The next morning, the streets were hushed and unjammed. I arrived in early April, and, watching the trains glide and stop at the railroad station, after dark, with nobody alighting or boarding, I felt as if I were staring down at a model railway.
FUN FACTORY MOVIE
So what do they put in the coffee at Pixar that jacks up the average earnings of a movie to more than two hundred and fifty million dollars in America alone? The answer is to find the coffee and then smell it, and to do that you take the Bay Bridge out of San Francisco, to the orderly town of Emeryville. She will dab her eyes during the marriage-story that takes up the first ten minutes he will warm to the villain’s airship and the talking dog. Pixar’s canniest construction work has been to apply fresh cement between the generations a boy whose viewing habits could not be further from his grandmother’s, and whose iPod would give her a migraine, will eagerly accompany her to “Up,” which is itself about the bonding of young and old. Whereas I could pack them off to “Wall-E,” with or without their children, and fully expect chocolates and a thank-you note the next morning. Any acquaintances to whom I recommended “Sucker Punch,” say, would emerge from the screening, call their lawyer, and sue me for grievous mental harm. To put the matter baldly: as a frightening proportion of supposedly grownup movies have reverted to the childish, so a disarming proportion of supposedly child-friendly movies have found friends in an adult audience. Six of them won, and two of those-“Up” and “Toy Story 3”-were also nominated for Best Picture, a distinction that signals a growing bewilderment not just in our prize-giving but in our choices as filmgoers. Of the eleven full-length features, eight have been eligible for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, which was established only in 2001. The total income from these, like the lamb in “Boundin’,” Pixar’s Oscar-nominated short of 2003, has now bounced cheerfully out of sight, having last been seen passing the six-billion-dollar mark. But the crown of Pixar is its roster of feature films. The company has made short movies, and it used to make commercials if you enjoyed “Ratatouille,” for example, you might pause to reflect that its artistry was honed in the service of Listerine. Characters from Pixar: what is it that drives each employee to take more pains than the next one-to pedantry, and beyond? Photograph from SHAPE & COLOUR / DISNEY*PIXAR