24 Fps - Saturday, August 7, 2010 20:03

Script Talk

The Magic of Pixar

Creative Screenwriting magazine’s Danny Munso argues that, despite stunning visuals, it’s Pixar’s investment in story that steals the show.

Spoiler Alert! This column features minor plot details from Toy Story 3 and other Pixar films.

Film is the ultimate visual medium, so the focus of the issue you are currently holding is vitally important to making a great movie. Your audience needs to be visually stimulated or you will simply fail. But, however great those visuals are, if there is no story behind them then you really don’t have a film at all. That doesn’t stop us seeing movies released every year that succumb to the formula of all visual and no story. This is particularly popular in the realm of ‘comic book’ films. But if you go back and take a look at two of the better ones released this decade, Spider-Man and Iron Man, you could make the argument that the scenes in which those characters are simply their human alter-egos are more powerful and striking than the effects-laden fight scenes that follow.

Or we can look to the highest grossing film of all time, James Cameron’s Avatar. A lot of moviegoers went to see the spectacle, the groundbreaking visuals with the added boost of revolutionary 3D technology. But the defenders of that film all cite its story as the reason it has their undying love. Most of the world can agree that Cameron’s visuals were out of this world, but it’s the story that factors in the most in whether someone loved or loathed it.

But the winning formula of great visuals plus an even better story has been perfected in Emeryville, CA, on the campus of Pixar Animation Studios. Just last month saw the release of their 11th consecutive blockbuster, Toy Story 3, and one could argue it’s their best film yet. And this has everything to do with the story that Pixar decided to tell.

Don’t misunderstand; Pixar’s films certainly look better than their competitors. But that is not the essence of their domination. That can be found in their constant ability to craft tales that may seem, pardon the pun, cartoonish at first, but actually speak to the human condition. Whether it’s an automobile who has lost his connection to the real world and must find his way back home in Cars, or a simple rat who feels he is destined for greatness even if it’s in the place he is welcome the least (the kitchen) in Ratatouille, Pixar’s stories speak to us as people, even if humans are sometimes never even involved in the movies.

Director Brad Bird, a veteran of The Simpsons, was coming off his 1999 animated film The Iron Giant which, despite flopping at the box office, was one of the year’s most acclaimed movies. Bird had felt betrayed by the Warner Bros. studio heads and marketing department, who pushed the picture aside. When Bird, a hand-drawn traditionalist, decided to accept his friend John Lasseter’s invite to Pixar to make his next film (The Incredibles), he was ribbed by a few of his friends for ‘selling out’. But Bird simply told them the truth: he was going to Pixar because they would protect his story.

At its simplest distillation, Pixar’s success can be traced to Bird’s statement: they genuinely put story above everything else. From their filmmakers all the way down to their artists, the studio preaches that story is paramount. From its very inception, the studio understood what the rest of Hollywood and their desperate attempts at launching animation studios couldn’t; that it was far more important what a film said than what it looked like.

Even someone who has not studied the studio’s films intently can probably attribute their success to this simple fact: they make movies that children and adults can enjoy simultaneously. But it is far more than that. Yes, Pixar films became the films parents didn’t mind taking their kids to, but to simplify it to that fact makes it sound as if this is the studio’s deliberate intention; it sounds like a business decision. But Pixar’s filmmakers are often quoted as saying they simply make these films for themselves.

It’s an easy statement to prove, as the past 10 years have seen Pixar take risks that many wouldn’t. The two largest Pixar films of the decade, Finding Nemo and Up, both open with the deaths of major characters. This is not kids’ stuff; these are stories of life and loss wrapped in the shell of bright colours and talking animals. A further step was taken in 2008 with Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E, a film whose main character was a robot who only communicated through beeps and featured no dialogue of any kind for its first 30 minutes of screen time. Some risks were taken internally, as with 2007’s Ratatouille. Midway through production, Lasseter and the creative minds at Pixar didn’t like the way the film was shaping up. They made the decision to replace director Jan Pinkava with Bird, who reshaped the script on the fly, yet still delivered the film in time for its release date.

Pixar’s important creative minds Lasseter, Bird, Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter all studied under the great animators at Walt Disney Animation, and it’s clear they took more than drawing skills with them from their days at the studio. Disney’s classic animated works became legendary because of their character work, and their unwillingness to pander to children, even though they were its main market. Sound familiar?

You will never see a sideshow such as Jar-Jar Binks in a Pixar work (sorry, Mr Lucas). Every character, every plot point, serves a purpose. Take the eager 10-year-old wilderness scout Russell in 2009’s Up. He provides the film with much of its comic relief, yet is not there merely for laughs. He is a child from a broken home, searching for a father figure, and it’s that character trait that helps him form the bond with 81-year-old Carl, the film’s protagonist.

“We as moviegoers need to become immersed in a world to believe it.”

And that brings us back to their latest masterpiece. Toy Story 3 tells the emotional story of the toys deciding to move on when their owner, Andy, is about to move to college. It’s a script perfectly balanced on sentimental and comedic actions. Near the end of the film, two sequences in particular had an effect on me that I rarely have in a movie theatre. I asked around to see if others felt the same as I did, and we all agreed; the ending of Toy Story 3 is the most emotional in recent film history. A few of the people I polled were men and we were all slightly ashamed to admit the reality: that we had shed a few tears. I was astounded at this, as these weren’t even real actors we were watching. But we were watching real characters. Somewhere along the line of the first two Toy Story films, these toys became real not just to their owner in the film, but to the audience as well.

So when the climax of the trilogy rolls around, we are more invested than we thought possible. Pixar, for all their infinite storytelling wisdom, had pulled off their biggest sleight of hand to date: making us care about inanimate objects. It’s an astounding feat in filmmaking and one that relies very little on the visual aspect of those films. While the animation in the Toy Story trilogy is increasingly impressive, it’s the soul of those plastic playthings that took incredible talent to put there.

Director Lee Unkrich, screenwriter Michael Arndt and the rest of the Pixar brain trust infused these fan favourites with life; Woody’s steadfast loyalty, Buzz’s frank earnestness, Mr. Potato Head’s irascible wit, just to name a few. This film is not about looks, it’s about raw emotion; the emotion we have toward these characters and the emotion we have about our childhoods in general. That is masterful storytelling.

Visuals can only take a viewer so far. We as moviegoers need to become immersed in a world to believe it, and that’s where the visuals play a key role. But once we’re in that world, we need a reason to stay; we need a story and characters that we can immediately identify and sympathise with. Or else what we’re seeing on screen will descend rapidly into meaninglessness.

The lesson here is that a film can look or sound as perfect as possible, but none of that will amount to anything worth remembering if you aren’t telling a great story. And if you have beloved characters ready to make grown men cry at the drop of a hat, well, even better.

For more information on Creative Screenwriting Magazine and its new Digital Edition, visit www.creativescreenwriting.com. movieScope readers get a special 15% discount on a subscription by entering the coupon MOVIESCOPE in our shopping cart.
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This article first appeared in movieScope Magazine, Issue 18 (August/ September 2010)