Pete Docter
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Filmography
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Connections, in both directions
Where previous Pixar movies have jammed in the pop culture references thick and fast, Inside Out is almost completely stripped of them, so the few that remain — a Chinatown gag, a visual nod to Contact’s intergalactic wormholes, a jellybean-like voice actor in Dream Productions who looks like voice superstar John DiMaggio — really hit home.
Movies with jabs at San Francisco’s new-agey vibe with organic broccoli pizzas and jokes requiring the viewer to know things like the last line of Chinatown (1974) are not entirely aimed at 9-year-olds.
Because the Pixar brain trust (which, besides Docter, includes executive producers Lasseter and Andrew Stanton) is brilliant at story, the saga of "Inside Out" finds room for crisp action, genuine jeopardy, cartoon slapstick, even adult humor like a jest that references "Chinatown."
Almost every scene contains at least two simultaneous gags, one visual, the other verbal (has there ever been another cartoon aimed at children that contained a shout-out to Chinatown?)
When a character in Pixar's Inside Out makes an allusion to "Jake," it jogs the Chinatown core with aplomb.
The jokes flash by at synaptic speed, buoyed by an exuberant score from composer Michael Giacchino (Jurassic World, Up, Rataouille), and with shout-outs to such adult pleasures as the movies Vertigo and Chinatown.
In sort of a high-tech version of the devastating, wordless opening of “ Up ,” we see David and his wife Pamela ( Sara Sohn ) raising Margot over the years through a series of photos, videos and calendar entries.
After an opening montage that introduces us to the Kim family (and evokes “Up” and its simple emotions), we see the groove that father David (Cho) and teenager daughter Margot (Michelle La) have gotten into.
It does this by launching with a montage that’s basically the famous opening sequence of Up, if those scenes from a life had all been captured and narrated through the internet.
Much like Pixar’s 2009 Up , the film opens with an emotionally devastating montage of the passage of time, and of lives, setting up an expectation of poignancy not always matched by what follows.
The movie begins with a moving montage, almost like it’s ripped from Pixar’s Up (who can ever forget those devastating four minutes?), that plays out through old footage on a computer screen, and it immediately gets the viewer up to date on the visual language of the film.
Basically, it's the opening to Up , attached to the opening of a gimmick-driven kidnapping thriller, and it is very fucking weird.
No wonder the movie's Venezuelan-plateau destination is borrowed from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World: Carl is longing for an existence that cannot be recovered.
Drifting through lightning storms and near-collisions, they land in the high plateaus of Venezuela, the strange landscapes that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in writing "The Lost World," and find artifacts from the lost explorer Muntz.
Up’s visual scope is its own constant marvel, giving us generous helpings of imaginative wonder sprinkled with familiar bits of the pop-culture past (the opening newsreel is reminiscent of Citizen Kane, and Paradise Falls’ odd formation is taken almost directly from the 1925 silent version of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World).
Directors Pete Docter (“Monsters, Inc.”) and Bob Peterson and their co-screenwriter Tom McCarthy brilliantly draw on such cinematic touchstones as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Wizard of Oz.” They’re also inspired by less likely sources such as “Fitzcarraldo,” “The Red Balloon” and Jules Verne’s “The Lost World” — not to mention Warner Bros.’ animated Road Runner and even the logo of its archrival, DreamWorks Animation.
He earns it the hard way, helping Carl drag his hovering home through the South American jungle in a fashion that pays subtle tribute to Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo .
Up may be the first animated kiddie crowd-pleaser to feature dentures and an hommage to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, as old man and boy drag a house and the burden of dreams through the jungle.
Directors Pete Docter (“Monsters, Inc.”) and Bob Peterson and their co-screenwriter Tom McCarthy brilliantly draw on such cinematic touchstones as “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “The Wizard of Oz.” They’re also inspired by less likely sources such as “Fitzcarraldo,” “The Red Balloon” and Jules Verne’s “The Lost World” — not to mention Warner Bros.’ animated Road Runner and even the logo of its archrival, DreamWorks Animation.
Sadly, echoing George Bailey’s stasis in It’s a Wonderful Life , events conspire to tie them to their small house in a neighbourhood that, as the film begins, is set for redevelopment by sinister men in sleek suits.
It's touching, too, and reminiscent of "It's a Wonderful Life," that they had bought and fixed up the abandoned house they once used for their pretend adventures as children.
Still, the film seems better suited to adult audiences, the way Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life” or Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” resonates differently with a little life experience.
This is a film in two parts and while the earthbound, jazz fueled pieces soar, the Great Before is another in a series of candy-colored representation of those intangible things which make us human (see “Inside Out,” “Over the Moon”) featuring ideas recycled from Docter’s prior work and the likes of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
So begins a clever refashioning of “It’s a Wonderful Life” in the ether, as the odd couple careen through adventures as life-affirming as they are strange and unexpected.
Writer-director Pete Docter’s last film, Up , was Pixar’s most recent genuinely great feature film; it was also the last of a trio of audacious films, along with Ratatouille and especially Wall-E , that stretched the limits of what a Hollywood animated film was allowed to be.
Brad Bird (The Incredibles, The Iron Giant, Ratatouille) is probably the most known and celebrated in the lot, and he deserves the accolades.
After a quartet of uninspired cash grabs (“Toy Story 3,” “Cars 2,” “Brave” and “Monsters University”) designed primarily to sell toys, Disney’s quasi-independent computer-animation arm returns to the glory days of “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille,” “Wall-E” and “Up,” with an envelope-pushing instant classic from “Up” director Pete Docter.
On its surface, Inside Out is yet another Pixar film — like Toy Story , Ratatouille , and both of director Pete Docter’s previous efforts, Monsters Inc. and Up — about a couple of mismatched buddies learning to work together in the midst of a desperate quest.
Ratatouille (2007) and Finding Nemo (2003) are my two favorite Pixar creations, and I am sad at their plundering.
By the end–as with the best of their films–which include “The Incredibles,” “Finding Nemo,” “WALL*E,”and “Ratatouille”–you’ll have laughed and thrilled and perhaps even shed a few tears.
Cars 2 (2011)
Directed by John Lasseter
influenced Inside Out (2015), Up (2009), Monsters, Inc. (2001)
Themes Plot
Cars 2 was light, not matching its predecessor (which was itself one of the studio’s lesser pictures), Brave was sweet but ultimately unmemorable, and Monsters University, while very good, wasn’t up to the level of the original.
Sure, you still get the occasional Cars 2 and ... Cars, but for each of those, the studio still releases movies with themes that resonate with actual human beings.
Twenty years since Pixar transfigured the animation filmmaking process with trailblazing innovation in Toy Story and after the recent shaky offerings of Cars 2 and Monster’s University failed to reach the dizzy heights Pixar audiences have become accustomed to, the studio’s fifteenth feature produces an abundance of spectacularly detailed CGI effects combined with an intricately ambitious narrative, which sees Pixar not only return to top form but indeed raise the bar further within animation filmmaking itself.
John Lasseter gave us the first two Toy Story films, which earns him forgiveness for Cars 2.
After a quartet of uninspired cash grabs (“Toy Story 3,” “Cars 2,” “Brave” and “Monsters University”) designed primarily to sell toys, Disney’s quasi-independent computer-animation arm returns to the glory days of “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” “Ratatouille,” “Wall-E” and “Up,” with an envelope-pushing instant classic from “Up” director Pete Docter.
"Cars 2" is a loud, obnoxious, carnival ride of a movie whose only redeeming value is that its merchandise sales - the chief reason for its existence - might help the studio fund three or four more worthy projects down the road that will be on the level of "Up" or "Finding Nemo" or your pick of the "Toy Story" movies.
In a storytelling convention that’s at least as old as the 1966 sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage —another example that springs to mind is Madeleine L’Engle’s great novel A Wind in the Door —Inside Out cuts between two parallel storylines, one taking place around Riley, the other inside her.
Miniaturized interlopers have also found comic results ("Innerspace") and harrowing ones ("Fantastic Voyage") after being injected into bodies.
This isn't the first film to depict small beings inside others (beyond the likes of "Fantastic Voyage" and any number of demonic possession flicks there's been "Everything You Wanted to Know about Sex" (or at least one segment of that Woody Allen film), "Meet Dave" and "Osmosis Jones," among a few others).
Tipping its hat to The Wizard of Oz, Fantastic Voyage and numerous other fantasy journeys, this animated adventure thoroughly amuses and challenges on its subconscious quest.
When something goes wrong and Joy and Sadness are inadvertently ejected from the "Control Room," we begin perhaps the strangest road trip since Fantastic Voyage: a trek through Riley's subconscious.
Soul might be Pixar’s most musical movie, harkening back to Disney’s Fantasia , which set images to some of the greatest works of composition this side of the 18th century.
It also can’t be an accident that the visuals for some of Joe’s jazz sequences appear inspired by Disney’s own Fantasia , but the transitions between story, music, and moods are orchestrated to perfection.
Not since Fantasia has a Disney film treated music with such reverence, as the seed of all the visual flowering that follows.
But on the whole, "Toy Story 4"—which was written by Stephanie Folsom and Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton (" Finding Nemo ") and directed by Josh Cooley (" Inside Out ")—breaks somewhat with tradition, in that it's less of a straightforward, linear comedy-adventure than a patchwork of scenes, moments, and groups of characters, unified more by shared themes and ideas than by any particular thing that happens.
Josh Cooley (who co-wrote Inside Out ) makes his feature directorial debut with this installment.
Directed by Josh Cooley (his feature debut, following prior credits as a writer on 2015's Inside Out and storyboard artist for popular titles such as The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007) and Up (2009), the film surpasses its predecessors as a work of supreme visual splendour: rendering the minutiae of a rainstorm, or (in a slightly more foreboding manner) the membranous layers of dust in an antique store with hyperreal precision.
Director Josh Cooley, one of the “Inside Out” writers, keeps the humor well-timed, and the animation itself is astounding, far beyond what was possible in the original 1995 “Toy Story.”
Debutant feature director Josh Cooley (who co-wrote the Inside Out screenplay) and his seven fellow writers have crafted a terrific tale which only the hardest of hearts will fail to be moved by.
Toy Story 4 is directed by Josh Cooley, who cowrote Inside Out, Pixar’s essay on childhood sadness , and you see the same ideas at work in the arts-and-crafts sequence — Bonnie converting her feelings into an impulse to invent, creating an entity to make her feel less alone (it’s funny that this process is mediated by Hanks, who did the same thing in Castaway).
Consider a sequence involving Carl’s house engaged in a mid-air dogfight with a giant silver airship: not only is it executed with grand flair and craftsmanship, parts actually feel inspired by some of the better aviation movies of vintage Hollywood, including William Wellman’s “Wings” and Howard Hughes’ “Hell’s Angels.”
Drawing inspiration from the overtly flat, linear animation style of 1960s Disney shorts — not unlike Fantasia 2000’s Rhapsody in Blue sequence and Pixar’s own “Day & Night” short — Soul whips up a friendly world overseen by cheery, ontologically ambiguous counselors who are all called “Jerry” (voices include Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade and Wes Studi) whose look is part Picasso and part UPA short.
That delineation features some of Pixar’s most interesting visuals since the 2010 short Day & Night , which combined 2-D and 3-D animation.
Drawing inspiration from the overtly flat, linear animation style of 1960s Disney shorts — not unlike Fantasia 2000’s Rhapsody in Blue sequence and Pixar’s own “Day & Night” short — Soul whips up a friendly world overseen by cheery, ontologically ambiguous counselors who are all called “Jerry” (voices include Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade and Wes Studi) whose look is part Picasso and part UPA short.
The film suddenly transforms from a Pixar spin on the sublime “Rhapsody in Blue” sequence in Fantasia 2000 to an animated take on Uncut Gems , as the stakes — and tension — ramps up to an absurd degree.
It's not worth cataloging it all, neither the details nor the referential jokes (though I have to go on record as saying that the re-enactment of a scene from the 1952 Chuck Jones short Feed the Kitty is as noble an homage to classical animation as Pixar has ever performed), because even a cursory viewing can't help but pick up at least some of the work that went into creating a deep, totally plausible environment for the film's action, using indescribable breadth of imagination to create the illusion of a quotidian world.
I’d pictured someone more along the lines of a live-action version of the old guy in Up because, in a way, Otto is like the first 10 minutes of Up combined with Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor: It’s about a cantankerous old guy who is no longer interested in living after the passing of his wife, Sonya (Rachel Kellar).
If such catharsis is what you seek, à la Pixar’s 2009 Up , then A Man Called Otto is for you.
But his biggest battle is with the developers who have been throwing up ugly new apartment buildings and chopping down trees (shades of 2009’s far superior Pixar film Up ).
Truman’s performance is all wide-eyed naïveté, and his scenes, with their cutesy soft-focus cinematography and achingly sentimental needle drops, come off as mawkish imitations of the opening sequence from Pixar’s Up .
It's like the first 10 minutes of Up , spliced throughout.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
Directed by Michel Gondry
influenced Inside Out (2015)
Themes
Pixar’s 15th film has the emotional intelligence and conceptual innovations of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , the interior narrative logic of Inception , and the referential, visual slapstick of Chuck Jones and Friz Freling.
We see Riley’s memories collapse and fade, not unlike the memories in Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but here there is the added threat that Riley’s very sense of who she is could collapse along with them.
Paddington starts out with a black-and-white newsreel back story reminiscent of “Up,” and then borrows liberally from “101 Dalmatians.”
The film takes its first cues from Pixar's Up , setting its stage with an old newsreel of a British explorer, Montgomery Clyde (Tim Downie), leading the first-ever expedition to Darkest Peru (the best example I can give of where the film's sense of humor lies is to point out the unblinking way that no character ever, ever refers to the country as just "Peru", anywhere in the film).
One can also spot some connections to Pete Docter and Bob Peterson’s animated Up (2009) with its adventurer travelogue newsreel footage.
That opening segment is shown in old b&w newsreel footage style, which immediately lets us know that this is a movie that's been made every bit as much for adults as for children (Pixar's "Up" comes to mind).
The film opens with a clever, and "Up"-echoing faux sepia-toned serial, as an explorer (Tim Downie) ventures to darkest Peru, encountering a rare family of bears, helping to teach them English, and giving them a taste for marmalade sandwiches before returning to London, telling them they'll always have a warm welcome if they ever come to visit.
Pixar’s 15th film has the emotional intelligence and conceptual innovations of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , the interior narrative logic of Inception , and the referential, visual slapstick of Chuck Jones and Friz Freling.
We see Riley’s memories collapse and fade, not unlike the memories in Inception and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but here there is the added threat that Riley’s very sense of who she is could collapse along with them.
At times, "Inside Out," co-written and co-directed by Pete Docter ("Up"), feels like a mash-up of "Toy Story" and "Inception," particularly in the awesome Dream Productions studio that creates dreams/nightmares based on Riley's day and Riley's imaginary friend Bing Bong (Richard Kind), himself a blend of several different animals, who fears Riley no longer has any need for him.
Si en Toy Story y Monster Inc. , convivían dos universos inanimados e incomunicados, el de los juguetes y la realidad; la oscuridad y la luz, en Intensa-Mente la idea es explorar ese mismo esquema entre el cuerpo y la mente del niño, en la construcción de un mundo paralelo, con reminiscencias a Inception (2010) de Christopher Nolan en el análisis narratológico que surge entre la realidad tangible y la realidad inconsciente que se genera en el interior de nuestra mente.
This includes the head of the corporation, a cranky old English villain named Burnish (Eddie Izzard), who initially comes across as a bland rip-off of Charles Muntz in Pixar’s Up, complete with the occasional trailer-ready “I want my yeti!” lines.
The plot is rote (much is lifted from “Up,” and Paulson’s character has a designed ripped from “Brave”), the characters are dull and even the adorable yeti at the heart of the film is just a slight tweak on Toothless, the central lizard from the “Train Your Dragon” franchise.
There’s the “going on a quest to an exotic locale” bit from “Up.” Heck, they even borrowed that film’s villain, an ancient explorer who wants to bag the mythical creature to silence the naysayers.
The exhilarating film pays tribute to Buster Keaton's The Balloonatic by way of its slapstick, and to Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle by way of its watercolor palette and traveling domicile.