After watching Up and Toy Story 3 with my daughter, I've come to the conclusion that someone over at Pixar is going through something and needs a friend. Pixar is getting darker and darker in the tone of their movies. I remember seeing Toy Story 2 in high school (shut up) and empathizing with the girl cowboy who got ditched by her previous owner and left to rot in a box on the side of the road. As fucked up as that was, the overall movie was still kind of a comedy. My how we've lost our way.
With the exception of Wal-E's heavy handed "save the planet" theme, all of Pixar's movies have been pretty fun to watch. The Incredibles has to be one of my all-time favorite movies, cartoon or otherwise. Imagine my confusion when I sat through "Up." What the hell happened to Pixar's collective life? The first fifteen minutes were like the worst "welcome to reality" for kids that I've ever seen.
"Yeah Billy, if you think you were sad when you found out there was no Santa Claus, wait til 'Up' teaches you about miscarriages, ovarian cancer and the fact that none of your dreams will ever come true."
By the time we actually got to the plot of the movie, I completely understood why the old guy was bitter as hell at the world. He married his childhood sweetheart and NONE of their dreams came true. They had some place they wanted to visit and everytime they saved up enough money to go, some shit would go wrong in their lives. Talk about realistic. Then she had a series of miscarriages and they found out she couldn't have kids. Finally, later in life the old guy finally decides to just throw caution to the wind and take her on their dream trip and what happens? She fucking dies! WTF?
Then you meet the most pathetically optimistic kid on Earth only to learn throughout the course of the movie that neither of his parents give a damn about him. His father left them for another woman and according to his mom, "He only has time for his new family." His mom must have been getting plastered somewhere when he went fundraising by himself downtown and ran into the old man who inadvertently kidnapped him for about a week. Then at the end, after all he'd been through, his dad doesn't even show up for his badge ceremony. His negligent mom is there though and I'm certain that her guidance coupled with his slightly sadistic interest in the duty and honor of the cub scouts that he'll grow up to be that asshole assistant manager at Wendy's or Dairy Queen who makes life hell for anyone who doesn't take the job as seriously as he.
After making it through "Up" I found myself searching for hope at the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniels after watching Toy Story 3. Never mind the fact that they just gloss over the fact that half of their toy friends are dead/discarded ("We lost Bo Beep years ago"), they grab life by the balls and shove em down the throats of the poor preschoolers watching it. There is a scene at the end of the movie where all of them are basically on a conveyor belt leading to a fiery incinerator and after a fairly long attempt at escape they all give up, hold hands and embrace their fate.
What the hell are you trying to teach my daughter Pixar? What happened to not going quietly into that goodnight? This isn't the Taliban, it's preschool. I want my daughter to fight, kick and scream in the face of opposition, not hold hands and just say, "Eh, it was a good run." What's your view on old men with candy Pixar? "Obey your thirst?" I mean damn. I was sitting there like, "Okay, they're gonna get out of this one somehow." Then they all just sat there. I won't give away what happens after that, but I'll just say that I was still depressed by the end of the movie.
I saw a trailer for Cars 2 and it didn't have any actual movie footage on it, which leads me to believe that it can only get worse from here. I won't be surprised if one of the cars happens to be a Prius and it suffers from some car version of Parkinson's Disease which causes it to lose to control and accelerate into (and kill) other cars. Either that, or one of them is gonna join up with some extremist religious group and become a car bomb in the Middle East. Anything short of that will really surprise me.
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