I had the pleasure of chatting with two Singaporean filmmakers, Jeremy Sing and Leon Cheo, about the local short film finalists at this year’s Singapore International Film Festival over at SINdie, the local indie film blog headed by Jeremy where I also write. The films were screened in one sitting at the Sinema Old School theatre, which can be reached by climbing a flight of over 140 steps from the nearest train station—much like being a prospective disciple to a kung fu master.

I’ve never enjoyed a more promising slate of local short films, which speaks as much to my relative inexperience in this area as it does to the state of our indie film “industry” and the diverse quality of this year’s crop of finalists. You can find my distilled reviews of each film under the jump, or better, read them in context: Part 1 and Part 2 of our conversation.

Que Sera Sera (dir. Ghazi Alqudcy)
What a sweet film, and how cheeky indeed that it achieves this by being as profane and borderline racist as it is! A lot of this can be attributed to the disarming figure of Syahidi, who plays the chubby kid that is the film’s centre; as well as the ever-present voiceover by the director Ghazi himself. Like I noted, the voiceover can be rather profane, at one point even getting into a chant of words I won’t repeat here, while the sanitised subtitles keep swapping between “Dick.” and “Head.” It also tempts charges of racism, despite disclaiming that “I am not racist”, when the kid, late for school, bumps into the Indian discipline master at the school gate. It helps, of course, that I know the actor playing the discipline master is a sporting friend of Ghazi’s. But what saves all this even more is the disparity between the cursing voiceover and the boy’s sweet and natural disposition, which ends up making the former seem more harmlessly amusing.

I also loved that, like Philothea Liau’s Brazil (where the value of an eraser reaches absurd heights), Que Sera Sera manages to evoke nostalgic details of past school days, and appends to that a kid’s perspective on those details. I’m referring here to the discipline master’s punishment, so idiosyncratic to its time and place, and so random and unfitting to the problem; and to the boy’s reaction, never questioning the punishment’s logic, but troubled by an unrelated set of problems that it will cause him.

The only complaint I have is that the film contrives a tummyache just so that the main character will miss his class. This makes sense logistics-wise, since you’d only need to cast the teacher and none of his classmates; and it helps the emotion of the scene where he presents his ambitions to the teacher alone, since it’s no longer a chance to show off to peers but a more intimate reveal of his dreams to someone who seems to care (which prompted another filmmaker during the Q&A to ask Ghazi if he ended up marrying that teacher, heh). Yet since the rest of the autobiographical film feels light and frothily believable, the tummyache could have been better foreshadowed so that it wouldn’t seem like a mere storytelling device. For instance, his voiceover could have mentioned that he eats just about anything (and showed him eating something bad), or he could have been filmed eating just before he was made to run laps around the parade square. A minor point, really, when the rest of the film manages to be so funny, truthful, and above all sincere.

Contained (dir. Harry Zhuang, Henry Zhuang)
Great stop-motion animation nearly always catches me in the throat, just for the sheer technical bravado and patience involved, and Contained managed that early on with its depiction of those plasticine waves sloshing. But despite the breathtaking difficulty of crafting those wide shots of the island, I find that my favourite scenes of the film are those set in the dark, tight confines of the hut interior, where the main character tends to his dying flower. There’s a surprising rage to his attempts to save the mere appearance of the flower’s health, culminating in that sad image of the re-attached petals blowing off the flower, leaving strips of cellophane tape flapping in the wind. I love that, while most films would opt for making a similar character pitifully emo, this film drives him insane instead—and breaks out that madness visually in its memorable final shots.

Sunrise (dir. Platon Theodoris)
The theme of being left alone carried over to Sunrise, about an eldest son who has to care for his younger sisters after their mother leaves them for work. It’s the most “foreign” film among the finalists, filmed and set in Cambodia with the orphans of the Sunrise Children’s Village, which may explain why I found it hard to identify with it… although the languid first half may also be to blame. There’s an approach to observational detail (e.g. a shot of a plastic scoop bobbing in a full bucket) that works when these details are tethered to a narrative throughline, and I don’t think it’s achieved in “Sunrise”. To be fair, I like the scene where the boy heads to the temple with his siblings to arrange his mother’s funeral; it reminded me of Kore-eda Hirokazu’s Nobody Knows (Japan, 2004), which also involves a kid having to step up to being an eldest sibling, an adult, and even a surrogate parent, long before he ever deserves to.

Promises in December (dir. Elgin Ho)
In Singaporean cinema, the taxi driver and the maid are in danger of being far too common character types, the film pairs the two as leads rather fruitfully. I like that it opens with the maid on her phone, shaping her as a person with an imaginable life back at her Indonesian home, without abstracting it into a burden as many migrant films do; and I like that her employer family’s daughter for whom she makes breakfast actually seems appreciative of her work, when so many other filmmakers want to harp on the flashpoint of abuse.

Instead the film makes the taxi driver the worker-class character who is beset with problems. His HDB flat and packet char kway teow are clearly meant to contrast the landed property and pancakes where the maid works, and yet the film does this while skirting past a lot of the cheap oppositions that are one of my pet peeves about local film. I suspect it works because the maid doesn’t actually live there, making the contrast more complicated, and because the film doesn’t demonise either way of life.

This leads to what is absolutely my favourite shot among all the finalist films: when the maid is in the driver’s taxi, he tosses off a comment that she probably wouldn’t want to live in Singapore if it weren’t for the pay, right? As he says this, we get a shot of the maid looking out of the cab window, on which is reflected a row of HDB flats, and she is silent as they drive by. It’s such a profound shot, capturing the perspective of a woman who probably dreams of a life that the man is disavowing, even as we acknowledge that her six years’ work in a landed property would likely misrepresent life as he knows it.

And then the film has to spoil that by contriving an explicit link between them, of all things by invoking the Asian tsunami of 2004, and delivering “justice” to each character. Not only does the link make the whole setup feel artificial, it’s a little unfair to use a senseless tragedy like the tsunami to give fictional characters grief, especially if it’s a fake-out or if it’s to “punish” a character for not being understanding. Promises in December does both, and I haven’t even mentioned the awful closed-captioning on the film, which mars a potentially horrifying tsunami recording over a black screen with the words “[woman screaming]“. (Or that, at an earlier point, reads “[phone vibrates]” even though the onscreen phone isn’t visibly vibrating.)

Life with Ummu (dir. Tanya Lai)
Life with Ummu’s central features are the shots of the autistic Ummu whacking herself, frantically rearranging the pillows on her bed, and screaming for no clear reason. These are easy for unfamiliar viewers to misunderstand, so it helps that we approach her from the perspective of her empathetic parents and younger sister, obvious though this approach may seem. Life with Ummu is an amateurish stickler for talking heads and unneeded voiceovers, which brings up a recurring issue I have with the still-young Singaporean cinema: the divide between fiction filmmakers, who often have great technique; and documentary filmmakers, who often have great content. Of course, there are notable exceptions in both cases, but I still haven’t encountered a Singaporean fiction film with a narrative as urgent, politically and emotionally, as the ones I routinely find in any of our half-decent documentaries. Predictable it may be, but Life with Ummu is no different.

The 25th of Laura (dir. Joshua Simon)
Counter to the film prior, The 25th of Laura struck me as emotionally detached and clichéd in content (a man moping over his muse—meh), but where technique is concerned, its attempts to innovate are evident. I suppose I was somewhat receptive to director Joshua Simon’s willingness to scatter the logic of his film, even though I get that his efforts can be seen as total wankery. Out of the slipstream bits I can still remember a good few: the estranging Korean voiceover, a figure swathed in light on a bare stage, an attempt at suicide gone absurd, a verdant if under-composed heaven sequence, and an afterimage emerging from a mosaic of photos. But I suspect that as time passes, the absent backbone of emotional meaning will quickly blot these images from memory, so I hope Simon follows this up by discovering a worthy story to which he can apply his talents—without, of course, being overwhelmed by the need to show off.

Mu Dan (dir. Lincoln Chia)
It’s apt to discuss these questions about self-indulgence in conjunction with the last film, Mu Dan. This film is also easily charged with wankery, and not just because it features a shot from behind of a man doing that very deed, his buttocks half-exposed, in its opening sequence (an homage to Sun Koh’s Dirty Bitch, last year’s S’pore Short Film Award winner). It’s also because the film calls attention to its surfaces: hostile cant-angled shots of an HDB lift lobby, a curiously empty and dark HDB unit, Chinese actresses exchanging a blonde wig, wafts of cigarette smoke, red peonies as a metaphor for youth.

I haven’t even gotten to how whole scenes are shot voyeuristically, either from behind doors/corners onto unsuspecting characters; or into mirrors, so that we watch the characters’ reflections the whole time. And that’s before the film ends by re-appropriating a lover’s song of heartbreak to the central situation of a divorced mom losing her son to a girlfriend. Cuh-reepy. I can excuse the odd lapses in directorial control, as in the two-person medium shots without any sense of theatrical blocking, because the rest of Mu Dan emanates discipline and oddball imagination at a level unmatched by its fellow nominees, save for maybe Contained.

What’s a blogger writing Against The Hype to do? Well, to start with, I’ll be happy to point out that this year, the Academy did anoint a movie that, aesthetically and politically, couldn’t deserve it more. It’s now enjoying a re-run in local theatres, so catch it while you can!

Review: The Hurt Locker

My two theatrical experiences of this latest Best Picture winner were dramatically different, even opposing. The first time around, having just finished my two-year stint in the army, my sympathies lay with sergeant Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who is tasked with providing cover against potential snipers and bomb-igniters. Both he and I couldn’t stop being frustrated at the wilful bravado of his new bomb-defusal team leader William James (Jeremy Renner), who strutted through potential killzones, held standoffs against cars, and threw away his comms headset at critical junctures, keeping his entire team in mortal risk. So despite a thoughtful gesture towards Sanborn in the sniper scene, I watched with a chilly disposition as James took a turn for the utterly reckless, imagining himself as some Bourne Supremacy-style renegade in two later scenes. Those two scenes, and the ones right after, are clearly positioned to “teach James a lesson”, so I couldn’t stand that The Hurt Locker’s final scenes seemed eager to regress James into soldierly rock-stardom, with the music to match. Even if this was intended as irony, I felt aggrieved at the thought of siccing James on Sanborn’s wretched successor for a whole year. I left the theatre with mixed feelings, and then came online to discover a baffling ton of buzz for Renner’s performance, compared to almost none for Mackie. What a world!

After it re-opened last month, I returned to The Hurt Locker, eager to tether my perspective to James’ and see if that yielded a response closer to consensus. Lo, I found myself taking quickly to the bugger’s sexual charisma, as he grunted for help in removing the mortar-shield from his window, and flashed that rogue grin. By abandoning any notion of “gritty, realistic soldiering in Iraq” and instead tracing the movie’s eagerness to study James as its action star, I settled into a far more comfortable place from which to watch James dive into each new scenario that arose, and then to follow him down his self-inflicted missions. This time I caught, with full force, James’ sentimental logic and muffled desperation within those missions, or in the box of parts from bombs that almost killed him which he keeps under his bed, or in the world of difference between shoving a handgun into an Iraqi’s temple and racing against inevitability to unshackle another from his cage of bombs. The last shot of James, opaque in his bombsuit, transmuted from outraging to bleakly sad. Unfortunately, this made a casualty of Sanborn, who was clearly demoted from co-lead status, his pragmatism now too uptight for the genre’s demands.

These two Hurt Lockers still mingle in my mind, more dialectical than coherent. But forbid that an action flick or an Iraq anti-war movie should each stake claims on the other’s domain, or that the greatest overlap in those domains should lie in such gripping and diverse episodes of well-edited tension! I know a few people who, sight unseen, believe The Hurt Locker robbed Avatar’s Oscar, but there will be others who will now seek this movie out and wage a fair battle against their preconceptions. I couldn’t be happier.

The Hurt Locker | 2009 | USA | Director: Kathryn Bigelow | Screenplay: Mark Boal | Cast: Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, Ralph Fiennes, Christian Camargo, David Morse, Evangeline Lilly.

I haven’t yet parsed (nor could I possibly) all of the mysteries and wonders of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive after my first enraptured viewing, but how hypnotic is that scene in Club Silencio where Rebekah Del Rio sings “Llorando”, her a capella Spanish cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”? Her clear and tremulous voice, that creased forehead and weathered face, captured close-up over a dark background, echo more powerfully as a naked embodiment of desire than almost any musical number across the cinematic decade that followed. (And what are musical numbers meant to be but embodiments of desire?) The scene is wondrous in its simplicity, cutting between close-ups of Del Rio, weeping for a lost love, and of Naomi Watts and Laura Harring, weeping for beauty.

Mulholland Drive sustains its mystery by baring its heart in scenes like this one or Watts’ fabled audition, even when it complicates them with the futile threat of being illusory. What illusion? When Del Rio collapses as her voice plays on, or onlookers clap to Watts’ tear-choked breaths, we aren’t disappointed that “it’s all a sham”—because we remember. And so the magic persists: beyond death, beyond reality.

Mulholland Drive | 2001 | USA | Director: David Lynch | Screenplay: David Lynch | Cast: Naomi Watts, Laura Elena Harring, Rebekah Del Rio, Justin Theroux, Ann Miller

District 9: Bracing as a quasi-documentary on alien immigrants, and as a horror film on unwanted transformations; opaque as an action flick.

Double Indemnity: I just don’t get classic actresses playing hysterics. c.f. Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire, Hepburn in Long Day’s Journey into Night

Fighting: A formula film without the formula’s best parts: the sweat-soaked anticipation, the thrill of the win, or, y’know, the actual fighting.

Funny Girl: Nearly a revue meant to showcase Streisand’s talents at belting and rapid-fire line delivery; Streisand redefines stardom.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Potter fatigue has caught up to me; all of J.K. Rowling’s missed dramatic opportunities keep thwacking me in the face.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Sturdy pulp movie, with stars (Ford, Connery, Phoenix) that knew they were stars, and how to act as stars.

Katong Fugue: How is it that celluloid pianos so readily channel their player’s inner desires? (c.f. The Piano)

Moon: “Thoughtful scifi” for beginners: promising premise, predictable plotting.

Paper Heart: Shades of When Harry Met Sally, with clever, disciplined use of the handheld trope.

Paranormal Activity: Oscillates like Julie & Julia between its annoying and gratifying plots, but with demons (actual v boyfriend) not cooks

Public Enemies: Retreads Bonnie and Clyde, laced with the irony that even America’s Most Wanted doesn’t beat its citizens’ self-absorption.

Ratatouille: Anyone (who can reconstruct whole recipes from scratch with just a whiff) can cook.

Silkwood proves that horror movies are scarier when they feel like a part of life, especially one you haven’t the means to escape.

Taken: dooming teenagers worldwide to clampdowns on travel by their paranoid parents, who believe that kidnappers lie at every foreign turn.

There Will Be Blood score is such a keeper: each track is flavorful and distinctive! If it didn’t fit the images, that’s the movie’s fault.

Up: Apart from the vignettes of lifelong marriage… eurgh. Eurgh. Pixar at its most infantile.

The Wedding Banquet: Queer domesticity warms my soft heart.

West Side Story: (Romeo + Juliet’s plot) – (Shakespeare’s poetry) = Awful book scenes. Rita Moreno sets her scene ablaze; other songs nowhere as fiery.

You Can Count on Me: Exactly what the title says.

Movies I’ve seen so far from these lists (ranked in descending order):

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (‘04): A patchwork quilt of relationship truths and clever scifi, culminating in the wisest romantic insight since Annie Hall
2. The Incredibles (‘04): Deft, rocket-paced flexing of superheroes into crises of identity and family (full review)
3. Erin Brockovich (‘00): Finally, a star vehicle that fully capitalises on Julia Roberts’ prickly edges
4. Julia (‘08): You won’t find a more sober and disciplined director-actor pair playing so drunk, desperate and out-of-control
5. Birth (‘04): Nicole Kidman thrives in close-ups and in being profoundly disturbed; this movie indulges her
6. The Bourne Supremacy (‘04): Whip-smart, breakneck spy thriller that sustains Jason Bourne’s clear-headed urgency while suffused with the pain of his loss
7. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (‘01): Epic worldcrafting, with actors and designers attuned to the demands of old-school myth
8. In the Mood for Love (‘00): Aestheticised within an inch of its life, which fits brilliantly its tale of yearning and suffocation in ’60s Hong Kong
9. Before Sunset (‘04): Sadness and self-absorption jostle in this narrow Parisian sequel to the gloriously expansive and romantic predecessor
10. Synecdoche, New York (‘08): A heartfelt meditation on self-centredness and ageing; relies on your capacity for deadpan humor, sadsack-watching and between-the-lines editing
11. Kill Bill Vol 1 (‘03): Candy-coloured pop fantasia of actresses and Japanese action movies, with a drop in mid-film momentum from Uma’s ineptness with bimbo humour
12. The Hurt Locker (‘09): More realistic, tense sequences of warfare than you’ll find elsewhere, though the soldiers teeter a bit towards broad enigma
13. There Will Be Blood (‘07): Fiery tempests wrought from the earth’s depths, Jonny Greenwood’s alien strings, and Daniel Day-Lewis’ oil baron. But things can get un-illuminatingly loud
14. Memento (‘00): Gimmicky collage of noirish scenes, blank-slate grieving and emotional manipulations held fast by a punchy existential twist
15. Sideways (‘04): Depends on your mileage for sadsacks, especially when they’re insulated by narrative perks, e.g. sex with the luminous Virginia Madsen
16. Adaptation (‘02): Depends on your mileage for sadsacks, especially when they’re insulated by narrative perks, e.g. being fictional
17. No Country for Old Men (‘07): Cleaves too easily into standalone scenes of well-edited tension and recycled caricature-humour to truly earn its mopey “bleak” ending
18. King Kong (‘05): Fanboy-wank remake bloated with CGI, wrapped around a cross-species romantic core that should have ventured beyond mere gestures at empathy
19. Mysterious Skin (‘04): Alternates between its boring and its exploitative plots, though Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s hustler gets a few emotionally raw/tender encounters
20. Hunger (‘08): I’m tired of arthouse exploitation as an excuse for male nudity, or vice versa; hurling shit-stained walls and clichéd police brutality at me doesn’t help

(The movies I have yet to see, or don’t remember enough to write about, can be found after the jump.)

Unseen movies from Tim Robey’s list (ranked in ascending order):

100. Dogville (‘03) 99. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (‘01) 98. Tropical Malady (‘04) 97. Monster (‘03) 96. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (‘05) 95. Atanarjuat, the Fast Runner (‘01) 94. Last Resort (‘00) 93. Sugar (‘08) 92. In this World (‘02) 91. The Last Victory (‘04) 90. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (‘07) 87. A Time for Drunken Horses (‘00) 86. Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (‘02) 85. The Fountain (‘06) 84. Gerry (‘02) 83. White Material (‘09) 81. Frozen Land (‘05) 80. The King of Kong (‘07) 79. Johnny Mad Dog (‘08) 77. Les petites vacances (‘06) 76. Abouna (‘02) 75. We Own the Night (‘07) 74. School of Rock (‘03) 73. The Night of the Sunflowers (‘06) 72. Yella (‘07) 71. Red Road (‘06) 70. Downfall (‘04) 69. Summer Hours (‘08) 68. Deep Water (‘06) 67. Secret Sunshine (‘07) 66. 13 Lakes (‘04) 65. Requiem (‘06) 64. Bright Star (‘09) 63. Uzak (‘02) 62. Capote (‘05) 60. Modern Life (‘08) 59. Nationale 7 (‘00) 58. The Corporation (‘03) 56. When the Levees Broke (‘06) 55. I ♥ Huckabees (‘04) 53. The Wrestler (‘08) 52. Lady Chatterley (‘06) 51. The Fall (‘06) 50. Bus 174 (‘04) 49. The Circle (‘00) 48. Adam & Paul (‘04) 47. Y tu mamá también (‘01)

46. Kings and Queen (‘04) 45. Couscous (‘07) 44. The Company (‘03) 43. Punch-Drunk Love (‘02) 40. The Son (‘02) 39. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter… and Spring (‘03) 38. The Holy Girl (‘04) 37. Solaris (‘02) 34. Los Angeles Plays Itself (‘03) 33. The Sun (‘05) 31. Songs from the Second Floor (‘00) 30. Amores perros (‘00) 29. Far From Heaven (‘02) 28. Code Unknown (‘00) 27. Donnie Darko (‘01) 25. Morvern Callar (‘02) 24. What Time is it There? (‘01) 23. Talk to Her (‘02) 22. The House of Mirth (‘00) 21. Eureka (‘00) 20. I’m Not There (‘07) 19. Our Daily Bread (‘05) 17. Spider (‘02) 15. A Prophet (‘09) 14. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (‘07) 13. L’emploi du temps (‘01) 12. Black Sun (‘05) 11. The Piano Teacher (‘01) 9. Junebug (‘05) 8. INLAND EMPIRE (‘06) 7. Yi Yi (‘00) 6. demonlover (‘02) 5. The New World (‘05) 3. The Death of Mr Lazarescu (‘05) 2. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (‘03) 1. Mulholland Dr. (‘01)

Unseen movies from the Skandies Top 20 list (ranked in descending order):

1. Dogville (‘03) 4. Mulholland Dr. (‘01) 6. The New World (‘05) 8. 25th Hour (‘02) 9. Yi Yi (‘00) 12. Silent Light (‘07) 14. Werckmeister Harmonies (‘00) 15. Irreversible (‘02) 16. Zodiac (‘07) 17. Ghost World (‘01) 18. The Man Who Wasn’t There (‘01)

19. Trouble Every Day (‘01) 20. Gerry (‘03)

Despite the title, (500) Days of Summer is not about a sunny romance, as the narrator is quick to warn you. “This is not a love story,” he intones, and he’s probably referring to the routine heartbreak in movies that accompanies any belief in love. But he’s also right about the relationship at this movie’s core not being about love. See, there are two kinds of romantic comedies in this world: the ones that divide people into Men and Women, and the ones that don’t. (500) Days of Summer hastily identifies itself as one of the former, in a kitschy montage that narrates how Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the Man) believes in love, and how Zooey Deschanel (the Woman) turns heads wherever she goes. How are you supposed to react to a montage like that? He’s the guy of this movie, and she’s the girl: they’re going to fall in love.

Except they don’t. From Day (1) that Deschanel’s character waltzes into mopey office-cubicle hipster Tom’s life, his eyes follow her in slow-mo as it dawns upon him that she’s the girl of his dreams. Days later, when she identifies The Smiths through his headphones and gushes about the band, that’s confirms it. So when she keeps not asking him out, and later tells him that she isn’t looking for anything serious, it floats right past Tom’s rose-tinted sensors even as we’re yelling in exasperation at the movie screen, and things go predictably downhill from there. (500) Days of Summer has been dubbed an anti-rom-com, but it deserves that label not because the two leads don’t end up together, but because it’s an unromantic study of infatuation at its most blinkered.

Once we have shorn the misleading connotations off the title, (500) Days of Summer is literally just about the five hundred days that Tom has known the Deschanel character. (Guess her name.) Well, no, not literally—the movie skips over the days when nothing happens, leaving something resembling a “greatest hits” compilation of Tom and Summer’s relationship. It also alternates back and forth along the timeline, steadily converging on the actual breakup. Some critics have noted that this is an accurate representation of the fragmented remembrance of romances past. More cynically, though, it’s a structure that well suits first-time feature director Marc Webb, whose experience lies in music videos.

Conspiring with the writers, cinematographer and editor, Webb orchestrates a fistful of engaging, standalone scenes with visual wit and tasteful music choices. A heartbroken Tom sits in a cinema, watching himself in famous Ingmar Bergman scenes. A split-screen of a party scene plays out the difference between Tom’s expections and reality. A documentary about finding love cuts from one familiar talking head to another, until it alights on Tom’s sullen, confused face. Part of the fun of these scenes, and Gordon-Levitt’s performance in them, derives from how they make light of his self-serious acting persona. Not that Gordon-Levitt is a stranger to comedies, being an alum from TV sitcom 3rd Rock from the Sun and teen comedy 10 Things I Hate About You, but his acting revival in the past decade has been largely marked by such dour roles as his child-abused gay hustler in Mysterious Skin. The presence of numerals in (500) Days of Summer’s title might have been an unintended cue to Gordon-Levitt’s return here to his comic roots, but we still never expect a “serious thespian” to be game enough to re-enact that perennial scene where the guy, having gotten laid the night before, prances through the streets in afterglow and a silly grin. Except Gordon-Levitt does go there. And he dances. And interacts with animated birds. And sings.

Zooey Deschanel gets to show off that last item, more ingratiatingly than Gordon-Levitt, but that’s about it: the movie mires itself in Tom’s headspace, leaving Summer an unfortunate casualty of that narrowed perspective. We never get to know much about her as a person, though as an ideal we get plenty—nowhere more obvious as when we get a fractured montage of various close-ups on Summer, brandished once as a listing of what Tom loves about her, and then later as a listing of what he hates. The movie tends to be clever like this at Summer’s expense, but in the straight-up conversation scenes, Deschanel acquits Summer from the two extremes of angel and demon by being blunt about her character’s desire for no commitment. The approach makes Summer feel more real, mingling her honesty and frostiness, and it’s these moments that clearly signal Tom’s pathetic blindness to who she is. Ultimately, though, Summer’s under-writtenness impairs Deschanel’s battle against both her past typecasting as a fantasy girlfriend and her own gleaming irises and bubble cheeks, which give her the look of a porcelain doll. The script doesn’t help much either, trapping Summer into a caricature of defensive frigidity with an early throwaway line about her parents’ divorce, which I don’t think any conceivable actress can recuperate.

To its credit, the movie takes a few playful gambles on our understanding of Tom and Summer. One arrives at the centre of the movie’s converging timeline, and turns on our knowledge of The Graduate. If you haven’t seen that 1967 movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross, you might not get (500) Days of Summer’s reference to how Tom misreads its ending as romantic, while Summer bawls her eyes out as the movie affirms her belief that love can’t be the antidote to not knowing where one’s life is headed. The other gamble comes after this revelation, when Tom and Summer return to an old hangout and find that they’ve swapped their perspectives on love and fate. Deschanel shines best here, since her character’s offscreen actions have matured her into a happier, more wistful person than before, and the framing, costume, lighting, script and performance rally around Summer’s newfound faith. The movie, however, loses its nerve over Tom’s corresponding loss of faith. Unlike with Summer, Tom’s apparent change in perspective doesn’t signal any growth on his part, except where the script can find a place for its politically correct platitudes. Just a few scenes prior, Gordon-Levitt already had to contend with a cringeworthy monologue against the evils of capitalism, and a hokey plot turn about embracing one’s dreams. But it gets worse from there, as the movie finally rewards him for his infatuation by providing him with a new love interest, and punishing us for our time by providing us with a horrific final twist. (Guess her name.)

(500) Days of Summer | 2009 | USA | Director: Marc Webb | Screenplay: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber | Cast: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zooey Deschanel, Geoffrey Arend

For all that Pixar loves to celebrate its underdogs, WALL·E marks the first (and so far, only) time the studio has named an entire movie after its protagonist, neither effacing him into part of a wider community (Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., The Incredibles, Cars) or a central mission (Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, Up). That WALL·E’s name is shared by his peers and short for his mission—”Waste Allocation Load Lifter · Earth-class”—barely counts against this claim, since the acronym is pronounced like a regular human name; the movie is built on the premise that he is the last of his kind; and the essential pleasures of WALL·E do not spring from his assigned mission but in the tangents he chases beyond it. Though the break in titling scheme alone implies it, we can tell from the raves accompanying the movie’s prologue—in which WALL·E is only character we encounter, save for a curly-feelered roach—that Pixar invests much of WALL·E’s success on the cult of personality that forms around its title character.

And what a personality! Binocular eyes that pivot as though they were brows; a stocky frame into which he can retract like a tortoise; a symphony of blips, squeaks and squalls: all these feats of character design conspire to make WALL·E as expressive as a droid could realistically be. Left to clean up a trash-strewn Earth, WALL·E splits his time between compacting trash and unearthing lost reminders of humanity’s technological gifts from the rubble. He has a child’s fascination with simple interactive objects: it is endearing to watch him handle sporks, hubcaps, whisks, fire extinguishers and even brassiere in unexpected ways (or bubble wrap in an expected, universally beloved way), collecting and playing with them as though they were the peaks of our civilisation. Maybe they are. The pleasure of WALL·E’s early moments derives from the tiny wonders of these things that humans have made, dismissed and discarded for their “worthier” counterparts. At times the movie sums this up with as cheaply-earned a gesture as WALL·E opening a ring box, contemplating the ring within, before flinging it away to keep the hinged box. Such a simple jab at materialism draws quick laughs, until we recall that WALL·E has all the world’s resources at his disposal, and hasn’t much use for items whose mere value lies in their short supply.

But the movie also knows how to complicate its critiques. We find WALL·E obsessed with a tape of Hello, Dolly!, a movie musical that few would rank among the classics, and yet the two isolated numbers from it (“Put On Your Sunday Clothes” and “It Only Takes A Moment”) that are repeated throughout WALL·E, in both audio and video, resonate with the joys of life and love. I have it on good faith that those old enough to have watched Hello, Dolly! would deem it derivative and overproduced, as if its makers hoped that throwing enough money into costumes and sets would compensate for a lack of creative bite. It may be more jarring for these older viewers to find that WALL·E nearly redeems Hello, Dolly!’s dearth of authentic feeling, using the older movie’s ode to wanderlust (“Out there, there’s a world outside of Yonkers…”) to usher us into this newer movie and its incipient wonders, opening with the star-cobbled expanses of outer space. If a third-tier movie like Hello, Dolly! can tide WALL·E through his working days with a tune so breezily hummable, and if it can connect him to us by teaching him our ageless language for making contact with one another, then are we wrong to dismiss its worth, and what painful things does it say about the worthier works of art that WALL·E’s apocalyptic world has lost forever?

Despite these grand efforts, though, WALL·E retains all the fidelity of a Looney Tunes character. Early on, we trail WALL·E into a junkyard strewn with the rust-eaten remains of his fallen peers: a breathtakingly grim visual, but one implying a vulnerability to WALL·E that the rest of the movie only strives to upend. Nothing troubles him as badly as it might a more flesh-and-blood hero, not the immense heat of a rocket’s flare or being compacted by a titanic version of himself, and since these action scenes rely on our fear for WALL·E’s safety, each time around our suspense is further dulled. I groaned when he got flung into the ceiling of his trailer, leaving a WALL·E-shaped emboss in it; but I was even more horrified when this throwaway punchline went on to prove just how indestructible WALL·E was, as he replaced his broken parts with ease.

It is troubling, too, that the earlier junkyard sequence showed us just where WALL·E was getting these spare parts, because the mise en scène leading us into that sequence evokes distant echoes of another in Pixar’s oeuvre. In Toy Story, a crew of grotesquely mismatched toys—the deranged experiments of a sadistic kid—converge upon the body parts of a fallen toy. “They’re cannibals,” gasps an onlooker. Even if you don’t buy that Suddenly, Last Summer-esque twist showing up in a family film, the whole thing still plays as a horror sequence because the shadows and hushed music gather to that interpretation. But if we’re invited to a similar reaction to those mangled WALL·E silhouettes, the rest of the sequence spurns it by reverting to a blasé comic tone. Should we not judge a sentient robot, who squeals when he runs over a roach by accident, for having nary a cringe when he enters what must be to him a graveyard? Does a humanist plea not count against his utter disaffection as he scavenges body parts off a dead member of his kind? Or, if it feels too crass to blame the adorable WALL·E, can we not take the filmmakers to task for their callous use of a wondrously evocative image, without ever following up on the ambition it implies?

Not that this is the only image in WALL·E’s prologue that reaches for more than the movie finally delivers. As we follow WALL·E through his daily routine—rolling through the deserted wasteland, compacting trash into cubes, stacking them, and then going back for more—the movie pans wide from close-ups of this routine into a vista of sun-bleached skyscrapers, all crafted by WALL·E’s hands. “What if we did the last robot on Earth—everybody’s left and this machine just doesn’t know it can stop?” mused director Andrew Stanton in an interview. “It was just the loneliest scenario I’d ever heard and I just loved it.” The sight of WALL·E dwarfed by his centuries-long labours thrums with the loneliness that Stanton describes. Ultimately, though, I feel he shortchanges WALL·E by harvesting this loneliness mostly along a romantic axis. That is, if “romance” can be defined as stalking an off-handedly destructive, idealised iPod-sleek feminine character who just. isn’t. interested. and trying to non-consensually clasp her mechanical claws. Other critics have situated WALL·E’s romantic thread as part of a larger Hollywood trend of the slob getting the out-of-his-league lady, and I can’t say I disagree: EVE barely takes notice of WALL·E, even gets pissed at him, when her di·rec·tive is at stake. But my greater beef is that this fits into a more annoying Hollywood trend, that of screenwriters adding romance as a bonus trophy to an already-heroic enterprise. This dilutes the purity of WALL·E’s motive: does he aid EVE with her directive because he has a stake in Earth’s future, or just so he can impress her?

By muddying WALL·E’s motives, the movie suffers an uneven split once the spaceship of humans arrives into the picture. Usually, Pixar wraps its keen observations of human foibles around the plight of their victims: neglected toys in Toy Story, unappreciated superheroes in The Incredibles, maltreated marine life in Finding Nemo, and so forth. But WALL·E’s own abandonment never grows into an issue against the humans here, who are far more interested in the tiny sapling he carries with him as a sign of their environmental blameworthiness. Not to mention that they do this against a backdrop of the AXIOM spaceship, a fully-automated luxury cruiser where all the humans, fat as bugs, sip liquid meals from their hover-chairs as they whizz through a cornucopia of billboards: a lazy, incoherent satire on consumerism, especially since no one seems to lift a finger to produce anything around here. WALL·E thus becomes a wallflower in his own narrative, as the movie busily conflates all of humankind’s ills before its last half-hour erupts into a fracas over the sapling.

Apparently the ship’s autopilot Auto, a dead ringer for HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, has been programmed to stop any plant from again seeing the light of day, and commands an army of robots to see to that. WALL·E, for his part, leads a crew of “malfunctioning” robots against them, whatever his motives. However, the 2001 allusion turns out unflattering, since we get no semblance of inner life from Auto, reducing the struggle for the plant to a strictly mechanical one between the sentient and non-sentient beings, rather than a more nuanced one between the rebels and the hegemon. This is also why the majestic strains of Also Sprach Zarathustra, set to the AXIOM captain’s triumph over Auto, rings false. If the movie had to make a musical homage to 2001, I’d much have preferred a “Daisy, Daisy…” swansong for Auto, which would have made for a more emotionally complex response worthy of Pixar than the whoops and cheers of the AXIOM passengers. What do these losers know? Earlier, these infantile proto-humans encountered a rust bucket trundling through their pristine world, and their only reactions were surprise and unfettered adoration. The most generous reading I can offer for this sheeplike behaviour? It’s another outer-space movie homage, this time to the mindlessly adoring toy aliens of Pixar’s own Toy Story films.

Look, if Pixar had chosen to animate the plant as sentient as well, with WALL·E as its platonic guardian, I might have been more invested in WALL·E as a modern take on the Little Prince fable. If it had committed to the irreversible damage that WALL·E seems to be dealt in the last reel, raising some bold Eternal Sunshine-style questions about his identity as an amnesiac, I might have capitulated all my reservations. But it doesn’t. For all of WALL·E’s obsession with Hello, Dolly!, then, his movie is perhaps better compared to an earlier Barbra Streisand vehicle, Funny Girl. Sure, both movies share a canny director with a knack for eye-popping compositions and making grand gestures at high art. But they also share a charismatic star with whom the filmmakers and audiences alike are so besotted that the plot doesn’t dare—or, goddammit, even try—to hurt his fortunes.

WALL·E | 2008 | USA | Director: Andrew Stanton | Screenplay: Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Jim Reardon| Cast: Ben Burtt, Elissa Knight, Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard

It is telling that Pixar’s least-discussed movies, A Bug’s Life and Cars, are the only two in its oeuvre completely divested of the presence of humans. Or, to be precise, bug species and car models provide visually striking designs for otherwise totally human personalities in these two movies: a typical strategy of American animation to enliven its stories. At its most distinctive, though, Pixar is a stalwart champion of anthropomorphised “others” whose gains we take for granted (toys, supermen, ornamental fish, rubbish compactors) or whom we treat with disdain (rats, old grumps, bedside monsters). The studio’s preferred medium of CGI is the ideal conduit for this reversed perspective: more uncanny and spatial than traditional 2D, yet brighter and more fantastical than live-action—as though we’re seeing our world heightened in another’s eyes. By aligning our empathies with its protagonists against the onscreen humans who mistreat them, Pixar’s narratives stoke a wondrously complicated guilt rarely seen in other family films—and nowhere have they demonstrated this better than with Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles.

Toy Story 2 stands alone in its status as an animated sequel—a label whose history is rife with profiteering and artistic bankruptcy—by being needlessly, absurdly good. It’s hard to realise that the movie was once relegated for direct-to-video release when one observes how cannily the final feature is put together, as its own movie and as a follow-up to its groundbreaking predecessor. Buzz Lightyear’s exhilarating flight through outer space doesn’t just provide a kinetic, adrenalin-pumping opener for Toy Story 2, it also throws a curveball to Pixar fans with its obvious discontinuity from the “realism” of Toy Story. Sure, at the end of this sequence, we’re reassured that Toy Story 2 hasn’t completely abandoned the thrust of what made the first movie such a poignant keeper (and no, it’s not just “all a dream”). But we’re also primed for a sequel that doesn’t look to its predecessor as an excuse or crutch to limit the adventurousness of its narrative, but as a springboard for its own wild, unfettered marvels.

Now that Buzz no longer thinks he is an actual space ranger, a delusion that drove his narrative arc in the first movie, Toy Story 2 jettisons any existential crises related with “not being real”. The movie thus frees itself to more fully develop the most powerful theme in the series’ arsenal: the much “realer” fear of being left behind. It’s a fear that we can all identify with, but it’s a plight that is especially inherent to being a toy, making the generic title Toy Story such an apt one. If the first Toy Story falters, then, it is that it confines most of our empathy to the character of Woody, a cocky cowboy doll whose place as his owner’s favourite toy is usurped by Buzz. When it isn’t Woody’s jealousy at Buzz that’s propelling the narrative, it’s his desperation to alleviate his fellow toys’ mistrust. Or his fear that he may never find his way home. Or his terror at a sadistic kid’s idea of fun. The movie keeps itself in Woody’s orbit at the expense of everyone else, though to be fair, Tom Hanks’ affable voice and the immediacy of Woody’s situation conspire to make him seem less dangerously self-centred than he is. Nonetheless, we have all the more to celebrate that Toy Story 2 breaks free from its predecessor’s containing gesture, extending the stakes of abandonment to include a generous number of other toys.

Ironically, we’re alerted that Woody has grown up only after his owner Andy swiftly abandons him to a dusty shelf before leaving for camp, reigniting his former fears. After a hilariously surreal nightmare, Woody wakes up (quite literally) to the notion that his fate is nowhere as jeopardised as those of the toys who don’t share his owner’s favour. Even in Andy’s absence, his mom pointedly doesn’t add Woody to her pickings for a junkyard sale (a scrawled “25¢” is the sly insulting detail in this scene), but in an unforeseen act of gallantry, Woody initiates a rescue mission for the toys that she has. This quickly goes awry, leaving Woody stranded a long way from home once more. Unlike the first movie, though, his story from there doesn’t boil down to a simple “get back to Andy!” motive, coupled with diverting obstacles along the way. Not that Toy Story 2 abandons the pleasures of such a narrative: it twines in a parallel action plot requiring Woody’s peers to navigate the harsh territory of a toy megastore, a capitalist satire populated with ever-smiling Barbies, still-deluded Buzz Lightyears, and the treachery of gaming guides and automatic doors.

But the major plot of Toy Story 2 turns on an empathic dilemma, not on physical shenanigans. When Woody finds himself with a trio of spin-off toys from his merchandised TV series, he is saddled with deciding the fate of a community to which he never knew he belonged. What continually amazes me is how deeply the stakes change—from being usurped to being forgotten entirely, and then into a choice between ephemeral bliss or a lifetime of compromised happiness—even as Woody remains in the same room throughout. For all its visual wonders, Toy Story 2 hinges ultimately on its rhetorical power, in two heartbreaking songs (the nostalgic elegies “When She Loved Me” and “You’ve Got A Friend in Me”) and in the specific histories evoked by Buzz, to events of the previous movie; and by these new characters, to their own identifiable offscreen troubles. Given that each side has a point, Woody’s eventual decision is deeply satisfying, which is why the curt end he deals to one antagonist may come off as more puerile than it deserves to be—a notable lapse in the movie’s otherwise-gratifying maturity.

Narrative ingenuity aside, Toy Story 2 sparks to its own immaculate construction, boasting some of the most jocular, attention-calling scene transitions this side of Citizen Kane: an American flag billowing behind a stump-speechmaker, an offhand order to “use your head!”, etc. The movie operates on the kind of delirious logic where a minefield of Cheetos looms wider than a four-lane street in busy traffic; where drivers swerve to obey traffic cones; where a plane lands on a runway after the last one barely left it; or where, in more targeted allusions, characters are disarmed swiftly by parental revelations (Star Wars) or camera flashes (Rear Window). Screw Tarantino or Dante! Here John Lasseter presents us movie-moviedom at its finest, in which our heroes are powered by the forces of entertainment, and the laws by which their universe runs are not only informed, but dictated by the movements of earlier classics. (Even when the movement is that of a gurgling belly, at its funniest here since Chaplin’s Modern Times.) And if its heaps of wit and feeling are to be any indication, Toy Story 2 can stand proudly aside these classics as one of the best that cinema has to offer.

Five years later, The Incredibles heralded the arrival of Brad Bird to Pixar, and with him, its first human protagonists. The complication is that these are superhumans, whose undeniable talent is both celebrated and envied, ultimately leading to a backlash against their public existence. However, the unique fascination of The Incredibles lies not in its themes of a superhero’s career-juggling burdens (a path trodden that same year by Spider-Man 2), the public suspicion of abnormal beings (the domain of the X-Men films), or the malaise of talented crimefighters forced into retirement (criticised by some as “Watchmen-lite”, a nod to the heavier proceedings of Alan Moore’s influential graphic novel). Rather, The Incredibles stands out in its complex braiding of these themes into its distinctive mix of family and superheroics. As I use it here, “family” refers to the all-American nuclear family, an idiom used in The Incredibles to revitalise the tropes of both the superhero action flick and the dysfunctional family dramedy, forming the meat of this movie’s pathos and humour.

Even the superpowers dealt to each family member seems to fit the idiom: Dad is strong, Mom is flexible, the son is brash, and the daughter self-effacing. Despite my attempt to be catchy in the previous sentence, though, I find that the labels I’ve used inaccurately reduce these characters to their roles as parents and children. For one, Bob Parr (aka Mr Incredible) can barely be said to demand the title of “Dad”, at least early on. After his feats in the movie’s prologue, we find him fifteen years later cramped—behind a desk, inside a car, within a frustratingly impotent job—and then distracted at the dinner table, where he all but ignores his family, scanning the papers for ex-superhero news before abandoning them for “bowling night”. “Mom” does suit Helen (née Elastigirl) better in the post-prologue, where we find her as a housewife, washing the baby at the sink, visiting the principal’s office, fetching the kids. But the spectre of Helen’s proto-feminist past (“Leave the saving of the world to the men? I don’t think so!”) haunts and complicates this reading considerably—and I’ll have more to say about this later. Meanwhile, the kids struggle with their own gender-ascribed troubles, with Dash frustrated that he can’t flaunt his talent at running, and Violet sneaking glances at the boy of her affections while (literally) invisible.

The Incredibles devotes a good deal of its running time hence to winking at this farce, which would serve as generic fare for a suburban drama except that this isn’t one. Really, what adds a thrill to the sibling rivalries and the couple arguments is precisely that we’ve seen them before, save that they’ve never before included the visual spectacle of a family entangled around a dining table or an enraged housewife’s head stretching for the ceiling. Likewise, Bob’s “bowling nights” and “business trips” are all a sham, lent new meaning because his indulgences lie in action sequences. But what’s less observed about The Incredibles is that the reverse is also true. The tropes of the superhero movie offers a sheen of invulnerability to these characters that, at its keenest, the movie strips away by pointing out that this is a family. I’m thinking here of the moment when Helen and the kids, while on a plane, find themselves pursued by a bunch of heat-seeking missiles. We’re so caught up by the immediate thrills of this setup, with Helen executing maneuvers while the kids tumble about the swerving plane, that it’s a rude shock when Helen yells over the air: “Abort, abort, there are children aboard!” We’ve been put on by the verve of the editing, the genre’s tropes and the gloss of the animation, and so the best parts of The Incredibles are suffused with the urgency of Helen’s voice here, punching through all that surface to remind us that real human lives—and relationships—are at stake.

Among the Incredibles, then, Helen’s arc is to me the most interesting, not least because she’s the character most saddled with taking care of everyone else, while also being most at ease with hiding her own powers. In a way, she has it easy: as a housewife, she isn’t as burdened with holding her powers back in public, as Bob and Dash are behind their desks. It’s a believable subtext to me that Helen is keeping them both from any job or sport that could even use a measure of their physical prowess, since they might be prone to showing it off. But Helen’s problem is that she is almost too adaptable, making it seem that she has compromised little even when she reduces the range of her elastic arms to the furthest reaches of the living-room carpet.

Her take on post-superhero life can be contrasted with that of Edna Mode, Helen’s erstwhile costume designer. While it is implied that—like Helen—Edna is still free to use her talents in her new field, she thrills more obviously at the functionality of her craftsmanship, both in her legendary “no capes!” monologue and in her gleeful private showcase to Helen of her new costumes. More importantly, she talks circles around Bob and Helen to get them (and the children) to fully reclaim their identities as supers. She maneuvers Bob into “convincing” her to create a new suit for him, which means that he isn’t just “re-living the glory days” but pursuing himself anew. She refuses to acknowledge Helen on the phone until the latter identifies herself as Elastigirl. She insists that Helen show up at her place (for the costume showcase, although she doesn’t reveal that yet) without leaving her any room to stammer her hesistant replies. She awakens Helen to the fact that Bob may not be doing what Helen has convinced herself he is doing, and then offers Helen the means to lead her to him. She gets indignant when Helen weeps like a hapless housewife, thwacking her and telling her to buck up and take Bob back. And she creates costumes for the children (and, it is implied, insists that Helen take them), despite Helen’s reluctance to let the kids have them, thus creating opportunities for the kids to find out for themselves and claim their super-identities as well. Voiced by Brad Bird himself, Edna thus represents The Incredibles’ guide into a new realm of possibilities.

Just as, I might add, The Incredibles represents Pixar’s own guide into a new realm of possibilities. The movie so richly unfolds the novelistic implications of its premise that, even as it draws to a close, we’re still left with plenty of questions unanswered. Can Violet be distilled into her arc from shy waif to confident girl, and how exactly will her particular way of not “being normal” affect her romantic prospects? Surely Dash can’t be content with confusing his way through every race, but is there even to be a proper answer for him? What future does this portend for their mutual sibling, who has yet to discover his own potential? And what of side characters like the villain’s assistant, whose powers we realise we haven’t even seen? As Nick Davis points out, the movie ends on its own tantalising question, as threats to “declare war on peace and happiness!” are overlaid onto images of the Incredibles reclaiming their masked identity. The Incredibles, then, is the one movie out of Pixar’s oeuvre to which I most want to see a sequel, but it’s also the movie that poses its own greatest challenge to such a possibility, layering on the heights of visual and sonic pizzazz as well as newly enlivened depths of feeling. And, unfortunately, this is not a challenge that I’m sure Pixar can achieve.

For what are we to make of Pixar’s current status, another five years since its last creative peak? For me, Pixar’s four features since The Incredibles have been disappointing efforts by its stable of auteurs, each of whom handed in superior contributions during the studio’s impressive streak: Cars, widely acknowledged to be Pixar’s first dud, was nowhere in the realm of John Lasseter’s Toy Story movies; while Ratatouille, reprising Brad Bird’s theme of unappreciated talent from The Incredibles, paired it this time around with an unconvincing “Anyone Can Cook!” thesis that one character (an easily-unconvinced critic, no less!) had to apologise for in the last reel—not to forget how it loses with Colette the ground that Edna and Helen so valiantly fought for on the women’s front. And allow me this honesty, but Andrew Stanton’s WALL•E never gives its title character any real hurdles to surmount, compared to the palpable danger his protagonists feel in Finding Nemo; while Pete Docter’s Up, despite a few touching moments between its elderly hero and his late wife, never builds a convincing relationship between any of its other characters as enduring as the one in Monsters, Inc between Sully and Boo.

It appears to me that Pixar no longer has the creative discipline to marshall its pool of admittedly-wondrous elements into fully cohesive stories, whether we can attribute this to its full ownership by Disney, its unrivalled artistic freedom as a studio or its lack of new blood since Bird joined the team. Up, touted by some as its most mature movie, strikes me instead as its most infantile yet. Consider an aspect as seemingly tiny as the way it treats its dogs—which, if you’ve followed my argument about sidelined characters, may be the most telling detail of the quality of a Pixar movie. Is it at all hard to decide if the gleeful retriever and the pinched Doberman are meant to be anything other than “good” and “evil” respectively, especially with the choice of species? And is the tinny squeak that the latter’s malfunctioning “voice” often segues into meant to elicit any emotion other than mean-spirited laughter?

As a contrast, I contend that the most hard-hitting part of Up is not the much-heralded montage showing Carl’s relationship with his wife up to her death, but a moment that comes after: when his mailbox, a memento of his late wife, is knocked over by a construction vehicle, Carl rushes to protect it from the well-meaning construction worker who steps up to fix it. In the ensuing struggle, Carl thwacks the worker on the head with his cane, and an unforeseeable thing happens: the worker starts to bleed. In my mind, there’s nothing in the movie that comes close to this moment, as poignant as the best bits of Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles, when we’re swung around to the other person’s perspective, even for just a while. If Pixar could reclaim its gift for shaping these moments consistently through a movie, in next year’s Toy Story 3, in the potential The Incredibles 2, or simply in any of its features to come—then I, for one, can’t wait to be there. But if it doesn’t, then at least it will have made two unimpeachable gems, if only to shame all the rest.

This piece also doubled as an entry for Pixar Week over at The House Next Door. For more critical analyses of Pixar’s work, please head over there and have a look!

Toy Story 2 | 1999 | USA | Director: John Lasseter, Ash Brannon, Lee Unkrich | Screenplay: John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Ash Brannon, Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlin, Chris Webb| Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Kelsey Grammer, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Wayne Knight

The Incredibles | 2004 | USA | Director: Brad Bird | Screenplay: Brad Bird | Cast: Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Spencer Fox, Sarah Vowell, Jason Lee, Samuel L. Jackson, Elizabeth Peña, Brad Bird

Like last year’s Oscar-winning Departures, Tokyo Sonata kicks off with its leading man’s abrupt dismissal from his job. The recession has clearly gotten worse since then: where the earlier movie proceeded to thrust him into the bewildering reaches of the embalming business, Tokyo Sonata offers up nothing to leaven its protagonist’s similar desperation to keep up appearances to his housewife. Well-shot, well-rehearsed images of the jobless’ indignities (stuffy unemployment lines, merciless interviewers, grubby leftover jobs, etc.) are the stock of this technically proficient study of one dysfunctional family as a microcosm of urban malaise in modern Japan.

In its screenwriting, the movie resembles an Eastern take on both Little Miss Sunshine, with each character seeming to embody his respective cue card (the long-suffering wife, the iconoclastic elder son, the ambitious younger son); and a Paul Haggis film, in which every ambient event contrives to reflect its protagonist’s troubles. In a more benign instance, as the newly unemployed Ryûhei Sasaki (Teruyuki Kagawa) ambles into a plaza, a passing couple amp up their conversation about visiting the “Hello Work” career centre before it is too late. At its weirdest, a desperate robber breaks into Sasaki’s house and holds his wife Megumi (Kyôko Koizumi) hostage, a late-arriving twist that threatens to derail the movie altogether.

Near the film’s midpoint, though, the movie almost promises to liberate Megumi from cliché, shifting our perspective of her to that of an adept, resilient woman who accommodates each of her family members’ dreams and insecurities better than her husband can. But the screenwriters prefer to leave redemption to the hands of fate—their hands, to be exact—and so each member has to push themselves to the end of their respective tethers, before chance mercies can show them that home is where they belong. Aww. The movie’s last scene is a literal sonata, kept in a mercifully gimmick-free long shot, until the lingering on the empty stage and awed full-house audience hammers in exactly how the movie wants us to view it as well.

Tokyo Sonata | 2008 | Japan | Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa| Screenplay: Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Max Mannix, Sachiko Tanaka| Cast: Teruyuki Kagawa, Kyôko Koizumi, Yû Koyanagi, Inowaki Kai, Haruka Igawa, Kanji Tsuda, Kazuya Kojima, Kôji Yakusho

For such a glorious time, Departures succeeds in being, at turns, a screwball comedy about a cellist thrust into the embalming business after his orchestra goes bust (Masahiro Motoki, who plies his movie with a hilarious physicality), and a faux-documentary about the intricacies, nobilities and pathos of the embalming ceremony and its bereaved spectators—that it lets us down whenever the more obvious narrative or “artistic” cues rear their head, as when various characters seem primed to have their opinions changed about the respectability of our hero’s profession, when the movie throws in random shots of him plying his cello atop the rolling hills, or when a few elderly characters seem just a little too important for their own good…

Departures | 2008 | Japan | Director: Yôjirô Takita| Screenplay: Kundo Koyama| Cast: Masahiro Motoki, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Ryoko Hirosue, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Kimiko Yo, Takashi Sasano