios) got a wide and successful theatrical run. Turning Red's box office returns are irrelevant because of this. However, due in part to people going back to theaters and (largely) to the film's brand recognition, Lightyear became the first Pixar film since 2019 to be given a real theatrical release. And the main reason it bombed was, I believe, because everyone and most importantly families had gotten used to being able to watch those movies on Disney+ for a lot cheaper. Even if that one waited two months to come to the service.
As for Strange World, it was widely observed that Disney didn't give it any marketing push and a majority of people weren't even aware of its existence. To me, the main reason is that Disney doesn't bother to hype up movies that they don't really believe in. Strange World was one such film, a WDAS movie that isn't a fairytale or a musical (and isn't safe from the kind of conservative hate campaigns that Disney tends to avoid). Disney has a long history of letting their studios make films outside of the cookie cutter but release them with little fanfare. They can now easily be written off as Disney+ fodder.
Disney absolutely still relies on their animation studios for blockbusters, but they've noticed which formula works best for each. Pixar is never as successful as when it does sequels. WDAS routinely hits the 1 billion mark when it makes new additions to their fairytale canon, or bombastic musicals (see Encanto's massive success). It's no surprise then that they're now pushing WDAS, a notoriously sequel-adverse studio, into making a third Frozen and a second Zootopia, and that a _fifth_ Toy Story is suddenly in the works at Pixar alongside... Inside Out 2. Any other project is bound to get buried in the release schedule or dumped on Disney+.
So what kind of movies are core to Disney's strategy? Star Wars is on a kind of hiatus and lives on Disney+. We have Marvel of course, which isn't in the healthiest state but still produces frequent hits. Avatar is now a big one. Any animated movie that fits their preferred formula. And of course, the depressing string of live-action remakes which, if they're all quickly forgotten, often hit the 1 billion mark, and I've no doubt that their lifeless Little Mermaid clone will do the same. I think Disney is now suffering from the same "we grew too big, too quick" realization as every other tech and entertainment giant, and they're definitely reeling from a few recent failures, but I wouldn't use Strange World or Turning Red as the poster children of their troubles; they never bet much on those anyway.
Unfortunately, when Disney makes the most bland and forgettable nostalgia bait, they still make the "movies people want to see".
I wonder if Pixar's "Soul" had anything to do with it? It was a popular 2020 movie and the protagonist was a jazz musician and it included quite a bit of jazz music.
I don't think Disney can quite be put in the same breath. (disclaimer: shareholder, though not in any grandiose quantities) I always imagine Disney as basically 3 apparatuses:
1. A squeaky-clean princess printing machine that reliably churns out 50 billion dolla- I mean, a new Disney Princess franchise every 5-10 years. No expense is spared on making the movie a lavishly animated, voiced, scripted, and instantly treasured addition to any childhood. (Because they know every dollar there will throw off a thousand in merchandising and Disney World tickets)
2. Weird creative stuff. Pixar is in this bucket, imo. Soul and Inside Out and such were amazing, amazing movies but they're obviously not going to put merchandise on the shelves. But they still sell out theaters and help build (maintain) brand prestige.
3. An oracle-tier legal/financial arm that is essentially independent of 1 and 2 that just views itself as having a giant stack of copyrights and money and it needs to turn it into more money.
So while (imo, this is subjective obviously) I think 1 and 2 are roughly as good as they ever were (and remember that Disney almost died multiple times due to not actually being very good for decade long stretches), 3 doesn't care about that and if some tactic with DVD supply or whatever will help juice sales, they'll do it because it's their job.
Disney gets a lot of flack, and rightly so! They're a big reason why copyright in the US is so fucked up, and I do hate them for that. But at the same time, I think they honestly do contribute more to artistry and enduring culture in the West than lots of other companies with even-worse legal departments do.
> Not sure if they produced anything lately though?
Recently-ish: Coco, Soul, and Inside Out are among my favorite Pixar movies and all compete with the golden-era Pixar classics in terms of being memorable and story-first.
The Disney acquisition seems to have crushed some Pixar magic. You can no longer assume every Pixar movie to be gold, but they can still turn out top-quality content.
I recently did a month of Disney+ when they sent me promo for first month for $2.99.
During that month I watched the Pixar movies Soul, Luca, and Turning Red (and rewatched Onward). I also watched the Disney movies Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto. And Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs. Oh, and also the latest Dr. Strange and Thor Marvel movies, plus the Loki series.
Are you seriously claiming that all that was garbage?
I know this is subjective, but I'm not sure I agree. Some of the later Pixar films seem to have plenty of adult themes/moments to me. "Coco" (2017), "Soul" (2020) and "Luca" (2021) have things that strongly resonate with me as an adult, while obviously having appeal to kids. "Turning Red" in contrast feels pretty childish, but that's the exception. (Haven't watched Lightyear as the subject doesn't interest me).
I highly don’t recommend the 2020 film by Pixar: Soul.
Are you excited to get to know all about an aspiring jazz pianist who is trying to make it in nyc?! Well tough luck, that’s not what this film is about. Instead, after getting hooked on a character and his goals, you are instead treated to a 30m-1h sequence of “lessons” (similar to a video game tutorial that’s overstayed its welcome) about how this meta afterlife world works. Everything is explained. But the explanations suck. But I’m not even here to start taking notes on the mechanisms of this after life world (which end up being broken anyway). It’s very… boring.
The best parts of the movie are in the real world. Who is this guy? What’s his life like? What are his dreams, how does he fall short? Those are also the shortest parts of the movie.
The movie is mainly the main guy running and bouncing around trying to get back to the actual interesting part of the film.
The after life world characters are bland. They are mechanical (on purpose), which makes them difficult to connect to. I had no sympathy for their goals and struggles.
Overall Soul is a big miss for Pixar. And I love Pixar. I can see what they were going for, they wanted to make a movie about life, death, purpose, etc. This movie is not that. It’s a weird adaptation of intangible concepts personified but not done well. It’s also way too much like Inside Out, which was better (but also not anything amazing).
If you need your Pixar fix, I recommend: - Ratatouille - Coco - WallE
Highly recommend the 2020 film by Pixar: Soul
watch Soul film by Pixar...
Counselor Jerry: A spark isn't a soul's purpose. Oh, you mentors and your passions. Your "purposes." Your "meanings of life." So basic.
Fun fact, Trent and Atticus are still scoring films, most recently Pixar's Soul! It's a great soundtrack[0] that has a number of jazz tracks contributed by Jon Batiste as well as Reznor and Ross's synth pieces. Fair warning, it's a very different vibe compared to Social Network, much more relaxed and atmospheric. I particularly recommend the track Falling, which plays during the opening credits sequence after the main character dies (if you haven't watched Soul, this isn't the spoiler you think it is lol. You should watch Soul, it's great)
[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_keoZPbaxTzFnlAJVB2OJprX6ELEANOSNc
Or they simply watched everything they were interested in watching on the first service so there was no point in keeping the subscription active. It's not like it takes any effort to cancel. They will come back to it later (it's easy at most to reactivate a dormant subscription) when it has accumulated enough new stuff.
That's what I've been doing for the streaming services that aren't bundled with something else I have for reasons other than video streaming (Prime Video because I have Amazon Prime, Hulu because I have Spotify, Peacock Premium because I have XFinity as my ISP, and Paramount+ because I have Walmart+).
For example a couple months before "Avengers: Endgame" was released I realized that I had to see it in theaters. My previous approach for Marvel movies of waiting until they showed up on some non-premium cable channel like FXX meant I was a couple years behind, and I realized there was no way I'd be able to avoid major spoilers while waiting to see Endgame that way. So I got a month of Netflix (they had all the Marvel movies back then) and caught up on Marvel, and a few other things, then cancelled.
Later I got Disney+ for a week (free trial) and caught up on Disney and Pixar animated movies (Coco, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Frozen II, Onward), watched Captain Marvel, rewatched Endgame to see what I'd missed on my bathroom break when I saw it in theaters, and watched the Star Wars trilogy that starts with The Force Awakens, watched Rogue One, and cancelled.
Right now, a couple years later, I'm back on Disney+, because they sent me on offer for a month for $1.99. I've caught up again on Pixar (Soul, Luca, Turning Red), Disney animation (Ralph Breaks the Internet, Raya and the Last Dragon, Encanto), Marvel (Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder, the Loki series), some Simpsons shorts, and am trying to decide if there is any new Star Wars that interests me. When the month is up I will rewatch Luca once or twice, and then cancel.
I'll be back on Netflix for a month probably next year to watch Lucifer.
I'll also probably at some point do a month of HBO Max for South Park.
Not sure what the "last few years" mean to you. Personally I got to see Pixar's movies in the cinema all the way back since Toy Story. They certainly had an incredible run for about 15 years. Up is the last "Pixar classic" in my view.
However in recent years they actually did have a couple of truly wonderful titles. Luca and Soul are pretty good, and Coco is really one of the best Pixar movies. So perhaps not all hope is lost.
Sounds like the plot of the Pixar movie Soul. I'd rather just enjoy the movie. :)
Pete Docter has always been my favourite Pixar director. I feel like he doesn't get the limelight as often as the others, but his movies (Monsters Inc, Up, Inside Out, and Soul) I think go considerably deeper than the rest of the Pixar catalogue as far as offering tender and humanizing insights about people and relationships.
I actually do try to stay away from cars. I think we are absolutely horrible at addressing risk accurately, and someday when we have some sort of carless society (or maybe self-driving cars?) we will not understand how we could possibly have accepted the mortality rates associated with cars. Not to mention the less immediate effects on long term health from exhaust, etc.
Although I feel you were trying to make the opposite case, I think events like COVID should illuminate the dangers and inadequacies of other elements of our lives. If you've read "The Maniac of New York" comic, it makes a similar point: a murderer that can't be stopped eventually just becomes accepted by society. Perhaps we have recency bias with COVID, but we have a more worrying complacency bias with other elements of our lives, like cars. Dramatic life extensions and quality of life improvements come when people stop accepting that "meh, people get sick and die," and instead get curious and start pushing for "burdensome" things like public sanitation.
Perhaps more importantly though, the ICU is getting filled up and causing other unrelated ailments to become worse. This isn't the case with most the other things you listed.
> babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth
This one is hard to avoid unfortunately, unless you believe in Pixar's "pre life" world from "Soul". Also, arguably avoiding it leads to 100% mortality depending on how you count "not living". Neither here nor there, but I wasn't really a fan of that movie.
There's a scene[1] in the Pixar movie 'Soul' where the main character(a black man) goes for a haircut to a black barbershop and has a deep philosophical discussion. Director Kemp Powers says 'There's really no more authentic black space in the community than a barber shop'[2] for the reason to have that scene.
Your friend and his team has put that space to a great use; Congratulations.
[1] https://youtu.be/MPXjSCHsfxY?t=21
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0GLyDJveVs
> There were a couple of movies around this trope.
It’s even referenced in a Disney (Pixar Animation Studios) film (Soul, where the main character’s history of arms-length interactions in that context as a violation of social norms is called out.)
The barbershop scenes from Soul were one of the things that made me think they were trying to make an authentic, specifically black movie that nevertheless had universal resonance (and they succeeded).
Reminds me of the Pixar movie "Soul" (which is very good)
I'm not sure why you're so offended by remakes of things where the race of a main character has changed (on the grounds that writers should be able to come up with some new stories), but for some reason are ok with remakes where the race of a main character is kept white.
> Or are the beancounters stopping any risks, so they feed us 200+ year old fairytales, that we've seen before?
I mean, yes, I think this should be pretty obviously the case, given all the remakes and reboots we've seen in the past decade or two. This has nothing to do with some diversity conspiracy, though.
To be fair, though, I do think there is at least some creativity in animated movies recently (that don't specifically target a white audience), for example (IMO fantastic) movies like Coco and Soul.
These are 3D characters from Pixar's most recent film: https://static.onecms.io/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/10/15/SOUL-1-2000.jpg
I asked in another HN thread how the line "you sound like a middle-aged white woman" in the Pixar movie Soul, is not racist? (It got downvoted)
Im not really taking a stand either way, Im just trying to understand.
However the case, I believe the normalizing of selectivity by race (which I guess is the definition of racism) is not final nor is its demarcation really stabilized yet.
Yeah, it's sad – Wolfwalkers was a beautiful, innovative film. While you could argue Soul is better, no one even bothered to look into that category much because the winner was inevitable.
There’s a HN rule against complaining that HN is becoming like Reddit. This comment is in the same genre - it was better in the good ole days.
Spoiler alert - it wasn’t. You’ve cherry picked 5 movies from each era out of thousands. There’s no reason to choose these movies instead of others. While the biggest blockbusters are more likely to be remakes or sequels, there’s no shortage of interesting movies.
Just from last year, original films that weren’t remakes or sequels and blew my mind - Parasite, Knives Out, Soul, The Father, Hamilton, White Tiger.
Best part is, we’re living in a time when you have practically unlimited entertainment a few clicks away at absurdly low prices. It’s easy to find something that suits your particular niche if you just look. That wasn’t the case in previous eras where studios had to pander to the largest audience possible.
It seems like author took too much of the responsibility, like 10X dev. Its better to take less responsibility with slightly above average salary and get more of personal time.. this reminds of a story about fish finding for ocean from a movie Soul
I cried after watching Soul. It made me go through my own life when I was a "lost soul" and I somehow recovered. I loved the person who was carrying the sign board and kept a photo of him for me to recollect.
That's the impact that I recognize with Pixar, a movie a like Soul and an Auteur like Pete Doctor.
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 ...
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?
That's more accurate, Soul was probably rendered at 2k, as most of their movies.
If a shot doesn't look good enough when upscaled, they re-render in 4k.
Actually, they used to upscale most of the movies using Nuke, but recently, started using deep learning for that. At Siggraph 2020, they gave a talk on this topic: https://s2020.siggraph.org/presentation/?id=gensub_443&sess=sess440
One of the things they mentioned briefly in a little documentary on the making of Soul is that all of the animators work on fairly dumb terminals connected to a back end instance.
I can appreciate that working well when people are in the office, but I'm amazed that worked out for them when people moved to work from home. I have trouble getting some of my engineers to have a stable connection stable enough for VS Code's remote mode. I can't imagine trying to use a modern GUI over these connections.
There's a brief footnote about their REVES volume rasterizer used in Soul World crowd characters. They simply state their render farm is CPU based and thus no GPU optimizations were required. At the highest, most practical level of abstraction, it's all software. De-coupling the artistic pipeline from underlying dependence on proprietary hardware or graphics APIs is probably the only way to do it.
https://graphics.pixar.com/library/SoulRasterizingVolumes/paper.pdf
On a personal note, I had a pretty visceral "anti-" reaction to the movie Soul. I just felt it too trite in its handling of themes that humankind has wrestled with since the dawn of time. And jazz is probably the most cinematic of musical tastes. Think of the intros to Woody Allen's Manhattan or Midnight in Paris. But it felt generic here.
That said the physically based rendering is state of the art! If you've ever taken the LIE toward the Queensborough Bridge as the sun sets across the skyscraper canyons of the city you know it is one of the most surreal tableaus in modern life. It's just incredible to see a pixel perfect globally illuminated rendering of it in an animated film, if only for the briefest of seconds ;)
"The WW84 viewership and accelerated work on Wonder Woman 3 aren’t surprising. Most US movie theaters are closed due to COVID-19, and the holiday would have left many people at home regardless. Much like Pixar’s Soul, Wonder Woman had a large potential audience that couldn’t visit family or otherwise mark the holidays as usual. Still, this could help WarnerMedia justify its decision to stream all its 2021 movies on HBO Max — it could keep people subscribed well after the novelty wears off, at least until it’s truly safe to return to theaters."
You're right on the price, but it looks like the $30 didn't fare well for Disney.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/oct/12/cinemas-shocked-and-dismayed-by-disney-decision-to-launch-soul-on-streaming-pixar
> However, it appears Disney does not currently have plans to charge extra for Soul, which will be made available on 25 December.