Watching Pixar's Soul and Onward back to back and thoroughly enjoying myself makes me wish they had the scope to make a non-Hollywood/non-ameriformula film. Like, Pixar is already doing A+ versions of standard Hollywood filmmaking, let them make a Kiki's Delivery Service or so
Given the way corporate Disney works I realise the difficulty of this but ... Disney Animation did also eventually let Clements and Musker make Treasure Planet, which was 1. not a musical and 2. aimed at a fairly distinct and different demo than the renaissance films
So like, I wonder if there are any writers at Pixar right now who have a burning passion to write something that doesn't conform to the hollywood/ameriformula. People treat the standardised 3-act teaching method as if it's fact but it's just another means of engaging the audience
OTOH there's no immediate need to diverge completely from Hollywood formula if you say, go to any other version of Hollywood than the one we're in right at this second. Remember how Ghibli made an interbellum pulp adventure and a samurai epic?
The difference with saying "I wish Pixar would make a samurai epic" though is that we've seen when Pixar attempts to break with their house storytelling tools for a different genre and it was ... messy (*cough* Brave)
I'd say the closest to what I'm actually hoping for is more stuff like WALL-E and The Incredibles. Those felt like Pixar-quality films that put a lot of creative effort into splitting from the norm for the studio, and they still busted blocks
Now I feel like this is a subtle dig at the Pete Doctor films which it isn't; even though I might say his are certainly the most apparently "Pixar-y" in their thematic craft. Both Onward and Soul have magical naiveté as an important thread and the Pixar Epiphany moment
People say it's "manipulative" not because it's any worse or more mechanical than other means of expert emotional manipulation; it's just that there are so many Pixar movies that feel this way now that people can spot the pattern
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