Some 25 years ago a boy in a beard attempted to make a film about samurai, imperialism and rebellion, and robots, the film was Star Wars and the hairy youth was George Lucas. For his shiny new film Mr Lucas wanted lots of spaceships and aliens, but rather than spend all his time in the basement making these things himself, he created his own special effects company, Industrial Light and Magic, to construct these visual wonders. After the release of Star Wars, while playgrounds everywhere were rife with imaginary lightsabre duels, ILM created its own off-shoot company, tasked with the development of computer effects. But due to financial difficulties he experienced later Lucas decided to sell on his SFX off shoot, passing it on to Apple founder Steve Jobs for $5 million, with a further $5 million being injected my Jobbs into the company, now known as Pixar.
Pixar at this time mainly dealt in high end hardware, probably why Jobbs was interested, but it also had a small animation division headed by former Disney employee John Lasseter. Their initial animations where designed to showcase the company’s hardware, but after poor sales of these products, Lasseter’s division, in an effort to help pay the bills, began making commercials for such brands as Tropicana and Listerine, as well as inserts for Sesame Street. Pixar’s branching out was to be their making, it would eventually lead them into a three movie deal with Disney, and the rest is history.
In 1995 the world’s first computer generated feature film was produced, and the rest was history…that’s pretty poor writing using the same phrase at the tail end of two concurring sentences, but then Id woznt no gud at skool en stuff.
Toy Story was a phenomenon, and for anyone who's been living in cave since the early nineties, followed the misadventures of a group of toys, headed by a cowboy named Woody voiced by Tom Hanks, who at the time was Hollywood’s golden boy, having won best actor Oscars the two previous years with Philadelphia and Forest Gump respectively.
The second of the Pixar/Disney three movie deal came in the form of A Bug’s Life, a film while entertaining never came close to the brilliance of its predecessor. It was also the start of a trend of DreamWorks Animations and Pixar releasing films of a similar theme, in this first instance with DreamWorks releasing Antz a month before A Bug’s Life. While having nearly twice the budget, Antz only earned half as much as A Bug’s Life, and unfortunately while being far superior to Pixar’s effort is also often forgotten by most people, but I will always be its champion.
Next came a direct to video sequel to Toy Story, imaginatively titled Toy Story 2, which was later bumped up to a theatrical release, a fact which, in Pixar's view completed their contract, but Adolf Disney didn't agree. In Disney’s view it didn't qualify as the third movie of their deal with Pixar. A disagreement which saw Pixar attempt to distance themselves from Disney slightly once the deal was done with Monsters Inc. Their three following films, The Incredibles, Cars and Finding Nemo were produced entirely by Pixar, with Disney only distributing the films. A trend that was set to continue with Ratatouille, that was until Mr Jobs sold the company to Disney.
Ratatouille also marks what is currently my favourite period of Pixar, a period which includes their subsequent films Wall-E, Up and Toy Story 3 which, fact fans, is currently the highest grossing animated film of all time, as well as being only the third animated film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, the previous two being Disney’s Beauty & The Beast, and Pixar’s Up.
But all good things must come to an end, as did this glorious run, screeching to a halt with a sequel to Cars. Cars 2 is essentially a spy movie, consisting of two tried and tested movie elements. The first being that of mistaken identity and the second, the classic embarrassing friend, who’s eventually excepted for who they are regardless of what the rest of the world think. The friend in question is Mater, the idiot tow truck, who in the sequel takes a more central role, skidding out from behind the bland shadow of the originals lead, Lightening McQueen. For all my bellyaching it was fairly entertaining, though just as weak as its predecessor. The Japanese airline being called Sam-Air-ai was probably my favourite moment in the film, which I suppose doesn’t say much does it, if a 5 second sight gag was the highlight.
To be honest I was surprised when I first found out that they were planning a sequel to what in my opinion is one of the worst Pixar offerings, a view which is obviously shared by the ten people who voted in the poll recently posted on this very blog, which had a Bug’s Life, Cars & Cars 2 not receiving a single vote.
Hopefully Pixar can redeem themselves with the upcoming Brave and Monsters Inc. prequel, Monster University.
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