I am not a big fan of Pixar productions, for the prime and simple reason that, like most western cartoons, and particularly like their Masters at Disney, they are overbearingly misogynist. Well, not as much as Disney itself, which I contend employs a misogynator, a special staff member whose job is running around the creative department butchering any scene or plot which threatens to represent women in a good light. But Pixar comes a close second, ensuring that, for example, in Monsters Inc the only female characters are a jealous clingy bimbo or an old hag. Their stories are also transparently boys-own-adventures, not aimed at or even thinking about potential girl viewers. For one or two movies this is bearable, but when you start to see the pattern, it becomes a real turn-off. Particularly compared to Studio Ghibli.
This is not true for Dreamworks, though I grant you I’m not that familiar with their work and Antz was certainly a shocking piece of (how come woody allen gets to do nothing but whine and squeal, and then gets credit for everything at the end?) But Shrek ran a very fine line in girl-targeted viewing, as well as being an excellent adventure and really funny. Monsters vs. Aliens is a similar type of movie, but with an even more transparently girl-power storyline, and applying the genre-bending fun-and-games of Shrek to science-fiction and horror movies.
Genre-bending is of course an excellent way to make a childrens’ movie fun for adults, and this movie is no exception. I think it has a nod to every major sci-fi ever made, as well as some cool references to anime, old-school Japanese monster movies, and some b-grade horror references. I’m sure insectosaurus starts off as a weird insecty totoro, which is a perfect nod to Miyazaki’s most famous 2 movies. There are also visual moments – such as when the lead character is hanging from the bottom of the alien ship – which are obviously nods to screen captures from famous movies. And the whole thing has a liberating feeling of empowerment and joy. The final message is even positive, which I can’t say I thought of the original Shrek movie[1]. The first half of this movie is unrelentingly funny, as well.
My flatmate, who is a computer graphics researcher but doesn’t have his own blog (wtf omg) tells me that Pixar’s animation is slightly more sophisticated. Well, I don’t know much about animation, but I know what I like, and I prefer my animation to be at least 10% non-sexist, so I can’t bear Pixar anymore (and what was with the rat-in-the-soup movie anyway?) In any case, there were scenes in this movie which were art, sweety-dahling, even if they weren’t perfectly animated (not that I could have noticed, my eyes have a 3 fps limit). And the key to a good animation is not the animation, anyway, but the plot and the action sequences. This is why Castle of Cagliostro is better than Toy Story…
Anyway, having padded out this post with a whole series of obviously completely subjective comparisons of “A is better than B so nyaaaah I’m right!”[3], I should finish by recommending this movie highly. Go and see it, especially if you like sci-fi genre-bending.
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[1] Shrek claims to have a moral that even the ugliest person is beautiful to someone, but this isn’t strictly true. What it actually says is that if you are of the same race or class as another ugly person, they will find you pretty because they are cosmologically designed to, even if to everyone else you are a butt-ugly troll. The princess’s ugliness was an objective fact to the viewer, it just so happened that the lead character is not human, so has different standards. This isn’t quite as nasty an ending as the Breakfast Club[2], which has to be the most misinterpreted and deceitful ending in cinema.
[2] which, how the fuck can anyone think this movie has a positive ending? Halfway through the movie the nerdy kid predicts that on monday everyone will go back to being themselves, and pretend the weekend never happened, which is exactly what happens, except that the gothy girl pulls the jock and so therefore throws away her gothiness, which was all just an act until she could get in with the popular crowd. This is treachery on so many levels, particularly because you’re led to believe that the nerdy kid was going to be wrong until the very end, when the writer sticks the knife in and twists.
[3] It’s an internet movie review kids, what were you expecting, deconstructionist marxism?
Compromise and Conceit 
April 27, 2009 at 4:32 pm
“[1] Shrek claims to have a moral that even the ugliest person is beautiful to someone, but this isn’t strictly true. What it actually says is that if you are of the same race or class as another ugly person, they will find you pretty because they are cosmologically designed to, even if to everyone else you are a butt-ugly troll.”
I do love how by applying post-modernist analysis to the text you manage to move from a moral of “True beauty is within and you’re beautiful to the ones who love you” to “That’s just his kink” aka Rule 34 (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RuleThirtyFour?from=Main.Rule34)
April 27, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Well, you can’t expect anything else but post-modernist analysis when you come to a movie review on the internet, can you?
I don’t think I’m stretching the truth much pointing out that in Shrek, who you found attractive was biologically determined. Shrek didn’t find the princess pretty because he loved her personality – in fact, it’s pretty clear that she is an ogre babe. It’s nice that there is someone for everyone in the story, but let’s not pretend that they aren’t the cool kids on the block, or that there isn’t a strong hint of racial determinism in that aspect of the story. So it’s not really even Rule 34, I think…
April 28, 2009 at 11:26 am
Firstly, the movie shows that they’re connecting even before Shrek knows that she turns into an ogre. The fact that she does so is a convenient story twist plus a way of avoiding some really wierd human-Fiona/Shrek fan-art online.
Secondly, to imply this is racial determinism is actually overlooking the fact that this is a fairy tale and its purely narrativium ( http://wiki.lspace.org/wiki/Narrativium ) that’s driving them to be together. Why look for sociologic reasons for character actions when we all know they’re riven by the demands of the story?
April 28, 2009 at 9:20 pm
I don’t think this works either, because once again you’re confusing my intent – which is not to test the causality of the story, but to infer the moral from the causality. Shrek didn’t have to be an ogre, the authors made him that way in order to distinguish him from the viewer. This is a racially deterministic choice. It’s different from the choice in The Breakfast Club, where the children were set up to differ by culture. Why weren’t the kids in that movie divided by race? Because the authors didn’t want to tell that story and draw that moral. They left that task to the writers of Shrek.
If the authors truly wanted to make the story fit the moral generally ascribed to it, they would have made it a multi-racial love affair between a beautiful woman and an ugly ogre[1] – or better still, an ugly ogre woman and a handsome man, but that would be just going way too overboard. Instead they made it a story about how two people who are completely equal in looks and background somehow find one another despite the odds.
Who could imagine such a thing ever happening?
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fn 1: not out of some sense of PC “we should all miscegenate” but because it’s a perfect metaphor for people loving each other despite their differences.
April 29, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Err, it’s a fairy tale parody, one that gets particular jollies from taking the piss out of Disney, in part no doubt because the Dreamworks was a direct competitor (and Mr Katzenberg a potentially embittered former employee).
I can’t really see racial determinism taking a strong lead during their storyboarding sessions.
And being a fairy tale (not a Grimm one naturally – and apparently not Beauty and the Beast either), there naturally had to be a happy ending. The moral message of which has already been suitably punctured.
April 30, 2009 at 10:22 am
So you’re taking the existing story and then looking for Broken Aesops ( http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BrokenAesop )in them?
OK. Yeah, you can take a moral of “If you are of the same race or class as another ugly person, they will find you pretty because they are cosmologically designed to, even if to everyone else you are a butt-ugly troll.”
Though what moral do you take from the Donkey/Dragon story then? I propose “Flirting in bad faith can land you making ongoing child support payments to a woman who’s not really your type.” After all Donkey should have learnt the message that he should only find animals similar to him attractive.
May 1, 2009 at 9:51 am
So Lord Merton stands by the central moral of the story as “it’s what’s inside that counts” even though the part where this happens (the donkey/dragon) isn’t the main thread of the story.
I would say too that this isn’t a movie aimed primarily at taking the piss out of disney, but at writing fractured fairytales.
Both of you are judging the movie primarily from the standpoint of how the plot should have hung together. I think this is ex post facto reasoning, because there’s lots of ways that a movie like this could have had a functional plot, been a lot of fun and yet been different to the one that was made. The interesting question is why they chose this plot. Why did they foreground the couple from the same racial background, for example, and make the cross-cultural story (which actually supports the commonly accepted moral of the movie) the secondary story? Why did they choose to make Shrek and the Princess Ogres? They could have made Shrek a handsome prince, and the princess an ugly ogre, and after his initial surprise at her fatness, he loves her anyway. But this was too gross for the movie makers.
So in the end, after all their troubles, two people who are from the same racial background, who think each other are hot for purely physical reasons, and who have a huge amount in common, get together. It’s a nice ending! But it doesn’t support the commonly accepted moral of the movie (that people love each other despite their differences) because there are no differences between the main characters.
May 1, 2009 at 10:21 am
No, I’m totally on board with the approach of examining the movie with a critical eye and seeing what lessons we can draw from it.
For Shrek this gives us:
1. “Don’t judge others because of how they look. Unless they’re short.”
2. “Short people are evil and its OK to make jokes about their height. These facts may or may not be correlated.”
For Aliens and Monsters it tells us:
1. “Women can only become empowered by gaining enormous amounts of weight.”
2. “If you can’t tell the difference between individuals in a race, they must all be mentally the same too.”
3. “Sometimes when a caterpillar goes into its cocoon, the result is just as ugly as the starting state. So don’t assume your going to grow up to be beautiful.”
4. “Stupidity is in no way a disadvantage.”
Princess Mononoke says:
1. “Killing God is OK, as long as you run away fast enough afterward. So have a good plan.”
And Finding Nemo is totally message free. Which may explain why I hate it so much.