Yes, today is Election Day and, therefore, is a serious day filled with serious talk about serious issues that seriously affect us. I was prepared to write today about a serious book that, in the minds of most, encompasses America and, by virtue of the main character in said book, is a representation of how most of us view our own ethics and morals. But then I thought to myself that the post about that book can wait until Thanksgiving—not only because it would seem more appropriate but also that we Americans are now so serious. Everything is a crisis and everything will soon fall apart because the center cannot hold. We all find ourselves to be modern-day Yeats‘s who have become defeated by the existential dread burdening us all.
It would seem, to me, that now is the perfect time to play the opposite card. So, check your seriousness at the door and relax. Ready? Okay.
We all have an inner dork in us. It is inescapable. We are all capable of engaging in hours of discussion about the NFL, Babylon 5, game shows, Precious Moments, Tex-Mex or Asian fusion recipes, child television stars, debunking religious myths, whatever. For me, my inner dork is fueled by a few things: Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Lost, music, and Pixar movies. While you would not outwardly know this if you met me (I do not own any collectible trinkets of any nature), I am a Pixar nerd on the inside. To me, Pixar movies are the only ones that make going to the theater an event nowadays. As I have said to people before, go see a Pixar movie and try to come out of it in a bad mood; between the sheer entertainment quality and the sounds of kids and adults laughing, you simply cannot.
Pixar as we know it today was founded in 1986 when Steve Jobs purchased it from George Lucas’ Computer Division of Lucasfilm (it was originally started in 1979 under the ultra-bland name of The Graphics Group). John Lasseter, one of the founding members of the company, is the face of the company alongside Jobs and was one of the driving forces behind Toy Story, the first feature-length, exclusively computer-animated movie that has forever changed modern cinema. Toy Story is our generation’s Citizen Kane or Bonnie And Clyde.
The history of Pixar aside, this post is obviously about the movies. With the exception of Toy Story 2 (I’m allergic to Joan Cusack’s voice), every movie has been nothing short of outstanding and with each new release they seem to outdo themselves. The first Toy Story was so fundamentally groundbreaking that it would have been well within the bounds of reason to suggest that the follow-up movie might be average at best. Instead, A Bug’s Life was released and it pretty much cemented Pixar’s place in history as a movie studio that would take huge creative chances and meticulously craft movies that would redefine the child/adult dichotomy within the cinema world. In both movies, it is the secondary and tertiary characters that play to this dichotomy flawlessly as the bit parts of Mr. Potato Head and the army soldiers in Toy Story and the roly-poly bugs and Denis Leary-voiced ladybug of A Bug’s Life play right into the up-front laughter of kids while also serving as something way more contextually funny for adults. All of Pixar’s movie have this quality and its excellence is usually so effortless that you begin to wonder if they have access to some oracle that other studios are unaware of.
Following A Bug’s Life, the roster plays out like this: the aforementioned Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, and Wall-E. All of these—with the exception of Toy Story 2—play on an entirely new perspective and lets the audience process the “authenticity” of these alternate universes.
We have all thought of bedtime monsters before, either as a kid who is scared of them or as an adult who had to be called in to quell them for kids, and the idea that “Sully” and Mike scare kids for a living by way of an office that uses closet doors as portal to kids’ rooms is something that seems plausible.
A world in which superheroes have been banished, yet an overweight dad that cannot help but to help people is a theme worthy of most comic book story arcs.
Cars living in an outdated ghost town who have to deal with the ego and bravado of a race car who believes himself to be a future racing God is a modern re-telling of the country mouse/city mouse dynamic.
A mouse who aspires to be a five-star chef and the critic who yearns to yield total control over people’s tastes fits perfectly into our current culture of simultaneously loving cooking shows, books, and channels while also yearning to see elimination and judgment.
The story of a robot, designed solely to clean up our mess after we jettisoned the Earth so that we could live in space, that begins to develop a personality and falls in love with a robot that was sent back to Earth to scan for signs of life is one of the best “love” stories to grace a cinema in a little while.
And, of course, there is Finding Nemo, which may be the crown jewel of Pixar’s lineup up to this point. The lush backgrounds, the flawless casting of Ellen DeGeneres as Dory, and the cast of tertiary characters (the personalities assigned to the seagulls, the crabs, and the turtles are top shelf stuff) make this story of journey and family about as timeless as any of the other masterpieces of our time, be it in cinema or in books.
To a certain extent, we humans are probably programmed to believe that “things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” This notion has certainly accelerated in the last two hundred years or so when European philosophers, psychologists, and writers started to find a burgeoning, fertile audience who eagerly agreed that the end was near. Huge events like the Industrial Revolution and both World Wars wreaked havoc on our psyches during and afterwards to the point that we take it for granted that something is fundamentally wrong with our society and that shadowy groups of men are putting the screws to us. (Sorry, I guess I have to get back to serious stuff if I am to tie this all together.)
To be sure, some of this is valid—either objectively because proof was obtained by legal or journalistic measures, or subjectively because everyone else’s reality is always slightly unique when compared to others. What is also valid is that even in times of spectral chaos we also crave escape. Hollywood was founded on escape; beauty, glamour, humor, suspense, and drama all visually realized on a screen. Pixar, like any studio, will never save the world from itself but their movies certainly put us in a much better state of mind before arriving at the box office.
At least, this is what my inner dork thinks.