psocoptera

I was also impressed by how smart it was. And how nuanced for a kids' movie (or any movie, but especially a kid's movie). And, yes, as funny as any of the better Pixar movies.

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irilyth

I feel like Pixar has almost started to move out of the kids-movie business. :^) The kids liked it too, but I wonder if in fact their target demographic is more like "people who were kids when Toy Story came out" these days.

(Hmm, but maybe not; I had forgotten that Up was six years ago, and we've had Cars 2, Brave, and Monsters U since then, all of which are more kid-ish.)

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I don't know. It felt like a kid's movie to me, albeit probably aimed at an older set than your kids. Maybe not the topic itself, but something about the handling of the topic felt very much aimed at kids who haven't figured this out on their own yet--who are still pretty emotionally immature and could use the guidance. I think an adult version of this movie would have had a much more open-ended and less moral-tale feel. But it was certainly handled well enough and sophisticatedly enough to be an all-ages film.

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Interesting. I maybe don't have the highest "EQ" or whatever we're calling emotional maturity - I'm not sure I would have come up with "the purpose of sadness is compassion", like, when they first raise the question of "what is the purpose of sadness", that didn't spring to mind for me. And I thought the not-able-to-feel-anything/at-least-she-can-feel-sad thing at the climax was unexpectedly nuanced.

I think an adult version of this movie would have focused much more heavily on sex drive, sigh.

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irilyth

Yeah, I didn't think about it too hard, but I immediately guessed that Sadness would have an important role to play, and didn't figure out what it was until it came up. (Compassion, or catharsis, or healing, or something.)

I don't know what sildra had in mind, but a different idea that the movie might have been conveying, which I might expect adults to already be pretty comfortable with, and not necessarily kids, is that there isn't just one you in your head, but that your personality has different aspects that are useful for different things. And that they're all useful, and that you shouldn't try not to feel sad or angry or afraid or disgusted, but instead that you should embrace those feelings and use them appropriately.

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So, I have some mixed feelings about the moral "the purpose of sadness is compassion" and think there are a lot of other slightly different ways they could have gone and picked different morals (which wouldn't have necessarily been better, just different). So I think not being able to come up with that specific message doesn't really say anything about you.

The fact that there was a message, and that it was so clearly articulated that the film felt didactic at the end, that's what makes it a kid's movie to me.

(Sex drive aside) An adult version of the movie wouldn't have spelled it out quite like that--or if it did, it would probably be a sign of clumsiness of the script, which would have showed up in other parts as well and we wouldn't have had such a high opinion of the movie as a whole, probably. And an adult version might have presented multiple possible purposes of sadness. Or might have merely left the audience thinking, "hmm, maybe there's a purpose to sadness" without giving an answer at all.

[Edit: I think the target audience (although again, this is clearly a movie meant to be enjoyed by all ages) is that age group that can understand nuance, but is really consumed by emotional processing and hasn't sorted it out yet--especially hasn't sorted out that even negative emotions can be used constructively. So, like preteen and young teen--the age of the girl, basically. And really that description applies to a lot of older teens, too, but I don't think they were quite the target.]

Edited Date: 2015-07-10 10:15 pm (UTC)

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i really thought it was something like catharsis, not compassion. i mean, we never actually see Riley exhibit a significant amount of compassion towards anybody else, but we do see her achieving something like catharsis at the climax of her emotional arc.

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Honestly, as portrayed, if you take Riley to be the main character it was something like "make other people bond with you." If you take Joy to be the main character, though, I think it was compassion.

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The key triumph of Sadness is getting Riley's control panel reactivated and getting her off the bus, and getting her to be willing to talk to the parents. I don't think ‘make other people bond with you’ really covers that.

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elysdir.livejournal.com

I think an adult version of the movie might've also explicitly talked about depression. That was what made me the most nervous going into the movie: the trailer I'd seen made it sound like it was going to be about a kid dealing with clinical depression, and I didn't trust them to do a good job with that.

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the thing with the volcanoes was pretty weak, though.

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Okay, I think the thing with the volcanoes would have been *awesome* if they had had the balls to skip the magical love intervention. Imagine the old volcano sinking, the new volcano standing there, and then we pan back and behind the old volcano we see the traces of an even older volcano, and a younger one starting in front of the new one, as would be appropriate for a seamount chain forming over a hotspot. I mean, I know they wouldn't ever, but hahaha, can you imagine? Or if they wanted to nice it up a bit, a narrative voice sings a verse about how we might never know who hears us but we have to keep singing or some bullshit like that.

Also I thought the photorealistic whales were kind of nice.

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irilyth

I love your alternate version of the Lava short.

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elysdir.livejournal.com

Me too.

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I knew it wouldn't happen, but I was hoping for that too.

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that would have been gloriously brutal.

but i still would have had a problem with the asymmetry of level of anthropomorphism and visual gendering between the two volcanoes.

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Heh, maybe after the fucking umbrellas I've resigned myself to the gendering of inanimate characters. (And I think I recall liking the animation in that too...)

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i didn't see Monsters University, so i missed that one.

i don't really mind that the volcanoes were gendered. i do mind the asymmetry of how the boy volcano is so much less human-shaped and has so many fewer gender-indicating physical traits than the girl volcano.

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You know what's awful, though? It's been nearly two weeks since I saw it and the lava song still pops into my head occasionally.

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so tragic!

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Yes, me too. I do sort of have to admire them for pairing a movie with a running gag about an annoying earworm with a short with an annoying earworm, though, like, well, that was on-theme at least. ::grin::

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