The Company That Cracked Hollywood

Disney / Pixar With Up, Pixar continues to show why it’s the Disney of the 21st century. The Daily Beast’s Tom Shone reveals the secrets to their success and what Hollywood could learn from the maverick studio.

It’s official: With its latest animated film, Up, Pixar has continued the winning streak started back in 1995 with Toy Story, and now includes such insta-classics as Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and WALL-E. You have to go back to Disney in the 1930s and ‘40s, when they lifted audiences out of the Great Depression with Snow White, Bambi, Pinocchio, and Dumbo, in quick succession, to get anything close. This is living history, right under our noses. Your grandkids will ask you about this. So what is Pixar doing right? And is there enough to go around? Filmmakers, please take note.

As Carl’s sidekick tells him, “It may sound boring but it’s the boring things I remember the most.” Michael Bay: Please stay behind after class to write that out 100 times.

Give audiences a lift. All Pixar movies could be called Up, of course—they provide the most reliable high in Hollywood, right now—but in the case of Up, the uplift is literal. The image of a man’s house hoisted into the sky with balloons came to director Pete Docter during the making of Monsters Inc. Doodling to soothe his frazzled nerves, he “drew this floating house, and it seemed very appealing and poetic and interesting. We started thinking, ‘Who's in this house? Where is he going and where is he coming from?'" For sheer lyricism, that single shot is hard to beat—a one-man answer to the home-foreclosures crisis. Who would have thought that a cartoon would offer such an object lesson in the classical virtues of the empty frame and elegant long shot? At a time when most movies feel like cartoons, Up looks more like a movie than most movies.

Leave your spandex at home. Traditionally, filmmakers use CGI to bend the laws of physics and make supermen of us all. The hero of Up, on the other hand, is Carl Frederickson, a get-off-my-lawn cuss with Spencer Tracy hair and the voice of Ed Asner, whose most death-defying stunt is the trip to the mailbox and back each morning. The film’s climactic fight is a delight—all cricked spines and slipped dentures—and a reminder of just how rooted in mundanity the Pixar boys are, how closely their creations follow the old Hitchcock formula: ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Toy Story belonged to worn-out Woody not brand-new Buzz Lightyear. Monsters Inc. was about creatures who couldn’t rustle up a decent scream. Up, meanwhile, is an adventure movie for those who have long since left adventure slip from their grasp. As Carl’s sidekick tells him, “It may sound boring but it’s the boring things I remember the most.” Michael Bay: Please stay behind after class to write that out 100 times.

Keep it simple. But don’t be afraid of complexity—“simplexity” in Pixar-speak. One of deeper mysteries of their success is that a process so agonizing—five years to make a movie, as many as 40 separate revisions for each sequence—should result in films so sprightly: Up comes in at a trim 89 minutes. The first five in particular are a small masterpiece of compression: a quick montage of Carl’s life, showing his first meeting with his wife, Ellie, their courtship, marriage, a miscarriage, old age, and finally death, all set to the plaintive waltz of Michael Giacchino’s score. Grown men are reduced to whimpering wrecks within minutes. It is also entirely without dialogue, recalling the first 20 minutes of WALL-E, another silent poem to the lovelorn, and a welcome respite from the deafening fusillades of Terminator Salvation, Star Trek, and the sound of Tom Hanks reeling off plot exposition for two-and-a-half hours in Angels and Demon. Audiences are advised to follow Carl’s example and turn off their hearing aids. Filmmakers are advised to go brush up on their Chaplin.