Graduation

Rating: Null/10 (25 June 2010)

You go to hear Steve Jobs at one of his Keynote addresses not because you worship the man. It is because you want to be a part of history. You want to be present at the moment that in the future people will say that the world changed. Jobs is a revolutionary; always was. Always will be.
His whole approach is based on advancing, advancing, even if he ends up cannibalizing his own market. This is why no one can really compete, because there has to be a fearlessness to do the new. Pixar was like that, and it is why I cherished their projects. Oh, they used good old story engineering. And they were quite happy to pander to simple established emotional responses. But in every film they did two things which kept me coming back. You might call it the Orson Welles model:
— advance the cinematic vocabulary so that the narrative has fresh power.
— support a narrative that itself is new, that does not rely on genre conventions, so that it can hook to the cinema rather than the memory.
Well, folks, Pixar might be dead as a force in film. This movie is a disaster. Oh, it is polished enough. It has that Pixar sheen. It is profoundly effective in making you cry at the endearing new character, Daisy. But it has no new visual ideas in it. None. None at all, the first Pixar project of which this can be said. I will point you to the texture of the shredded garbage toward the end and its luminescence which is novel. But this is merely a software advance that isn't leveraged. No. After giving us a new set of camera conventions every bit as influential as Hitchcock's, they have stopped.
Disney? The "just a manufactured product" mentality? I guess.
Oh, and the story. I will grant you that this story is superficially like the others. But look more closely. In the past, they have been scrupulously original. They would never, never have sullied a story by asking you to refer to another movie — excepting other Pixar movies of course. Let other, lessor studios do that, seemed to be their stance. So while it is okay for "Madagascar: Escape 2 Afric" to be made entirely of references to other films, Pixar stories connected because they connected with your emotions without a film memory as intermediary.
But what do we have here? The central element is the big escape, and a half dozen movies are trotted out. Sure, we get it and it is even a fun thing. But it is not pure storytelling, not of the kind we expected.
Don't go to this if you do not want your heart broken. They have grown up and gone to college, and have left their imagination at home.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.