2020 Was Not Pixar's Year

    I grew up thinking Pixar was untouchable, of course, because I was a naive kid. We all knew, or should have known, that Pixar was fallible but even into my early 20s I thought they were Gods because Wall-e is incredible and, at the time, I was in love with Up. Then the 2010s kicked off with Toy Story 3, one of their all-time best. But after that Pixar started to stumble for a bit with Cars 2, Brave, and Monsters University. 2015 was the year it finally hit me.

  We had the creative, thoughtful, funny, weepy Inside Out and...probably the worst movie they've released to date. The Good Dinosaur didn't feel like Pixar at all, especially because of the stark contrast with Inside Out. Since then it was more bumpy roads and only one high (Finding Dory and Cars 3 being the bumps, Coco being the high) but no valleys quite like Dinosaur. Toy Story 4 came along as a proper end to the decade, since it was a sort of epilogue to bookend 3's last chapter at the start.

The Good Dinosaur was just a weird hiccup - whatever was next for Pixar, I was on board. It couldn't get any worse than that.

  Onward  kicked off 2020 and it's not as bad as The Good Dinosaur, it's almost worse.

Hear me out:

   Dinosaur stinks so obnoxiously that it activates my fight-or-flight response. But Onward is so odorless that it barely gets any reaction out of me. If either of them were secret poisons, Onward would kill me first because of its numbing agent. Every beat, no matter if it's comedic or dramatic or whimsical, we've seen this all before. I mean, the Dad legs gag is inspired but it's a one-note joke that gets old really fast - as does everything else. Oh...he's really small, his voice is high-pitched..........comedy! Look out, those little fairies are actually really tough bikers.......comedy cuz irony! I don't even have any more to say.

    Good thing Soul was on the way...

  Soul is an exciting movie on its own but especially for Pixar because it expands the existential teases it'd made with Toy Story 4 and pairs those with the conceptual highs of Inside Out. I like both of those but neither of them got quite as weird and bold as I'd wanted them to. Soul goes where they didn't. It's a bastion of ideas, creativity, and eccentricity. It would feel manic if it weren't for its concise world-building and minutiae so it ends up being intoxicating and sublime. I even forgive its Nolanesque explanations because it's a pretty heavy/heady movie for kids. Pixar finally buckled down on their writing, let loose of their imaginations, and made something as idiosyncratic and profound as I'd wanted since Wall-e. If Onward is the trade-off then all is forgiven.

    There is a gigantic problem with it though.

  And before I start: I'm not trying to 'Cancel' Pixar or virtue signal here. I've been accused by friends and family of being a stick in the mud, reading into things, doing mental gymnastics trying to 'find something wrong' but it's unavoidable. In fact, I've committed the sin of trying to ignore it but it's just too blatant for me to.

  Soul is pretty damn racist.

  Now, when I say that, I mean benevolently so. Do I think it's concerted and insidious on Pixar's part? Absolutely not. I think it's well-meaning but really out of touch, with a spoonful of irresponsible; benevolent racism is still racism. I mean, if you look hard enough, every movie has some sexist, racist, homophobic, classist, ableist element(s). Take A Star Is Born (2018) for example. I love it but there's always that annoying little moment where Cooper pans over to the snotty british producer's black bodyguard to convey foreboding. That actor's sole purpose in the movie is to signify danger, perpetuating the stereotype that black men are menacing. Does this make me hate A Star Is Born? No. But it's still an annoying blemish on the otherwise rapturous romance.

  Soul is so perpetually racist that it gets in the way of everything else for me, it's not some small little moment. In fact, there is a moment in Soul, aside from the main narrative, that stands out, so we have surplus racism to deal with. We'll get to that later.

  Tina Fey's 22 has no identity: she's a soul that's never been in a human body so she has no race or gender or orientation. Even me calling her a her/she is, technically, inaccurate. And this is where I'm said to be reaching. Let's face it: she is a woman, a white woman. Joe explicitly acknowledges that she "sounds like a middle-aged white lady" but I'm supposed to be colorblind...? She says that she chose that voice because she likes it but it still means that Pixar's first movie with a black lead has to share the stage with a white lady. #Representation amiright?

  The fact that 22 and Joe fall to Earth, into Joe's body and the therapy cat, respectively, is sort of like Get Out; a white woman gets to live in a black man's body while he's shut out of it. He's robbed of autonomy and agency while she gets to learn how great it is to live life. Then toward the end there's the scene where he finally gets his body back and has memories of her time living as him. And now, with this 'fresh perspective,' he has a newfound appreciation for life - because of a white woman's born-yesterday innocence. She doesn't experience, ya know, any of the atmosphere of racism's looming canopy. To her, being a black man is a hunky-dory experience. The closest the movie even gets to acknowledging racism (barely) is 22 saying that a man yelled at her on the subway. She says she liked it because at least she felt something. Now, of course this guy didn't yell anything racist, but being accosted, to her, is yet another one of the little things. She wouldn't even understand racism so if it were racist: she would like it.

  When I brought up Get Out, I wasn't being snarky. Consider the scene where Chris deflects the Japanese man's question about the "advantages and disadvantages of being African" to Andre who's under the possession of an old white dude.

  "I have not experienced any disadvantages," he says, perpetuating Chris' mistrust as he sharpens his side-eye at him with a smirk. Then he reveals, "Though...we have been spending a lot of time indoors lately" to which his wife reiterates, "That is true, we have become...homebodies." It shows that they can't have the perceived 'advantages' of being black without experiencing the very real disadvantages. They never acknowledge the side effects of The Coagula. Soul completely erases this so 22 can have an experience that makes her want to be some body. There's more shit I could rant and rave about, like the 'magic' of the barber shop chair, but I've made my point. There's still

 that surplus I mentioned:

 
Terry tries to recollect Joe's soul and accidentally kills another black man in the process. When he's brought back, he's traumatized and shuddering because he got a glimpse of the afterlife. It's not unlike a cop shooting a black man because he thought he was someone else or any other hundreds of instances of racial profiling. They all look alike, after all. So racial profiling and its psychological effects is played for laughs here.

Do I actually think that? No. But it's not a huge cognitive leap to take.
It's just one step.

I couldn't fucking believe Pixar was this out of touch. It was one of those things where it's so upsetting I just started laughing because they'd have to be out of touch. If this were intentional it'd be a really clever, intelligent, but extremely dark joke that would wind up on Random Acts Of Flyness. Even personified quantized fields of the universe are racist?? Fuckin' LOL

  But Pixar didn't make a satire, though, so this is just good ol' fashioned ignorance.
When you accidentally make good satire, you're what's being satirized.

  MAKE PIXAR GREAT AGAIN