Interview: Pete Docter of ‘Up’

Posted on May 26, 2009 at 3:55 pm

The first thing I saw when I walked into the room was — of course — a bunch of beautiful helium balloons. And then I saw Pete Docter, the lanky and affable director of Pixar’s new film, “Up,” about an extraordinary journey to South America in a house lifted into the sky by an enormous bunch of balloons.

What makes a good voice actor for an animated film?

Some actors can create a picture of what is happening with their voice. Some actors works a lot with their bodies and facial expressions. You have to unplug the video part and listen to the voice. For Carl we wanted a voice that was grouchy and curmudgeonly, a voice that suggests that nothing is quite as good as it used to be, but a voice that is still very appealing and funny and Ed Asner fit that bill. You can tell he deeply cares about the peoople he is insulting. For Russell Joe Grant taught me to ask, “What are you giving the audience to take home?” You have to have some relatable emotion as a foundation for the fun stuff. You need the sad beginning so that you care about Carl and want what he wants.

What movies did you love as a kid?

I loved “Dumbo.” I watched Bugs Bunny time and again. The Muppets were big, too. All of those, they have this real, not darkness but poignancy, that’s what makes it stick with you. We tried for that in this film. When we were about halfway done we showed it to an audience, and the highest group of positives was women age 12-25 because they connected to the story.

Did you draw inspiration from real-life locations for some of the stunning images in this film?

Yes, we studied the Tabletop Mountains called tepui, with all these weird rock shapes. You start to see figures in the mist. There are strange plants you dont see anywhere else. It is where Venezuela meets Brazil and Guyana. “The Lost World” was inspired by this one mountain we studied. Most of them have never been set foot on. The more we can base on real life, the more you will believe the stuff we make up. The bird in the film was based on a crane and a monal pheasant, the most iridescent creature there is.

Every animated movie director tells me there was one technical challenge that was especially difficult. What was yours?

Balloons! The maximum our system could only handle was 500 and we had to expand to ten thousands. Not only does each balloon “know” where the others are, each one can respond to wind, turbulence, and each of the other balloons. And we could not have thousand strings. The whole things is so preposterous we had to find little elements that anchor it and make it more believable but also poetic.

What were some of the decisions you made about the film that were different because it was being made in 3D?

We did a bunch of reseasrch what makes successful 3D. We did not want the “Whoa! 3D” effects that take you out of the movie; we wanted them coming out of the story. 3D allows us to play with the depth the way we use color and lighting. When Carl is cut off and closed, we made it claustrophobic and slow. When he triumphs we make it as spacious as we can.

I don’t know the exact quote, but there is this thing that Walt Disney said, something like, “We’re not making these movies for kids, we’re not making them for adults; we’re making them for that still quiet part the world has made you forget but that our films can make you remember.”

Related Tags:

3D Animation Interview

New In Town

Posted on May 26, 2009 at 8:00 am

Despite the title, there is nothing at all new about this romantic comedy, but it manages to endear itself anyway.

RenÃ©e Zellweger plays uptight and ambitious Lucy Hill, an ambitious, stiletto heel-wearing executive based in Miami who thinks she can get a promotion by taking on a new assignment to oversee the retrofitting and downsizing of a manufacturing plant in Minnesota. As she discovers over and over, she is clearer on the theory than the reality, starting with concepts like “cold” and “snow.” And “factory” and “downsizing.” Casual decisions about eliminating jobs are a lot easier when looking at budgets and bar charts, not people.

The people Lucy meets in the small town of New Ulm are straight from the Ma and Pa Kettle school of movie country folk: cute, quirky, corny, colorful, and sometimes cantankerous. They are given to expressions like “Oh, cry in my cheese-beer soup!” And of course there is the handsome single dad (Harry Connick, Jr. as Ted) with whom Lucy will have to get off on the wrong (stiletto-clad) foot before discovering an unexpected (only to her) connection.

What works here is the easy chemistry between the two leads (despite the distraction of whatever Zellweger has done to her face). While it may seem at first as though the film is making fun of the locals, it is Lucy who takes most of the literal and metaphoric pratfalls. The film shows an unusual level of respect in a mainstream film for the New Ulmers’ religious faith, sense of community, generosity, and resilience. Both sides have to adjust their assumptions and discard their prejudices, but making Lucy’s journey the steeper climb gives the story some added sweetness. There may be nothing new here, but like one character’s favorite recipe, sometimes bland can still be tasty.

Related Tags:

Comedy Date movie Romance

Connie and Carla

Posted on May 18, 2009 at 8:00 am

B+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for thematic elements, sexual humor and drug references
Profanity:	Some strong language and double entendres
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Characters drink to respond to stress, scenes in bar
Violence/ Scariness:	Character killed, mostly comic violence
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	2004
Date Released to DVD:	2005
Amazon.com ASIN:	B00005JN1K

Nia Vardalos captivated audiences with the unstoppably successful My Big Fat Greek Wedding and her next film opens up in a few weeks. So it is a good time to take a look at her last film, which never got the audience it deserved. It is very entertaining, if less broadly appealing than her blockbuster debut. What made her first film a hit was its fresh and unassuming presentation of a universal theme — families drive everyone a little crazy. This one is a more traditional farce with the always-reliable gender-switching theme. It worked for Shakespeare and it worked for “Charlie’s Aunt,” “Some Like it Hot,” and “Tootsie,” and if this movie doesn’t hit that level, it avoids the mistakes of flops like “Sorority Boys” and “Juwanna Mann.”

Vardalos and Toni Collette (“The Sixth Sense” and “Muriel’s Wedding”) play best friends who dream of starring in dinner theater productions of Broadway shows. Instead, they are waitresses at an O’Hare airport restaurant who get to belt out tunes to stranded travellers in between taking orders. One night bad guys shoot their boss over a drug deal and, when they see Connie and Carla watching, they try to kill them, too. So Connie and Carla have got fo find a place to hide. Cue “Born to be Wild” and point the station wagon to Los Angeles.

And then before you can say “Queer Eye on the Girls from the Heartland,” Connie and Carla disguise themselves as drag queens and get a job performing in a nightclub. And they are wildly successful because they finally found an audience that appreciates Broadway show tunes! Connie starts to fall for the handsome brother (David Duchovney) of one of the drag queens, Carla misses her boyfriend, and those bad guys are still trying to find them….but these are girls who know how to deliver a happy ending.

This is a bright and colorful door-slamming farce directed by Michael Lembeck, whose experience with “Friends” keeps the pace so brisk that there isn’t much time to notice the parts that don’t work. The plot is nothing new — Lucy and Ethel would be right at home — but there are some good lines given maximum punch by a strong cast.

Duchovney’s low-key charm works well in the midst of all of the over-the-top emoting, but it is a shame that the plot requires him to be so squeamish about his brother’s lifestyle. The movie’s biggest weakness is its attempt to be just too, too good to the last drop, sprinkling self-esteem over every person who comes on screen like, well, fairy dust. This movie is going to make sure you get the message. Like the two main characters, it throws everything at you it can think of, from shameless power ballads to a real old-time movie star. The song and dance routines really are a hoot, delivered with such affectionate sincerity that I dare you not to be entertained. Yet what it does best is what it does most quietly, with some understated humor about how everyone, even a hitman for the mob, is just one showtune away from discovering the transcendent power of dinner theater.

Parents should know that many of the characters in this movie are drag queens, although as is typical in movies of this kind, they are portrayed as non-sexual. Parents should also know that characters use some strong language and there are some double entrendre sexual references and crude jokes involving tampons and a “sit on my face” insult. Characters respond to a stressful situation by deciding to get drunk and much of the action takes place in a bar. A character is a drug dealer and the response to accidental use of cocaine is portrayed as humorous. A character is a hitman and there is one murder (off camera). There are fights, mostly comic. A strength of the movie is that prejudice against drag queens and anyone who is different is an important theme.

Many families may find this movie a good starting point for discussions of how we know who we are and how we treat those who are different. They might want to talk about why it is easier for the drag queens to feel good about the way they look than it is for the women that Connie and Carla see.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy some of the other classic cross-dressing comedies including Tootsie and Some Like It Hot and drag queen comedies like The Birdcage, Victor/Victoria, The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Outrageous!, and To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar (all with some mature material).

Animated ‘Lord of the Rings’ — last 600 copies!

Posted on May 13, 2009 at 8:00 am

Peter S. Beagle, who write the novel and screenplay for this week’s DVD pick, The Last Unicorn, also wrote the screenplay for the animated version of “Lord of the Rings,” the movie that inspired a kid named Peter Jackson to read the books and then grow up and make the live-action movie trilogy. The last 600 copies of the 1978 animated version of Lord of the Rings on DVD are now available exclusively from Conlan Press.

Related Tags:

Animation Based on a book Fantasy

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Posted on May 12, 2009 at 8:00 am

Brad Pitt is a very fine actor (see “Twelve Monkeys” and “True Romance”) but in this epic fantasy his diligent and thoughtful performance contributes less to the film than his appearance, about two-thirds of the way through. I mean appearance in the broadest sense. It is not until that point that we feel that the Pitt we have been waiting for shows up on screen. And it is at that moment that Pitt’s appearance, meaning his golden movie star beauty, provides the essential jolt that propels the story forward into its final, heart-wrenching conclusion.

It takes its title from a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald about a man who lives his life backwards, born as an old man and getting younger every day. The movie begins with both of its main characters very, very old. One is Daisy (Cate Blanchett), dying in a hospital, with her daughter standing vigil. Daisy asks her daughter to read aloud from an old diary and we go back to the Armistice, the end of World War I. A baby is born and his mother dies in childbirth. The father is horrified by the child and leaves him on the doorstep of a home for the elderly where he is adopted by Queenie (the marvelous Taraji P. Henson), who works at the home. At first he seems like an exceptionally ugly baby. And then as he gets older he seems to be disabled. A nursing home is a perfect environment for young Benjamin Button. He’s just another person who needs help. He is raised in an atmosphere of unconditional love and acceptance and grows up to have a gentle and observant nature.

One day a little girl comes to visit her grandmother. It is Daisy. Benjamin looks like a very old man but he is really a little boy and he wants to play with her. As she grows up, he gets younger, but there are still decades between them. Benjamin leaves the nursing home to work on a ship and writes to Daisy from around the world.

The digital effects are very well done and by this time Pitt starts to become more recognizable, so almost-familiar that we almost believe that this is the way he looks now, that he’s getting a little older like the rest of us. And then, all of a sudden, there he is, the wind brushing his hair, a burnished glow on, around, and coming from him, the very personification of youth and promise and every possible kind of yes. Our hearts ache with the bittersweet longing for what he has that no one ever will, the look and energy of youth with the wisdom and experience of age. And then they ache again with what he shares with us and every human, the awareness of how brief it all really is and the need for connection to transcend life’s limits.

This is a film with the scope and reach of almost a century but its power comes from the smallest gestures and the simplest moments. And its ultimate conclusion is one of the most powerful and moving of the year.