2023-07-13 23:17:26
What happened with Lightyear in the summer of 2022 it was painful. That strange derivative of Toy Story, raised as the film that encouraged Andy to buy a Buzz Lightyear doll in the 90s, came to theaters after three direct releases from Pixar to Disney +. Faced with the complicated pandemic framework, Disney had relegated the streaming the premieres of the flexo studio in a surprising move due to the supposed prestige of the brand: one that should not be enough to risk an exhibition in rooms with limited capacity. It was the fate of Soul, Luca y Red. Lightyear He came to return the waters to their course.
Except he didn’t. Disney believed that a spin-off of Toy Storyone of his most lucrative franchises, would take people to the movies and yet, Lightyear disappointed at the box office. Not only that: in addition, he was accompanied by the controversy over a kiss between two women that led to his censorship in some countries —including Spain, although that was a year later—, and the criticism was very cold. Lightyear It came to show the worst facets of the studio: on the one hand, its subsidiary nature of Disney —which since it absorbed Pixar in 2006 has threatened the mechanical outcrop of sequels—, and on the other, the dramatic corseting of its formula.
Pixar became the world’s most powerful animation studio through storytelling rather than animation itself. This model, in Lightyear led to a film that was predictable and drowned in solemnity, while crammed with all kinds of reminiscences from the surrounding area —not precisely from the 90s, but from the cinema of Christopher Nolan and Marvel— that contrasted with the solid results of Soul, Luca and especially Red. There were hopes that Elemental, next Pixar project after LightyearI would have learned something from Domee Shi’s movie with the red panda. It is not the case.
The Disney+ problem
History aims to repeat itself with Elemental. Pixar’s 27th film closed the Cannes Film Festival without sparking passions, and then hit theaters in the US on June 16. For now, its box office is much worse than expected and, beyond how well it can do in foreign markets, everything indicates that the public has lost its attachment to the brand. The disappointment has been so well known that the discomfort may well extend to Disney, after the very poor collection of its latest animated film, Strange world.
It is the case that in 2023 Disney celebrates the centenary of its foundation, for which it has set up its own film, Wish. This feature film will be released next November and, as of today, it does not start with the best forecasts, there being a real fear that animated films made in Disney don’t move families out of the house. What can be the motive? Pete Docter, Pixar’s leader since John Lasseter’s departure for inappropriate conduct in 2018, gave a possible answer in a recent interview. con Variety.
Throughout the pandemic, audiences would have gotten used to watching Pixar movies on Disney+. the window of streaming has snatched the aura of event from each premiere, offering greater comfort to families with respect to a billboard where, in addition Elemental I wouldn’t have known how to stand out. The preventive failure of Elemental to the lack of publicity —which could have weighed down Strange world—, as well as the proximity to Spider-Man: Crossing the Multiverse, animated production that has succeeded.
In any case, it seems clear that there is a problem with the streaming. Docter already expressed his discomfort with Disney’s decision in his day, assuring that Pixar made films with such a level of detail that they should be appreciated on the big screen, but he has had to see how little by little the production took on a television character. In principle against his wishes, but Elemental suddenly he has come to demonstrate something else, strengthening his bond with the streaming from the short film that accompanies its exhibition in cinemas: carl’s date.
Originally, carl’s date it was one of the shorts Dug y Carl, Disney+ series that gives continuity to Up. For some reason, they wanted to release it together with Elemental and thus resume a tradition in which Disney had not incurred since Bao con the incredibles 2. It is not the first time that Pixar has made a move like this: in 2017 it screened before Coco an endless short starring Olaf, from Frozenbut then we were not talking about a study with the credibility crisis it is experiencing now. carl’s date It comes to underscore that the exceptionality of Pixar is a thing of the past. That it is a catalog content like any other.
A catalog content that looks especially good, on the other hand. Pixar has not lost muscle in this field. After so many years at the forefront of American animation, the flexo studio continues to guarantee sophisticated animation, with special care in lighting and textures. For some time now, however, he seemed to have lost his way in terms of technical progress, obstinate in pursuing hyperrealism, and that is why it was so refreshing to come across a film like Red.
Red yielded to the energetic subjectivity of a girl, Mei, while flirting with techniques outside the influence of Pixar such as the anime. In his own way, he swelled the current trend of animation mainstream according to which, having reached the ceiling the possibilities of 3D, it incorporates elements of the two dimensions in search of a hybrid expressiveness. It is the school of Spider-Man: A New Universewhich has managed to rival the Disney emporium to the point that the aforementioned Wish also uses this style.
The animation is changing, but has Pixar reacted to it? In Red did so, so below images of Lightyear They were totally generic and greyish. Elemental takes a more colorful path, but does so by the exacting standards of nearly thirty years of Pixar style. Constricting the animation, each design being recognizable and well-worn, and delving into an astonishingly ungrateful general impression: that we’ve seen this too many times, but never this impersonal. With so lazy lace to a mold.
Pixar Presents: Pixar The Movie
Elemental presents us with a city populated by elements: fire, air, earth and water. The visual composition of each character-element, organized according to ethnic groups, is as technically solvent as it is inane from the design. There is not a single character with a charismatic trait or that is not reminiscent of another studio film, while the city that shelters them offers itself as a mixture of every business scene that has paraded through well-known titles, from the city of Coco’s dead to the offices of SA monsters
Still sticking to the meritorious work of visualizing the elements, the film does manage to shine where Lightyear he was unable to do it…in small doses. Elemental narrates the romance of Candela (a fire girl) and Nilo (a water boy). A romance marked by all kinds of difficulties, among which the obvious one stands out: they cannot touch each other without receiving some type of damage. But the plot leads to the distance being supplied, and the approaches have great dramatic and sensory force. The strength that emanates from trusting in the possibilities of the medium which, unfortunately, is limited to one or two scenes.
The logical thing would be that an affair between fire and water would be dispatched according to the patterns of a romantic comedy, and indeed, it is there Elemental where it performs better The problem is, this is Pixar, and Pixar can’t just make a “romantic comedy.” During its years of greatest critical affinity, the study of flexo internalized that its plots should have considerable thematic ambition, which ended up resulting in a lowering of the sense of humor and a progressive alienation of the scripts, with the possible result of limiting the satisfaction of the children’s audience. Elemental suffers to the extreme from both consequences.
On the one hand, the comedy is terrible, supported entirely by quips about the condition of the characters, like the aquatic public of a sporting event making a literal “wave”. On the other, the script exemplifies the worst vices of the studio, dispersing in an enervating succession of metaphors and metaphors within metaphors that shield Pixar’s intellectualoid alibi. Because, beyond the romance, Elemental He wants to talk about immigration, social justice, racism, family expectations…
It is surprising that such a saturated story is signed by Peter Sohn, the director of a film like Arlo’s Journey that it could be just as problematic, but at least he knew how to be much more concrete and let his ideas breathe. Sohn has devised the story based on the experience of his parents, Korean immigrants in New York, but there is such an overdose of layers in his film that not even the slightest closeness can be deduced from this biography, which has become the check list necessary so that Elemental articulated as a complete sociological treatise. Which it is not, not at all. The film associates nature so recklessly with the sociocultural/identity that it does not even notice its essential frivolity —in this it resembles Soul—, and attaches such importance to what is “reflexive” that it forgets to polish a story, resorting to exhausting automatisms and overexplanations. Your error reaches such an extent that Elemental welcomes the sign of a farce: the reduction of what was once Pixar to the absurd, to self-parody. An especially depressing way to hit rock bottom.
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