Caught Pixar's latest on Friday afternoon, when Malaya and I belatedly realized that
Sunshine, (catch
the Extended Trailer; see my raving
about it here) which we both much more wanted to see, was not opening wide until the next weekend.
Sunshine was showing in the Bay Area on Friday the 20th, but only at a big theater in downtown SF, and we didn't care enough to BART way the hell over there. So
Ratat it was.
The first risk of seeing a Pixar film is that the experience may be ruined/compromised by noisy children. Fortunately, that risk can be minimized by not seeing the film on opening weekend, or at any weekend matinee thereafter. We were in the early afternoon, but on a Friday, so we were okay there. The second risk is less avoidable, and it hit us right between the eyes. Horrible trailers for horrible "family" movies. We endured
Daddy Day Care,
Underdog,
Bratz, and a couple of equally-mind numbing others, none of which generated any audible response from us or anyone else in the theater. They're not merely stupid and bad; they literally suck the air out of the building. No wonder Pixar puts a short before their films (a cute but forgettable alien-abduction comedy before
Ratatouille). They need some kind of buffer to let the audience's minds reboot after going into white noise neutral to survive the onslaught of other brightly-colored "family" films.
The trailers were useful in one way; as a reminder of why I do what I can to never watch any regular network programming during the afternoons or weeknights, or any non-feature films on Nickelodeon, Disney, USA, ABC-Family, or other similarly-themed cable channels. The pandering and dumbing down of everything to the level of a not very bright eight-year old is physically painful. Painful to adults, and even to the children. As I mentioned in my recent
Transformers review, I remember thinking how stupid the writing on that TV show was when I was in the target age audience.
In retrospect, I can hardly imagine how crazy I would have gone for the Anime available today, if they'd had it when I was nine. I loved cartoons as a kid, despite the fact that every series on US TV was just so stupid. Childish characters, formulaic plots, crappy animation, etc. I remember sitting through
Inspector Gadget and
Transformers and
He-Man and
GI Joe and all the rest and loving the visuals, but always being so bored with the stupid events. But that's all we had, in the early 1980s. Most of it was being drawn in Asia, and lots of it was translated and dubbed (dumbed?) into English from original programming in Japan or Korea or Hong Kong, but it might as well have been churned out by the hacks running Fox Kids these days.
If I'd have had access to real Anime though, the good, intelligent, adult-themed (but still silly and juvenile, granted) series that are now on Adult Swim and filling up the Anime section at your local video store, I would have been in heaven. The visuals I loved with interesting characters and plots more involved than your average episode of
The Smurfs? Man, if I were 10 today I would just about live on YouTube grabbing every episode of everything coming out of Japan, and anime DVDs would permanently dominate my Xmas/Bday lists. And imagine how different I would be today? Why without those years of soccer practice and skateboarding, I might still have two functional knees, for one thing.
That digression aside, the trailers for everything before
Ratat were ghastly, and the worst was for the new Mr. Bean film. I know nothing about the guy/character other than that he did an earlier US movie that I have remained blissfully ignorant of, and that people say the Mr. Bean in the movies now is a stupid, dumbed-down, Americanized version of a classic comedy character he created in Britain. I have no opinion on that, but I don't disbelieve it. I do have an opinion on
this new trailer though, and it is that I have almost certainly never seen a stupider trailer in my life. I'm sure I have seen something dumber and forgotten it, but it couldn't have been much worse. I am willing to entertain the notion that if you like the Mr. Bean character you might be older than the age of 8 and find some portions of this amusing; but you would need some pretty strong evidence to convince me of that. Malaya and me sat there in dumb, sociological, horror. What was it? Who was this meant to entertain? Are children really entertained by this sort of face-making, pratfalling, silly-dancing imbecility? It's almost a kind of art, like a parody of parodies, with a nonsensical man-child idiot capering about, performing antics no actual human would ever engage in, to the soothing-toned narration of Mr. Voice.
There was one decent trailer, the
one with SpiderPig, but even that trailer isn't aging well. I enjoyed it when I first saw it online, but now that I've seen it several times it's grating on me. It's too frantic and chopped full of .5 second clips of every single chaotic scene in the movie. It's as if the marketing people had a list of trailer requirement, and they insisted that the Simpsons trailers give no more than a faint hint of the film's plot, and that they constantly remind the audience that it's a Simpsons
movie. "This is the big screen, ladies and gentlemen, and we've got a budget now. We can produce shots in which more than one character moves at the same time!" As a result, every shot in the trailer depicts hundreds of townspeople running from an explosion, or hundreds of missiles blasting into space, and the only slower portions are those with Homer and SpiderPig. Those are the only bits with anything character-based, the only moments in the whole trailer that show the sort of human interaction that's made the show popular for umpteen years, and the only thing anyone remembers from the trailer, since everything else is just a wash of frantic
Strum und Drang which possess no cohesive properties for our memories to latch onto.
If the Simpsons trailer were for a new cartoon property, or even one not known very well, it would be an abysmal failure. At best it would inspire some faint "WTF?" curiosity. Since everyone knows the Simpsons, and everyone pretty well already knows if they're going to see the film version or not, based on how they feel about the TV show, the trailer exists mostly to let us know it's not just a 3x longer version of a TV show episode. And at that they theoretically succeed. I think the trailer would be much improved if it stressed more of the elements that makes the show work, rather than all the special effects the movie gave them the budget/processing cycles to indulge in. The greater resources will not make the film, but they might well break it. Fans of the Simpsons, even/especially ones like Malaya and me who haven't watched the show in years, are interested in the movie because it's a wacky comedy staring characters we love. No one is buying a ticket to
The Simpsons Movie because they've always wanted to see Springfield destroyed with slightly 3d-tinged computer graphics, while hundreds of the townsfolk run in individually-animated terror. Yet that's what the trailer pushes, almost non-stop.
As
Ratatouille itself... it's very good. Very smart, very well-written and well-produced, and filled with interesting, living characters who evince real human emotions (even when they come from rodents and food critics) with clever and witty dialogue. It is not, however, a great deal of fun or action-packed or anything else you might anticipate or desire from a Pixar film. It's directed by Brad Bird, who last directed
The Incredibles, which I thought was the best Pixar film to date, and almost certainly the best superhero movie as well.
To make a very poor analogy,
Ratatouille is
The Incredibles minus 90% of the brilliantly-inventive action sequences. Same good characters and clever dialogue and believable motivations; and lots of scenes of them interacting exactly as real human actors could have, without the benefits of CGI. It's proof of Bird's frequent statement that animation is a technique, not a genre. There's basically nothing in
Ratatouille that makes it children's entertainment, except for a lack of profanity or sexual content. It's all about mature themes such as pursuing your dreams, accepting diversity, learning to grow in life, balancing family with desires for independence, not being afraid to try something new and different, etc. And it handles all of them very surely and very competently. It is not, however, a thrilling movie experience.
To be honest, even though it will put me into direct conflict with my excoriation of the trailers presented before the film, I wanted
Ratatouille dumbed down a bit. More action, more comedy, more wacky hijinks. I appreciated all the good acting and voice work and animation and direction and such... I just wanted more fun in my movie experience. I don't think those elements are mutually-exclusive;
The Incredibles demonstrates that. I just wanted more oomph in the voomph.
Some scores.
Ratatouille
Script/Story: 8
Acting/Casting: 8
Action: 3
Eye Candy: 6
Fun Factor: 4
Replayability: 6
Overall: 7
I'd go into my reasoning on some of the individual scores, but I think they're pretty self evident from the intro, eh? Nothing was done poorly in the film, I just wanted a rebalancing of the elements. The personalities and human conflicts and dynamics in
The Incredibles worked even though there were lots of wildly enjoyable action sequences, and that could have worked here as well. Not to the same extent, since this isn't some kind of SuperRat movie (*shudder of memory at the
Garfield the Movie-esque, uncanny valley-dwelling,
Underdog trailer*), but I'm an action movie fan at heart, and if I can have a great film with action sequences, I'll take that over the great film without them. In fact, quite often I take good action sequences and ignore
the utter crap that is the rest of the film/overall product. So yeah, I'm biased, but at least I’m honest about my biases.
Ratatouille is being rapturously received on the whole, and has the highest score to date this year on
RottenTomatoes and
MetaCritic, metrics that are achieved by aggregating dozens of individual reviews. As I remarked to friend while discussing it on Saturday, this is the kind of movie that you appreciate more, the more movies you see. Me seeing a movie a month, enjoyed this but wanted a bit more fun to go with the intelligence and character-driven performances. A movie critic sitting through eight or ten instances a month of the kind of empty-headed drivel we saw trailered before
Ratatouille... couldn't help but think this film a revelation. As evidenced by the near-unanimity of their scores.
Labels: movie review, movie trailers, pixar
