Perhaps I’m breaking my post-graduation tradition here.
Back in July of last year, I had ceased writing for my old animation news blog Kyle’s Animated World, but I did say that I would still be talking about the happenings in the animation industry in some way or another. A lot of animation news and newly-announced movies have made the rounds, and while I used to dedicate whole blog posts to these developments, I simply mention them on Twitter nowadays. A few words, boom, off to other things.
Very rarely has a fairly recent announcement moved me to actually talk more about the subject… On the 12th of December, Pixar and The Walt Disney Company officially announced the title of their upcoming “Suburban Fantasy World”-set epic. Called Onward, and set for release on the first weekend of March 2020 (a Pixar first, a movie of theirs not opening in the summer or the holiday season), the film is to be written and directed by Monsters University director Dan Scanlon. The film’s wildly inventive premise and already promising storyline were already announced last year at the summer D23 Expo, and at this point, I’m just thrilled about the whole thing.
Onward begins not only a new decade for Pixar, but also begins a new streak of films that are not sequels, as it has been announced that this coming summer’s Toy Story 4 will be the studio’s last sequel for a while. Onward also happens to be the first original Pixar film to begin full production after the departure of former studio head John Lasseter. As many of you may know, Lasseter was out of the studio since November of 2017, and officially ended his run after a “sabbatical” this past June. He was on company payroll till the very end of the year. Pete Docter, one of Pixar’s most instrumental people and the director of favorites like Monsters, Inc., Up, and Inside Out has taken the reins as Pixar CCO and Onward will be the first original he’ll be overseeing. Though much of the film has been in development during Lasseter’s final years (Scanlon presumably began development on this film after Monsters University‘s completion in 2013), it’ll be a Docter-era release. So many firsts, but Pixar more than has it in them to soldier on under a new leader. By all accounts, the Lasseter regime had to come to an end. The abhorrent sexual misconduct and frequent objectification aside, he was too much of a cult of personality figure who few questioned, he often hogged credit and even outright took ideas from people, and his Pixar wasn’t quite a benevolent dictatorship. His Disney Animation wasn’t much nicer. His guard dog Ed Catmull (who was instrumental in a long-running, industry-wide wage fixing scandal) also hung up the cape, co-president Jim Morris looks to be on his own in this department from here on out.
The newest Pixar feature operates off of the typical “what if” premise, and thankfully this one sounds fresh and exciting again. One thing that Pixar has barely tackled in their 20+ years of making feature films is the high fantasy genre. Castles, monsters, dragons, magic, dark lords, all that sort of stuff. Things along the lines of Lord of the Rings, The Chronicles of Narnia, Dungeons & Dragons, The NeverEnding Story, Elric of Melnibone, etc. I feel that animation can realize that genre perfectly.
There have been attempts outside of the usual fairy tale. Long before Peter Jackson made what is the definitive film version of J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, it was given two animated adaptations by Rankin/Bass (in 1977 and 1980 respectively) and a rotoscoped adaptation by Ralph Bakshi. Disney had actually expressed a desire to take a crack at the property, but Tolkein infamously despised Disney films (he had blasted Snow White on its initial release), so that was never going to happen. Perhaps in response to not getting the opportunity to work within the world of Middle Earth, the Disney studio then turned to Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain, an adaptation of that went in and out of development and ended up becoming The Black Cauldron, a rather hollow adventure (despite its ambitions) and a commercial disaster that the company – in my opinion – treats rather unfairly to this day. Some of its visuals show that Disney could indeed pull off this sort of story…
Disney avoided the darker fantasy fare of the 80s after The Black Cauldron sank at the box office, and would later focus more on fairy tales, animal stories, and the occasional novel (like… The Hunchback of Notre Dame… Avoid dark fantasy, but adapt Victor Hugo!) or folk tale. In 2020, they may possibly be tackling a high fantasy story of their own, reportedly a film called Dragon Empire. The early word coming from the trenches indicate that it’s a Middle Kingdom-set story, and judging by that title, it could have some elements of the genre in it. DreamWorks gave us the How To Train Your Dragon trilogy, more of an action-fantasy series, but nonetheless a series that suggests just how well animation can pull off something in this field. Other films have either dabbled with the conventions, others have faint traces of it… Few animated films made here in the states fully immerse themselves in it all without being a familiar fairy tale. There have been various films over time, such as Rankin/Bass’ adaptation of The Last Unicorn to the Hungarian feature The Princess and the Goblin. In simple terms, where’s our American animated equivalent of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies? Something big budget and animated through-and-through, that can rival that series and other works like it.
Pixar slightly dipped into the genre with Brave, a film that at its core was a mother-daughter relationship drama with some comedy and adventure sprinkled in. We get hints of magical things, from the witch and her spells to the will o’ the wisps. However, they don’t feel as front-and-center. Merida’s mum turning into a bear is about as far as we go in terms of the magical stuff, and the witch is in and out and more of a comic relief character. It’s a fantasy-set film with unusually subdued fantasy elements, if that makes any sense. I like Brave for what it is, but after seeing it, part of me always wanted to see something like it that was much more fleshed out, with lots of worldbuilding and unique elements… Onward appears to be just this.
Onward is set in a world where fantasy and magic gave way to modernity. Its world was once magical, but it all seems to have disappeared. Elves, sprites, trolls, and whatnot now live in a suburban. Unicorns are like raccoons in this world, pests rummaging through rubbish. Dragons appear to fly around town, if the concept art revealed at D23 is any indicator.
If anything, as unique as that idea is, the suburban world must be boring compared to what it once was. Perhaps this change can be seen as a parallel to wonder and imagination being pushed aside by cynicism and boredom, not dissimilar to how animation consequently gets linked to childishness, then people toss it away in their attempt to be “grown up” and “adult”. How did all the magic disappear? Is it considered fake in this modern setting? The storyline follows two elf brothers who never knew their father, a story that mirrors Dan Scanlon’s childhood. The two go on a journey to see if magic still exists, and if they find it, they hope they can use it to spend a day with their deceased father. I’m already getting emotional just looking at that synopsis… I was wowed the first time I read it back in June 2017.
Recently, a Pixar animator and story artist named Austin Madison stated on twitter…
“If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if John Hughes directed a Tolkien story, you may want to join our quest.”
A Pixar animated film channeling the iconic 80s coming-of-age comedies of Hughes is certainly something to get worked up about, but it also poses another question… Since this film is about two teenaged elf brothers, what kind of tone and content will Pixar aim for outside of the obvious fantasy elements? Are we in for a feature that, while being family friendly, will push its PG rating in a way that the recently-released Incredibles 2 and the debut Pixar SparkShort Purl did? Will it tackle some teen issues that will indeed be complicated for the young’uns to understand? I didn’t expect Disney Animation’s Wreck-It Ralph sequel to have its titular character’s story arc mirror who I was when I was 15, and he’s technically an adult! Just imagine how Pixar will tell a story of two teenaged boys. While my experiences during my teen years aren’t that of everyone else’s, I’m curious as to how close Onward‘s story might be to what I went through.
So… Pixar tackling a John Hughes-esque teen drama with a high fantasy backdrop… That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more territory to explore in the limitless medium of animation, and I don’t say that they’re the only ones who should explore, but after a decade of sequels and some meaty originals, I think it’s high time they really experiment. Not just for shorts…
I think Scanlon’s a good director, and the right fit for this material. Scanlon’s previous film had him playing in a pre-established sandbox, that of the fantastical world of Monsters, Inc. While Monsters, Inc. and Monsters University aren’t set in a world of swords and sorcery, it is full of… Well… Monsters! Not the sinister kind you see in most high fantasy films, but a different and everyday-life kind. Not dissimilar to the suburbanite creatures of this upcoming film. Scanlon and his crew made Monsters University their own, with cinematography and staging that set it apart from its predecessor, most of which took place at the titular factory. Scanlon showed what he was made of with the film’s third act climax, where Mike and Sulley are plunged into the human world. Those sequences contrast quite nicely with the warm intimacy of the rest of the film and its campus setting, but there’s a break in the hectic, sometimes claustrophobic and eerie tone of the campsite scenes… The scene of Mike and Sulley sitting at the lake, confessing to one another… The highlight of the film. That right there showed me that Scanlon was as good a director as any at Pixar.
Instead of coming into someone else’s world, Scanlon has created his own, and that’ll be very exciting to see. For me, I’m always excited to see how a director on a Pixar movie shows his or her stuff. Maybe Docter’s Pixar will be even more filmmaker-friendly than ever before, and perhaps we’ll see Scanlon knock it out of the park in a way Lee Unkrich, coming off of his directorial debut – a Toy Story sequel, did with Coco last year. At Pixar, I can kind of see something in the veteran directors. Pete Docter always made the quirkier films, ones that effortlessly balanced wackiness (i.e. Up‘s talking dogs, Inside Out‘s many brain lands) and raw emotion. Andrew Stanton is the “epic” director, as I like to say. His films are BIG. Massive. He may be credited as mere “co-director” on A Bug’s Life, but I feel that film is also his through-and-through, as much as it is Lasseter’s. I think a lot of his undersea odyssey Finding Nemo shows what he learned on A Bug’s Life, they’re both stories about relatively small creatures navigating big, sometimes harsh, and often beautiful worlds. WALL-E was set on post-apocalyptic Earth and in outer space. Stanton later directed a live-action sci-fi adventure epic for Walt Disney Pictures, the much-maligned John Carter of Mars, and regularly works in live-action now, save for his work on Finding Dory. Thomas Newman has scored most of his films, and his work enhances the bigness Stanton goes for in his movies. Brad Bird is always the cutting edge director. The Incredibles was the punk Pixar film in the development slate circa 2002, he made Ratatouille a very distinctive film, and his return to Pixar – in the form of Incredibles 2 – was just as unique. Brad’s loud and proud about animation, and will tell you straight up that animation is a goddamn art form. You can see that in his movies, he makes movies for adults that just happen to be suitable for children to watch. Most children, anyways.
Up until Toy Story 3, the Pixar films had been handled by that group of directors, with Lasseter filling in whatever gaps there were. Cars was mainly the late Joe Ranft and Jorgen Klubien’s film, but Lasseter’s narrative was that he was the main director of Cars and most of the project’s originator. Toy Story 3 was directed by Lee Unkrich, who had been a “co-director” on the second Toy Story, and on Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo as well. Nowadays, I’m iffy on the “co-director” credit, which you don’t see in movies much, or even animation for that matter. It makes one wonder if “co-director” was just a fancy word for something else when it comes to Pixar’s films, and the films John oversaw at Disney Animation. Anyways, Toy Story was very much Unkrich’s toybox, so he fared very well with Toy Story 3. When Coco came out, I saw the parallels. Unkrich has something of a dark streak in his work. Toy Story 3 was heavier in tone than its predecessors, and ended on a bittersweet note. Coco was an exploration of death, with some very upsetting undertones and an equally bittersweet ending. Perhaps the final death of Chicharron, a friend of deuteragonist Hector’s whom no one remembered in the Land of the Living, is one of the bleakest minutes of any Pixar film. He is no longer at Pixar now…
What about other directors? Well, these last few years have been hard for anyone who isn’t Docter, Stanton, Bird, or Unkrich. Brad Lewis was given a very difficult timetable with Cars 2 and was directing a B-team, then he ended up being shuffled off of the project. Given that it was handed to Lasseter at the very last minute, it’s easy to assume that a lot of the movie was his. Brave‘s behind-the-scenes drama was infamous. Brenda Chapman was on the project up until it went into full production, Lasseter removed her on the vague grounds of “creative differences”, but truthfully, Chapman – a woman, no less – stood up to Lasseter. That got her axed from her very personal project. She fought to get her director credit on the finished film, and fought to hold the Oscar on stage with the man who finished the film, Mark Andrews. Some of what we see in Brave suggests something more intimate and nuanced than the usual Pixar adventure. The Good Dinosaur was to be directed by veteran Bob Peterson, but even he wasn’t enough to please Lasseter. After his removal from the movie, everything was restarted. His co-director Pete Sohn took the reins and crafted an overlooked, atmospheric, quiet, and sometimes relentlessly brutal Western wilderness adventure… With dinosaurs. Not all of it was distinctive, but the parts that were? Imagine a whole film like that! Brian Fee basically followed the model of the first Cars when directing Cars 3, he did fine, now he has an original in the works, so we’ll really see what he can do sometime next decade.
Like this decade, we’re going to see new directors handle films, and with Lasseter out, I have a feeling these folks will actually get to finish their films. Domee Shi, director of the wonderful short film Bao, already has a feature in development. With what she achieved in six minutes with Bao, think of how glorious a full 90-or-so minutes overseen by her will be! Not to mention, the film is sure to have her cultural stamp all over it, something Pixar’s been needing for a long while. Coco is just the beginning. Mark Andrews was said to have an original film in the works as far back as 2012, and it may still be in the works. If so, then we’ll also get an idea of what kind of director he is. Bob Peterson is taking a crack at another original story, soldiering on (or appropriately, heading onward) after his dismissal from the dinosaur film. Pete Docter, despite being in his high position, has a new film in the works, sure to amaze. It is unknown when Andrew Stanton will direct another Pixar film, he’s back and forth with live-action stuff and animation. Brad Bird is off making a live-action musical with a good chunk of animation in it. For whom? No one knows yet. For some people, these things take time. Bird has ideas for animated films that wouldn’t fly at Pixar, or the industry for that matter, so he may be seeking alternative outlets to make those happen. Maybe not. Stanton is big on live-action, as he stated that animation is too time-consuming for him. It’s time for new folks to do Pixar movies, and Scanlon’s going to be one of the folks at the forefront. Perhaps a younger generation is getting ready, what with Domee Shi being in her late 20s. Like Disney went through in the 70s, the baton needs to be passed at some point. Maybe the directors of those SparkShorts are going to get a push. SparkShorts was meant to be an underground initiative, and its first few entries are films that probably wouldn’t have made it past Lasseter, but again, he’s gone and Docter’s in charge. Who knows, maybe the experimental basement folks will get a seat upstairs…
Who knows where Pixar will be, post-Toy Story 4… Perhaps the new and presumably final adventure in Pixar’s first franchise will be the end of an era…