Metacritique

Now this is a review.

The New York Press’s Armond White is a contrarian provocateur: he gives positive reviews to movies that other critics pan, and negative reviews to movies that other critics celebrate. His reviews have generated controversy for years, and people take his criticism personally. In fact, I’m not the first person to review his reviews: there’s an entire blog devoted to writing about his writing. (See this New York Magazine profile for a fuller explanation of his work.) If it were arbitrary, this contrarian pattern would quickly expose itself as thoughtless. But, man, White is a thinker, and a really, really good movie reviewer.

So it’s no surprise that A) his review of Pixar’s Up, titled “The Way of Pixarism,” is a negative one, and B) it’s motherfucking awesome. His argument is that Pixar flattens and narrows human experience into something saccharine, cutesy, cloying, and simple, feeding the audience’s addiction to a melancholy and nostalgic vision of childhood.

White uses the simile of American car fanaticism to make his case against Pixar. He writes that the studio’s “rote whimsy is as dispiriting as a productionline gas-guzzler,” says that audiences “buy animation to extend their childhood like men who buy cars for phallic symbols,” and says of critics’ unwavering support of Pixar films that “they would pass this on to their children, the way autoworkers once instilled union loyalty.” It’s a good analogy. Pixar movies occupy a space at the beginning of this century that cars held throughout the last: at once industrial, domestic, patriotic, symbolic of technological advance, and central to the American identity. The implicit suggestion is that our shortsighted infatuation with Pixar will lead to a crisis down the road, brought by emotional depletion and pollution rather than the environmental kind.

White goes on to identify Pixar’s clichés, explaining that Up follows “the same Journey/Rescue/Return blueprint as Finding Nemo, Cars, Wall-E, Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 1 and 2,” thereby processing its main characters’ loneliness through a grinding mill of narrative formality. I don’t agree that this is necessarily bad, but I appreciate the naming of the pattern. White sees Capitalism as the vicious mechanism behind Pixar’s cute cartoon façade, trafficking in a mythology of lost joy as though it were a drug.

White describes this device as the first half of a bait-and-switch, arguing that Up leads with emotional manipulation that doesn’t develop, instead exploiting its sweetness to propel the movie through formulaic contrivances: “Up drops its emotional elements for chase mechanics and precious comedy.” There’s a hint, but not an explicit acknowledgment, that White sees in Pixar movies a violence against the individual. He says that “critics who forget that movies should be about people defend this reduction of human experience,” and claims that “Pixarism domesticates and homogenizes animation.” And in his conclusion, he writes of the sad splitting of the singular into the indistinguishable many:

After ripping-off Albert Lamorisse’s classic The Red Balloon, dispersing it into Carl’s thousands of colorful orbs, Pixar then literalizes the meaning of flight as a commercial icon: Up. Here, it’s simply the means to “adventures” and not an ecstatic elevation of individual identity.

I haven’t seen Up yet, and I’m excited to. But thank goodness for a reviewer who takes a broader view, is principled in his evaluation, and talks about a movie not just as an entertainment, but as an artwork, with problems to dramatize and lessons to teach. I will probably love Up, as I have the other Pixar movies. But, just like my enjoyment of Hitchcock’s Rear Window was troubled in college by Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” I’ll now be able to better understand the reasons for that satisfaction, and to question its terms and its value, thanks to this enriching critique.