No, it's real. Disney gets to decide if a Pixar movie gets a sequel.

Not anymore. Pixar and Disney almost broke up their partnership because Disney wanted to be able to make their own sequels to Pixar films if Pixar wouldn't make them themselves. One of the conditions of the purchase was that Disney isn't allowed to pressure Pixar into making anything.

So basically, Pixar is solely responsible for this thing.

This has nothing to do with Disney. Cars was John Lasseter's favorite of all the movies he's done.

Well damn.

You're sort of half-right. That was a bone of contention under the original partnership, but Disney OWN Pixar now, and their animation departments have this symbiotic relationship where any Disney animated film gets looked at by the 'Pixar brain trust' and this stuff. Also John Lassetter is head of Disney Animation now too.

Anyway, these sequels are 'cause Disney demands them, not because Pixar is running out of ideas. They've got plenty of their own films they want to make.

THE DEALIO:

California Adventure is an unpopular money sink.

John Lasseter takes over Imagineering, proposes a Cars themed land in California Adventure to insert some fast roller coasters with a driving theme, because the park has a serious lack of thrill rides.

Disney doesn't want to sink a lot of money into a failing park without a timed movie opening to attach the CA opening with.

John Lasseter greedily rubs his ham-like hands together, and everybody has a solution.

Well, they managed to make a decent prison break/ action film out of Toy Story, so switching up genres doesn't seem insurmountable for them. Of course, the characters from Toy story were likeable and memorable and most importantly, not talking cars.

The main difference being that Toy Story was good, if not amazing. Cars wasn't terrible, but it was their first real misfire (if you don't count A Bug's Life).

Make no mistake, if Pixar can turn an movie about a gourmand French rat who makes a stewed vegetable dish into a hit, anthropomorphized Nascar spies should be easy. Which is sort-of the problem. They didn't try hard the first time around, and since it worked, I'm not sure they'll do anything different.

Regardless, its a brief teaser for a movie I'm indifferent about.

Why are talking cars inherently worse than talking toys?

Part of being a child is pretending your toy is alive, or talking, or having adventures. It's practically universal.

Sane people do not do that with cars. Also NASCAR sucks and is stupid. And the world in which Cars takes place is actually pretty fucking disturbing if you actually look at it.

Yeah, we never question why Toy Story toys are alive and how are they born, how they reproduce, etc. But the world of Cars just leaves the viewer with a million disturbing questions.

Well that's just it. Toy Story's only conceit is simply "Hey, what if your childhood toys really did have lives of their own?"

In Cars, they're supposed to be FREAKING ALIVE, in a world that evolved exclusively for and around cars. Even the natural formations look vaguely vehicle-shaped, and everywhere exists technology that would have required actual hands to construct. And then, in addition to kicking myself for asking such stupid questions during the showing of annoying children's film, I kept wondering why the characters had to be CARS to tell this hackneyed old story.

And then I hated myself for taking a movie, especially a children's movie, so seriously. PIXAR, YOUR MOVIE DID THIS TO MEEEE

Look OBVIOUSLY people want their cars to have sex with each other.

dead cat: I think the problem is not that that stuff doesn't make any sense, but rather that there is a perfectly logical answer to all of it - it just doesn't have anything to do with the story.

Look guys, obviously Cars takes place on Earth, untold millenia into the future, after we finally designed a self-aware anthropomorphic car and a fully automated factory to manufacture them.

Then came the virus.

I saw a really funny comic strip on DeviantArt of the Sheriff pulling over a human!

I learned early on in my career that, except in rare cases when the stars align, art is what you work on at home, not what you do at the studio.

Probably, I really hope that PIXAR wouldn't make a sequel so bad that Larry the Fucking Cableguy would turn it down.

YEP

You have a very delicate constitution.

He preys upon milk. Milk is his prey. He hunts it.

Sometimes, he kills it.

It takes no effort to entertain children.
Making movies that entertain both children and adults simultaneously without relying on explosions and dick/fart jokes, however, takes considerable effort.

This marks the moment when they stopped trying.

The point of making movies that appeal to both children and adults is to make movies that parents will take their children to without feeling bored and ripped off.

Sure, these movies also attract a bunch of nostalgic virginal nerds and/or pedophiles, but that's really not a significant fraction of the bottom line. If and when the artists think about you guys they're mostly thinking about how you are kind of sad and weird.

I mean honestly, as good as "Toy Story" was would you bother showing it to your kids now that the graphics have aged and the jokes gone stale? We're not exactly talking about high art here.

I'm ok with that one - I thought the first one was one of their best flicks and don't understand why it doesn't get more love.

I love Monsters, Inc. but am a bit unsure about the need for a sequel. It ended perfectly. PERFECTLY, I tell you.

I was also skeptical about TOY STORY 2, and it's one of Pixar's best films.

This, though, looks like a Dreamworks movie.

Pixar has some derivativeness to them. The concept of Toy Story - toys becoming intelligent, animated entities when the humans aren't around - was done years ago in a Jim Henson Christmas-themed thing. Monsters, Inc. has the conceit of magic closet doors that all go back to a same central alt-universe location where monsters go through them to terrorize kids at night, which is VERY close to a couple of episodes of The Real Ghostbusters where ther turned out to be a Bogeyman and he lived in this world with all these closet doors he would go through to terrorize kids. I think Little Monsters had a similar concept, too.

Pixar isn't always fantastically original, but they do tend to improve on a central concept like that. But I'm with the "Cars was not up to snuff plotwise" crowd on this one.

They're not all completely original ideas sure, but most of their stories take familiar themes and do amazing things with them. Cars was just Doc Hollywood with cars instead of people

Up 2: UPPER

UP RELOADED: THE UPPENING