The Animation List Discussion & Suggestions (Genre Project)

[knives]

What ever are you talking about with regards to The Incredibles?

[matrixschmatrix]

I haven't actually seen that one yet, so I'm going 100% on something that was described to me by a friend- I am not going to make any attempt at all to defend it as a viewpoint.

[knives]

Yeah, not only is that a mischaracterization of Nietzsche, but of the movie itself. The last scene and how it relates to the main theme which I assume is where your friend is coming from (the mundane against the fantastic) subverts that hard. Because of the nature of the story being told (Watchmen for kids pretty much) there is a tough tightrope to walk between Eisenhower conformity and objectivism to get to the real point of the film, but I feel utterly confident that it avoids both pratfalls to same something of actual depth. Though I do prefer Ratatouille.

[bamwc2]

I'm also lost with regard to your interpretation of Toy Story 3. Could you explain, Matrix?

[matrixschmatrix]

It's more of a slightly off plot point than a broad philosophical theme, but the degree to which the movie makes being given to an daycare a bad thing seems to alter the 'toys are meant to be played with' idea- evidently, being played with is good, but being given to charity and played with by many is less good.

I think it's a place where the plotting is meant to be specific to the characters with whom we've formed a bond and not to the universal archetypes of toys- I doubt that Pixar actually intends anyone to think it bad to donate one's toys- but compared with the governing idea of Toy Story 2 it seems a bit off.

[Shrew]

But day care isn't what's awful to the toys, it's the age of the children playing with them. According to the hierarchy set up by the Big Bear, the older toys are played with by older kids (still in a day care) and that's depicted as near heaven as toys can get. The new toys then get stuck with the 2-3 year olds, and that's hell. If I recall, that was present in the earlier films, where the toys are pretty terrified of falling into the little sister's clutches.

[Mr Sausage]

Do right wingers think giving to charity is against their ideology? I always thought that while they were against government-backed mandatory programs, they do believe in voluntary charity and usually offer that as an alternative to the former. Correct me if I'm wrong, as you no doubt know far more about this than I do.

The fear of being taken from your family and placed in an orphanage is universal. I knew kids growing up who refused to report the abuse they were suffering at home because they were even more terrified of being in an orphanage. And believe me, politics had nothing to do with it.

[matrixschmatrix]

Haha, I think I probably shouldn't have brought this up, since they're not even particularly my view (and I have enough of a hard time defending my own viewpoints on movies and politics)- I just remember that it was a widely discussed idea that Pixar had conservative or even reactionary undercurrents a few years ago, at least among people that I know, and I wanted to address that a bit.

[bamwc2]

Sorry still don't see it. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes an orphanage is just an orphanage and doesn't need to be seen through ideological lenses.

[matrixschmatrix]

Looking around, I'm seeing a fair number of articles from right wing writers trying at the time to claim Toy Story 3 as being conservative, but nothing even vaguely compelling on that front-and I'm unable to find the left wing article accusing it of being conservative. As I said, it's not a viewpoint that I find particularly convincing myself, and I only brought it up to contrast it with what I was seeing in Monsters Inc.- I just thought it was an idea that was fairly familiar, enough so that I could reference it in passing and people would know what I was talking about. Obviously, my half-remembered fragments of an argument founded in part on a movie I haven't seen are not going to represent anything really worth debating here, unless someone else knows it better than I do.

[swo17]

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm strictly going to be voting for films because I like how they are animated, not because of any top secret hidden political messages that may or may not be laced into the films' DNA.

[matrixschmatrix]

The line between theme and politics is often a thin one, and I think it's impossible to discuss something like Wall-E without considering how the trash-planet concept and the Wal-Mart future elements fit into the movie's ideas of overcoming one's programming and becoming something more and better than a mindless consumer or automaton. How I feel about those themes, and implicitly, the politics of those themes, is surely going to affect how I feel about the movie, in the same way that how I feel about a given iteration of Miyazaki's personal/political themes about the supernatural or transcendental relationship between man and nature is going to affect how I feel about whichever of his movies. One of the things a great movie can do is put me into the headspace of the movie's creator, and if that headspace is full of ideas I find repellent, that's going to change how much I want to be in there.

Certainly, getting into "well this movie is secretly for Democrats, while that movie voted for Richard Nixon once in 1972" becomes quickly silly, and I'm certainly not going to change my feelings about Toy Story 3 based on a half-assed concept of political affiliation- but the politics of a movie in a broader sense are absolutely going to affect how I feel about it, how much I like it, and how much I want to show it to everyone. To me, the strictly technical aspects of a movie's creation are mostly means to an end, whether that end be storytelling or an experiential rush in watching it or just sheer abstracted delight, as with Fishinger, and I don't have the interest or the desire to reduce my reactions to movies strictly to their technical aspects.

[movielocke]

and if anything, Toy Story 3 is secretly leftwing with it's ardent, heart-on-its-sleeve message about non-traditional families being awesome.

[Mr Sausage]

but the politics of a movie in a broader sense are absolutely going to affect how I feel about it, how much I like it, and how much I want to show it to everyone.

matrixschmatrix: how far are you willing to extend this? At the moment you only seem bothered when it comes to American partisan politics. But what about political/philosophical differences that are far wider than American ideologies and current social concerns? Can you watch, say, a nihilist movie or some other movie with a conceptual framework that you don't subscribe to without being particularly bothered by the fact that you disagree on its fundamental guiding principle? Is it then that you are able to both disagree while allowing the framework to hold true as long as the self-enclosed world of the movie is ongoing? If so, when do you decide to be dual-minded and accepting and when do you not, and why?

To me, the strictly technical aspects of a movie's creation are mostly means to an end, whether that end be storytelling or an experiential rush in watching it or just sheer abstracted delight, as with Fishinger, and I don't have the interest or the desire to reduce my reactions to movies strictly to their technical aspects.

But all too often you do seem content to reduce your reactions to bipartisan political issues of an easily-stated kind, without ever giving a sense that there is a world of things in the movie to balance out the one or two points where the politics could possibly diverge from your own. Often you don't give a sense that the movie contains more than the political strand you picked out, that there are other avenues within it in which to find joy and insight. Or even that the viewer can gain a real benefit from how a film creates its political strands, even if one disagrees*. Whether this reflects how you actually feel, I don't know, but this is what your posts usually privilege. It's rare when you take these kinds of films on their own terms, anyway.


*reminds me of an anecdote: Wittgenstein used to hand his bemused colleagues copies of Otto Weininger's wacky, delusional misogynist and anti-semitic philosophy book, Sex and Character, stating that Weininger's arguments were wrong, but the way he came to them was of considerable interest.

[bamwc2]

Some more ramblings:

Kihachiro Kawamoto's The Book of the Dead is an interesting, if ultimately unfulfilling ghost story. The stop-motion tale charts a young noble woman who mistakes the ghost of murder victim for the Buddha. As it turns out, she too is mistaken by him for a woman that he once loved. Liked the koans of the zen tradition from which this tale originates, the story itself is impossible to unwrap. The ending in particular left me scratching my head. That being said, I'd still give it a recommendation based on mood and style.

Sylvain Chomet's love of Tati is well known, and going into both The Triplets of Bellville and The Illusionist I thought that they would be direct homages. While the latter film tells the sort of charming late period story that one could envision Tati doing, I was more than a bit shocked by the violent deaths in the former's finale. I've never been a huge Tati fan myself (although I adore Parade, and merely like his other films) and found that my opinion of Chomet's films is on about the same level. They're interesting and genial experiences, but nothing that will stick with me in the long term.

I started out very disappointed with Azur & Asmar: The Princes' Quest, but was eventually won over by it and greatly enjoyed it by the end. Michel Ocelot often switches between animation styles, using traditional pencil drawings in Kirikou and the Sorceress and silhouette animation in Princes et princesses. However, here he goes with CGI that despite being released in 2006, looks like it was done over a decade earlier. Although I've never played the game, my wife tells me that the characters looked like those found in The Sims game that her roommate used to play on her PS2. The film itself is saved by telling a charming fairytale in which a pair of "brothers" (non-biologically related, but both raised by the same nanny) go off on separate searches to liberate the imprisoned Djinn Fairy. Like Ocelot's other works, it's told with a charming sincerity that's missing from most of the animation coming out of Hollywood today.

Bruno Bozzetto's Allegro Non Troppo was another real treat. I used to see this on the video store shelves as a kid and Netflix also used to recommend it to me constantly, but I never had any interest in seeing it until it popped up in a recommendation on this thread. As previously noted in the recommendation, it's a rather ribald retelling of Fantasia with live action framing all of the animated sequences. Nudity is frequent and the jokes hit more often than they missed for me. It's a strong recommendation and may find its way on my final list.

George Dunning's Yellow Submarine was the final film of the Beatles that I had left to see (and no, I will never count Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in that list), and like both Help! and Hard Day's Night, this one was a lot of fun. Like those other films, the plot is purely incidental and I doubt that I could explain it no matter how hard I tried. Instead, the film is merely about getting the band from one scene to the next in order to get the musical numbers going. The jokes are stale, but music great (coming from what is almost universally recognized as the band's greatest creative period) and the characters charming enough for none of that to matter. It's was another great experience and may also be on my final list.

Coonskin was the final full length film of Ralph Bakshi's 70s output that I had not seen. Based on a very lose retelling ("retelling" in the same way that Wild at Heart was a retelling of The Wizard of Oz) of Uncle Remus's Briar Rabbit stories, the film is mostly told in flashback by Scatman Crothers, charting Brother Rabbit's rise to the top of Harlem's underworld. Like Bakshi's other films of this era, Coonskin proves problematic with its frequent use of derogation and racial/sexual/religious stereotypes. Of course this was his trademark style, and I tend to agree with the NAACP assessment of it as "difficult satire". I know that Bakshi is a polarizing figure around here, though I tend to like his work more often than not. Out of curiosity, will any of his films appear on the list of anyone else? One (not Coonskin) is on mine.

Up Next: Chico & Rita, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Kirikou and the Wild Beast

[bamwc2]

reminds me of an anecdote: Wittgenstein used to hand his bemused colleagues copies of Otto Weininger's wacky, delusional misogynist and anti-semitic philosophy book, Sex and Character, stating that Weininger's arguments were wrong, but the way he came to them was of considerable interest.

Out of curiosity, where did you here this? I tend to think that Wittgenstein was wrong on just about everything, but I'm still fascinated by his thought.

[colinr0380]

and if anything, Toy Story 3 is secretly leftwing with it's ardent, heart-on-its-sleeve message about non-traditional families being awesome.

Isn't that also the message of The Incredibles too, where you shouldn't be hiding your talent away to fit in with the herd (bad Communism) but instead should be utilising your special abilities for the benefit of all (good Communism!), with the family being a microcosm from which good citizens are produced for the wider good. In that sense non-traditional families are great because they breed non-traditional, flexible citizens, where their superpowers can be re-imagined to become a good job skill on an individual's CV rather than just a detriment.

[Mr Sausage]

reminds me of an anecdote: Wittgenstein used to hand his bemused colleagues copies of Otto Weininger's wacky, delusional misogynist and anti-semitic philosophy book, Sex and Character, stating that Weininger's arguments were wrong, but the way he came to them was of considerable interest.

Out of curiosity, where did you here this? I tend to think that Wittgenstein was wrong on just about everything, but I'm still fascinated by his thought.

Dunno. TV somewhere? You could google it or check wikipedia to see if they mention it.

[matrixschmatrix]

but the politics of a movie in a broader sense are absolutely going to affect how I feel about it, how much I like it, and how much I want to show it to everyone.

matrixschmatrix: how far are you willing to extend this? At the moment you only seem bothered when it comes to American partisan politics. But what about political/philosophical differences that are far wider than American ideologies and current social concerns? Can you watch, say, a nihilist movie or some other movie with a conceptual framework that you don't subscribe to without being particularly bothered by the fact that you disagree on its fundamental guiding principle? Is it then that you are able to both disagree while allowing the framework to hold true as long as the self-enclosed world of the movie is ongoing? If so, when do you decide to be dual-minded and accepting and when do you not, and why?

Well, that's certainly a fair question- I think the issue is that, generally speaking, my reaction to a movie comes first, and my attempt to explore why I feel that way about it comes second. So with something like Bambi or Mononoke, it's not a matter of looking at the movie in an attempt to decipher its politics and what they mean, it's a matter of feeling uneasy or less than entirely on board with the movie while watching, and trying to tease out why I felt that way afterwards. That probably leads to somewhat hypocritical reactions, I suppose- I can enjoy Spielberg's Indiana Jones movies even after being largely won over by Robin Wood's ideological criticisms of them- but it moreover makes it very difficult to say why the ideology I see in one or another movie will stick out to me.

To me, the strictly technical aspects of a movie's creation are mostly means to an end, whether that end be storytelling or an experiential rush in watching it or just sheer abstracted delight, as with Fishinger, and I don't have the interest or the desire to reduce my reactions to movies strictly to their technical aspects.

But all too often you do seem content to reduce your reactions to bipartisan political issues of an easily-stated kind, without ever giving a sense that there is a world of things in the movie to balance out the one or two points where the politics could possibly diverge from your own. Often you don't give a sense that the movie contains more than the political strand you picked out, that there are other avenues within it in which to find joy and insight. Or even that the viewer can gain a real benefit from how a film creates its political strands, even if one disagrees*. Whether this reflects how you actually feel, I don't know, but this is what your posts usually privilege. It's rare when you take these kinds of films on their own terms, anyway.

Hmm- the two arguments about this I'm most recalling, Bambi and Mononoke, were about heteronormative/patriarchal messaging and colonialism, to me- I don't know that those are issues I would characterize as being specifically American bipartisan politics in the way that tax rates or whatever would be. I suppose that it may be a failing on my part that I'm not good at getting across the gestalt of a movie, and tend to focus on the parts that have some bearing towards running down some particular thought, but again, what I talk about tends to be what struck me most strongly. As for the idea that a movie can be remarkable in how it expresses an idea, regardless of how palatable that idea is- I should restate that I really liked Mononoke, and for all that I find what I saw in it to be somewhat queasy, it also managed to tell that story in a way that was vast and extraordinarily powerful. To some degree, the very extraordinary quality of the way in which the movie communicates itself made me that much more invested taking apart and investigating what I was getting from it- to go back to my earlier point, perhaps I don't worry about the politics of a Raiders of a Lost Ark because I don't find them particularly compelling.

Fundamentally, this may be an issue of my just not being terribly skilled at writing about movies- I find longer discussions about them very rewarding, but trying on paper to get at the core of what I think worth talking about is difficult, and may betray a more provincial conception of the ideological cosmology than I would like to think I have. Though I think part of it is that, for anything about which my feelings are particularly contentious, the further dialog is shaped as much by whomever I'm arguing with as by me- it becomes about one particular aspect in one particular dichotomy because that's what was taken issue with. I apologize for this last little Pixar argument being somewhat inane, but as I have mentioned, I didn't actually think I was going to have to go into it when I brought it up, and I feel as though I'm trying to make a point through three rounds of google translate on it.

I think this whole issue is heightened somewhat with this project, as so much of it is aimed at least in part at children, and ideology expressed in children's movies always feel to me either as though they're trying to express eternal verity or to be politically invisible- either to say something that's true for all people in all places and all times, or to appear as though they are saying noting at all. In both cases, I think my reactions to perceived differences with the ideological framework are heightened somewhat. I think one of the things I'm finding with Pixar, though, is that it's not particularly fair to look at their work as attempting either- the politics of a Wall-E or an Up are both out on the surface and somewhat ideosyncratic, not trying to be a fable for modern times or anything. That may actually be what I was trying to get at about Monsters Inc, as I think it fits the same mold, but I got sidetracked rather horribly before the thought fully coalesced.

[Mr Sausage]

I didn't have the Mononoke argument strictly in mind (because I may even agree with you on that one). Bambi somewhat, only in that there were much wider reasons why there may've been patriarchal overtones, so those overtones shouldn't have been the stopping point.

If you're not terribly skilled about writing about movies, I don't know what that makes the rest of us. You are one of the few people on this board whose every post is interesting and worth reading, including the ones I disagree heavily with (which aren't that frequent).

I think this whole issue is heightened somewhat with this project, as so much of it is aimed at least in part at children, and ideology expressed in children's movies always feel to me either as though they're trying to express eternal verity or to be politically invisible- either to say something that's true for all people in all places and all times, or to appear as though they are saying noting at all. In both cases, I think my reactions to perceived differences with the ideological framework are heightened somewhat. I think one of the things I'm finding with Pixar, though, is that it's not particularly fair to look at their work as attempting either- the politics of a Wall-E or an Up are both out on the surface and somewhat ideosyncratic, not trying to be a fable for modern times or anything. That may actually be what I was trying to get at about Monsters Inc, as I think it fits the same mold, but I got sidetracked rather horribly before the thought fully coalesced.

An interesting issue, but one of the things I think you're not always allowing yourself to consider is where Pixar is getting its stories and how it uses or deals with the immense tradition of children's narrative.

In the case of children, thinking about the potential audience can make you paranoid in a parental way, where each bit of politics and ideology comes to seems gravely important, vying for the minds and souls of kids in a conspiratorial way. The problem is not with your finding political issues--they are almost always there--it's how you sometimes approach them as tho' they were an agenda. I, personally, think its more fruitful to admit that they may not actually be part of any agenda, and from there chase down the real reason why they're present (in the case of Bambi, the increasing reliance on archetypal narrative beats as the character leaves childhood). I think the way certain narrative and thematic structures end up importing certain values is fascinating, but that aspect gets lost the minute those values are treated as part of an explicit agenda. That's part of why I liked your Mononoke argument, because that political dimension may have been an unintended, unavoidable import.

Anyway, the best example of my own approach to ideological notions I dislike is The Last Temptation of Christ. I don't believe Christianity is true and I find the very idea of human sacrifice deplorable, especially when it's being offered as a good. On that basis, I would have to deplore Last Temptation because its fundamental philosophical framework is not one I endorse. But I love the movie, because even tho' I disagree with its framework, the way it works through the idea of human sacrifice is intelligent, interesting, and novel. The how makes all the difference in the world. Compare it to The Passion of the Christ, where the same framework is worked through in the dumbest, most brutal manner possible. I disagree with the framework to each movie in an equal measure, but I can appreciate and enjoy the intelligence and beauty of the former and see the merit in its method.

[zedz]

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm strictly going to be voting for films because I like how they are animated, not because of any top secret hidden political messages that may or may not be laced into the films' DNA.

You're just saying that to put us off the scent. I'm sure there will be lots of secret revolutionary messages in there. Pwobably about wabbits.

[swo17]

My only hidden agenda is that things that are clearly not animation in any sense of the word...maybe actually are?

[zedz]

That was hidden?

[swo17]

This isn't a public forum, is it?

In other news, I recently acquired the Soviet Propaganda set, but have limited time to watch it. Does anyone recommend any highlights in particular, other than Shooting Range and Songs of the Years of Fire?

[knives]

Ave Marie, Forward March, Time!, and The Pioneer's Violin are also very, very good. Also I'll go more in depth when I have time, but for anyone who loves Svankmajer you need to run to Koji Yamamura yesterday. He's easily the best discovery I've had this list with Mt. Head and A Child's Metaphysics being some of the most thought provoking pieces I've ever seen.