pixar recap

I love Mrs. Jones, but sometimes we don't see eye to eye. Take animation. I love animation. Anime, hanna-barbara junk, stop motion Ray Harryhausen, The Avatar, Venture Brothers - I'll take it all. The Tivo gets loaded up with my cartoons for me than for the kids.

But Mrs. Jones can't stand cartoons on principle. It just repulses her - I don't get it. She didn't reallly get to watch T.V. growing up, and her brothers didn't play with toys, so I think it was how she was raised in that barren lobstering island. Raised by wolves who hate cartoons and toys. I think when Krumpus comes for bad boys and girls on christmas and whisks them away in his sack - that's where he dumps them. The island of no cartoons and toys. Boo-hoo. But back to the subject at hand. Cartoons!

But even Mrs. Jones likes the Pixar stuff. Not all of it, but she can get her Nemo on. Every new entry seems to outdo the previous - and Wall-E is looking to be no exception. Like Harry Potter, Pixar seems to be one of those cultural treasures - treasures that seem to largely satisfy in spite of ridiculously high and overly familiar expectations.

Something else I love is the Onion's A.V. Club. Long after the satirical publication began to wallow in its own predictable hackneyed humor, it's sister (niece) sub site, avclub.com, has flourished into a sort of slate for generation snark. Slightly snobby, but reverent to greatness, scoring some pretty candid interviews with interesting subjects, and staffed by reviewers who are funny and know their stuff, I definitely give it a click a day.

So lets consummate the arrival of Pixar's latest feature, Wall-E, with the AV Club's Primer on Pixar. I fancy myself a psuedo-expert on Pixar, but I learned some interesting back story about the animation studio that almost wasn't. An interesting read for sure.