Word: pixar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Zurg to speak and declare his intentions to rule supreme over the universe, Buzz holds his breath. "Noooo," answers Zurg in his guttural robonics, "I am your father." Cut to: Zurg and Buzz Lightyear playing with whiffleballs on the side of a highway. And so the wonderful world of Pixar rolls merrily along...
...Story 2 is no ordinary sequel. It's an absolute miracle--the type of movie where you shake your head and ask, "How did they do that?" But even more, you don't want to know the answer. Let the wizards at Pixar work their magic. We'll just enjoy the product. (And a whole lot of us seem to be enjoying the product. The movie raked in an earth-shattering $80.8 million in its first week...
...Pixar--an independent studio that uses Disney as a distributor--first made a splash back in 1995 with the original Toy Story, the highest grossing movie of that year and the spark that kindled the computer animation glut. (You won't be seeing any more paint/cel animated films for a long time to come....) But Toy Story was special not because it had kids forking over $8 to see the movie a dozen times, but because it brought the adults back to animation. Not since Aladdin or the Lion King had we had indulged in a cartoon that purposely surfed...
...returning Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (now officially married), Slinky Dog, the incontinent Hamm, the still neurotic Rex and the ever-prone-to-PDA Bo Peep. The sequel adds a few new ones--most notably, Barbie (Mattel realized they lost a major marketing chance when they refused to let Pixar use their infamously-proportioned doll in the first film). Also in the fray are Wayne Knight's villainous Al McWhiggen, a proprieter of a nearby toy store who dreams of selling Woody to a Japanese museum (why Japanese? Exhibit A of Pixar subversiveness); Jesse and Stinky Pete, the missing figures...
...though incredibly detailed, still seemed--well, too shiny. Sure, the toys looked great, but the humans had plasticky visages and seemed cut and pasted from a B-grade video game. The sequel gets it right. Director John Lasseter (the hottest man in Showbiz right now) and his crew at Pixar studied countless pictures of human skin in order to perfectly recreate it--we see Al McWhiggen's pores, his nose hairs, his mild case of adult acne. In fact, Lasseter is so confident in his company's animation capabilities that he inserts "show-off scenes" to prove it; the opening...