4. Because They Never Lose Sight Of The Reality Beneath Each Moment
Remember the bad guys on the shows you used to watch on Saturday mornings? Well, these guys arent like those guys. They wont exercise restraint because you are children. They will
kill you if given the chance. Do not
give them that chance. On the surface, an animated film seems like a ridiculous thing. Or, at the very least, an audience investing in the outcome of an animated film seems like a ridiculous thing. Not only are they being asked to care about non-existent people doing things that could never happen, but those non-existent people are literally non-existent. Pixar has pushed that even further than most studios, by abandoning the hunt for photo-realistic humans and instead embracing cartoonish designs and exaggerated physicality. On the surface, it seems ludicrous for an audience to give themselves over to such things. And added to
that, the current pop culture mood is such that we mistake grit and grime as being synonymous with quality. The more po-faced and miserable the characters and look, the better the movie, right? Pixar triumphs over that by going in the opposite direction. Making the characters cartoonish doesnt distance us from them. Instead, it gives the audience a broader slate to impose their own inner, emotional lives onto, deepening the connection between them and the characters on screen. Read Scott McClouds exceptional
Understanding Comics to dig more into that idea. Beyond that, Pixar films work because they never forget to find the honest, emotional moment that is just beneath the surface. So yeah, maybe youre watching a movie about toys that come to life and go on adventures. But broiling under that scenario are feelings of jealousy, excitement, friendship and family, and the exquisite kind of terror that goes along with discovery and adventure. And theres pain involved in that. Characters we like are endangered. Characters we empathize with, and see ourselves in, make brash, awful choices, choices that we hate to see play out. But by doing this, by playing fair with the darker moments, it makes each laugh and each triumph of love that Pixar films contain stand out all the more, and seem that much more precious. Pixar will drop the toys in the furnace, yes, but only to make it all the sweeter when the rescue arrives. And theyll let the bad guys make a real effort at killing the Incredibles, but only so itll be that much more triumphant when the family smacks em into smithereens.