Triple Scoop of Pixar and Disney

Luca (2021, d. Enrico Casarosa) - Disney+
Onward (2020, d. Dan Scanlon) - Disney+
Encanto (2022, d. Jared Bush, Byron Howard, Charise Castro Smith) - Disney+

For about a decade and a half Pixar was the name to beat in family entertainment.  Every release seemed to have have a kiss of magic to it, a nugget (or nuggets) of something that made it more than just a kid's movie.  It wasn't long before parents began looking forward to a Pixar movie more than their kids did, and it wasn't uncommon to see childless singles or couples in the theatre alongside them.  It wasn't the revolutionary CGI animation, at least not alone, but the maturity in which Pixar films dealt with their supposed children's stories.  They became appointment cinema-going, at a time when parent company/distributor Disney was struggling to find yet another fable or fairy tale to adapt into an expected musical.  Disney was stale, Pixar was inspired.

But Pixar also opened the flood doors and found themselves faced with a sea of competition and imitators, but for every good one like Kung Fu Panda or How To Train Your Dragon there were dozens of others that were just the same old fart joke kid's pap.  CGI animation wasn't an instant sign of quality, but Pixar was.  But something happened around 2010.  Pixar started to lose the handle on their reputation, going back to the well for another Cars movie proved they were just as capitalistic as any other filmmaking company, and the muddled messes of Brave and The Good Dinosaur showed that even the seemingly infallable studio could make a dud.  Disney meanwhile decided to drop traditional animation altogether, having made a few middling-at-best efforts in the first decade of the 2000s, but hitting fairly huge putting their old model of traditional fairy tale into new CGI form with 2010's Tangled.

It would be another few years of muddled output before Disney started to get the formula right, Frozen, obvioulsy, the behemoth that pushed them forward, but Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero Six, Zootopia and Moana each could very well have been a Pixar film a decade earlier.  Only 4 of Pixar's ten films released in the 2010s would be originals, all the rest would be sequels to earlier hits.  Of this entire run, only Inside Out feels significant.  Beyond 2015 I lose track of which films are Pixar, and which are Disney (sequels excepted).  Such that I could have sworn that Encanto was Pixar and that Onward was Disney, and not vice versa.

Luca, honestly, feels like neither studio.  While it has some familiarity with traditional animated storytelling, it's not transporting you into a completely other world like Pixar films are so good at doing, but it's also not playing off of familiarity like Disney films do.  Luca is a big, expensive CGI movie that wants to be an Italian art film, focused on the melodrama of emotional friendships and family connections.  I mean, it does involve strange underwater creatures that appear human when they dry out, and we see a bit of that underwarter society, but it's not our focus.  

Our focus is on the mainland where Luca befriends a human boy, Alberto, and they fast become best friends. Luca has basically run away from his family who have threatened to send their disobedient son away, and he feels embraced by Alberto and Alberto's father in a way he never was at home (and also in a way Alberto himself can't be embraced because he hasn't forgiven his father for having abandoning him years ago, much like Alberto's father hasn't forgiven himself).

There's a lot to be said about the friendship between these two boys, and Luca's exploration of himself is a coded puberty metaphor, but in typical Italian fashion, there has to be a female interloper in Giulia who start to cause friction between the boys.  There is definitely a way to read Luca and Alberto's relationship as a gay love story, but I worry about viewing children in this manner.  It's not that I worry about it being a "queer kids in love" story, so much as "kids in love" story. I don't think the kids are quite thinking in these terms, even if deeper down those are the unknown and unfamiliar emotions they're responding to.  I mean, a story of gay and/or bisexual pubescence is far more appropriate a description than "love story".

The animation style is much different than most anything we've seen from a Pixar or Disney feature, a much more rounded, cartoony design to the characters that rings somewhat of Aardman-style clay animation mixed with Studio Ghibli converted to CGI, plus the much simpler environments of post-war Italy.  There's a looseness and bounciness to this picture that makes it's such a light and gentle watch, but allowing for emotionality and drama and a few exciting Vespa and bicycle rides.

In comparison, Pixar's offering from a year earlier, Onward, tried for too much detail, too much world building, that it got lost underneath it all, to the extent that it felt more like a Pixar knock-off effort. 

Where Luca succeeds at building dynamic relationships with dramatic complications, Onward really struggles with its central relationship, that between two brothers, the anxious Ian, and the enthusiastic, outgoing Barley.  They are both magical creatures, living in a world of magical creatures that, well, has become a lot less magical as they seemingly embraced a capitalistic reality similar to our own world.  It's the film's most fatal mistake, making a magical real too similar to our own.  Zootopia, or Monstropolous in Monster's Inc could have had a similar problem, but Zootopia is so uniquely its own place while Monstropolous isn't so much the backdrop as the Monster Factory is (and you get sort of comparisons with the human world and the monster world to highlight the differences).  The world of Onward is the worst possible result, boring.

Ian and Barley happen upon a spell that would allow them time with their long-deceased father (a father Ian doesn't even remember) for one more day only the wand facilitating the spell breaks leading to only the lower torso of their father appearing, and they must embark upon a quest to find some of the land's last remaining magic in order to complete the spell.

Where Luca is a joy throughout, Onward merely has moments that stand out, either visual gags (the half-a-dad pays dividends) or a solid set piece, but overall the world it establishes doesn't really connect.  It's trying to hard to be that kind of reality Cars had, but it winds up feeling like a weird Flintstones knock-off, only less clever.  The weight of the relationship between Ian and Barley isn't appropriately felt until the film's climax.  Ian keeps Barley at arms' length for too long and the film suffers for it.  There's a whole sub-plot about their mother and her cop boyfriend chasing after the boys, which again, has its moments, but altogether feels contrived.

We don't talk about Bruno

Encanto makes its own magical reality that exists both within and without our reality, or at least our reality at some point in time.  It also all about family dynamics and the impact of generational trauma.  It's also a lively musical, like Moana and Frozen before it, that should signify that it's definitely a Disney movie, but its fantastical reality feels so much more Pixar.

Escaping with her village from the violence of a civil war in Columbia, Alma witnesses the murder of her husbands by soldiers.  In a fit of grief she screams, triggering something magical.  The land raises up around her secluding the survivors from the violent reality outside.  Decades later, the land is a prosperous, safe, and happily isolated village.  Alma and the two generations of her family that follow live as the head household of the village, in a magical home that seems alive.  Each descendant of Alma is granted a special gift, a superpower basically, which they are to use to help the village grow and prosper.  Each descendant, that is, except Mirabel, who wasn't granted any gift, and as such is treated differently by the family (the townspeople still revere her because she is a part of the family).  But only Mirabel sees that the need for her grandmother to maintain the image of perfection, her need to keep the town safe, the need for everything to just be perfect, is actually causing fractures in the family, and their beloved home.

I'm into superheroes, so this sucked me in easy, being about a family who each get a special gift, all except one. How that person is treated because of it, and how they react to the way they are treated is just one of the film's many, many pleasures. 

The specficity of the location, the history the family (and town) matriarch brings, the ever-present Columbian cultural inspiration (food, music, dance, fashion and decor, flora and fauna)...I may not have picked up on everything, but you feel it. You definitely feel it.

The family members are each so distinct and wonderful, visually and personality. I adored each one of them, even Alma who is so hard on Mirabel. I understood from the tale that opens the film just what Alma had lost, and then had to build and protect. Very, very different story, but my grandmother had to do the same. We come to understand her better late in the film, as we should all come to understand our grandparents when we get older, to see them as human, not just a figurehead or relic of the past or silly old person. They lived a life. But it also doesn't excuse them: to understand them is to find perspective. In Mirabel's case, it's enough to help heal the wounds in her family.

While I didn't pick up on it until the second song, I started hearing Lin Manuel Miranada's voice so clearly in all the songs. I'm not sure what it is within me that wants to knock the tunes for that, but truly they are great. Having to restart a half hour in (because my daughter finally decided to want to watch something with me) and I realized how finely tuned these songs are. He is an exceptionally talented craftsman and, even though he has a few signature tells to his songs, those are kind of what defines an artist. 

I didn't really talk about the actors in either Luca or Onward (young talent in the former not really Italian, big name talent in the latter not really elfs) but Encanto's largely Colombian-American cast really grounds the film with actors with roots to their characters.  I know Stephanie Beatriz from Brooklyn 99 (and a few other things), and Diane Guerrero from Doom Patrol, and I think they're both amazing, verstile performers...I just had no idea they were such wonderful singers. I want them in a live action musical asap. Maybe in that Almodovar musical Penelope Cruz is trying to will into existence.

Encanto resonates magic in a way Onwards lacks.  It builds its fantastical reality based around emotion that make it more like Inside Out than Frozen. 

Of the recent Disney/Pixar releases, I still need to see Raya and the Last Dragon and if you were to ask me what studio it's from I wouldn't be able to tell you.  The upcoming Lightyear seems like such a Disney cash-cow move, not a Pixar-quality production, yet, that just goes to show how resonant that early Pixar reputation is, that we still hold it to a higher standard that it clearly won't always achieve, or even strive for.

[We agree-ish: Toasty on Luca]
[We agree: Toasty on Onward]