Ntuple Indemnity

This comes a bit late, but since Friday there have been reports of Disney going ahead on Toy Story 3. This is, in a word, problematic.

When Pixar’s contract extension negotiations with Disney fell apart earlier this year, one of the stumbling blocks just begging for trouble was Disney’s retention of sequel rights. This is the result: the possibility of a second-rate, non-Pixar Toy Story movie – and one likely going straight into cinemas.

Let’s be very clear about one thing: second-rate sequels of any sort have no place existing at all, but given that studios nowadays are greenlighting such hotly-anticipated titles as Baby Geniuses 2, let’s accept that they are a very real threat. The least you could do is relegate them to a second-rate medium (i.e. direct-to-video) where you can exploit the pocketbooks of uninformed parents all you want without disturbing the peace for the rest of us. Franchise projects like this are a veritable sinkhole for a studio’s marketing dollars and come bundled with a theatrical print release strategy known as “clogging the rivers with their dead.” In the end, nobody wins, except for the execs who point to the opening-weekend figures and think they made money, ignoring the fact that said figures are nowadays more indicative of hype than lasting appeal. The result: Toy Story 4.

Worthwhile sequels in general are rare enough, and when it comes to animation, there is perhaps only one, that being Toy Story 2; and before you heckle “The Rescuers Down Under?” let’s not pretend for a moment that it is on equal parity with John Lasseter’s seminal masterpiece. The point is, the reason why Toy Story 2 escaped DTV Hell at all was because to understate its quality, it was a cinema-worthy project made by cinema-worthy storytellers.

Apparently this sent the Mouse House the message that DTV-quality sequels can still make a lot of money at the multiplexes, hence the silver-screen treatments of The Jungle Book 2 and Return to Neverland, which nobody remembers, and with good reason. This is backwards thinking. The other form of backwards thinking we’ve seen recently is how Pixar’s nine-digit returns on every single film has sent Disney the message that CG is automatically salable. What they are forgetting is that the likes of John Lasseter, Pete Docter and Andrew Stanton actually know how to make movies, while the only in-house CG feature we’ve seen from Disney tried to rip off The Land Before Time and couldn’t even do it right. But lest I waste more valuable keystrokes flogging this deceased equine, I will defer to this editorial entitled “Why Pixar’s films are more ‘Disney’ than Disney’s”, which explains it a whole lot better than I could here.

The best solution, of course, is a coup at the top of Disney’s chain of command like the shareholder revolt last month, only successful. Ejecting Michael Eisner could mean repairing the Pixar-Disney relationship, which implies there will thankfully be no Toy Story 3 unless and until there’s a worthy idea to back it up. Furthermore, as explained in a lot more detail in this Jim Hill article, this may resolve the issue of which distributor picks up Ratatouille in time for a projected 2006 release.

If you have noticed the conspicuous absence of any entries in the past week – and if you are one of the handful of people who lurk here without telling me – three things: a) I know you’re out there by way of third-party information, b) the “Annotate” link is there for a reason, and 3) you are probably wondering what I thought of The Matrix Revolutions.

Regarding the film, I have drawn the conclusion that I cannot formulate an adequate assessment until a second viewing. My initial impression is one that lacks fulfilment. This is a movie that needed to provide both plot resolution and thematic resolution, and save for the best exchange of dialogue in the entire trilogy during the final fight, the second was distractingly incomplete. Plot-wise, there was the appropriate balance of denouement and ambiguity. Theme-wise, some ideas were swatted away rather than provided with appropriately soft landings.

The film was enjoyable nonetheless, though the intelligence and visual audacity exhibited by The Matrix Reloaded was not improved upon. The biggest problem with Revolutions is that next to the first two films, it feels all too conventional.

The laziness-business dialectic axis prevents me from elaborating any further at this time, so do not take this as a full review.

Another release that deserves some comment is the debut of Cartoon Network’s Clone Wars series of shorts by Genndy Tartakovsky, perhaps the flag-bearer of this generation of expressionistic animation, a generation without a Friz Freleng or Chuck Jones at the helm. The first episode is on the Cartoon Network website, but is inaccessible for anyone outside the United States. File-sharing is a Canadian’s best friend – except hockey, that is.

Chapter 1 is, more than anything, a tease of what’s to come. So far, it looks good. The best part about it is that it does not yet show any signs of falling victim to the stock conventions that make the Expanded Universe so unbearable. It’s slick, it’s stylish, and even though it isn’t at all like the style of the films, it possesses a dynamism that somehow feels right. Chapter 2 is due out tonight, so we will see how this develops.

As for what occupied me all weekend: I was debating in the University of Alberta’s home tournament, the Hugill Cup, Friday through Sunday. That’s right – Sunday. For a variety of reasons, among which was the ineligibility of a rubber duck named Bismarck, I made it into one of the two semi-final rooms and won an exquisite set of coasters. Unfortunately, I botched my secret mission from uncharted space to break into public speaking finals right in the very first round. Next time, Gadget, next time.

Check out the results. And if you see one of Misters Crossman or Tse, buy him a well-deserved drink, and ask him to show you that snappy champions’ pocketwatch.

My praise for the Metro Cinema may become a fairly regular feature of this weblog. Tonight they presented a reel of the winning entries from this year’s Ottawa International Animation Festival.

The amount of pure, sweet creativity thrust upon me tonight was so staggering that describing my individual reactions to each of the eleven shorts is quite an unmanageable affair. There were two delightfully quirky (read: weird) films by National Film Board staple Chris Hinton, “Flux” and “Twang”, which both push the limits of what sequential drawings on paper can do in terms of narrative storytelling. The winner of Most Hilarious Film, “How Democracy Actually Works”, provoked exactly that reaction from the audience. I will never look at public washrooms the same way again.

The NSPCC-commissioned short, “Cartoon”, was one entry I’d seen before in the 2002 Cannes Film Festival’s “World’s Best Commercials” reel. To this day it remains one of the most shocking thirty seconds of mixed media I’ve seen; in fact, I thought of it again a week ago when I read this Economist article about how child abuse is still tolerated in France. It depicts a father smacking around a cartoon child who reacts with all the eye-rolling, head-spinning wackiness of Wile E. Coyote. At one point the child tumbles down the stairs; “Real children don’t bounce back,” we’re then told, as it pans over to reveal a real boy lying at the foot of the steps.

My faith in modern television programming was also renewed by an episode of Samurai Jack (“Jack and the Blind Archers”), winner of Best Television Series, which I had never before seen. In all my years of bemoaning the demise of worthwhile television cartoons, it appears that all the creativity in the industry had been monopolized by this particular show and its creator, Genndy Tartakovsky. Suddenly, my faith in Tartakovsky’s upcoming Clone Wars project – about which I once had serious doubts – has been renewed. They picked exactly the right man to do a Star Wars spinoff. Of course, I will have to see it first before I comment further.

The Norwegian winner of Best Film Made for Children, Anita Killi’s “The Hedge of Thorns”, was probably my favourite of the evening. It depicts a world of personified bunnies, where a boy wishes only to play with a girl across the creek, but one day finds in place of the creek an endless line of barbed wire. As far as tackling the subject of war goes, it surpasses most feature films that see release in the multiplex nowadays.

I should really stop here before I get carried away. If the Ottawa reel plays anywhere near you, I unreservedly recommend that you go see it.