Hacker Cinema
Turning Red
2022 · Film · 100 min
Directed by Domee Shi
Thirteen-year-old Mei is experiencing the awkwardness of being a teenager with a twist – when she gets too excited, she transforms into a giant red panda.
14 positive11 negative4 mixed22 neutralfrom 51 commenters
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63 comments on Hacker News
Just saying "Pixar movies" was probably not a great example. They can be deliberately location ambiguous (Monsters Inc., Toy Story - though it's clearly _somewhere_ in America, The Incredibles - a generic "metropolis"/50's futuristic city, lightyear, Elemental) or very specifically somewhere (cars - mashup of Route 66 towns, Finding Nemo - Sydney when on land, Ratatouille - Paris, etc...)
It makes sense to "translate" locale cultural indicators in say Wall·E which was very location agnostic but not so much for say Turning red which is very culturally specific.
> But then the children of immigrants in America who are associated with that country wake up, and suddenly 8 hours later you're a monster.
Mostly what this immigrant effect has produced in America is a bunch of movies about how the writer of the movie hates their mother. (EEATO, Turning Red, etc.)
But a funny one I've repeatedly noticed in West Coast Japanese-Americans is they have West Coast progressive political beliefs (basically, noone should ever be punished for crimes because it's mean) at the same time as Japanese ones (copyright violation or disrespecting important big companies should get the death penalty), and I don't think they've noticed.
A couple things:
1. The academy has had a significant increase of young voters in the past 10 years or so. Generally speaking, young voters are more likely to take animation as a "serious" medium.
2. These interviews were always somewhat overstated. Of course some voters have stupid rationales, but I don't think this dominates the academy.
3. Disney's Inside Out 2 was nowhere close to winning the award this year - Flow's biggest competition was The Wild Robot, which did gross far more than Inside Out 2, but far below Inside Out 2.
If you look at the past couple years, The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli) won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Elemental nowhere close) in 2023, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Turning Red nowhere close) in 2022, etc.
I'm curious what year you're thinking about above. Perhaps Toy Story 4 over Klaus in 2019?
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.
Oh, are you offended? Do you need a safe space? I thought you liked offensive comedy? Or is that just when it offends other people who aren’t you?
I never said I hated anyone. I just think these conservative talking points all rhyme with each other and when you trace them far enough they are all rooted in white supremacist ideas and misogyny.
Turning Red is only “woke” if you think people shouldn’t talk about going on your period because women are bad.
The Little Mermaid remake is only “woke” if you think Black people shouldn’t be the lead in movies.
Lightyear is only “woke” if you think people of the same gender shouldn’t kiss.
The list goes on and on. Literally none of these pro-offensive content people ever explain themselves in any way that makes sense beyond their hate for non-white people, women, and the LGBT community.
You literally criticized Disney for trying to please everyone. If they aren’t trying to please everyone, who are they supposed to sell tickets to, ghosts?
And this conservative cult gets in the way of understanding objective reality, like how you thought that Disney stock went down because of woke movies, when the financial reality of their stock decline had more to do with low Disney+ profitability and the Covid-19 collapse of theme park revenue.
Turning Red was released in 50+ countries - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8097030/releaseinfo/ I know it was released in at least one country not listed by you, because I have a photo of the movie poster from a theater (it stuck out to me as was using spanish language material, in a non spanish speaking country).
> 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.
Pixar is just a movie studio now, churning out basic animated movies. They’re no longer head-and-shoulders above everyone, and other studios are certainly competitive or even outclassing.
Turning Red and Teenage Kraken have a superficially similar plot and the Pixar one is much “better made” in many ways, but neither is earth-shattering.
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.
That’s funny. I thought Luca was the best, Encanto was mediocre, and Turning Red one of the worst kid’s movies I’ve ever seen.
Domestic numbers for Turning Red have not been reported, and the movie is mostly streaming on Disney+. You can’t jump to conclusions about losses.
Also pay extra special attention to the warnings you find on the “sources” for this data: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/budgets
“Note: Budget numbers for movies can be both difficult to find and unreliable. Studios often try to keep the information secret and will use accounting tricks to inflate or reduce announced budgets.”
If Disney was really losing that much money repeatedly, they would stop making movies. And yet they don’t stop, but they do keep making it look like they’re not very profitable. Why?
> 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.
I think the target audience is kids and their parents. As a parent of young children, I really enjoyed both Turning Red and Elemental, as did my kids.
It isn't easy to make movies that kids like and want to watch but parents don't mind watching multiple times (because that's how kids do movies... multiple times)
Disney still does a pretty good job of that.
I thought Elemental and Turning Red were very well done story wise (Romeo/Juliet, teen angst), they are worth multiple watches on Disney+. Encanto (Disney, but not Pixar) was brilliant, it is too bad it didn't get the theater release it deserved because of COVID.
I get not being in the audience for a film. I felt like that about all the Star Wars prequels, and I spent my pre-10s on the original trilogy. I couldn't tell you what is wrong about sequels, even if they were done well I probably wouldn't be in the audience for them anymore.
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 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.
The trivial reading of Turning Red as prostitution is thus: a thirteen year old girl suddenly struggles with transforming into a red panda, and this is quickly explained in such a way to heavily associate with the physical and mental changes a girl typically experiences with puberty. One of the next plot points is that, to make money, the girl decides to sell pictures of herself as the 'panda' to make money. This being contemporaneous with a popular website designed to make it easy for women to sell pictures for money.
Even later on, the movie concludes with this confident thirteen year old girl declaring that she has a right to twerk, all while she hopes to end up backstage with her friends at the local boy band concert. What typically happens to underage girls backstage at concerts? I wonder.
I did very little reading into the events the story presents to get to this conclusion. Turning Red is not very subtle at all. It shouts in your face about pads and how twerking is the bomb.
>Concerned parents from the 1950s, you mean?
To the extent that any parents today care about what their kids watch, instead of shrugging while letting their toddlers gormlessly stare at a youtube video pipeline of strangely pornographic spiderman and elsa videos, they typically care about explicit violence, references to sex, and references to drugs. Turning Red has very clear cut examples of two of these things. I cannot imagine most parents being comfortable about discussing pads with their five or six year old daughters, nor thinking that the world is a better place when those daughters decide they want to start twerking as well because they saw it in the movie.
> The message in Turning Red can be trivially read as a thirteen year old girl learning to prostitute herself against the wishes of her stifling and controlling mother, even if this wasn't the intent of the filmmakers.
I think you'd have to work kinda hard to justify that reading—and while believe you that you can, I do wonder why you'd want to work so hard to make such a reading?
> Concerned parents will probably also find it strange that a Pixar movie made for small children casually throws around words like 'degenerate' and 'stoner' and talks explicitly about pads for minutes on end.
Concerned parents from the 1950s, you mean?
> but who knows what the balance sheet really looks like with these big companies these days
Agreed.
The message in Turning Red can be trivially read as a thirteen year old girl learning to prostitute herself against the wishes of her stifling and controlling mother, even if this wasn't the intent of the filmmakers. Concerned parents will probably also find it strange that a Pixar movie made for small children casually throws around words like 'degenerate' and 'stoner' and talks explicitly about pads for minutes on end.
I am not sure I would take popularity on the streaming service as a sign of financial success, given something like Encanto was big in both the box offices and after the fact streaming, but who knows what the balance sheet really looks like with these big companies these days.
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+?
> Coco and Inside Out did around $800m each, but Luca did very poorly, taking under $50m.
Coco had a domestic theatrical release and was in theaters in over 50 other countries.
Luca did not get a domestic theatrical release (except for one week in one theater). Internationally it was in theaters in 20 countries. Similar for Turning Red except it was only in theaters in 17 countries.
Luca and to a lesser extent Turning Red did reasonably well in those countries where they were actually in theaters considering that it was during a pandemic when attendance was down. If they had been released in theaters in a non-pandemic year and in all the countries Coco was in they would have probably been at least $500m movies.
Luca was the most streamed movie of 2021 (10.6x10^9 minutes of streaming) (and it was #9 in 2022 with another 5x10^9 minutes) , and Turning Red was the second most streamed movie of 2022 (11.4x10^9 minutes) (#1 was Encanto at 27.4x10^9 minutes).
BTW, Encanto did get a domestic theater release and an international theater release in almost as many countries as Coco and yet only pulled in $256m worldwide. I think that's a pretty good illustration of how much the pandemic affected box office.
Turning Red was not released theatrically in the U.S., it was a Disney+ release that did not require a separate purchase (unlike the Mulan remake) so the fact it still made $20m is quite impressive. Based on the numbers for Poland, UAE, etc. in the BoxOfficeMojo link, Turning Red would likely have made over $600m globally if it had been released theatrically in major markets.
As other commenters have noted, Turning Red was the second most watched films on streaming in 2022, across all platforms (Luca was #9.)
I was a huge fan of Pixar films, but honestly a lot of their films have just been really bad. I enjoyed Lightyear, Turning Red, etc. but they weren't nearly as good as their previous films. It's now put me off seeing most of what Pixar puts out, they all look like the same film.
On the other hand, other animation studios are putting out some really good films, the two animated Spier-Man films, the Puss in Boots sequel, etc.
Pixar needs to raise it's game and try telling more interesting stories.
I'm not convinced you're putting the blame in the right place. Looking at the last decade or so, most of the original films — Inside Out, Coco, Luca, Turning Red, etc — have ranged from "great" to "incredible". It's the sequels and spinoffs like Cars 3, Toy Story 4 and Lightyear that have fallen flat. I don't know where in the Disney org chart people start worrying about revenue, but from where I sit Pixar still has plenty of spark.
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.
> 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.
I'm a huge fan of the Disney movies that came out when I was growing up (Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast are my favorites). My kids like those movies a lot too.
But I think some wonderful movies have been made in the last ten years, most notably Encanto and Turning Red. They're both massive successes, and I think they are in many ways better than those movies I grew up with.
Not to mention Frozen, Moana, Inside Out, etc. These are all wonderful movies.
(Ratatouille is also great, btw, don't get me wrong!)
Turning Red was a great movie—my daughters love it and have watched it repeatedly. I put that one in the category of wonderful box office bombs: miracles that they managed to exist, in spite of being obvious box office failures, like The Big Lebowski or Blade Runner.
Hmm. Allow me to rephrase. Clearly, we are assuming two different current states. I indicated that T2 was made almost 30 years ago with MASSIVE improvements across just about every facet of computer generated visuals. That movie cost 100 million to make ( about twice that in today's dollars adjusted for inflation ) and it had some stars in it ( Arnold reportedly being paid cool $15M ), which easily explains some of the cost.
I am not assuming its cheap and easy. I am assuming it is both cheaper and easier than it was and noticeably so.
All that said, I think we may be just approaching it differently. Let me share my thought process.
Cameron suggested the actual CGI scene count is 42[1] ( we can do 50 for easier math, but 42 will favor your position so lets assume 42 ). According to wiki[2] CGI budget was 15M-17M ( and lets assume 17M to account for the upper cost to accommodate your view of CGI cost ).
At $17M for 42 an instance of CGI comes to $404k a pop for T2. Unfortunately, this is misleading as it does not give us a good way to compare against Turning Red as its all CGI, so we need to compare in minutes ( tr is 1h40m or 100 minutes ). Without doing any real analysis, I have to rely on net again[1], where we learn that:
"all the work required to bring the T-1000 to life, costing $5.5 million, and taking eight months to produce, which ultimately amounted to 3.5 minutes of screen time. "
5.5M/3.5 = $1.571M per minute for Terminator 2 ( or about ~3M USD adjusted for inflation ).
In other words, adjusted for inflation re-running TR assuming the same cost as T2 results in 300M ( 100 minutes * 3M per minute ) projected CGI cost for TR ( almost double TR's budget, which we know was not all CGI ). In other words, CGI has gotten almost 100% more efficient, partially because I seriously doubt entire $175M TR budget went to CGI ).
I am not arguing its peanuts ( although I am sure argument could be made what with current AI tools ), but it is definitely more cheap.
To be fair, it might not be more easy ( that I have zero knowledge of ).
[1]https://computeranimationhistory-cgi.jimdofree.com/terminator-2-1991/ [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_effects_of_Terminator_2:_Judgment_Day
Funny, I don't feel this way at all - Encanto is probably one of my favourite recent disney films, I must have seen it 100 times now(partially because of my kid watching it all the time, but that's the funny thing - despite pretty much knowing every single line by heart now, I still like it. The story is good and the songs are great).
Turning Red is equally great - as someone who has also grown up in the 90s the film just gets so much right, it's a delight to watch. The story turns into absolute nonsense by the end but meh, the joy of watching teenagers figure out how to get money for a concert they want to go to is worth it.
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".
> that Disney is simply not making movies anyone wants to see
I can't completely discount what you're saying, since I have no interest in Lightyear (the toy from Toy Story, but it's not a toy? Why?) or Strange World (it looks fine, but their ads didn't make very clear anything about it).
But I will say that Turning Red was wonderful, and my family has happily watched that a number of times. Not surprised it flopped in the theater, though, given I didn't even know it was in the theaters. As far as I'm concerned it went straight to Disney+, like Pixar's previous 3 movies. It's been one of my favorite things about the service.
Turning Red and Lightyear are both Pixar movies
Turning Red was released on Disney+ instead of in theaters due to Omicron, so the fact that it still made $20m in theaters is actually quite an accomplishment. It apparently did quite well on Disney+; at the time of its release was the 2nd-most watched movie on [edit] streaming in general for 2022.
Disney didn't brag about the viewing numbers for either Strange World or Lightyear, so those films didn't appear to do well in theaters or streaming.
Yes, Turning Red's low revenue was primarily a cause of the film not being in theatres, rather than the quality of its story.
I personally liked the story of Turning Red very much (though I'm biased to like it because it's set in Toronto), but more objectively, the film is a step above Strange World and Lightyear in terms of ratings.
Turning Red's ratings: 95% on the Tomatometer of Rotten Tomatoes (RT), 7.0/10 on IMDb, and 3.7/5 on Letterboxd
Lightyear's ratings: 74% on RT, 6.1/10 on IMDb, 3.0/5 on Letterboxd
Strange World's ratings: 72% on RT, 5.6/10 on IMDb, 3.0/5 on Letterboxd
Crucially, Turning Red was _not_ released in theatres in most countries due to COVID-19. It may or may not have been a money loser, but there's very little reason to believe executives think it's anything about the movie that made it that way.
Their last few movies have been... well "abysmal" would make some abysses unhappy to be compared to the movie performance.
Strange World [0] was a box office bomb - reported box office revenues of $74M on a budget of $135–180M.
It's got nothing on Turning Red [1], though. $20M on a $175M budget. Whoof.
Lightyear [2] only barely made their production costs, $225M on a $200M budget.
They've had some mild successes, but their last couple years of performance have been marked by some absolutely horrid bombs.
You can blame their "going broke" grade performance on whatever you want, but the reality seems to be that Disney is simply not making movies anyone wants to see. And if you're an entertainment company, well, that's a problem.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_World_(film)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turning_Red
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightyear_(film)
FWIW, Encanto (Disney Animation, 2021) and Turning Red (Pixar, 2022) were the most streamed movies on any platform for all of 2022 according to Nielsen. Moana (Disney Animation, 2016) was #4.
It's debatable whether these films feel like "sequel direct to DVD" or not, but I don't think it's debatable that audiences are watching them.
https://www.adweek.com/lostremote/nielsen-top-15-stranger-things-most-streamed-program-2022/71019/
Moana is also rebellious however?
Turning Red isn’t about rebelling. It’s about finding out who you are. In the film she only really rebels against her mom about one thing, which is the same number of times Moana defies her dad. The rest of the movie is about her desire to venerate her ancestors while still being true to herself. In many ways it’s similar to Moana.
I’m unsure how any of these are “woke” so much as messages you disagree with. Which is fine, but I would encourage reflecting on it further.
Disney has had tons of rebellious characters over the decades. Ariel is rebellious. Simba is rebellious. Belle is rebellious. Mulan is rebellious. Lilo is rebellious. Aladdin is rebellious. Tony Stark is rebellious. Peter Parker is rebellious.
Interesting characters tend to be rebellious. Luke is literally a rebel who doesn’t listen to his father after all.
I dunno. My wife and I used to insta buy/ take our kids to see Disney movies, but now we double check what sorts messages the movie has in it.
For example, Turning Red. It seems to have a message of… never listen to your parents? Rebel against authority? I’m not sure exactly. It’s a weird movie.
Which is interesting because Moana is, as an adult, possibly one of my favorite movies of all time. The messaging of the heroes journey, venerating your ancestors, but being able to look toward the future and find a new way that sometimes faces resistance is a perfect tale. Then there’s also the subtext of Maui and Tefiti being the archetypal divorced couple, with Maui stealing her heart which causes severe emotional trauma until she is healed by Moana, the archetypal child mending the family.
Frozen is a weird one, I could write a book about it.
Princess and the Frog is great.
It’s so weird! I never know if a mainline Disney movie is going to be good or terrible. I don’t really know what’s going on over at Disney right now.
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).
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.
I'm not sure I'd call it skirting around the issue. More operating from inside our sphere of influence.
> The shift to being able to "see" arbitrary women as they'd look in certain positions or level of undress will also change how young men perceive real women in harmful ways in a society where women already have to deal with constant objectification.
There is a storyline in a children's movie about a young girl making sexually suggestive sketches of a boy in her notebook (Turning Red). The mom discovers it and confronts the boy thinking he's taken advantage of her daughter. That's going to evolve into using AI to do the same. It's not just a trope, those problems exist already; this is just going to make these cases more common. And you're nailing it with how it's going to change perceptions. These dream images are going to be created to match the fantasies of the person generating the image. Those images aren't the actual bodies of the person being undressed - it's just a fantasy created by the artist optimized to their own preferences.
> Firstly it's about things like lighting, skin tone, background details etc that set the scene for us on the unconscious level and which inevitably leaves the current generation of fakes somewhere in the uncanny valley. Secondly the fact that we know they're fake didn't impact the initial associations our brain will create upon seeing them.
Expert fakes exist for celebrities that pass uncanny valley without the use of AI. There are sites dedicated to cataloging celebrity images and documenting if they are fake or not. Same with request threads and WYWD threads - the stuff on message boards can be pretty convincing, enough to get to those initial associations. I'm not sure why you think otherwise. The dark corners of the internet are full of this content.
This cat is out of the bag and has been for some time. The frequency is only going to increase as the bar for generating these images lowers. Photoshoppers running request threads are the bottleneck right now; soon those threads are going to be replaced with generators that spit out 100s of candidate images.
We don't really have control over how others use our likeness beyond the tools the law extends to us but, even then, it only addresses the problem after it happens and doesn't stop someone from doing it in the first place. I don't see us stopping it. If we can't stop it, we either let it happen to us or we figure out how to remove its power over us at an individual level (and help others do the same).
I'd like to turn this around. You're bringing up a lot of problems without solutions. Other than shifting our view of these images on a person-to-person basis, how do you see us stopping it?
Inside out was good, but not great, IMO.
Counter-counterpoints:
Cars 2, Brave, Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, Finding Dory, Cars 3, Coco, Onward, Luca, Turning Red, Lightyear.
The (not very original) point is: You can no longer count on a Pixar movie being excellent.
Turning Red is a Pixar film, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Pixar_films
Neither Turning Red nor Encanto are Pixar movies? They're from Walt Disney Animation Studios, rendered with Hyperion (just like Frozen, Tangled, Moana or Zootopia).
My wish/dream has been that realistic tech is so mature they're no longer spectacles. I felt "tentpole" movies were getting there before Marvel kicked off. Instead the focus is either on story or stylization. I love that in Turning Red they billowing smoke will dissipate into clumping bubbles and they adopted a lot of anime styles into 3d. Effects like smoke, water, and fire are the easiest to focus on. 2d animation has done a lot of this for decades; Malificent's dragon breath, Genie's smoke, Akira's effects.
I think CG sequels, especially as far apart as Toy Story 1 and 4 (24 years!), are a unique thing. It has to be familiar and consistent with previous movies that used older tech, but they can't make a new movie using 24 year old tech, either.
I hope one day we are able to simply walk/drive/fly around the worlds created for movies like Monsters, Inc., Secret Life of Pets, Luca, Turning Red, etc. The artists and modellers have done such a fabulous job of creating these insanely detailed worlds, and I would love to be able to actually explore them at my own pace. For me, this would be a great use of VR, though I think we're probably at least several years away from having the hardware necessary to render that all in real-time at a quality that I'm hoping for.
Netflix has lost 200,000 and expects to lose ~2-million over the next few months under its current guidance.
Does it make sense, from an accounting point of view, to have "paid" for Bright in 2017 dollars and its 2017 cash-flow? Or does it make sense to pay for "Bright" with 2022 dollars?
Its all accounting. But next year, when Netflix is down by 2.2 million customers, Netflix's 10k statement is going to be "paying" for 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 movies despite having much fewer customers.
In contrast, Disney+ or Disney loses 90% of their value in the 1st year, so Disney's accounting will only be paying for "Turning Red" this year and next year.
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It kind of sorta doesn't matter "how" accounting is done, as long as everyone understands it. Except because of this Netflix methodology, Netflix has effectively "borrowed future money", from an accounting perspective, to make 2017, 2018 and other years "look better".
It's clear they are just outclassed by Disney+. People thought the hard part was creating the streaming platform, the content was mostly licensed with a few exclusives. It's now clear that exclusive content is everything. Disney have new content every month (ie. Moon Knight -> Obi-Wan Kenobi) and high quality movies like Luca and Turning Red.
Netflix's strategy seems to be just get big name actors and mediocre creatives and hope it works. The Adam Project might have a lot of viewers but how many of those are just because it's there? How many people would say "The Adam Project is my favorite movie" and how does that compare to Luca?
Netflix has been essentially making the equivalent of direct to DVD movies as its whole strategy while Disney has been bringing their best. They are becoming The Asylum of the streaming world.
As a loyal Firefox user...
I may be switching browsers.
I'm mostly happy with Firefox but not entirely. I used brave years ago but wanted to support an open web by supporting competitive software. I've been looking at brave more recently because the web doesn't care and Firefox has made some questionable decisions lately (like pocket and suggested results from sponsors and the turning red ad... which is a good movie but a terrible move by Firefox). I use brave on my phone and I'm pretty happy with it and I hate amp links. This is a compelling change for me.
Yep
You have critics saying things like
> "I recognized the humour in the film, but connected with none of it," O'Connell wrote in his review.
> "By rooting Turning Red very specifically in the Asian community of Toronto, the film legitimately feels like it was made for Domee Shi's friends and immediate family members. Which is fine — but also, a tad limiting in its scope."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/turning-red-review-pulled-1.6377614
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/12/1086040083/turning-red-controversy
> audience typically only goes to see movies that they are likely to enjoy
That doesn't really explain the opposite phenomenon: movies that have higher critic rating than audience rating (e.g. movies like Mulan and Turning Red come to mind). IMHO, if you were to apply that rubric across all movies, the conclusion you should get is that critics and general audiences are simply different demographics and that it is normal for discrepancies to arise from sampling different demographics, not that general audiences are more biased towards what they like to watch. For example, parents wouldn't necessarily pick kids movies as their first choice of entertainment if age appropriate-ness wasn't a consideration (I think a lot of parents can relate to being sick of replaying Frozen, for example)
Aside from what my sibling comment said about a fantasy world, why'd you pick Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist and The Dragon Prince? Surely shows like Abbott Elementary and Euphoria would be more culturally relevant? Or recent animated movies Encanto and Turning Red?
And even as far as the Dragon Prince is concerned, it's interesting how you mention it as overrepresentation when much of the diversity is relegated to secondary characters. Callum, Rayla, Claudia, Soren and Viren are all white (elves are in some ways minority coded, but the British accent makes that remain firmly in the realm of coding), and seem to be straight and cisgender.
I personally love stories with "overrepresentation" - and not only just to make up for a massive history of erasure and underrepresentation. It makes me so happy to hear people saying "I usually don't feel seen, but THIS character, they look/sound/act like me!" Honestly, as a gay man I still don't feel especially seen - and as far as gay characters I feel connected to beyond just that, it's pretty limited. I can think of maybe... 4 main characters? And they're all in the past few years.
Lets see, last night while you were sending the comment I was watching "turning red" -- AFAICT it fails it: There was no scene where two men talked to each other about something other than a woman.
Most movies have most or all of their dialog about the important characters. When the important characters are disproportionately men then thats what the dialog will be about. When the subject is about the interactions of some differently gendered characters, then the dialog will often be about a different gender than the character talking.
The prior posters point was that it reflects the under-representation of women as substantial characters more than anything else-- I'd also add that it also reflect the further under-representation of women in movies that aren't about relationships. We don't need to invoke a complicated test to observe that women are underrepresented in serious roles and stereotyped into certain kinds of plots when they do have significant roles.
Well it is a red panda, i.e. a firefox. In fact, "Turning Red" could be seen as a metaphor for switching from Chrome to Firefox (in addition to, uhhh, the advent of menstruation).
Maybe if they had managed to sneak some product placement for Firefox into the movie it would balance things out and make it seem better.
In all seriousness, I don't like it either, but I wish the question wasn't so unnecessarily hostile ("Disney shit") toward a Pixar movie that I and my young daughter found quite delightful. That kinda makes me want to defend Mozilla.
Curious why you singled out that bit and not "Canada/Toronto love"?
Turning Red is the first Pixar film solo-directed by a Chinese-Canadian woman Domee Shi (who also made the Academy Award winning Bao short). The film was inspired by her childhood in Toronto, hence the many Canadian references, and is told from a culturally and gender specific lens. It's a 2nd generation immigrant story.
Remember, there are tons of Chinese people out there who have little or nothing to do with the authoritarian Chinese state. I should know. I'm one of them.
This knee-jerk bias against anything Chinese is xenophobic and racist.
> In celebration of “Turning Red,” streaming on Disney+ on March 11th, we are creating new Firefox desktop colorways and mobile wallpapers based on the movie as an optional way to show your personality through your browser. We’ve also created a destination for all things 2002 nostalgia and will be having conversations with people about their journeys to embrace their true colors online.
Making a couple themes and an ad site couldn't have been a big project, presumably this is the sort of thing a couple marketing interns can throw together in a couple months, right? If this got Mozilla a nice check from The Mouse which they can use to fund browser development, I don't see any downsides here.
This is a terribly ill informed take.
Sony Animation ( who you misattributed to marvel) were already pushing animation style heavily. Just go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
There's also tons of animation variety from outside America. The issue is that in America, a lot of the style was defined by Pixar. Which was probably the biggest experiment of them all.
But even among the major studios, there's a lot of variety in style. Trolls is incredibly stylized and DreamWorks really pushed style far in Kung Fu Panda 2.
Even Pixar are now experimenting more with style with Luca and Turning Red.
This is also only considering feature film work. If you pay attention to shorts, there's a huge variety.
It comes down to Art Direction. Arcane and Spiderverse are expensive and require an insane amount of per shot bespoke work. A lot of people also tend to find hyper stylized content not as compelling. So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.