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SUPERGIRL nears. I will admit that the trailers, up until the one released today, weren't really grabbing me... Even though the movie itself looks well-cast, Kara Zor-El is soooo not Kal-El (which makes for a great contrast), and promises an interplanetary adventure. Director Craig Gillepsie could bring something fun and interesting to a DC movie, and that it may not just be a James Gunn-lite. We'll have to see...

Luckily, they only spent $175m on it, which is what MCU movies *used* to cost. Deadline, curiously, says the breakeven point for SUPERGIRL is $315m... That can't be right, that's only 1.8x the budget. Typically, it has to do 2.5x that to make it back... Maybe they meant $415m, which isn't all that high anyways. It's obviously not making SUPERMAN numbers, but Gunn and co. knew that.

Anyways, whether SUPERGIRL gets there or not... I find it kind of interesting that this one movie is getting all this scrutiny online. Nevermind that MAN OF TOMORROW is all-systems-go right now and will likely match the box office of SUPERMAN if not surpass it next summer, keeping Gunn's DC Universe chugging...

I think we know what's going on: DC movie with a woman lead, said lead character is played by a blonde woman who isn't afraid to speak her mind, and it being a movie that has nothing to do with the guy whose last name rhymes with Rider.

If it loses money, which is possible... Well, the second Marvel Cinematic Universe movie lost money too... Like poetry, it rhymes. That was THE INCREDIBLE HULK, released just one month after IRON MAN kicked everything off. INCREDIBLE HULK, starring Edward Norton as Bruce Banner for that film and that film alone, made $264m off of a $150m budget. That wasn't even double the cost, and no one really made a big deal about it from what I can remember. It kinda just disappeared into the summer, a summer absolutely ruled by THE DARK KNIGHT.

That wasn't kaput for the MCU. IRON MAN already did pretty well, and ensured a sequel. THOR and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER were still a go, THE AVENGERS was still going to happen down the line. Marvel Studios had to pay back what they took out of the bank, and they were gonna stick to it, not close up shop because of a single movie that already arrived nearly five years after a separate, quite divisive Hulk movie.

Ultimately, THE INCREDIBLE HULK wouldn't get a sequel, plus the cinematic rights with Banner/Hulk remain a conundrum because of Universal. I always wanted to see a 2nd MCU Hulk movie - Norton or Mark Ruffalo, but it never happened. Banner and associated characters pop up in AVENGERS movies and other characters' flicks, like we saw last year with CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD, which felt more like a stealth HULK '08 sequel than a Sam Wilson Captain America story. Any hope of a PLANET HULK/WORLD WAR HULK movie was pretty much dashed because they basically distilled elements of those stories into THOR: RAGNAROK. President Ross as a Red Hulk, manipulated by Samuel Sterns, rampaged in a movie where Banner wasn't present. Just so weird, what these rights issues do.

So yes, MCU Movie #2 lost money, and for a long while it was the lowest-grossing film in the canon. THE MARVELS is now the lowest-grossing. It was to the point where they kinda quietly acted as if it wasn't canon to some degree. It's seen as an odd movie because it's Norton and not Buffalo, because it's a little moodier than the usual MCU offerings, because it was released by Universal, and because it didn't really do all that well.

Yeah, so, I'm not worried that much about SUPERGIRL. I think it should do fine, should it turn out good and satisfying to audiences. It is up against some big competition, but if it's liked well enough, it should hold fine on subsequent weekends. Milly Alcock will obviously reappear in subsequent films, so...

But, I feel like it's one of those big summer movies that the vultures have been OUT for. So sure that it'll flop, almost *wanting* it to flop. It's giving me WORLD WAR Z flashbacks, honestly. The 2013 adaptation of the zombie novel of the same name went through a delay and significant reshoots, changes that reshaped the whole third act of the picture, which many pointed out was one of the best things about the film. The budget ballooned because of that, and the press were soooooo sure that WORLD WAR Z was going to be the summer of 2013's biiiiiiig flop... And to some folks' surprise, it did really really well. Reviews were solid, too. I liked it quite a lot, myself. A shame that sequel never happened, though.

Anyways, yeah, SUPERGIRL. Maybe it does well, maybe it doesn't, but I don't think it possibly underperforming does too too much to DC Universe. It probably just means no sequel for the character, and little else.

Storyboards are often a big blueprint of films. Both animated AND live-action, and not just this century for the latter.

And it's the HUMAN HANDS and HUMAN BRAINS that make those early drawings and outlines possible.

Scorsese, IMO, is making a BIG mistake with this "AI storyboarding" nonsense.

That's a first... A TOY STORY song *not* written by Randy Newman.

Yeah, after much hinting and speculation, Taylor Swift wrote a song for TOY STORY 5. Titled 'I Knew It, I Knew You', some are already figuring - if one of the cover arts didn't already imply - it's about Jessie and Emily, given how the plot of the movie will land Jessie at her first home.

If so, massive boots to fill right there. Newman's 'When She Loved Me' from TOY STORY 2, sung - fittingly - by the ASPCA ad queen herself, Sarah MacLachlan... Is there anything to say that HASN'T been said? Good luck matching that, I wouldn't envy being tasked with such a job.

Ever since TOY STORY 2, there have been callbacks to Jessie's past and fear of abandonment, even if the character largely plays second fiddle to Woody and Buzz in many subsequent endeavors. In TOY STORY 3, she briefly worries about such a thing happening as their future at Andy's house grew uncertain, and in TOY STORY OF TERROR!, she's made into the main hero and has a pretty great scene where she confronts her phobia of being stored. Her envisioning the cardboard box closing in all around her? Good stuff. I feel like TOY STORY OF TERROR! doesn't get talked about enough, it's my favorite thing to have come out of the franchise since the release of the 3rd movie. A literal under-half hour TV special that could've just been any old gap filler but actually went an extra mile... And directed by the sadly laid off Angus MacLane.

When they announced that Jessie was basically going to be the main character in TOY STORY 5, that's what really piqued my interest. She lead OF TERROR!, which I'm a fan of, now this. So that did it for me. If it's going to be about her, then it's got to incorporate something pertaining to her abandonment, as she now faces a similar situation under her third kid owner... So, it makes sense that there will be another likely really emotional song about that! And a likely Oscar play, at that.

Fascinatingly, the only TOY STORY song to win an Oscar was 'We Belong Together' from the 3rd film, while 'You've Got a Friend in Me' lost to 'Colors of the Wind' from POCAHONTAS, and 'When She Loved Me' lost to 'You'll Be In My Heart' from TARZAN. That goes to show just how dominant the music from the Disney Animation films still was in the latter half of the '90s, that they could still outlast really tough competition like that. (While I like 'You'll Be In My Heart', I think 'When She Loved Me' was the clear winner there.) Funnily enough, 'We Belong Together' was up against TANGLED's 'I See The Light' for Best Original Song 2010. Then for 2019, 'I Can't Let You Throw Yourself Away' lost to '(I'm Gonna) Love Me Again' from the Elton John fantasy-biopic ROCKETMAN. That same ceremony, 'Into The Unknown' from FROZEN II was nominated.

Disney Animation's new film for this year, HEXED, is seemingly not a musical. But it could have a song in it that is sung offscreen, or in the credits, and if quite good, that could be nominated and be some WDAS competition for TOY STORY there. If not, that'll also be a first... A TOY STORY not competing with a WDAS song at the Oscars.

I put this in my Letterboxd review of it, but...

It's kinda funny how THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 - which I just got out of - is about how companies and bigwigs acquire beloved institutions and then hollow them out, sucking the soul out of them, outright getting rid of them even (especially when a company "folds" what they get into their infrastructure)... And often, strip them for parts.

And it's a movie released by 20th Century Studios, formerly known as 20th Century Fox... Bought by huge company Disney in a package that included them, Fox Searchlight Pictures, and Blue Sky Studios... And Disney gutted some of those divisions, folded other ones, or did away with certain labels... Like the one used for the first DEVIL WEARS PRADA from 2006: The Fox 2000 Studios label.

Most animation fans, myself included, are still not over the shuttering of Blue Sky in February 2021. Over five years ago. Surreal.

Nailed it. A lot of this video is basically what I've been saying for a WHILE about multiplexes, especially in relation to where box office has been for years.

The theater I worked at for a decade, a Cinemark, shared many of the same or similar issues to the ones Rolfe highlighted. All those premiums largely add little while driving up the price, but the indifference to what a gamble going to the theater is remains the same, if not worsens.

Though, funnily enough, my Cinemark continued to do a lot of things the old school way: Old-style soda fountains that you hook the syrups up to, actual paper posters in cases, and we never used old popcorn - we always popped fresh batches all day every day.

But it's not the same, elsewhere. Rolfe was largely detailing his experiences at AMCs and Regals, most of my theatergoing experiences have been at Cinemarks (all the ones I go to used to be National Amusements-owned Showcase Cinemas buildings), sometimes AMCs, and every once in a while the *one* Regal near me that closed down a few years back. That Regal used to be a Hoyts, which is an Australian theater company, for a while they had had multiplexes here in the states.

Even a local non-chain theater near me needs to up their game, I went there in March of last year to see THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP, and the movie wasn't even projected correctly. About 10% of each side of the image was OFF the screen. Because of that, and because of how cool the movie was, I wanted to see it again. I went up to an AMC showing the film, since my Cinemark didn't book it. The AMC showing's picture was an improvement, but the sound was unusually quite low. Win some, lose some, I suppose!

I went to that same AMC to see SCARLET, the latest Mamoru Hosoda film, and I could hear the movie next door blaring through the walls. Where's the quality control?

And I already said it in other posts, there are plenty of other things that make the experience a gamble. That all being said, people are still flocking to movies. It's the power of the movies themselves that keep people coming (i.e. PROJECT HAIL MARY, DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2, OBSESSION, BACKROOMS), those movies are the ones really doing the heavy-lifting alongside the staff who do what they can with what they've been given. I should know, I did just that for 10 years lol.

#Youtube

Quite something... Extremely low-budget original horror and a film based on something originating from internet posts, from budding YouTuber directors in their 20s, are either making Marvel/Star Wars tentpole-like numbers, or outclassing those kinds of movies.

Again, healthy box office. The heavy-hitters of May, typically Marvel domain, were fashion comedy-drama THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 ($76m opening), OBSESSION (rose on its second wide weekend, looks to keep at it), BACKROOMS (poised to make over $70m+ this weekend), and April leftover music biopic MICHAEL ($97m opening). THE MANDALORIAN & GROGU opening with a series-low $81m and being beaten in dailies by OBSESSION only really adds to the pot, but it shows that the typical biggie is sharing some space now. And that audiences want something different, not just from STAR WARS, but from a typical non-toon Disney blockbuster. (Because TOY STORY 5, looking reliably like a TOY STORY movie, is set to score a $150m+ opening within a matter of weekends.)

Whether intentional or not, it was pretty smart of Marvel to just opt for two films this year, one of them not even being released by Disney. I think SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY and AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY are easy locks for a billion, but we're in this era now where that one extra digit no longer really makes for a magic number.

Back in 2006, there were three billion-dollar grossing films: TITANIC, THE LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING, and PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST. James Cameron historical drama, the third big-budget Tolkien movie, and a sequel to a theme park ride-based movie. A few movies hung out right outside of that high threshold, like THE PHANTOM MENACE and SHREK 2. Plenty of superhero films existed back then, too, but most settled for sub-$500m unadjusted worldwide totals, exceptions being Sam Raimi's then-massive SPIDER-MAN movies. Even BATMAN BEGINS, the start of Christopher Nolan's DARK KNIGHT trilogy, made a fair $373m worldwide back in 2005. DVD and TV was where that movie really thrived, setting the stage for THE DARK KNIGHT to do way better. Even if Heath Ledger hadn't died, it still would've been enormous. Would've at least doubled what BATMAN BEGINS took in. Wild to think that Sam Raimi's SPIDER-MAN was at one point the highest-earning superhero movie, but I was there, I remember how big all three movies were.

That was the landscape back then. Ticket prices got higher and higher, 3D and IMAX and many premium formats were added as well. 2007 went by without a single film making a billion, though PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD'S END came very close. 2008, THE DARK KNIGHT did it. 2009, James Cameron returned *big* with AVATAR and passed $2 billion. Game changed. Barring 2020, every calendar year since 2009 has at least one billion-dollar biggie.

In a weird way, 2026 kinda feels like the mid-aughts in that regard. That, and given what's also going on in politics, an unpopular war, economic woes, an awful prez in his second term, errrrmm-

Jorge R. Gutierrez abandoned that AI crap he was set to make for Amazon after so much backlash, and also wrote something of an apology for his decision and weird behavior about it.

Sometimes good things DO happen.

One thing I do want to clarify just in case any words get misinterpreted or if I seemed too down on it...

I don't have it out for the newest STAR WARS film. I'm sure it's adequate in some way or another, well-made, even entertaining for people who'll just stroll right into it expecting popcorn fun. A theme park movie ironically starring the man who called movies like these "theme park movies", Martin Scorsese himself! And even funnier, it was directed by Jon Favreau, who helmed the inaugural Marvel Cinematic Universe film: IRON MAN. The very thing Scorsese pointed to in his critique of the modern film landscape.

I think it's a weird and unusual choice for the franchise's first theatrical movie since THE RISE OF SKYWALKER, deciding to go through with a disjointed movie after the planned season of the TV it's following up got put on hold due to the 2023 strikes. I also feel that, even if may not be intentional, it's a safe movie catering to Original Trilogy nostalgia once more and making sure it doesn't offend the foamiest of mouthbreathers. I don't think that is the way, ironically. STAR WARS should remain interesting and trying new things, there's a gaggle of people who will be angry at it anyhow. A lot of those idiots are celebrating the relative underperformance of this new movie anyways. THE LAST JEDI, the movie that supposedly ruined everything and went too far (in what way?), is still the second highest-earning film in the entire franchise. $1.3b worldwide, only behind THE FORCE AWAKENS. The very spineless RISE OF SKYWALKER couldn't replicate that - though it did still make a billion. SOLO *especially* didn't. Did horribly overseas, so-so domestically.

MANDALORIAN & GROGU will be lucky to make half a billion when all is said and done. Way less than RISE OF SKYWALKER.

So, the premise that TM&G is a win-back-the-crowd movie is silly. In a weird way, it's the MOANA 2 of STAR WARS movies. There hasn't been a new movie in *years*, a new season of a highly popular STAR WARS TV show ran into trouble as the streaming craze wanes, "okay well then that's the next movie! That'll go over well at the next shareholder conference or whatever!" A very later-era Bob Iger product.

It's less the movie itself, which I'm sure was just a crew having fun making a pulp adventure with no ill intentions, and it's more the conversation around it and the wider STAR WARS franchise. That, and Iger's cowardice in his final years as CEO, the pivot to being less "political" or whatever. How the press and other people go on and on and on about the franchise making a huge misstep by being "woke" or having women characters or whatever, when they're referring to two films that made $2 billion and $1.3b worldwide, respectively. Like I saw some people unironically call the latter a "flop" or a box office comedown/disappointment, never mind that with each STAR WARS trilogy, the first film in it always makes the most. By a WIDE margin.

But ohhhh, with MANDALORIAN & GROGU, a very inoffensive movie that shouldn't upset anyone, it's all this hyper-defensiveness. How it's actually ALL about the toy sales and Disney+ viewership and theme park stuff... The hell are they when people act as if THE LAST JEDI was a misstep that audiences turned away from? Or when a lot of the press were calling three pandemic-era Pixar movies and a leggy original of theirs disappointments that no one liked? The kinds of movies they need to STOP making? Or when SINNERS opened great and immediately looked to turn a profit? All the talk of how it could dip sharply on second weekend and flop?

They'll eagerly call the shady Melania movie from earlier this year that was directed by a predator a success, a record-breaker, when it actually did horribly. "Oh, but the theatrical release is really just an ad for its later Amazon Prime release! Not a flop, actually!"

Screw right off.

We know what's up, don't we? The press - a lot of them owned by the same right-leaning companies - loves to chastise filmmakers and studios when they dare to make films that are about something, or aren't afraid to speak some truths in an era where doing so means getting intense pushback. They sing with that awful chorus, joining their side in heckling the arts.

I think the conversation should be this: A modestly-budgeted STAR WARS movie making its money back is fine. I've said this before, but a healthy box office would see the likes of STAR WARS movies and MCU installments nicely settling for the lower ranks of the yearly Top 10s. I think it's cool that a DEVIL WEARS PRADA sequel is making so much and outdoing several tentpoles like this, not to mention horror movies having leggy-AF runs, mixed in with other stuff like animated original movies and sci-fi like PROJECT HAIL MARY.

Because of that, I feel a STAR WARS movie that *isn't* a Trilogy entry and budgeted smartly, could actually be more experimental and try something a little different. I feel it has the room to do that. Out of all the standalone movies, I think ROGUE ONE kinda does that. SOLO, which is more of a Cliff Notes retelling of Han Solo's past, not so much. On the TV side of things, sometimes you visited other pockets of that universe, like with SKELETON CREW. Sometimes animation has to be the one to shake things up, see STAR WARS: VISIONS.

Weirdly enough, and speaking of animation... I'm thinking about PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH and how it was the first SHREK or SHREK-adjacent movie in quite some time. Well, much like MANDALORIAN & GROGU, LAST WISH isn't a mainline movie in its series, and it was also following up on a movie where he was the lead character. (There was also that PUSS IN BOOTS TV series for Netflix in the mid-2010s, which was set before the first PiB movie.)

There's a long gap between the release of PUSS IN BOOTS (October 2011) and THE LAST WISH (December 2022), not to mention its originator - DreamWorks Animation - being bought by Comcast in that span of time. The cat's voice actor, Antonio Banderas, also went through some health issues, namely a heart attack in 2017. PUSS IN BOOTS 2 was originally set up as a direct sequel to PUSS IN BOOTS, with director Chris Miller (not of the Lord-Miller duo, this is the SHREK 3/SMURFS '25 director) returning to helm it, going for an Arabian Nights story. Financial troubles and mismanagement at DreamWorks put it on the back-burner, and well after Comcast's acquisition, it was revived as the movie we ended up getting. A whole new vision of what a SHREK movie could look and feel like.

Comcast could've just mandated DreamWorks to get going on SHREK 5, and have that thing out by the end of this past decade (scripts for a fifth film were being written as far back as 2016), but instead, PUSS IN BOOTS 2 remained a priority. A sequel to the lowest-grossing movie in the franchise outside of the original SHREK. Yeah, they really did do something cool and unique there. Like instead of a much-anticipated fifth SHREK movie, here's a wild and different PUSS IN BOOTS movie that few probably asked for. (Me being one of those few, lol. I followed PiB2's development since 2012.)

I wonder what would've happened if Lucasfilm and Disney had just done that for the newest STAR WARS feature film, instead of throwing together a re-cooked Disney+ show season. It's why STARFIGHTER, set five years after RISE OF SKYWALKER and being about all-new characters seemingly having nothing to do with the Skywalkers or any of the Sequel Trilogy characters, was always the more interesting upcoming project to me. That film could very well be something different and neat, a good way to walk audiences back into the STAR WARS universe in the way THE LAST WISH did for SHREK. Or maybe that film is just more of the same, who knows.

But the opening weekend gross tells me, being all safe and retro isn't a guarantee for a billion dollar hit. And not every STAR WARS movie should be required to be that anyways. Look at how ANDOR did in ratings and how it's the most-streamed STAR WARS anything on Disney+, and the most popular STAR WARS media with millennials and Gen X'ers. And I get it, THE MANDALORIAN was super popular with kids under 13 and with boomers, but one could yield similar if not better results when they make a STAR WARS movie that tries a little harder than just "your favorite action figures onscreen".

TOY STORY 5 tidbits from the filmmakers, now that there's a new trailer out (I'll skip that, I've seen enough footage and will wait for the movie itself), and the movie is weeks away...

Key takeaways...

Lilypad is more of an obstacle than a flat-out villain, and that the movie won't be - as I suspected - some "phone bad" ramble. I couldn't see Pixar - with all the tech at their disposal and being a pioneering studio in COMPUTER animation AND their long connection to Apple - just straight up going "phone bad".

Co-writer and co-director Kenna Harris stated:

“Lots of people at the studio wanted her to be a villain, and it was so hard to strike the balance because I think we all come in with such loaded emotions towards devices. At the end of the day, it never made sense... We’re not getting rid of these devices, no matter how hard we try. I’m always going to have my phone. I’m probably going to be partially addicted to it. So it felt right for the toys to have to grapple with that nuance.”

And hey, it's what I like about these films. Sometimes, these antagonists aren't muwhahaha evil bad guys. TOY STORY had Sid, literally a kid who was weird and a bit of a little shit to his younger sister and loved to mutate his toys into all sorts of wild concoctions... All without knowing that they're alive and have feelings. The filmmakers often joked that Sid was basically them when they were little. He seems to have grown up to be a fairly well-adjusted fella, if his brief cameos in TOY STORY 3 are anything to go by. Sometimes, these films *do* give us out-and-out bad guys, like Stinky Pete and Lotso. Or a fun boss battle, like the Zurg toy that follows Buzz to the apartment complex where Al lives. Then you have Gabby-Gabby, who really wants Woody's voicebox and to be loved, but she isn't necessarily evil. Lilypad looks to fit into that gallery just fine.

Director-writer and TOY STORY veteran Andrew Stanton also added that he was "asked" to write the film over five years ago. So, some time before May 2021. This thing was in the works *before* the release of LIGHTYEAR, not whipped into development following the spin-off's poor box office run by the middle of 2022. Back then, Stanton had blueprinted Jessie being leader of Bonnie's room, the Buzz army, and how a device could take away playtime from non-screen toys. Harris was the one who brought more of Jessie's backstory and revisiting Emily's (old) house into the picture, current occupier Blaze, etc. Which is quite interesting. A veteran and a relative newcomer working together with various sections, making a satisfying larger whole. That's what I find fascinating about lots of big-time animated films, the collaborative aspects, and who comes up with what. Who had the fun idea of a Buzz army, but who wanted to bring Jessie face-to-face with her past. That sort of thing.

Lastly, Stanton eased whatever worries one might have about generative AI poisoning the Pixar water hole:

“We’ve had machine learning since the beginning of Pixar as far as figuring things out for you occasionally, but it’s always been to make the tools work better. I have no interest in doing anything but working smarter, faster with another artist.”

Harris added:

“Pixar is a technology company first, and so things are changing. Pixar is figuring out how to change along with it. But as far as our process on TOY STORY 5 went, we had to figure it out ourselves, mainly because ultimately, what you’re seeing on screen is the work of a lot of awesome artists.”

Yeah, the closer we get, the more excited I am. I could've taken TOY STORY 5 or left it back when it was announced. As we learned it was about screens and had a Buzz army, I kept thinking "Could be cool, let's see"... But I'm actually legit pretty stoked for it at this point.

Something kind of funny... It came to mind...

Walt Disney Animation Studios, per their "official" canon, has made 64 films to date, soon to be 65 in November. The studio as we know it was founded by Walt and Roy Disney in 1923. Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio.

Pixar's 31st is out in a matter of weeks. (Re)-established in 1986. You could count their first few years as Lucasfilm's Graphics Group.

DreamWorks is releasing their... Uhhh... They don't really have a canon, honestly, and their productions/releases span from DreamWorks to Pacific Data Images to Aardman to... Oh there's also a direct-to-video movie in here (JOSEPH: KING OF DREAMS) that was outsourced to several houses. And films not made by them at all, but released under the label of DreamWorks Animation, like the live-action HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON movies and that Cocomelon movie lol.

And it's kinda debatable, I guess, how much the two stop-motion Aardman films - CHICKEN RUN and WALLACE & GROMIT: THE CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT - are really DreamWorks. They helped get them off the ground, Steven Spielberg certainly had some muscle in getting CHICKEN RUN made (he loved the concept and how it was very WWII/prisoner-of-war-esque, this was around the time he was working on SAVING PRIVATE RYAN), and notes were given by DreamWorks co-founder/former CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and other DreamWorks execs to the filmmakers across the Atlantic. The UK release of CHICKEN RUN was preceded by a Pathe logo, no DreamWorks SKG logo in sight. DreamWorks Animation became their own independent entity in 2004, and with that, introduced their own logo. It's still a boy on the moon, but it's during the day and it's a lot more colorful. That appears at the beginning of both WERE-RABBIT and FLUSHED AWAY. Those were largely Aardman films, though FLUSHED AWAY was when the two clashed, and then went their separate ways thereafter.

It's a lot more fluid if you ask me, and it all amounts to over 40 films. DreamWorks Animation SKG's roots are DreamWorks SKG, founded by former Disney exec Katzenberg in 1994. So in the span of nearly 32 years, there are almost as much films that are "DreamWorks Animation" as Disney Animation films. With DreamWorks and the defunt PDI, and with other units open elsewhere that later got sold off or shut down, they were able to get 2-3 films out in certain years.

Disney has often been a bit strict about the "canon", how it's all Disney Animation productions, films originated in/approved by the brass in California. None of the direct-to-video sequels count, not even the ones upped to theatrical release. (i.e. THE TIGGER MOVIE, RETURN TO NEVER LAND, etc.) Something like A GOOFY MOVIE, despite how beloved it is now and arguably very much a worthy entry in the "Disney Renaissance", does not count either. It was a Disney MovieToons production, a big screen leap for the TV series GOOF TROOP (though curiously leaves out plenty of the characters present in the show while introducing new ones), with top-rate animation largely supplied by Disney Animation's Paris unit. In the UK, the canon - for some odd reason - included THE WILD. Disney Animation had nothing to do with that film, whereas a film they *did* make, 2011's WINNIE THE POOH, is not in that canon. So weird. The American one is pretty much official, but that too is missing a film: 1943's VICTORY THROUGH AIR POWER. A World War II propaganda film that does not fit with the company's family-friendly positioning of their animated movies. It's also often debated whether DINOSAUR counts or not. I mean, The Secret Lab was a mashing of Dream Quest Images and Disney Animation's computer graphics arm. Disney Animation staffers and regulars worked on it. It's the rare collaboration on here, kind of in the same way the Disney+ show IWAJU was both Disney Animation and Nigeria-based Kugali's project, with animation outsourced to Cinesite. DINOSAUR is in a tricky area, I think, given that the project also began life elsewhere.

Pixar? Everything was Pixar. The closest they got to a collaboration was the scrapped film THE SHADOW KING, from director Henry Selick. Worked on from about 2010 to 2012, that endeavor would've been a stop-motion film done in collaboration with his Cinderbiter Studios. The project was micromanaged to hell by John Lasseter, and when Walt Disney Pictures had a chairman change in 2012 (from Rich Ross to Alan Horn), it was swiftly canned despite around $50m being spent on it by that point, and a good chunk of footage completed. At another point, Pixar was looking to partner with Disney's live-action division and Warner Bros. to bring Brad Bird's 1906 to the screen. That would've been their foray into live-action. Over time, they beefed up enough to get two pictures out every few years.

But no, with Pixar, it's all under Pixar. And one roof, at that. Pixar briefly had a Vancouver-based unit called Pixar Canada, but it was running for only three years, from 2010 to 2013. They worked on some shorts, and that was about it. It later became a satellite unit for Industrial Light & Magic, which was convenient, Disney had acquired Lucasfilm and STAR WARS in October 2012.

Now the other side of this story... Well, what Disney Animation went through in the decades *before* the 1990s. Pixar's first film came out in 1995, and DreamWorks launched their two debut films in 1998.

Early on, following the runaway success of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS, the plan was to stack up and get a new feature out every year. Walt Disney and crew moved from the old studio on 2719 Hyperion Avenue L.A. to Buena Vista Street in Burbank. There were some re-shufflings here and there. BAMBI was supposed to follow SNOW WHITE as the studio's second feature, going into development in 1936, a year before SNOW WHITE's world premiere. BAMBI was put on the back-burner as PINOCCHIO and a project called THE CONCERT FEATURE became priorities by the end of 1938. That was the game plan: PINOCCHIO to CONCERT FEATURE (later FANTASIA) to BAMBI. New studio, plenty of money from SNOW WHITE, it was full steam ahead! But once those plans were put into motion... World War II happened. PINOCCHIO and FANTASIA both came out in 1940 and failed to recoup their costs while BAMBI saw delays and cutbacks, DUMBO was belted out in 1941 as a stopgap feature along with the studio tour picture THE RELUCTANT DRAGON (which flopped), and then BAMBI finally got out in 1942 and also couldn't recoup its costs. The rest of the decade was spent making the anthology features, as the box office losses of PINOCCHIO, FANTASIA, and BAMBI really took the wind out of their sails. The studio was in debt, and it would take a long time to get back on track.

Come the '50s, single-story films were back and here to stay. CINDERELLA opened in February 1950, literally beginning a decade in new Disney features. The animated movies would now be made on lower budgets and would be released further apart from one another. Sometimes the wait would be a year and a half, sometimes over two years. Walt also turned his attention to live-action films, television, and a theme park. 1959's SLEEPING BEAUTY - already a troubled production that took almost the entire decade to get made - saw the studio indulging in a $6m budget and 70mm photography. It lost a lot of money at the box office, with more downsizing to follow.

By the end of the 1960s, the features take longer and longer to come out. It could sometimes take up to four years for one to show up.

After Hollywood comes to the Disney enterprise in the mid-1980s, the regime change that put Michael Eisner and Frank Well and Jeffrey Katzenberg in charge, the animation studio was heavily re-invested in, with the goal to get a new picture out every year. WDAS has been consistently doing that since, although they've missed a couple of calendar years for various reasons.

Let's do a breakdown, shall we?:

1940s: 10 films, six of them being the "package features"

1950s: 5 films

1960s: 3 films

1970s: 4 films, one of them being a Frankensteined film made up of previously-released shorts, two from the 1960s

1980s: 5 films

1990s: 10 films (FANTASIA 2000 premieres in late 1999)

2000s: 11 films

2010s: 9 films

2020s: 10 films, six of them released, four more planned/dated

Whereas, Pixar...

1990s: 3 films

2000s: 7 films

2010s: 11 films

2020s: 14 films, nine of them released, five more planned/dated

And then... DreamWorks...

1990s: 2 films

2000s: 16 films

2010s: 19 films

2020s: 21 films, fifteen of them released, currently six more planned/dated

Big difference, I think... When it comes to the studio, the branding, what counts and what doesn't, if such rules are set, etc.

Handy Pixar domestic multiplier list, as HOPPERS winds down...

For movies that have been re-released theatrically, I'll of course be going by their *initial releases*. These multipliers are also approximate, not exact. i.e. $339m divided by $70m, not every digit. It's all about the same anyways.

The multiplier of course refers to how much a movie made times its opening weekend. The higher end usually implies good word-of-mouth helped the picture climb to a higher gross, lower means it kind of fizzled out after opening weekend due to poor word-of-mouth and disinterest. Above 3x, on average, is pretty solid for most movies. It's almost a default number for an animated family film.

ONWARD, SOUL, LUCA, and TURNING RED all exempt. You know the drill.

Here we go.

6.58x - TOY STORY

5.31x - ELEMENTAL

4.90x - A BUG'S LIFE

4.84x - FINDING NEMO

4.38x - RATATOUILLE

4.30x - UP

4.29x - TOY STORY 2

4.23x - INSIDE OUT 2

4.20x - COCO

4.11x - MONSTERS, INC.

4.06x - CARS

3.95x - INSIDE OUT

3.77x - TOY STORY 3

3.72x - THE INCREDIBLES

3.68x - HOPPERS (estimate)

3.61x - TOY STORY 4

3.60x - FINDING DORY

3.60x - ELIO

3.59x - BRAVE

3.53x - WALL-E

3.34x - INCREDIBLES 2

3.26x - MONSTERS UNIVERSITY

3.15x - THE GOOD DINOSAUR

2.89x - CARS 2

2.86x - CARS 3

2.36x - LIGHTYEAR

...

kylesvariouslistsandstuff

What's that? A gaggle of chronically online perpetually unhappy young weirdos who complain for days on end about mainstream animation are also really broken up about popular "indie" animation that they initially hyped as the magical cool alternative to everything they dislike?

Sports at 6.

kylesvariouslistsandstuff

I'm aware of what's going on with certain shows...

I think some people form very weird parasocial relationships with things they consume that they do not have a part in creatively, and especially with creators they do not know personally.

I'm not into that.

If something I like goes a direction I truly don't care for, I step off the train and go board another one. Once in a while I'll criticize decisions made by someone in charge (i.e. Pete Docter at Pixar, capitulating to right-wing mouthbreathers) if I feel the need to, but even then, I don't know those people and I wouldn't want to do what some of these people are doing. Like it's to the point where certain creators now want nothing to do with what they've made, and that's sad.

Shame on them, be better. Crap like that is harmful to the arts.

Really neat to see the press doing backflips to *not* write THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU off as a flop even though its 4-day take looks to be worse than SOLO's, and it may or may not make back that $165m budget when all is said and done.

"Oh wait, it'll make its money back in toy sales", "it'll do great on Disney+", "let's wait and see how it does"... Wow, the entertainment press have faith in this, don't they?

I feel it's because the new film, from Jon Favreau and co-written by current Lucasfilm leader Dave Filoni, is said to be as inoffensive as you can get. I haven't seen it, but the project has always communicated: "STAR WARS, the way you always liked it". None of that awful "woke" "DEI" stuff in there, it's old-fashioned '80s-style and it's like playing with your action figures and you can turn off your brain!

One review by Matt Singer of ScreenCrush put it beautifully:

We may come to look back on THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU as the tipping point where Star Wars stopped making kids movies and started making dad movies. Sure, the adorable Baby Yoda got his full legal name in the title, and yes, Jon Favreau dedicates plenty of this big-screen adaptation of the hit streaming TV series to the tyke’s child-friendly antics. But unlike all the orphaned, loner heroes of Lucas’ Star Wars movies, the Mandalorian is a father. And the film around him, with its heavy use of old fashioned special effects and original trilogy callbacks — not to mention its themes about the bond between parent and child — feels targeted to middle-aged viewers hungry to relive their youthful moviegoing experiences with their parents at RETURN OF THE JEDI 40 years ago, now with their own kids.

Gotta love how the press weren't there for the "woke" Pixar movies that opened underwhelmingly, or only played on Disney+ due to a worldwide pandemic... How they tut-tutted to Pixar, finger-wagging to them that they should bring back a known misogynist creep and stop letting those "DEI" filmmakers make movies that are personal to them (the horror!), thus their movies would be better-er and would be big hits and things would be like the olden dayes. How they got all excited at HOPPERS, which only had a fine enough multiplier, barely turned a profit, and made over $100m *less* than what "autobiographical" ELEMENTAL made. And how excited they are about the billions all the upcoming sequels will inevitably rake in.

ADD-ON... Or how's about when SINNERS came out and opened pretty good relative to budget, and it was all "NOW WAIT A MINUTE, this could fall apart on second weekend and end up flopping!" Which... When was THAT ever said about a movie that opened like that? Never. And here these same dweebs are, saying MANDO & GROGU looks to do okay in the long run. And how that bribe movie about a certain someone holding a lot of power was successful even though it performed like dogshit theatrically...

I see you.

Actually, the real story this weekend is the $1m-costing horror film OBSESSION rising through the ranks, looking to hit #2 this weekend, rising over 15% up from its wide opening weekend. The film looks to finish up with $100m worldwide or more. A24's BACKROOMS film looks to be a hit too. Goes to show that the audience is actually hungry for something else sometimes, and that's a good sign of a healthier box office.

As part of a nostalgia-themed promotional summer event, Disney+ and Hulu are curiously getting these titles...

THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER... And both seasons of THE WEEKENDERS...

And they drop within days... Memorial Day itself, to be exact. Surprise announcement indeed.

Many are wondering, myself included, if this means... More much-requested titles long NOT available on Disney+ finally coming to the service. Disney+ was launched in November 2019, and it's kinda wild that some shows and films straight up aren't on there. Every new promo for what's new on the service is usually just "episode of a reality show" or whatever. Rarely have they put out new batches of classics, save for maybe a random short film dump here and there.

THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER last saw an official home media release from Disney in 2003, a DVD that sometimes popped up in used bins at my local Best Buy, back when they actually sold physical media. Sometimes I saw unsold 2000-era Gold Classic Collection DVDs of A GOOFY MOVIE and HERCULES at stores in the 2010s as well, even well into this decade. Quite something.

But it needed to happen, because BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER is an important part of '80s animation nonetheless.

Thomas M. Disch's story was optioned by the Disney enterprise in 1982, with a young John Lasseter and ambitious Disney executive Thomas Wilhite wanting to adapt it into a hybrid hand-drawn/computer-animated feature looking not dissimilar to a test short based on WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE the former made with Glen Keane. Then-high ranking executive soon to be CEO of the company, Walt's nephew Ron Miller, nixed it. No surprise.

Wilhite founded Hyperion Pictures after being let go from Disney, and Disney surprisingly helped fund the production of the movie over there. Albeit, on a low budget, with work being outsourced. Many of the Cal-Arts animators who were frustrated during their time at Disney in the early '80s working on THE FOX AND THE HOUND and THE BLACK CAULDRON found a project more suited to them in BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER over at Hyperion... At least one of whom - Joe Ranft - would later go on to work at Pixar, on a very similar "inanimate objects come to life" story that focuses on said objects' relationship with their owner. A relationship that becomes very pronounced in the sequels, including one that's out within weeks...

I don't think I've ever heard of that film series, though. What was it called now? TOY TALES or something? Disch would go to pen a treatment for Disney in 1988, a story set in the wildernesses of the African continent. Something about leopards, I think?

All kidding aside, the TOY STORY connections are there for a reason, and yeah, Disch basically birthed what would become THE LION KING.

Music and songs were provided by Van Dyke Parks, best known for co-writing with Brian Wilson on the songs that would form the latter's masterpiece SMILE. The great Beach Boys album recorded in the latter half of 1966 and into early 1967 that never was. Van Dyke Parks had actually done some work on 'The Bare Necessities' for THE JUNGLE BOOK around the same time, and was a close colleague of one Randy Newman. In fact, the opening track of his 1967 album SONG CYCLE, 'Vine Street'... Written by Newman, at about 1:38 in... It sounds like something out of the TOY STORY score...

Then came the weird release of it. THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER was screened one day in July 1987, with theatrical distribution set to be handled by a company called Skouras Pictures. But Disney already had the TV and video rights, and given how ruthless Eisner's Disney could be when it came to these sorts of things, they fast-tracked a February 1988 Disney Channel airing to prevent someone else from making money off of it. If it was on TV for free, then so much for the film making any money theatrically. The film did, however, play theatrically in overseas markets under other distributors. The filmmakers got to screen it at Sundance (the first animated feature to screen there, not counting John and Faith Hubley's anthology of previously-released shorts THE COSMIC EYE), and other festivals and specialty theaters well into the early '90s. Then Disney released it on video in 1991, and again in 1994. Domestically, once more. The film became synonymous with Disney by that point, though it is not a film that was made at Disney Feature Animation nor part of the "canon".

It's a weird sort-of "It's not Disney but it kind of is, and in spirit" Disney film. It was going to be a Disney animated feature, but it was scrapped, so former Disney people made it happen at another studio... Partially on Disney's dime, and Disney had the TV/video rights and used those to sabotage a potential U.S. theatrical release. Some even agreed that the film, upon its staggered release, showcased the kind of film Disney used to make but wasn't really making those days. Much like the then-new Don Bluth movies AN AMERICAN TAIL and THE LAND BEFORE TIME were.

A lot of the fuel to the 2nd Golden Age of Animation was former Disney people making what they - and even critics and observers - believed were films that really channeled the innovation and forward-thinking of classic Disney, but not making them at the studio where those sorts of films should have been happening back then. It's well-known that the Cal-Arts crew didn't find the likes of THE FOX AND THE HOUND, MICKEY'S CHRISTMAS CAROL, or even THE BLACK CAULDRON all that rewarding to work on. Projects like VINCENT and FUN WITH MR. FUTURE were outlets for their creative frustrations, to the point where some of them left and tried to get just that kind of thing made elsewhere. THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER fits firmly in that category. Even WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, a Disney production released through their adult Touchstone label that began life as a mainline Disney film in the early '80s, had little to no involvement from Disney Animation themselves. Disney Animation would finally release something that was universally acclaimed and quite successful at the box office with THE LITTLE MERMAID in fall 1989. It took some time, but it finally happened.

So, it's really neat to finally see BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER finally get the Disney+ treatment.

Now as for THE WEEKENDERS... What a whirlwind that show went through. A protracted roll-out across three networks (from ABC's Disney One Saturday Morning block to UPN's Disney One Too to Toon Disney), stretching the show's run from early 2000 all the way up to early 2004, and then largely disappearing until a Disney Movie Club exclusive DVD release... Sometimes, animated TV series during that era went through that sort of thing. Which episodes aired internationally first, how neglected it was, etc. Creator Doug Langdale's other Disney show, the irreverent medieval-set DAVE THE BARBARIAN, saw similar treatment.

But, all of THE WEEKENDERS is back, and as said earlier... Some are asking if other Disney animated shows NOT on Disney+ will eventually hit the service... Like the aforementioned DAVE THE BARBARIAN, along with RECESS creator Paul Germain and Joe Ansolabehere's LLOYD IN SPACE, FILLMORE!, and MICKEY MOUSE WORKS/HOUSE OF MOUSE. A lot of those shows either don't have home video releases, or you have to rely on YouTube uploads/bootlegs to watch them.

As a kid, I loved MOUSE WORKS/HOUSE OF MOUSE, I dug DAVE THE BARBARIAN, and I watched re-runs of both THE WEEKENDERS and LLOYD IN SPACE on the Disney Channel circa 2003/04. These cartoons are kind of part of this weird era for Disney TV Animation I feel, where Disney's One Saturday Mornings becomes ABC Kids, but some of the shows are released so oddly. That some of these shows belatedly wrapped up their runs on tucked-away Toon Disney says quite a bit, I think. "Burning off" episodes, as it's known in the industry. Not like, say, KIM POSSIBLE. That show's episodes all aired on The Disney Channel. LILO & STITCH: THE SERIES you could either watch as part of ABC Kids, or on the Disney Channel, back in 2003-04.

THE WEEKENDERS met such a fate, and then seemed to disappear. Still, releasing the two seasons on DVD back in 2013 was nice, even if it was through an exclusive club that now no longer exists... But, a happy ending, it'll be on Disney+ for fans to revisit and possibly make new fans.

#Youtube

Looking at the chronology of Walt Disney Home Video's "The Classics" line for their animated features, and the (factual, and sometimes likely) reasons why those films were chosen in their respective release years...

December 1984: ROBIN HOOD - The company at the time we hesitant to put the animated classics on video, despite plans being put in place by the middle of 1984 to do so. ROBIN HOOD was likely chosen as the inaugural title due to the film not being the most esteemed among the "untouchable" animated classics. Its release was perhaps meant to test the waters.

July 1985: PINOCCHIO - Followed its December 1984 theatrical re-release. Chosen because of the regime change at Disney, the new leaders encouraged the old guard to start releasing the prime classics on video, not "lesser" films like ROBIN HOOD. Originally, THE SWORD IN THE STONE was set to be the second Classics release.

November 1985: DUMBO - The film had been available on home video in some form since 1981, and Disney ran a promotion for Christmas 1985 to help PINOCCHIO - at a reduced price - sell better. The promotional event had 20 other titles at PINOCCHIO's price, DUMBO included. Thus DUMBO was upped to Classics status.

March 1986: THE SWORD IN THE STONE - Originally intended to be the second Classics release after ROBIN HOOD, likely due to how it was also not viewed as among the greatest of the Disney animated films. With PINOCCHIO released and the subsequent holiday season promo, it made sense to have this one follow.

May 1986: ALICE IN WONDERLAND - First released on video in 1981, so it made sense to graduate this film to the line.

October 1986: SLEEPING BEAUTY - Followed its March 1986 theatrical re-release, and likely chosen because prestigious PINOCCHIO had been released the year prior to good sales, lessening the tight grip on these films. The release performed very well, ensuring future classic releases.

October 1987: LADY AND THE TRAMP - Followed its November 1986 theatrical re-release.

October 1988: CINDERELLA - Followed its November 1987 theatrical re-release.

September 1989: BAMBI - Followed its July 1988 theatrical re-release.

September 1989: DUMBO - Video cover update, to coincide with the release of BAMBI, and probably for uniformity. Updated tape master released in late 1991.

September 1989: THE SWORD IN THE STONE - Video cover update, to coincide with the release of BAMBI, and probably for uniformity. Updated tape master released in late 1991.

May 1990: THE LITTLE MERMAID - The first title in the Classics line to be a newer film. The film was released theatrically in November 1989, and due to how successful at the box office the film was in comparison to the previous three films made at the studio, the home video division took a risk and decided to release it on video so soon after hitting theaters. Unsurprisingly, it was a big hit on video as well.

September 1990: PETER PAN - Followed its July 1989 theatrical re-release.

May 1991: THE JUNGLE BOOK - Followed its July 1990 theatrical re-release.

July 1991: ROBIN HOOD - Sitting in the vault since 1987, Disney Home Video brought back ROBIN HOOD to coincide with the release of ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES.

September 1991: THE RESCUERS DOWN UNDER - The film was first released theatrically in November 1990, thus the video release - now that LITTLE MERMAID had been released on video - followed.

November 1991: FANTASIA - Two reasons: It had been theatrically re-released in October 1990, and also because then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner would let Roy E. Disney make a second FANTASIA film if the original came to video, which Roy was against at first.

April 1992: 101 DALMATIANS - Followed its July 1991 theatrical re-release.

July 1992: THE GREAT MOUSE DETECTIVE - Followed its February 1992 theatrical re-release.

September 1992: THE RESCUERS - Likely due to the sequel being available on video first for about a year, the film had been theatrically re-released over three years prior.

October 1992: BEAUTY AND THE BEAST - Much like LITTLE MERMAID and DOWN UNDER, this was a new film - released theatrically in November 1991, and the video release followed thereafter.

March 1993: PINOCCHIO - Sitting in the vault since 1987, and following its July 1992 theatrical re-release, which presented the film in an all-new restoration.

October 1993: ALADDIN - Again, a new film, released theatrically in November 1992, so the video release followed.

March 1994: THE FOX AND THE HOUND - The film had never been released on video up until this point, and its latest theatrical re-release was six years prior. A possible factor in choosing this title was because it was about a dog, maybe they were hoping to position it as that spring's equivalent to 101 DALMATIANS. The line ended here, as the division was getting ready to change gears to celebrate the home video debut of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS - introducing the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection.

Side note for ALICE IN WONDERLAND. The 1986 cover was used all the way up through the early 1990s. An updated version changing the heading and removing the diamond logo from the rare artwork showed up sometime in 1994, well after at least two new tape masters were made in 1991/92.

...

Took them 30+ years and 5 movies to finally get that extra letter...

TOY STORY 5 was assigned a PG rating from the MPA.

For "some thematic elements and rude humor". The two descriptors slapped at basically almost every family movie since, what, 2010?

At last, the series has fully matured!

Goes to show how weird the ratings have gotten over the years. And I've had, erm, thoughts about said ratings for ages. You may already know that, lol.

I doubt anything in the movie will be more intense than the incinerator climax in TOY STORY 3...

Actually, some people were quite confused as to how TOY STORY 3 didn't get a PG rating from the MPA(A) back in 2010, what with that aforementioned scene where toys briefly stare down a certain death, and just the mood of most of the picture in general. Certainly the anxiety of not being loved the way they used to be would qualify as "thematic elements", right? Certainly all the insults these toys hurl at each other would be "rude humor", eh? Ya know, if the giant inferno that nearly ends the lives of these characters in the third act wasn't enough.

But no, TOY STORY 3 somehow got a G rating, despite some minor protest here and there. Even weirder, Pixar's next offering after TOY STORY 3 was CARS 2, which was loaded to the brim with explosions and gunfire and tons of car characters being killed... Still rated G, I guess because they were all talking automobiles.

I remember someone once said on a forum I used to visit, ages ago, that maybe the MPAA only gave PG ratings to Pixar films where humans were the primary cast. After all, the first Pixar film to get a PG rating was their sixth picture over all, THE INCREDIBLES. Then their 10th film, UP, was their 2nd to get the PG rating. Again, two of the leads are humans, some of the mild violence in it happens to humans. BRAVE was PG, most of the leads in that were also humans, but the picture was no more intense than TOY STORY 3's third act I'd argue. Again, human characters in danger I guess meant a PG, but not toys and cars.

But that can't be right, because several animated movies not made by Pixar or Disney Animation had animal/non-human characters in peril, sometimes not at all, and they got PG ratings. Perhaps Disney muscled the MPAA into giving them a family-friendly G rating, but even they were inconsistent. Disney Animation films, funnily enough, were all PG starting with WRECK-IT RALPH in 2012. Including all-animal ones like ZOOTOPIA. WINNIE THE POOH would be their last G-rated affair.

As the 2010s progressed, more continuations of early Pixar favorites showed up. MONSTERS UNIVERSITY, like its 2001 predecessor, was rated G. Then came FINDING DORY three years later, which got a PG rating, unlike the first film. Director Andrew Stanton was asked about FINDING DORY's PG rating in a Twitter Q&A back when the film came out. He explained that the ratings board were stricter than they were in 2003. I'd argue FINDING NEMO is a more intense film than FINDING DORY is, yet it remains a G-rated film. It kept the rating for its 2012 3D re-release, too. Whatever action happens in DORY has got nothing on the anglerfish attack in the original NEMO, to say nothing of the opening sequence. Stanton felt the two films were about the same in terms of how intense they might be for a little kid.

Only two Pixar films have gotten a G rating since 2015, and one of those was... Unsurprisingly, TOY STORY 4, which doesn't have anything as harrowing as the incinerator scene. Not even those Slappy-looking ventriloquist dummies could get it into PG territory. The other post-2015 G-rated Pixar film was CARS 3, even with that crash and all.

The only other big-time animation studio doing G-rated films in the 2010s still was Blue Sky, whose RIO, RIO 2, and THE PEANUTS MOVIE were deemed truly all-ages material. RIO actually got a PG rating at first for "off-color humor", 'til a very late in the game edit was made to bring it down to G. I could only imagine what that "off-color humor" was...

Honestly, if you ask me, the majority of Pixar's films would all be solid G-rated films if they were made and released in the 1990s. BRAVE, GOOD DINOSAUR, even COCO. The most recent films of theirs only get PG ratings because of a "sucks" or "crap" thrown in, really. The original TOY STORY has an edge to it that is sharper than most of the studio's subsequent films (Sid literally blows up a Combat Carl toy, and when we first meet his mutant toy concoctions, it kinda plays out like a horror movie), yet it still got a G rating back in 1995... and it was not re-rated for any of its theatrical re-releases, including the one from last autumn.

Younger people can't comprehend how, say, a movie like THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME got a G rating back in 1996, buuuut... Back then, you had to put in some extra work in order to get a PG rating. HUNCHBACK would absolutely be rated PG today, though. Ditto THE LION KING and a few others...

And films like THE PRINCE OF EGYPT, SHREK and ATLANTIS: THE LOST EMPIRE did just that. Intense moments had to be even more intense, there had to be language, that sort of thing. But then once you get to the mid-2000s, and something like HOME ON THE RANGE... One of the safest Disney movies you could show to a toddler... Gets a PG rating due to a single spoken udder joke that would go over most kids' heads... Like, what?? Yeah, it was becoming meaningless as a rating back then as well.

Nowadays, it seems like any candy-coated sugar-bowl kiddie movie gets a PG simply because the G rating is kinda extinct. The MPA apparently doesn't think today's kids can handle much of anything without a legal guardian at their side, or it could be because the studios releasing these films don't want a G rating, fearing it'll make their picture look like it's only for babies.

That kind of concern has actually been a thing for YEARS.

When STAR WARS was submitted to the MPAA, it was given a G rating, which the filmmakers and 20th Century Fox executives did not want. Even in 1977, the G rating was treated as a kiss of death. The conventional wisdom was that a scene of a severed arm during the Cantina sequence was added late in the game, but it was really because a majority of the board slept through much of the movie. Fox demanded a PG rating, re-submitted it, and got it. Nowadays, STAR WARS movies are PG-13 by default, and I remember some discussion back when THE FORCE AWAKENS came out. How that rating has also become so meaningless, applied to the movies that - if released in, say, 1988 - would be rated PG. Easily.

I think PG and PG-13 are either meaningless or misapplied these days. PG spans from like sugary Smurfs stuff to CORALINE, PG-13 either gives you an MCU spectacle-fest or a genuinely intense film like Nolan's Batman films or Matt Reeves' THE BATMAN. Plus, there are PG-13 horror movies, like THE RING. Every MCU movie is rated PG-13, and when DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS came out, there was minor controversy over the film's bits of gnarlier violence and horror movie-like scares. Applying such ratings to everything, I feel, could cause some confusion in that regard. A parent could take their kid to like 10 PG-rated movies that are quite safe, but then they'll take them into something that's a little rougher (like, again, CORALINE, or RANGO) and be caught completely off guard. Same with PG-13 movies, not everything will be STAR WARS or MCU-like. I remember there being hubbub over THE DARK KNIGHT back in 2008, whether it should've been rated somewhere closer to R or not.

I can barely think of any theatrically-released G-rated animated movies, or movies in general, made over the past few years. I had to Google which ones, and unsurprisingly got toddler fare.

All the ratings are becoming rather outdated anyways. The line-up as we know it was solidified in 1990, when NC-17 was created. Steven Spielberg was so powerful in the '80s that he willed the PG-13 rating into existence in 1984. The G and R ratings are as old as the line-up's beginnings in 1968, and PG is basically a revised version of the original M (Mature). Whether that all should change or not is another discussion, but again, I think the ratings are largely meaningless these days. And TOY STORY 5 being the sole PG in the series seems to confirm that once more. Who knows, maybe there is something in the film that warrants it, I don't know lol.

So this Betty Boop film starring ABBOTT ELEMENTARY creator Quinta Brunson that was announced today sounds rather... Interesting... And not too long after she has entered the public domain, at that.

It seems like there have been a few goes at adapting the Fleischer icon to a movie, but maybe this one actually takes off. Instead of just being "that cartoon you remember, the movie", this looks to go somewhat of a Greta Gerwig's BARBIE route, but is also something of a biopic about Max Fleischer. One that follows the creation of the character, and the impact she would subsequently make in the early-to-mid 1930s. The Variety story describes it as a film that examines "the relationship between the artist and his creation as he navigates the creative and commercial pressures of building one of the world’s first animated icons, particularly as that icon begins to take on a life of its own."

I wonder if there will be animated sequences, or an animated Betty interacting with their portrayal of Max. Hopefully co-creator Grim Natwick is part of the story, too.

Fittingly, working alongside Brunson on this picture is Fleischer's grandson Mark Fleischer, as the Fleischer Studio still operates today as a holding company, handling Betty Boop, Bimbo, Koko the Clown and others. It's a good thing that they've held onto those characters themselves, instead of them having a fate where they're mishandled by conglomerates eh?

Brunson had this to say:

“Betty Boop is one of our nation’s most beloved cartoon characters, yet somehow still remains pleasantly niche... She has had a quiet but undeniable impact on culture for nearly a century. After Erin and I met with Mark and learned more about his grandfather’s creation of Betty, I realized there was a much deeper story to tell. One that could be explored in a way that feels refreshing, subversive, and timeless, much like Betty herself.”

Like I said, it's giving BARBIE. How that film was very much a Barbie movie set in a very colorful and pink Barbieland, but it also took her and Ken to the real world. And when they got there, it wasn't some cliche fish-out-of-water stuff. Mattel was a part of the story, and to top it off, there's a scene with a ghost of Barbie's creator Ruth Handler. Mix that with the existential stuff and a takedown of the patriarchy, that movie was on another level compared to most IP-driven blockbusters being churned out these days. A big budget Barbie movie could've just been some regular old Barbie stuff, maybe similar to one of those direct-to-video movies albeit done in live-action, but no. Gerwig made a film that was her weirdo vision, all about what the character, the brand, means to the world. If it had been anything else, especially that (thankfully) rejected take on the movie that would've starred Amy Schumer, I don't think it would've been as much of a phenomenon. If at all, it just would've been another franchise movie.

Given that Betty Boop is a cartoon character, and the Fleischer cartoons were often very unique and off-the-wall in comparison to what else was out at the time, there's potential to make something really different here. Something that's not your average biopic nor your average movie adaptation of an American icon. A film that could explore the connections between an animated character and the larger pop cultural sphere, what influenced Betty and what she influenced. The transformative flapper culture which she was based on, the very real performer who attempted to sue the Fleischer Studio because she felt the character was a little too based on her, the Great Depression, the Hays Code that would dim her fire, etc. And since I love animation history, especially of American animation's Golden Age, I'm keeping my eye on this one. You don't see too many movies that explore this territory outside of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, set in 1947 Hollywood... And also featuring Betty Boop herself. And that some Fleischer descendants are involved? There's gotta be something brewing there.

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