The devices. They’re everywhere. Too much of a good thing isn’t a good thing. We all need creativity and imagination, our kids most especially. Are we losing it? Yeah, apparently so. Do not go gentle into that good night, says Pixar!
The thing about movies is, there are two types of quality judgments: entertainment value, and critical appeal—that is, separate low-culture and high-culture assessments. (The audience and critic ratings at Rotten Tomatoes capture these.) I think the best movies score high on both: they have some true novelty in their theme and execution, but they also broadly appeal to people who aren’t given to deep analysis. And so probably some of the people who are complaining about Toy Story 5 are really just saying it doesn’t meet the incredibly high bar of the first couple of Toy Story movies, which apparently satisfied everyone.
Maybe some of the people complaining about Toy Story 5 think of entertainment value and critical appeal as not just different but opposite: if a movie is popular, it can’t possibly be artistically respectable. And of course Toy Story 5 *is* popular, practically by definition, because it’s part of a popular franchise… hence the cynical attitude that it’s just a cash grab. I mean, if you ask me, it’s possible for something meaningful to also make money. Commercial success isn’t the opposite of meaning; the original Toy Story trilogy in fact supports this idea.
My knee-jerk personal opinion about Toy Story 5 aligns with what seem to be run-of-the-mill positive reviews like the one in Variety. My knee-jerk reaction strikes me as suspicious, though; surely there are criticisms that I didn’t think of myself but that I would agree with if I heard them from someone else? I tried to find some.
One that resonated with me more than not at all in this review (and others) was the idea that the central thematic high-stakes conflict of the movie is dealt with unsatisfactorily: “[O]ne of its greatest failings is that it presents such an intractable social problem in the first act that all its folksy solutions end up feeling timid, or like deflections. It’s hard to blame them for not ‘solving’ something so big, but at the same time, they’re the ones who asked the question.”
A broader artistic concern is whether Pixar should even be making any more Toy Story movies given that Toy Story 3 was such a fitting conclusion of a groundbreaking trilogy; at this point they’re arguably only making sequels to make money, not to tell important stories. It could be that nostalgia is getting in the way of people being able to evaluate a new movie qua new movie. People want a sequel to be, like, exactly the same as the original… but also different and better because if it really is exactly the same then it’s stupid and unoriginal. (Sheesh.) But upon further reflection, I think the anti-sequel crowd has a point. Pixar is kinda beating a dead horse.
Still, some of the criticisms I’ve seen seem misguided. For example, some people are complaining that the movie didn’t make sufficient use of the original characters, especially Buzz and Woody. But, like… who says they have to? The marketing, apparently. So maybe Pixar’s marketing people didn’t set expectations correctly, which is a legit criticism. But not a legit criticism of the movie.
I have another beef with that review. At least two other beeves, actually… One is that it literally says “making money and justifying your existence creatively are two very different things,” which is exactly the assumption about money and art that I reject. And also, the title of the review says the movie “isn’t good” but that “kids will probably love it.” I hate to hear people talk as if kids are stupid and stupid stuff is for kids. Saying a mediocre movie is “only good enough for kids” is backwards. Only our very best is good enough for kids. Someone’s formative experiences, which we’re responsible for giving them during the short span of childhood, should be as deep and meaningful as possible, not “even though” kids don’t consciously appreciate depth and meaning, but precisely because they don’t, and we do. And who’s to say kids don’t unconsciously appreciate depth and meaning?
In a sense, art is no different from food. Sure, superficially, kids love sugar. But as an adult past that stage, you don’t say “Sugar is awful and therefore only fit for kids,” or “Sugar is obviously all kids deserve,” and you don’t feed your kids nothing but sugar because “Oh well, that’s what they like.” So why are people like this about movies? The 2015 Minions movie, for example, was a terrible movie, not just for adults, but for kids. It was incoherent. Did it provoke some laughs? Yeah probably. Do people love the minions characters? Sure. Is that enough to make it a good kids’ movie? Nope. So I hate it when reviews say stuff like this (courtesy of Gemini): “While the storyline can feel thin or drag in places for older audiences, it delivers the signature high-energy slapstick, bright animation, and non-stop visual gags that keep younger kids thoroughly entertained.” Slapstick and storyline are not mutually exclusive. The minions movie should have had both, and didn’t. I hold the moviemakers (and reviewers!) accountable to the extent that they didn’t think the movie desperately needed coherence. Gemini’s conclusion should have been written the other way around: “While its slapstick humor entertains, sadly, the storyline is thin.” That is, the more important part of the assessment belongs at the end of the sentence.
Someone gets it: “I know, ‘It’s a kids movie,’ but that’s what makes it worse.”
So does whoever wrote this paywalled Washington Post article titled “We can make better movies for kids than Minions”.
Other truly awful kids’ movies you should avoid: Bad Guys (which introduces a stunningly random zombie guinea pig horde in act 3 and also glorifies stealing), Secret Life of Pets (which was manically crazy and chock full of unnecessary characters), and Turbo (which ineptly handled of the interface between the world of humans and the world of… sentient racing snails???), all of which I recall as making me ask myself, “What on earth did I just watch?” and also Madagascar 3, which was so forgettable that actually I don’t remember watching it at all, to the extent that it feels as if someone else, not me, wrote my blog post about it.
Right, so, back to Toy Story 5, which was a lot more thoughtful than the obviously terrible kids’ movies I’ve listed. The people who are trashing it are operating on a weird scale, if you ask me. I mean, it’s good to have high standards, I agree with them that much. But I think they’ve exited the Territory of High Standards and crossed over into the Domain of Unreasonable Expectations if they claim it isn’t good at all, rather than claiming it isn’t as good as they’ve come to expect from Pixar.
