The filmmakers behind two upcoming animated epics, Bolt and UP, present footage. Highlights:

• Bolt looks like a resolutely family-oriented film about a celebrity dog who thinks he’s at war with cats. Cute!
• UP looks like a Pixar-meets-Miyazaki art film version of About Schmidt. It made fanboys run for the exits.

Full transcript after the jump.

…Read more

This week I wanted to make a simple point: Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E is a near-masterpiece of A.I. proportions and socio-political implications, reduced by its cloying musical score to just another ingenious Disney/Pixar heart-tugger. The most effective way to illustrate this would have been to create a video mash-up of the WALL-E score and an immersive philosophical sci-fi like 2001: A Space Odyssey, THX-1138 or Tarkovsky’s Solaris. But my laptop’s down, so I’m stuck here telling you rather than showing.

Let’s try another way:

…Read more

Earlier this year, I thought that it was way too late for a Sex and the City movie. But then it made a ton of cash, so I guess I was wrong. Still, I’m going to continue similarly thinking it’s too late for another X-Files movie. And even if I’m proven wrong and the masses get out to theaters this weekend in search of the truth, I’ll keep on believing that X-Files: I Want to Believe is way past its time.

To celebrate Mulder and Scully’s tardiness, here are 10 other movies that came out too late:

1. The Godfather Part III (Released in: 1990; Should have been released in: 1976) - Never mind the fact that had this third installment been made years earlier, Sofia Coppola wouldn’t have been cast and therefore wouldn’t have given her terribly infamous performance. The more important matter is that sequels arriving more than a decade after the previous installment are almost always doomed. The longer the wait, the higher the expectations, and the greater the disappointment. Of course, not everyone agrees that it was also too late for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Live Free or Die Hard, Rambo, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, etc.
   …Read more

So, you hear about this iPhone thing? It’s, like, a big deal! We knew there would be lines; we assumed there’d be, at the very least, a Twitter outage. But apparently today’s impatient early adopters are finding that they can pay their $199, but they can’t use their new gadget thanks to an Apple network error––the dreaded 9838.

But we already learned this week that some economic problems are apparently nothing but neuroses––and suggestions otherwise are apparently bait for nonsensical James Bond references as comeback. So it’s not inconceivable that maybe 9838 is a manifestation of the psychological torment and guilt shared, at least on a subconscious level, by the energy-conscious, generally politically correct consumer class who, in spite of anti-corporate, anti-waste lip service, can’t stop themselves from placing of hundreds of dollars on the feeder bar and pressing down hard every time Apple release a new slice of fake plastic happiness. Or, as Anil Dash puts it in the Twitter above, you can’t go around saying that Wall-E has the power to change the wicked ways of the world if you’re not willing to let that change begin with you.

Semi-related: If you do get your new iPhone to work (and/or have an old one), Paul Harrill has rounded up a list of relevant iPhone apps for filmmakers.

I spent much of last week trying to avoid all that hysteria about Wall-E being “left-wing, America-hating propaganda,” even though I’m absolutely positive that The Sorcerer’s Apprentice was responsible for that steep rise in an interest in black magic amongst teens in the early 50s, and also that there would be neither PETA nor any form of federal gun control if it weren’t for Bambi. But what can I say? For whatever reason, I wasn’t in the mood to hear Steve Jobs compared to Joseph Goebbels, or to sound the violins for the poor demonized corporations, any of which could surely rule our state better than any democracy. Chalk it up to the holiday, I guess!

But now, here comes Frank Rich, late to the party but determined to shoot it up nonetheless. “Wall-E For President!” his NY Times Op-Ed column shouts from the headline––the exclamation mine, but definitely implied. …Read more

WALL-E may look like the bastard child of E.T. and a backhoe, but inside he’s all Snake Pliskin from Escape from New York (1981). YouTube’s Sara Pollack on the most exciting thing to happen to short films since… well, maybe ever.

3:11 Sarah Pollack from YouTube

14:33 Wall-E vs. Escape From New York

18:23 Movies to watch

filmcouch-77

Until last year’s brilliantly directed Ratatouille, all of Pixar’s animated features could be summed up with one word (toys, bugs, monsters, fish, superheroes, cars). Then the more complex plot synopsis of “rat functions as a culinary Cyrano in a French restaurant’s kitchen” came along and ruined the studio’s tradition of simplistic scenarios. Fortunately, this year Pixar is back on track with Wall-E, a movie that can be summed up as being about, in a word, robots.

But in their pipeline they’ve got a couple sequels (Cars 2, Toy Story 3) and a couple multi-word synopses (2009’s Up and 2011’s The Bear and the Bow are, at the least, each described with two words: old man and fairy tale, respectively. Only 2011’s Newt could have been pitched using a single word: newts.

So, while Pixar seems like it currently has enough on their hands, I’d like to suggest a few more single-word pitches for animated films in order to get things back to basics:

1. Birds - They’ve given us a movie featuring a variety of bugs and a movie featuring a variety of sea creatures, so the obvious next place to go is a movie featuring a variety of birds. And since Pixar has already made a short about birds (For the Birds), they already have a starting point to jump off from.

…Read more

At 30 seconds, the above clip is only one tenth of the film it’s teasing. But I guess we’re advertising short films now? I wouldn’t exactly call it a trailer, of course. More like those ingenius “watch the first five minutes of…” clips that help woo an audience for a movie that might not be tracking so well. However, giving us five minutes of Pixar’s Presto would be giving the whole thing away. So, here’s a little preview.

The thing I find more interesting than the idea that Pixar is bothering to sell us on its latest short (which will screen ahead of Wall-E in theaters) is the idea that Pixar seems to also be selling us on something else: Trix cereal. Doesn’t that rabbit in the film look exactly like the Trix rabbit? OK, maybe not exactly, but then that’s how this new “product suggestion” thing works. And considering we’ve already learned that Wall-E has admitted Apple product suggestion, it’s not very far-fetched to think that Presto does too.

I guess in a way the Trix rabbit fits with Pixar movies, because a lot of adults enjoy them. Is Disney trying to say: “silly adult moviegoers, animated films are for kids”? I doubt it. But are they at least trying to say: “buy Trix”? Perhaps. I guess yesterday when I Watch Stuff questioned the point of having a preview for a short and claimed we’re nearing the point of having commercials for commercials, the site missed the truth. We already have commercials for commercials, and that’s one right there at the top of this general mills, I mean post.

Maybe this really is the year of “product suggestion”, a term coined recently by Risky Biz blogger Steven Zeitchik after noticing the subtle hint of a McDonalds logo on the driver’s helmet and race car in Speed Racer.

Following that, we now have Pixar suggesting iPods and other Apple products through its new animated film Wall-E. If you take a good look at the sleek robot character Eve, you might be reminded of the typical Apple product design, and apparently it’s not so coincidental. Wall-E director Andrew Stanton told Fortune magazine of Eve’s development and the benefit of having Steve Jobs as your umbrella:

“I wanted Eve to be high-end technology - no expense spared - and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous,” Andrew Stanton, Wall-E’s director, told Fortune. “The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.” It is, of course, not the first time a product has inspired a film character - think of the murderous HAL 9000 robot in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” based loosely on big IBM mainframes of the day.

…Read more