The latest Pixar film Up is being received as if it were better than the Second Coming. It represents the Pixar team’s effort to be even more lugubrious than in their last animated film—more lugubrious than in their last five animated films—hell, more lugubrious than their personal god Walt Disney ever dreamed of being in his thirty years of lugubrious filmmaking. It’s a high-stakes game: we’ll see your Jiminy Cricket and raise you five Pollyannas, says Pixar. We’ll throw in ten-thousand dalmations and the ghost of Old Yeller. We’ll stuff you with sunbeams, choke you with hugs, smother you with the warm chuckles of reformed curmudgeons, waterboard you with the gushing tears of a million pathetic orphans.
The public loves this, it goes without saying. But the critics have gotten so besotted they’re egging Pixar on to dangerously high glucose levels.
Kissy reviews for Pixar go all the way back to their short film experiments that used to run at film festivals. They seemed harmless enough in those days; it was fun to root for the underdogs, computer animation geeks with offices in Emeryville, CA, then a blank nowheresville between freeways in the Bay Area. As they went along making hit films one after another—Toy Story I and II, Monsters, Inc, Finding Nemo, Cars, The Incredibles, Ratatouille—there was no denying that they had the craft down; they could animate the hell out of a film. Gorgeous-looking, all of it, in a rounded glossy computery way. Preachy, sure, but then so are most things aimed at suffering children, and in their best films there was enough humor to counteract a lot of it. If the Pixar sensibility seemed strangely locked in to a mid-20th century mindset, a kind of ‘50s-forever-world no matter what the movie’s time-frame might be, well, they made it clear they intended to inherit the Disney mantle, didn’t they?
Many, many Academy Awards later, the unanimous song of critical praise reached a painful crescendo with Wall-E, which was heralded by assorted buffoons as Chaplinesque in its divine pathos. That was the red alert.
Any time a critic calls something “Chaplinesque,” run. Because what they mean by this is so ghastly you don’t want to risk scarring your lobes absorbing it. It was Charlie Chaplin’s own downfall in his later career, becoming “Chaplinesque.” He was funny as hell, I assure you, till critics started mooning over his balletic grace and tragic “little man” pathos. Then he started milking it. Brilliant guy (though a right bastard according to most accounts, and far too inclined to impregnate underage girls), but he couldn’t resist the ever bigger and wetter close-ups of his own yearning face.
It’s a terrible disservice to Chaplin’s legacy that most people think of him clutching a flower against his teeth and gazing wistfully just off-screen, the famous final shot of City Lights. They forget that Chaplin earned that final shot with many preceding scenes—a whole career, really—of brutal, insightful comedy. They forget that early Chaplin was more dedicated to kicking the ass of the oppressor than to any other project beyond sheer survival.
Young Chaplin: meaner, better
And why do they forget? Because the aging Chaplin himself sold it so hard, the tragedy, the tears, the “significance.”
Chaplin once expressed the desire to play the role of Jesus Christ on film, and he wasn’t kidding, either.
Anyhoo, Pixar’s Wall-E is Chaplinesque in the worst way. Heart-tugging little robot with big eye-like lenses, working all alone on the giant junkyard of future Earth, tilting his head quizzically, persevering pluckily, miming out all his yearnings with beeps and hoots and no dialogue. And that’s the GOOD part of the film! After that it gets really stupid and sentimental!
Up starts off with chunks of wordless bathos, presumably to remind you how great Wall-E was. I’ll let Manohla Dargis of The New York Times tell it:
The movie opens with the young Carl enthusing over black-and-white newsreel images of his hero, a world-famous aviator and explorer, Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). Shortly thereafter, Carl meets Ellie, a plucky, would-be adventurer who, a few edits later, becomes his beloved wife, an adult relationship that the director Pete Docter brilliantly compresses into some four wordless minutes during which the couple dream together, face crushing disappointment and grow happily old side by side. Like the opener of “Wall-E”… this is filmmaking at its purest.
The absence of words suggests that Mr. Docter and the co-director Bob Peterson, with whom he wrote the screenplay, are looking back to the silent era, as Andrew Stanton did with the Chaplinesque start to “Wall-E.”
(Another word of advice: when somebody tells you it’s “filmmaking at its purest,” hit the exit. Impure cinema is the kind you want.)
I don’t think I’m giving much away by telling you they kill off Ellie. And there you are, maybe fifteen minutes into the film, with the tragedy of old man Carl (Ed Asner), who’s only crabby because he’s bereft.
By this point, adults all around the theater are snuffling. Their feral kids, oppressed by the tearful mood, start babbling uneasily. And you realize, to your horror, that now the film will have to TOP this pity party. There are masses of objects associated with the dead wife that will have to “pay off” again and again for increasingly sobby effect—her “Adventurer” scrapbook with its tragically empty pages, her bird knickknack she put on the mantle, her chair, photos of her, the house itself. Plus Carl’s cross-my-heart promise to her to have adventures in South America will have to be milked over and over, and his crustiness will have to be softened by that chubby kid in the previews.
And don’t think for a second they’ll stop in their tear-jerking efforts with the chubby kid, who’s got no mother to love him, only an absentee dad. Oh, no. Pixar hedges its bets by adding a cute dog who’s rejected by his dog pack. And a large endangered-species bird, which gets injured and hobbles pitifully. And baby birds. And a beautiful golden-haired blind girl who sells flowers…no, I’m only kidding about her. That’s Chaplin again.
Truthfully, it was only the bird and the dog that saved me from bolting out of the theater. They rated some laughs.
So Carl rigs up his house with a million helium balloons and he and the kid fly off and have adventures and somehow you’d think this might add up to interesting 3-D effects. Sadly, no. (That’s a pretty good political humor site, by the way, Sadly, No! You should check it out.) There’s no point seeing this film in 3-D at all. In fact, the 3-D shades dim the film’s colors, so that’s a positive reason to watch it flat if you’re going to watch it at all.
Pisses me off that Coraline is going to lose the Best Animated Film Oscar to this thing.
Read more: Charlie Chaplin, Pixar, Up, Wall-E, Eileen Jones, movies
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50 Comments
Add your own1. madura | June 1st, 2009 at 12:06 am
Havent watched much from them, but wall E was good. Pixar should not only create things for kiddies it should be watchable to everyone..or just neglect the kids say parents dont go to the cinema to watch some kiddy mumbo jumbo lol
face it pixar is better at making sensible, good films and there’s enough people to watch it and its true that if pixar stays in the same track they;ll loose but thats not predictable either.
Oscars? dont get me started.
2. Cri-cri | June 1st, 2009 at 12:26 am
Who lets Levine and Ames now add paradoxial final sentences to the authors’ texts. I know they can do it in general because many otherwise beautiful comments on the website have begun to end with ‘I suck cocks’.
3. Impregnation darts | June 1st, 2009 at 2:12 am
If one sees a sleeping female while flying a baloon is it physically possible to pull her up with some ancors and hooks and not to damage her significantly?
4. Strahlungsamt | June 1st, 2009 at 2:42 am
If you want to see a truly great CGI movie, check out “Terkel in Trouble”. A Danish cartoon about an 11 year old boy facing off against school bullies and drunken relatives.
The animation isn’t anything new. What makes this movie is the story. No inspirational ending, characters are South Park evil and the hero is a coward whose friends do all his fighting.
Watch it and never see anything by Pixar/Disney again.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0386820/
5. Tam | June 1st, 2009 at 3:57 am
‘Pisses me off that Coraline is going to lose the Best Animated Film Oscar to this thing.’
Frankly, if I gave a toss about the Oscars or believed they were any guide whatsoever to the brilliance of a film, it would piss me off that Coraline isn’t going to win Best Film period.
I watched it the other day and it’s put me off seeing anything else in 3D because I know it can’t be as good. Best thing I’ve seen at the cinema in years.
6. jobe | June 1st, 2009 at 4:12 am
you know this is a kids movie… right?
as much as i would like to sit back with my two year old and watch Eeaserhead it’s just not going to happen.
7. Moo | June 1st, 2009 at 4:37 am
So, Wall-E was when the connoisseurs decided they’d had enough of Pixar, and now the hipster critics are turning on them. (Needless to say, having no original ideas of my own, I agree completely.)
Prediction: Cars II will be when the mainstream critics decide to drop the axe. Or The Bear and the Bow, at the very latest.
8. Tommy | June 1st, 2009 at 4:41 am
You’re dead inside.
9. Paul F Chang | June 1st, 2009 at 7:25 am
I must say, I was occupied throughout most of this film’s runtime with thoughts of how superior “Coraline” was. The excessive critical acclaim for “Up” proves concretely that the superior Coraline is in fact the greatest animated movie ever made.
10. Peter | June 1st, 2009 at 7:45 am
Uh-oh! Another movie fails to live up to the Exiled’s standards of dangerousness! Oh shit, guys! OH shit! Sure, maybe two-thirds of the movie revolved around weird shit like dogs flying fighter jets, crazy old explorers trying to off people, and the difficulties of dragging balloon-borne houses around by the garden hose, but there’s a bit of bathos in the beginning and so BAM! The movie loses that punk-rock seal of approval that those of us who never left the late seventies see as so damn important. Never mind that one of the staples of Jones’ criticism previously has been that contemporary movies don’t move enough, and every Pixar movie is kinetic as hell; everything has to live up to some bullshit standard of edginess, no matter how defanged the concept of artistic dangerous has been in the last fifty-odd years, or else… well, or else the writers here will say dumb things about it, that’s what’s else!
What I’m curious about is how the group of brilliant people who write for this site don’t get the kind of millions of dollars they deserve. Frankly, I know I’m too cheap to give, but that’s also partly my envy. Ah well. Kill me, please.
11. bbot | June 1st, 2009 at 7:56 am
After Coraline and now Up, I’m not massively impressed by circular polarization pseudo-3D. (Or if you’re gobbling down Eisner’s cock, then “Disney Digital 3D”)
It adds a fairly convincing depth effect, but it doesn’t add enough depth to really justify the five buck surcharge.
12. brenda | June 1st, 2009 at 8:11 am
raaarrrggghhh i’m a derivative pseudogonzo journalist who is angry about cartoons somebody please take me seriously
13. Lugubr | June 1st, 2009 at 8:30 am
Why there is no hyperlink under Sadly No! political humor web-site Eileen recomended? It would be nice to relocate there in just one click. This very page could be a portal of disgrunted exile readers going under neon spirals and dissappearing en masse Mark Theodore Ames helplessly watching. But he and Levine cleverly ‘omitted’ the link and now the momentum is lost.
14. Anton Lucii | June 1st, 2009 at 9:01 am
It troubles me most that with so many descendants left when you travel to the united states any person could in fact be a Chaplin clone.
I would prefer they had castrated him not Einstein in a farm.
15. Rob | June 1st, 2009 at 9:39 am
Spend your money at the new Sam Raimi flick instead. That deserves an Oscar for pulling modern horror’s head out of its ass, and for providing comedy without Pixaresque schmaltz for a change.
16. Dennis Redmond | June 1st, 2009 at 10:20 am
The Disney-Pixar machine (a.k.a. the Combine) has been on a downwards spiral, like pretty much everything else in this Cheney-hole of a former Empire, for decades. “Toy Story” was their peak, and it was a reasonably well-plotted and smartly executed comedy, which even managed to smuggle in a few edgy Jan Svankmajer references. But they were bought by Disney and have gone downhill since. “Finding Nemo” was overbaked and overwrought, while “The Incredibles” was horrible neocon Rightwing crap. If you want animated brilliance, stick with anything by Hayao Miyazaki or Satoshi Kon, who have never made a bad or even mediocre film in their lives.
17. Korman643 | June 1st, 2009 at 10:24 am
The thing is, John (ok, “Eileen”, don’t really know why he insist on these stupid pseudonyms) is right as usual. “Up” is ok, but just ok, and it has all those silly pretenstions on being anything more than a preachy, well made cartoon that has, for instance, not even 1/1000 of the heart and fun of old Looney Toones. Which doesn’t suprise me – any art is the product of his age, and this is a pretty lame time of course. But on the other hand, Miyazaki’s “Ponyo” is much better than “Up”!
18. Ben | June 1st, 2009 at 11:56 am
Look,
Pixar is really really good at telling a story visually rather than having dialogue drive everything and the visuals react. That is their strength, and if the idea of a children’s story being cheesy is so outrageous to you that you have to scream all over the internet about it, I don’t know what to tell you.
19. Best straight man's friend | June 1st, 2009 at 1:01 pm
No American will ever understand Jan Svankmajer’s creations.
You have to be born in Europe for it, travel in Europe, breathe european air, have a real european sex partner, etc.
20. brenda | June 1st, 2009 at 7:46 pm
So you have to be born in Europe to truly appreciate shitty movies that confuse surrealism with self-indulgent repetitive crap? Okay, that actually makes sense, I’ll give you that one. Congratulations are in order, I guess.
21. aleke | June 1st, 2009 at 7:48 pm
@17.
Other than the completely different writing style, maybe Eileen’s voice on the radio should impress in you the notion that this is a different writer.
Also, what’s up with these awful Pixar dreadnoughts coming in and getting all riled up?
22. Antonio B. | June 1st, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Bahhaaa… Relax. Pretentious much #19?
23. Lyuba | June 1st, 2009 at 10:29 pm
‘Up’ does not match well with the benchmark of great cinema – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_Al_Falfa
LA’s answer to the PBS-Limbaugh cabal, radiostantsiya KPFK, is running a retro of Холхозник Альфальфа at the Vineland Drive-In, City of Industry, June 12-14.
‘KPFK’?
Еб меня к смерти!
24. Korman643 | June 2nd, 2009 at 9:59 am
There’s nothing done by Svankmajer that hasn’t been done twice as well (and with more fun and poignancy and simplicity) by Jri Trinka – or Kihachiro Kawamoto.
And at cost of sounding snob – I think that Michael Maltese writing for the Hunting Trilogy of the Loney Tunes (the shorts where Daffy and Bugs argue with Elmer Fudd over if it’s duck or rabbit season) is completely unrivalled in cartoons both as sheer fun and as skillfull movie writing. Saw “Rabbit Seasoning” two minute ago for the 1000000 time and I’m still grinnin
25. phil | June 2nd, 2009 at 11:56 am
Coraline wasn’t good because of the 3d thing, it was good because it was a non pandering story.
26. DMC | June 3rd, 2009 at 12:30 am
What the Pixar defenders attacking Jones for “taking a cartoon too seriously” clearly miss is the fact that the movie is only being scrutinized by the Exiled because mainstream critics have themselves been taking the movie as far more than “just a kid’s movie”. And, while yes it isn’t ‘edgy’, that doesn’t address the validity of Jones’s claim that it’s saccharine pabulum of the worst kind, and that Pixar’s movies have gotten markedly preachier and less interesting with each new film. Yes, it’s a movie for kids, but do children’s emotions really need to be so obviously manipulated? The idea that something should be critically bulletproof simply because its target audience doesn’t read movie reviews doesn’t seem to make all that much sense.
And finally, saying that a film critics is in the wrong for taking a movie ‘too seriously’ is one of the worst arguments that could be made: to #10 and others, do you go to people’s workplaces and tell them they shouldn’t be taking their jobs seriously?
P.S.: to any commenter defending Up!, do you like Frank Capra by any chance?
27. Mikhail | June 3rd, 2009 at 8:02 am
Awesome piece Eileen. Truth is I’m working for PR for Pixar on this, but since I’m a sock puppet and no one knows, I’ll just tell you that you’re absolutely right. Now I’ll have to go under another name in a moment and trash the article for being “pretentious” or whatever our talking points memo told us to do.
28. Peter | June 3rd, 2009 at 11:32 am
For what it’s worth, 26, I never told Jones she takes her job too seriously. What I was arguing against was making edginess the sole criteria for judging this movie, which is made doubly dubious by the fact that she’s judged movies by other criteria which “Up” meets, such as whether a movie moves. This led me to my main criticism of this site’s perspective, the whole punk-derived notion that art should be dangerous, which is also contradicted by other writings of the people involved (“the sword is mightier than the pen,” etc.).
Maybe I’m weird, but I don’t think I internalized that many messages from the movies I watched as a kid. If I watched “Up” I think I’d care less about the first fifteen minutes– pretty much the only part of the movie Jones writes about– and care more about the weird and colorful-looking stuff that happens for the rest of the movie.
And, actually, now that you mention it, DMC, I would tell any number of people (campus security guards, for example, or people at the DMV) that they should take their jobs less seriously.
P.S. Capra’s movies are ok for what they are, provided you’re not so insecure you need every scene in every movie you watch mesh with whatever worldview you’re into this week.
29. JustJack | June 3rd, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I’m also a sock puppet for Pixar trolling around looking for negative reviews. Weird how I meet myself here over and over. Well anyway, your review is right-on, except that we’re even more evil and crap than you wrote. Hope my PR firm doesn’t catch me saying it. Keep up the good work Eileen!
30. u2r1 | June 3rd, 2009 at 5:44 pm
I’m puzzled why no one has commented on the remarkable similarity of recent Pixar characters, in both background and foreground, to their exalted chief of creativity, John Lassater; the same shiny egg-like corpulence, the same permanent imbicilic grin, the same propensity for moronity
31. u2r1 | June 3rd, 2009 at 6:06 pm
@Люба
– с удоволствьем ! –
32. aleke | June 4th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
@26
You know, I think these children’s movies should be scrutinized even more, since it’s pure indoctrination.
33. Люба | June 4th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
‘с удоволствьем’?
Вы безграмотное дерьмо. Хотя бы скажите его по буквам правильно,падла ебанная. Строго в рту, мудак.
34. bbrtz | June 5th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
how can you spend your time watching and then even reviewing crap-cartoons (animation, whatever) like that?
I mean, I don’t get it. The reviewer seems to be completely aware of the fact that these cartoons are complete crap, boring, sugary, tasteless and, despite their seemingly innocuous, “childish” story and style they’re just appalingly ideological indoctrination.
SO here’s the big question: why don’t you stop reviewing crap like this and watch (and review if you feel compelled to do so) some good films that you like??!?
wouldn’t that make more sense?
i don’t get it.
35. Dante | June 9th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
The … house flies?
Anyway, great review, Eileen! You had me at “waterboard you with the gushing tears of a million pathetic orphans.” Awesome! I wish I could write essays as funny as this one.
36. steve macdonald | June 14th, 2009 at 9:07 pm
Re: 16
Disney didn’t exactly purchase Pixar, it was more like the other way around. When the dust settled, the acquisition left Steve Jobs as the majority stock holder of the Disney empire. As I keep telling people, Apple rules.
37. u2r1 | June 26th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
@33 – ЛЮБА
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
38. Serge | July 9th, 2009 at 11:35 am
12. brenda | June 1st, 2009 at 8:11 am
raaarrrggghhh i’m a derivative pseudogonzo journalist who is angry about cartoons somebody please take me seriously
this is a good example of “Falatia ad hominem”. when you can’t put better arguments on the table, you atack the critic’s personallity.
how dull and pathetic
39. Daniel | July 19th, 2009 at 8:07 pm
I am a PR bot whose job is to find reviews not sufficiently positive, and try to undermine the reviews. Please someone put me out of my misery.
40. Andrew | August 7th, 2009 at 6:27 pm
To Ms. Eileen Jones:
I enjoy reading your review. I actually work for a PR firm and I’m supposed to troll sites, but just wanted to say, good review.
41. norskboreskblekkmettle | August 14th, 2009 at 2:40 am
The only thing more predictable than your average children’s film is the response they get from wannabe renegade/anarchist/communist (yes I know a blatant contradiction but don’t let them know that) websites and their blind sheep followers who are probably too bonged up to come up with interesting opinions of their own.
Indoctrination? Indoctrinating…what exactly? Does it say “George W. Bush is your new god… hail the Aryan race” when you play it backwards?
42. Vinss | November 2nd, 2009 at 8:20 pm
The negative opinion you gave about the movie for all the wrong reasons sort of makes me think you’re the kind of person that tries to contradict everyone because no one does; now I’m okay with contradicting popular beliefs when it’s worth it, but contradicting for the sake of contradicting is useless and dumb.
Accusing Pixar of abusing of their popularity to create more and more heart-warming movies is outrageous by the simple fact that it’s their objective; in the film industry, the main goal of a company is to attract a great audience and please everyone that walks in the theatre to go see their movie; Pixar has achieved something big by attracting adult and children to the same movie and pleasing both during the viewing (followed closely by DreamWorks), you’re accusing them of their own success; what would you suggest, that they stop making movies people enjoy and like? Pixar’s target audience is children and parents and they have mastered their interaction, it’s their objective and their job and they perform exquisitely. Contrarily to DreamWorks with flops such as Shark Tales or Flushed Away, Pixar’s movies have always been suited for both adulthood and childhood, if they go deeper and deeper into the heart warming, it’s simply because that’s the key of their success and it’s on their way to beating their last movie.
Obviously, you have little to no knowledge of CG animation and modeling, because the movie is beautifully composed, the 3D modeling is a perfect mix of realism and cartoon and the textures and meshes are superbly crafted, the animation is flawless and the artists’ work on Up was great.
I suggest you try and get an opinion of your own instead of merely trying to create some bullshit opinion you half-assed together by saying the opposite of what people say. Going against the masses is alright if you have a good reason for it.
43. phil | November 19th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
“contradicting for the sake of contradicting is useless and dumb.” That’s what angry feminists do lol
44. Tommy V | January 10th, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Dogs flying planes… This movie was dumb. It opened so perfectly and then after about 30 minutes it completely jumped the shark. It may be an animated feature but it was completely grounded by reality in the first 15 to 20 minutes. Then all of a sudden an old man is running through the jungle with a fat kid and a house attached to his waist. All to find a person who no way in hell could still be alive, with talking, airplane flying dogs. Seriously WTF?
45. Cernunnos Trismegistus | February 1st, 2010 at 8:10 pm
@ Korman643
Sounds like you haven’t seen many Svankmajer films then since his style is not very comparable to Trnka or Kawamoto and you very much mis-characterize the tone of his output. Trnka and Kawamoto both rely mostly on stop-motion puppets, whereas Svankmajer has used a huge variety of animation materials, figurines being but a small subset. You could perhaps level your criticisms against the Quay Brothers better since they have mostly used puppet figures, but I would still prefer them.
Before I go further, I should say that I’m not sure whether you’re criticizing him based only on his feature films or whether you’ve also seen all or many of his 26 short films, which, in my opinion, are quite superior to any of his feature lengths, although I love those too.
Obviously it just comes down to an issue of taste as to whether you think Svankmajer’s films aren’t done as well or aren’t as fun. For my two cents, the scope, variety, and technical brilliancy of his films far surpass Trnka and Kawamoto, and I think it’s impossible to miss just how much fun and humor (albeit mostly black humor) is found in his shorts.
As for poignancy and simplicity….well I guess if you value those things in films. I don’t necessarily. I fail to see how the relative complexity of Svankmajer’s technical aspects or his themes are any kind of downside. I’ve never cared much for poignancy, but if you know anything about Surrealism, its history, and philosophy, you’d be able to see that Jan incorporates quite a lot of Surrealist poignancy for childhood imagination, even (and especially) those things that are frightening as a child. (“Jabberwocky” [1971] and “Down to the Cellar” [1983] are perhaps the best examples of his childhood obsession).
46. BradCheng | February 2nd, 2010 at 11:57 am
I agree completely that “UP” almost unbelieveably besotted every critic. I have enjoyed all the Pixar films, yet I felt “UP” was a poorly plotted and unsatisfying film. It had no second act (and I mean, NO second act: Skip the balloon trip across the world and jump cut to the finale), and the third act piled on cliches and wildly unimaginative obstacles (packs of zombied dogs) on what began as a heartwarmer. I, frankly don’t know why every critic missed that fact this film descended is to Hollywood action gunk, after a fine first 10 minutes. I absolutely am baffled by this and bouyed to see that this website dares to recognize that Pixar isn’t the second coming anymore when it comes to animated films. Their early work had much better writing, but now everyone employed there seems to believe their an auteur (based on the fact that for awhile they were the ONLY animation act in town) and capable only of genius. Frankly I hardly find their films geniunely funny anymore. And “UP,” for me, was the weakest effort they’ve put out. A warm short that descended into an incredulously bad thriller.
47. Someone in the Real World | February 22nd, 2010 at 8:05 pm
?????!!!!!! Non of these criticisms have any evidence behind them. They are the kind of comments that come from people who don’t get it sometimes. IF you watch Up with open-mindedness and compassion, then it is a wonderful movie. Sure, Charlie Chaplin was great, but using his movies to put down a perfectly fine and well-written movie? That;s just uncalled for.
48. BoredUser | May 16th, 2010 at 9:29 pm
“And don’t think for a second they’ll stop in their tear-jerking efforts with the chubby kid, who’s got no mother to love him, only an absentee dad.”
Actually, his mother appears at the end of the film..
“Pixar hedges its bets by adding a cute dog who’s rejected by his dog pack.”
This wasn’t really done as a tear jerker..
“And a large endangered-species bird, which gets injured and hobbles pitifully.”
Only at the end of the movie..
Sorry, felt it necessary to point these things out.
49. Lukoi | November 9th, 2010 at 11:07 am
i cant believe these happy movies have made some people so angry.
chill and enjoy the movie, fuck.
P.S. – Reviewer, you’re gay.
50. haha | December 18th, 2014 at 7:42 am
Eileen, you’re such a goddess. I will now stfu
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