A BRAVE NEW WORLD IN JEOPARDY: PIXAR STUDIOS IN 2013

More than anyone else in the world, more than any teen crush I once adored, the one person I couldnt stop myself bear-hugging if the faintest chance presented itself is John Lasseter. Lasseter, the animator and innovator behind Pixar Studios is a genius whose impact on contemporary childrens cinema equals the effect that Tolkein or Lewis had on childrens literature. Inarguably, nothing has been the same since he made Toy Story in 1995. His many imitators may have surfed his wake filling cinemas and Asda bargain DVD shelves with inferior facsimiles often libellously so but when the Pixar logo bounces across the screen you know that your world is about to change and almost certainly for the better. However, there are clouds gathering up ahead which give grim cause for concern.

Cars have always been Lasseters weak spot (he is an avowed NASCAR junkie). Carsand Cars (2006). That film chipped the link in a chain of largely perfect animated films that matched the dazzling innovation of their CGI with wit, heart, intelligence and craftsmanship that no other studio could emulate. Only Studio Ghibli and the hand drawn dream-poetry of director Hayao Miyazaki could compare. And its not that Cars was dreadful per se, it just didnt really work. The anthropomorphism of the vehicles by way of pupils on the windscreens and talking fenders was not enough to pull the characters into our arms like the animated playthings of Toy Story. It came off the back of The Incredibles which boldly challenged the popular PC orthodoxy that celebrated the pursuit of bland, across the board uniformity Everyone can be super, cackled the villain, and when

everyones superno one will be. Following that, Cars homespun lessons about limiting your expectations seemed as hoary as a Dragnet epilogue coda.

The ball was only fumbled though, not dropped. The short film that preceded Cars, One Man Band was the funniest and most inventive to date, and the advance trailer for the following years Ratatouille bade well. In actual fact, it signalled a purple patch of rubies that could rival any prolonged artistic endeavour of the last 100 years. Brad Birds Ratatouille was a living, breathing love letter not just to French cookery or Paris itself, but of the essential pursuit of sheer beauty for its own sake. Then came Wall-E, a Dystopian masterpiece of vaulting intellectual ambition that had a heart the size of an elephant beating inside it.

Then there was Up. Now, picture yourself as an archetypal Playeresque LA movie producer. Give yourself a ponytail for effect and imagine that youve combined a suit with white trainers, which you are now resting on your $75,000 desk. OK, shoot, you say to Pete Docter, who is here to pitch his new idea for a kids movie. Right, he begins, Theres an old guy, a widower. He ties about 2,000 balloons to his house and flies it down to South America. Then he finds a rare bird, but another old guy wants to kill it and he has all these dogs, which can talk. Oh and theres a fat boy scout with the first old guy. That sound youre making is your finger pressing under your desk where the producers panic button would be.

Up is the most extraordinary Pixar film to date, for more reasons than a reasonably sized paragraph could contain. One could summarise by concluding that notions of such poetic chimerical disparity have never been so perfectly sewn together, not even

by Miyazaki himself, and the many varied colours of humanity arent smothered by such virtuosity but allowed to turn into rainbows.

After Up, the only way looked down and probably would have been for anyone else. Pixar however released Lee Unkrichs Toy Story 3 and in doing so threw a Best Trilogy Ever hand onto the poker table. Few breath-draining moments in all of cinema rival the scene when the toys link hands in silent acceptance of death and descend towards a fiery inferno in the garbage dump. Toy Story 3 was the fourth Pixar film in a row to win the Best Animated Picture Oscar. It made over a billion dollars worldwide. There was absolutely nothing these people couldnt do. Then they made Cars 2.

No one but John Lasseter thought that Cars 2 was a good idea. I kept thinking, What would Mater do? was his explanation for building a film around Pixars least charming character going on a globe trotting adventure. Mater, like Nemo, is a character that is, yknow, for kids and the whole film is targeted exclusively in that direction. The moralising, the simplistic resolutions, the be who you are clichs: it was like watching Teen Wolf again, or even worse: Teen Wolf Too. Where tears had soaked my shirt collars in Up, Daddys trip to see Cars 2 with his little one resulted only in depression. Next time though, it would be better amazing even, as is the Pixar style. But next time was Brave.

The word First was bandied around a lot upon Braves release. Pixars FIRST fairy tale starring Pixars FIRST female lead: a feisty Scottish princess, Merida who fights against her mothers conformist plans and endangers the kingdom. By accidentally

turning her mother into a bear and then stitching a torn tapestry back together, Merida learns to become more responsible and her mother learns to loosen up.

There is certainly much to recommend Brave to an age-spectrum audience. In the final analysis though, its not a patch on Dreamworks How To Train Your Dragon, which shares the same territory of horned helmets and Craig Ferguson vocal duties. It lacks the awe of the flight scenes, or the inner torment of young Hiccups dragonloving deception. If anything, Merida cant keep anything to herself and spends the first 80% of the film loudly playing the part of the family teenager screaming Its not fair!! In, say 1995 a no-nonsense young girl rejecting the thumb-press of societys conformist demands by mastering weapons and scaling mountains would have been an iconic, era defining character. Nowadays such attitudes are essentially mandatory in young female characters. Ill leave the last word on Brave to my daughter who eagerly filled her Panini sticker albums for both Up and Toy Story 3 over many months of collecting. The Brave album, so many weeks later sports only the complementary stickers that were included with the introductory package. Like Wheezy the asthmatic rubber penguin from Toy Story 2, its been shelved: never to be opened again.

Like Cars, Brave is fun, diverting and occasionally marvellous. No more than youd expect from an Ice Age or a Shrek, but a Pixar movie must offer more than those wellmade diversions. You would assume that Pixar were the last people in Hollywood who needed to have that explained to them, yet when one considers the upcoming releases on Pixars slate there is little in the way of succour. Finding Dory, the sequel to 2003s megahit Finding Nemo has just been announced. This year in Monster

University, we even have that most dreaded of experiments: the prequel. It could be that Pixar will succeed where Butch & Sundance: The Early Years, Dumb & Dumberer and George Lucas failed so predictably, but is that really the extent of Pixars imagination at this point? After years of transforming and reinventing the storytellers palette, is straight-to-DVD Cars spin off Planes really what those animators are thinking about as they race around Pixar HQ on their Segway scooters?

It is tempting to lay the blame at the feet of Disney studios who purchased Pixar in 2006. Dark conversations that would have been previously beneath them now seemed worryingly plausible. Suddenly, Cars 2 with its merchandising bonanza looked like a sop to the parent company for having financed the toyless Up. Lasseter was poached to become the Principle Creative Advisor at Walt Disney Imagining supervising Disneys cruelly underrated return to hand-drawn animation, The Princess & The Frog. A generals sharpness of focus fogs understandably when he has to fight a war on two fronts, but it does leave one slightly disconsolate to even suspect that after years of taking the cinema of animation to heights not scaled since the days of Pinocchio and Fantasia, the greatest movie studio in Hollywood can now only see its greatness within the frame of a rear-view mirror.

Not that any of these considerations will stop me bear-hugging John Lasseter if I ever get my hands on him.