Over the last few weeks I’ve been writing about the fate of the creative artist, in both real life and in animated films, who takes a new, innovative path only to suffer rejection and failure. Last week I also referred tp essayist Paul Graham’s characterization of the innovator’s new ideas as “heresies,” as far as the conventional wisdom of the time is concerned. But with the passage of time, the truly talented creative artist receives the recognition he deserves, and his “heresy” is accepted as truth.

DIsney’s latest computer-animated film, director Stephen Robinson’s Meet the Robinsons, provides new variations on these theme. Along the way, the film propounds a “heretical” notion of its own: that failure is good.

The protagonist of the film is a twelve-year-old orphan named Lewis who has a talent for technology, but whose inventions keep malfunctioning. Transported into the future, Lewis meets the title characters, the Robinson family. When another of his inventions goes awry, Lewis believes he has failed again. But the Robinsons celebrate his failure, acting as if it were his birthday. They explain to the bewildered boy that failure is good, because it enables us to learn from our mistakes.

The Walt Disney Company recently purchased Pixar, the studio that has created so many successful computer-animated features over the last twenty years (See “Comics in Context” #120), and made Pixar’s John Lasseter the chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation. So this sequence made me think of another Pixar animated film, writer-director Brad Bird’s The Incredibles (See “Comics in Context” #62), which takes a very different point of view.

As you may recall, Bob Parr, alias the superhero Mr. Incredible, complains that “They keep finding new ways to celebrate mediocrity” in contemporary society. When public opinion forces the government to prevent super-powered individuals from using their powers as superheroes, The Incredibles presents this as an indictment of society for allegedly refusing to allow talented individuals to excel. Bob and Helen Parr’s son Dash says to his mother, “Dad says our powers make us special.” Falling back on society’s conventional wisdom in the film, she replies, “Everyone’s special, Dash,” whereupon he retorts, “Which is another way of saying that nobody is.” Indeed, the ultimate scheme of the movie’s villain, Syndrome, is to make it possible for everyone to gain super-powers, because, he says, if everybody is super, then nobody is.

In an article titled, “Take a Bow, Loser, the Spotlight’s Yours,” in the April 8, 2007 issue of The New York Times, drama critic Charles Isherwood contends that there is a “new mood abroad in America. A country renowned–for good or ill–as the land that enshrined success as a prize to be cherished above all others has lately evinced a sneaky fascination with failure. ” Among other examples in current popular culture, Isherwood points to last year’s indie film success Little Miss Sunshine, stating that “the ethos of the movie argues that winning isn’t really anything. Better to be a happy misfit, like the rest of the family, than a soulless success. . . .”

That, in fact, sounds like the philosophy of Pixar’s 2006 release, Lasseter’s own Cars (see “Comics in Context” #137-138). Its protagonist, Lightning McQueen, is no “loser,” but ultimately chooses the virtues of empathy that he has discovered over his ambitions for “soulless” success. He sacrifices his chance of winning the big race in order to aid an older, injured competitor. McQueen becomes part of a community of outsiders, just as the misfit Lewis finds happiness when he is accepted by the Robinsons, who are a clan of outright eccentrics who are also a warmly loving family.

I see from Googling that I’m not the only person who saw a similarity between the Robinsons and the similarly happy, caring family of nonconformists in the 1936 stage comedy You Can’t Take It with You by George S Kaufman and Moss Hart, which was adapted into a 1938 film directed by Frank Capra. According to an interview with director Stephen Anderson published in The Los Angeles Times on March 26, 2007, the analogy is intentional. Anderson said that William Joyce, who wrote the book A Day with Wilbur Robinson, on which the new animated film is based, told him “You have to watch this movie. It was a huge influence on me in creating the family in the book.” As a result, Anderson told the interviewer, “Several times throughout the process, as we were trying to crack this family and come up with moments for them and how Lewis would interact with them, I would pop in the movie and use it as an inspiration.” He continued, “I love how accepting and free they [the family in the Capra film] are. ‘Freedom’ is the word to describe that family and [the Robinsons]. There is no normal. There is no abnormal. It’s whatever makes you happy.”

According to the play and film of You Can’t Take It with You, Grandpa Sycamore, the head of this extended family, one day decided to quit his job. Except for the heroine Alice, no one among the Sycamore family and their live-in friends has a conventional career, and they obviously don’t have much money, though they somehow have enough for leading a simple lifestyle. The play and film thus clearly define two alternatives: the pursuit of “soulless” success and the decision to achieve happiness by “failing” to seek such success. (Presumably Alice and her boyfriend follow a path between the two extremes.)

Cars and Meet the Robinsons don’t make the dividing line so sharp. They contend that one need not singlemindedly pursue “success as a prize to be cherished above all” in order to achieve a more profound and emotionally rewarding sort of success. Lasseter said in an interview that in Cars “the message is not that life in the fast lane is bad, it just needs to be in balance. . . . If you don’t have friends and family for the sake of a career, when you’re a success you have no one to share it with. It’s much more satisfying to have people around you to share in your successes, and to help you through your difficult times. That’s what life’s about.”

McQueen’s act of charity during the climactic race actually makes him more popular with the onscreen audience than the actual, amoral winner. His new friends in the community of Radiator Springs are examples of talented individuals who have fallen from current fashion, like certain real life creative individuals whom I have mentioned over the last few weeks. Once McQueen, a current racing star, directs public attention to Radiator Springs, the enduring values of that community are again recognized, and the little town prospers once again.

Meet the Robinsons deals not with the talented individual whom the world has forgotten, but with the brilliant innovator whom the world has not yet recognized. Let’s go through the screening I saw step by step, and along the way I will show you how Meet the Robinsons develops this theme.

I saw a screening of the version of Meet the Robinsons in “Disney Digital 3-D,” which struck me as looking far more impressive than it had with Disney’s previous computer-animated release Chicken Little (see “Comics in Context” #110). Following the inevitable irritating series of onscreen commercials and trailers, we were alerted onscreen to don our 3-D glasses. Then there was a short, amusing sequence in which Carl, the Robinsons’ robot, welcomes the audience and demonstrates 3-D effects, as he abruptly seemingly moves from the flat screen right towards our faces, justly earning delighted vocal reactions from the kids in the audience.

But before the feature began, we got to see Working for Peanuts, a 3-D Donald Duck cartoon that was released in 1953 during the original fad for 3-D movies. The 3-D effect here is interesting, but hardly convincing. Everything still looks flat, but it’s as if the characters and the backgrounds are on separate planes, one in front of the other. In contrast, in the computer-animated main feature, everyone and everything possesses a convincing sense of three-dimensional volume. The 3-D version of hand-drawn animation emphasizes the flatness of the drawings and hence underlines the unreality of the cartoon. The 3-D version of computer animation gives the figures and objects and backgrounds onscreen a heightened sense of reality, so that it’s easier to suspend one’s disbelief.

My favorite 3-D effect in Meet the Robinsons came at the very beginning, in a scene set during a driving rainstorm: it was as if the rain was falling not just in the world of the film but around me, as well.

Working for Peanuts is nominally a Donald Duck cartoon, but he’s really only the fourth most important character in it. It’s really about chipmunks Chip ‘n’ Dale trying to steal peanuts from a elephant in the care of zookeeper Donald. In this cartoon Donald must be on Prozac or something, since though he gets characteristically annoyed, he never launches into one of his famous all-out temper tantrums, which are highlights of his earlier vehicles. (John Byrne has described Donald as Disney’s Hulk.)

Maybe Donald seems so tame because this is one of the Disney studio’s animated shorts from the 1950s, when they usually seemed low key in comparison to the Warners and MGM cartoons of the period. Donald, who at his animated best embodies this irrepressible splenetic force, has been relegated to a supporting role in his own cartoon. This cartoon represents the Disney studio of Walt’s time in a more easygoing, less ambitious middle age. There are good gags here and there, but the cartoon is more charming than funny, and it comes to a stop rather than building to a proper ending.

On the other hand, I was impressed by how good even such a mediocre cartoon from Walt Disney’s lifetime looked. The character designs were appealing, the animation was pleasing, the colors were bright and cheerful, and I found myself thinking that this minor Disney product looked so much better than most recent animation I see. The standards of Disney animation were so high that even a disappointing cartoon like this one now seems like a minor gem from a lost Golden Age.

Those audiences who attended the non-3-D screenings of Meet the Robinsons got to see a different introductory cartoon instead, Boat Builders (1938), a genuine classic from the true Golden Age of the DIsney animated shorts, teaming Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Goofy.

According to a December 3, 2006 article in The New York Times by animation historian Charles Solomon, Pixar’s John Lasseter, now that he is in charge of Disney animation, was the driving force in instituting a new series of animated shorts at Disney as a training ground for rising talents, just as CGI shorts have served at Pixar. So the shorts accompanying Meet the Robinsons presumably are to accustom audiences to looking forward to the new animated short subjects yet to come.

It seems to me that the shorts accompanying Robinsons serve other purposes as well. For one thing, they’re fighting back against the new conventional wisdom that contemporary audiences only want to see computer-animation on the big screen, not traditional hand-drawn animation.
Now here’s a prime example of important works of art–the great hand-drawn animated films from Disney and other studios–that have currently, unjustifiably, fallen from fashion!

Further, the shorts shown before Meet the Robinsons serve to introduce a new generation of kids to classic Disney characters. Meet the Robinsons began with a new logo for Disney animation, which incorporated a clip from the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928). My pleasure in seeing this tribute was suddenly interrupted by a kid’s voice from the audience yelling, “Who’s that?” Luckily, another child responded almost immediately, and nearly as loudly, “Mickey Mouse.” I know that the Disney Channel has the new Mickey Mouse Clubhouse for preschoolers and that its sister network Toon Disney features Mickey in the clever and entertaining House of Mouse animated series. Still, this little incident served as a reminder that even iconic cartoon characters have to be exposed to new audiences. Let’s not let them fall from fashion just because the new generation doesn’t know about them!

It’s also important to keep the classic Disney cartoon shorts in public view. Certainly I’m grateful that so many of them are available on DVD for aficionados. But when the Disney Channel started, these shorts were prominently featured, notably through the Mouseterpiece Theater series, wherein George Plimpton introduced them. That was an intriguing gimmick, since it was simultaneously parodying Alistair Cooke’s introductions for PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, while simultaneously making the point that these cartoons are indeed classics that are worthy of formal showcases. I continue to be amazed that nowadays neither the Disney Channel nor Toon Disney finds time to show the classics, not even as a late night show. So I’m grateful that Mr. Lasseter and company have released two of the classic shorts from the vaults to be shown with a new animated feature.

I’m even more surprised that at present Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies made from 1948 on aren’t being shown anywhere on television. This is something that I never thought would happen. Turner Broadcasting owns most of the pre-1948 shorts, while Warner Brothers retains ownership of the later shorts, including most of the best work of directors Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Robert McKimson. After Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting, Turner’s Cartoon Network would show Warners theatrical animated shorts from both sides of the dividing line, but, after the commercial disappointment of Looney Tunes: Back in Action, the Warners theatrical cartoons were all banished to the less widely seen Boomerang digital network. And now, even though Boomerang is owned by Time Warner, it still had to license use of the post-1947 cartoons and let the license lapse (see here for explanation) . And yes, I have all the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVDs, I appreciate that Warner Home Video includes cartoons as special features on DVDs of films made during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and I know about the new Looney Tunes website, but I still find it astounding that, after so many decades, so many Warners cartoons are no longer on television. Maybe Warner Brothers should follow Disney’s lead and pair classic shorts with new animated releases. Warners’ Happy Feet could have been accompanied by 8 Ball Bunny, a 1950 Chuck Jones cartoon with its own show biz penguin (which turns out to be the cleverly chosen bonus feature on the March of the Penguins DVD).

Now, as for Meet the Robinsons itself, in the dark, moody opening scene in the rain, an unidentified woman leaves the infant Lewis on the steps of an orphanage.

Sometimes I will see a critic figuratively throw up his hands in the course of a review of a story, exasperated that the supposed cliche of the hero as orphan is being used yet again. It’s not a cliche; it’s an archetypal situation, and there are good reasons why we see it used everywhere from the works of Charles Dickens to the Harry Potter novels to the origin of Batman.

For one thing, the orphan’s situation symbolizes that of all of us once we emerge from the protection of our parents in our childhood and have to strike out into the world on our own. There is a longing for lost security and a sense of aloneness, coupled with an awareness of the necessity for taking responsibility for our own lives.

Second, orphanhood connects to the individual’s quest for his identity, whether in Oedipus Rex or H. M. S. Pinafore or the origin of Superman. The protagonist searches for his past, in the hope that learning who his parents are and where he came from will define his role in life.

It turns out that in the case of Meet the Robinsons, orphanhood is a literally autobiographical element; director Stephen Anderson is himself an orphan.

When Lewis has grown to the age of twelve, he has proved to be brilliant in science, and is continually inventing new devices, most or all of which, it seems, do not work. Moreover, the film makes the point that he is long overdue for being adopted, and that, since he is on the verge of turning into a teenager, if he isn’t adopted soon, he probably never will be. (Since he’s on the verge of adolescence, Lewis is about to leave childhood behind, and start on the path to self-reliant adulthood; this, therefore, is the proper place for this contemporary fable to begin.)

But it seems that Lewis keeps being rejected by potential foster parents. We are shown how one interview with prospective parents goes awry. This couple is put off by the intense fervor with which Lewis describes his latest invention, and then the machine spectacularly malfunctions, creating a mess that infuriates the would-be adoptive parents.

In this sequence the film teeters on the brink of labeling Lewis as an obsessive nerd or geek, but it never crosses that line. Lewis remains a sympathetic figure, and the prospective parents come off as narrow-minded, unpleasant, and even anti-intellectual.

Though he is an inventor, Lewis can be regarded as a creative artist, following his muse, attempting to turn his imagination into reality. Computer animation involves both art and technology, so Lewis’s vocation is appropriate to the film. He’s also the artist as lonely, struggling innovative, who so far meets with only rejection and incomprehension. The world rejects his work, just as sets of potential parents keep rejecting him as a person.

One of his few friends is a fellow orphan nicknamed Goob, who likewise has never been adopted. Goob’s interests lie in baseball rather than science, but he seems rather sullen, joyless, and unimaginative. But the fact that Lewis and Goob are presented as roommates should alert the perceptive viewer that they may metaphorically represent two sides of the same person.

Focused on his past, Lewis invents a “memory scanner” device in the hope that he can use it to learn his mother’s identity. Lewis exhibits his invention at a science fair, where it is sabotaged by a mysterious villain known as the Bowler Hat Guy, whose hat is a sentient, sinister robot known as DOR-15 (alias “Doris”). Thus another of Lewis’s inventions causes a disaster, and the Bowler Hat Guy makes off with the memory scanner.

Another enigmatic stranger, a boy named Wilbur Robinson, shows up with a time machine. Lewis, still focused on the past, wants to use the time vehicle to go into the past to learn who his mother is, but instead they crash land in Wilbur’s own time period, decades into the future. There Lewis meets Wilbur’s large, eccentric family, the futuristic counterparts of Kaufman and Hart’s Depression-era Sycamores.

I found the first third of the film more expository than entertaining, and found my attention wandering during the start of the second third, set in this future three decades hence. On a second viewing I may find myself more interested in this section, which introduces us to the idiosyncratic members of the Robinson family.

But on this viewing I did like the bright, sunny, retro-futuristic look of this future world, whose buildings are designed in the “Streamline Moderne” style of the 1930s. According to Wikipedia, this is “a late branch of the Art Deco style. Its architectural style emphasized curving forms, long horizontal lines, and sometimes nautical elements (such as railings and porthole windows).” (That makes me wonder if that the giant porthole-like windows at the San Diego Convention center, home of Comic-Con International, may be references to the Streamline Moderne style.) According to my research, Streamline Moderne was a style used for the fantasy architecture in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) and, coincidentally or not, another Frank Capra movie, Lost Horizon (1937).

It doesn’t really make sense that the architecture of the Robinsons’ world would have so completely changed in merely three decades. Look around any American city and you’ll see buildings from many different decades coexisting. My own neighborhood is a historic district, with apartment buildings designed in imitation of the Tudor style, and even an Art Deco building. Similarly, the Robinsons wear clothes that are wildly different in style from those of the present day. Radical shifts in fashion can take place–compare women’s clothing in the 1890s to what they wore in the 1920s–but the extreme change in style posited by Robinsons seems unlikely.
Recently visiting my alma mater, Columbia University, I again observed that, apart from the cell phones and laptops, the students there look and dress just like they did in the 1970s.

But the thorough changes in clothing and architectural styles is actually essential to the theme of the film, as you shall see.

My attention revived when the Bowler Hat Guy and his nasty hat turned up in this future world to send a ferocious tyrannosaur from the Cretaceous Period after Lewis. Just as the BHG proves to be more of a pathetic incompetent than the master villain he seeks to be, the tyrannosaur turns out to be more charming than dangerous, and quickly turns into the Robinsons’ tail-wagging pet. Thus the family succeeds in incorporating another outsider into their charmed circle.

The head of the family is strangely absent, but the family takes to Lewis, and Mrs. Robinson offers to adopt him. When it is revealed that Lewis is from the past, however, she withdraws the offer, presumably because she now sees the big plot twist coming. (And if you don’t want to know about it, this is your spoiler warning, and come back after you’ve seen the movie.) Distraught and angry by yet another rejection, Lewis joins forces with the Bowler Hat Guy, who, as I suggested earlier, represents his dark side.

It is in the film’s final third when the movie finally comes to life for me. The long set-ups in the earlier part of the film finally pay off handsomely. I could see the Big Plot Twist coming: Lewis is actually the missing Mr. Robinson as a child, and the Robinsons are his future family. But I was caught off guard by the second Big Twist: the Bowler Hat Guy is Lewis’s sullen roommate Goob as an adult.

It turns out that by falling asleep at the wrong moment during a baseball game, Goob failed to catch a ball, dooming his team to defeat. Goob was paralyzed by his sense of failure, was never adopted, and led an empty life, putting the blame on Lewis for keeping him awake the night before the big game. So as an adult, he became the Bowler Hat Guy and went back in time to get revenge on his former roommate. The bowler hat itself, DOR-15, turns out to be one of Lewis’s inventions, which the adult Goob stole.

Like Lewis, Goob is fixated on the past, but Goob has taken this to obsessional extremes. Goob is tormented by his sense of failure, but is unwilling to take responsibility for it, and instead displaces the guilt onto his former roommate. You could easily interpret Lewis’s own fixation with learning about his mother as rooted in his own sense of failure and inadequacy: surely he wonders why he was abandoned. Was it somehow his fault? The fact that Goob’s primary weapon, the robotic bowler hat, is Lewis’s invention is a further symbolic link between them.

The BHG imprisons Lewis in the future; the side of Lewis’s personality, which the BHG represents, is now dominant. That side may not be so much the dark side as the weak side. The true villain is the robotic hat. The BHG goes back in time to the present day, Lewis’s own time, in order to forge a deal to mass produce the robot hats. As a result, in the future, the Robinson family’s time, the hats, following the familiar Frankenstein scenario, are taking over the world. Everyone who wears one of the robotic bowlers is mentally controlled by it. (This seems to be an archetypal science fiction scenario, like the Mad Hatter with his mind-control devices in Batman: The Animated Series, and the mind-control variations on iPods in the new Doctor Who series’ revamped origin of the Cybermen.) The mind control exerted by the hats seems to me symbolic of the way that Goob’s obsession with the past and with revenge dominated his own psyche. It’s as if the hat is usurping the role of the well-balanced human mind.

In this altered future, the bright, beautiful world of the Robinsons is altered into a dark, nightmarish dystopia. Reviewers have likened the plot to the Back to the Future film trilogy, but if we pursue the Frank Capra analogy, it’s like the metamorphosis of Bedford Falls into Pottersville in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

Lewis escapes captivity (his good side symbolically reemerging from domination by his anger and self-pity), and uses the time machine to travel back to the present. In a clever bit, Lewis alters history simply by declaring that he will never invent DOR-15, whereupon the evil bowler hat simply dematerializes from existence. Lewis takes the BHG (now hatless and symbolically free from DOR-15’s influence) back to the future, where they witness the dark dystopia’s transformation back into the Robinsons’ sunny utopia. The BHG repents, and later in the movie, Lewis changes the BHG’s own history by waking Goob up during the fateful baseball game, enabling him to catch the ball. The treatment of Goob/BHG shows the generosity of this movie, which ultimately has no human villains: Goob is granted redemption.

In the future Lewis meets his older self, a successful scientist and inventor. Young Lewis may be an orphan, but the adult Lewis, who is actually named Cornelius, is the central figure in his large family. Rather than seek our a lost parent, he has created a family of his own. Moreover, through his inventions, he has greatly changed the world in which he lives. That’s why it’s symbolically important that the world of the Robinsons looks so different from the present day. Cornelius has not only made a family for himself, but he has also reshaped his world. (Young Lewis has done so too, by banishing the dystopian alternate timeline and reinstating the Robinsons’ future.)

This is a metaphor for how every individual creates his own life through his actions. Lewis/Cornelius did so productively, benefiting the whole world. Goob/BHG took a different route, first turning his life empty through inaction and obsession with the past, and then having a destructive influence on the world through seeking vengeance.

But also the world of the adult Cornelius represents the ultimate triumph of the creative visionary. Whereas Lewis as a boy was not taken seriously as an inventor, three decades later, the adult Cornelius has won recognition and success, and, indeed, he has remade the world according to his vision. That is a metaphor for how innovative “heretical”: thinking can eventually overcome opposition and become recognized as truth.

Wilbur (who is now revealed to be the adult Cornelius’s son) takes Lewis back in the time machine to that rainy scene from the opening of the film, and Lewis is tempted to tap his mother on the shoulder, learn who she really is, and perhaps even somehow change his own history. But Lewis resists the temptation, and history proceeds as before.

This is an intriguing decision by the filmmakers. In other works of fiction it is both important and right that the orphaned protagonist discover his heritage. Harry Potter learns the truth about his parents, and thus goes from being an abused orphan to becoming a heroic magician. The revelation of the identity of Oliver Twist’s parents gives him a new identity as the wealthy Mr. Brownlow’s adopted son.

It reminds me of the end of John Byrne’s 1986 The Man of Steel miniseries, which rebooted and reinterpreted the Superman mythos. Whereas the Silver Age Superman could recall his childhood on Krypton through his “super-memory,” Byrne’s revised version could not. In the final issue of The Man of Steel Superman was confronted by an image of his father, Jor-El, which downloaded information about his Kryptonian origins into his mind. Yet on the final page, Superman, though grateful to have solved the mystery of his origin, asserts that it has changed nothing. He has lived his life on Earth, his foster parents were Earthlings, and he considers himself not an alien but an Earthman. Many have stated that the Superman myth is in part about the immigrant experience. In this regard Byrne’s version was sharply different from the Silver Age Superman, who longed nostalgically for his native world.

Byrne’s Superman is very much like Lewis in Meet the Robinsons. Both of them have made the decision that their past doesn’t matter; what matters is their present and future, which they are creating for themselves.

Just as Lewis revisited the scene of Goob’s failure and made it turn out right, he then returns to the science fair, and this time his memory scanner works. That’s because there’s no Bowler Hat Guy to sabotage it this time around. Perhaps it’s also symbolically because Lewis himself is no longer fixated on his past; maybe the destruction his inventions caused reflected the psychologically destructive impact of his own fixation. Now that Lewis is looking ahead to the future that he visited, his invention works.

Moreover, his triumph at the science fair sets dominoes falling that he and we know will lead to that future. Lewis is adopted by the science fair judge and her husband, who he realizes are the grandparents in the future Robinson family. (Actually, everyone in the audience should have recognized the raucous white-haired grandmother as the science fair judge long before.) And a girl at the science fair turns out to be the future Mrs. Robinson.

Just as Robinsons opened with a clip from Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie, it closes with a quotation from Walt himself, “Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” This connects the philosophy of Robinsons to that of Walt Disney himself. Goob remained stuck in a rut, obsessed with past failure; once he overcame his own fixation with the past, Lewis moved ahead as an inventor of “new things.” Possibly it is also a signal from Lasseter as to his hopes for the future of Disney Animation. The quotation also underlines once more that Meet the Robinsons is about the life and goals of the creative artist, whether he is a child prodigy inventor or the founder of a great animation studio.

And isn’t Walt Disney a prime example of a creative visionary who, despite early setbacks, literally transformed the world? Steamboat Willie premiered within the memories of people who are still alive, and yet I think it is difficult for those of us who belong to younger generations to imagine what American popular culture would be like had there been no Walt Disney.

The next Pixar animated feature, arriving this summer, is director Brad Bird’s Ratatouille. In the same interview that I quoted from earlier, John Lasseter describes the new film thus: “It is about a rat that wants to be a fine chef in a top French restaurant in Paris. It is a wonderful story about following your passions when all the world is against you. A rat to a kitchen is death; a kitchen to a rat is death.” In other words, Ratatouille follows Happy Feet and Meet The Robinsons in exploring the theme of the creative artist who pursues his muse in the face of universal opposition. When I review Ratatouille this summer, I’ll be returning to this theme as well.

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Since upgrading my Internet connection to broadband, I’ve found the explosion of online video more frustrating than pleasurable. Sometimes I get only the sound, other times the sound and picture are out of synch, and in many cases I can’t get the video link to work, period.

But meanwhile I’ve found videos that work perfectly right here at Quick Stop: comics and animation writer Paul Dini’s Monkey Talk, chronicling his interspecies Oedipal conflicts with his anthropoid son Rashy, a classic trickster. After an absence of several months, he’s posted new ones here at Quick Stop, and they just keep getting funnier. I recommend that you take a look.

–Copyright 2007 Peter Sanderson

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