According to an official press release, the Walt Disney Company has just acquired the film studio Lucasfilm LTD for approximately 4 billion dollars and has announced its immediate intent to release the seventh, eighth and ninth installments of the Star Wars movie franchise starting in 2015.

The original Star Wars trilogy, released between 1977-1983, became an unprecedented pop culture phenomenon, and is universally praised as one of the greatest film trilogies of all time. Anchored by stellar acting performances, strong writing, and (at the time) groundbreaking special effects, the series tapped into a societal mythos, and captured the imagination of multiple generations.

After a nearly 20-year wait and a mountain of hype, the much-derided Prequel Trilogy, released between 1999-2005, was universally panned for terrible dialogue, wooden acting, and an overabundance of CGI.

The consensus on the failure of those films (aside from the soul-crushing creation of Jar Jar Binks) was that all three were written and directed by series creator George Lucas, who had neither written nor directed a movie since the original Star Wars, and had spent the previous three decades as a producer and businessman.

Imagine what the Prequel Trilogy might have looked like if it were written by David S. Goyer (The Dark Knight) or Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption)?  What if it had been directed by J.J. Abrams (Star Trek), Joss Whedon (The Avengers), James Cameron (Avatar) or all three?  Well, that’s what the Sequel Trilogy will look like.

The Walt Disney Company, after having just assembled the myriad of creative talent to create the Marvel Avengers movies, seems poised to do the exact same to the Star Wars franchise with one crucial ingredient:  the blessing of Lucas.

“It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers,” said Lucas.  “I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.

The most exciting news is that the latest installment, occurring sequentially after 1983’s Return of the Jedi, heralds the probable return of Mark Hamill as an older Luke Skywalker who’s ready to pass on the torch to a new generation of Jedi Knights. It’s also possible that Hamill, who’s had a successful voice-acting career, may reprise an animated version of the role, since Disney has also announced plans for a television series. There is a very real possibility that Pixar, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, could create an animated television series about Luke Skywalker leading the pilots of Rogue Squadron in between episodes 4 and 5, starring the voice talents of Mark Hamill! (Heads of Star Wars mega fans the world over explode.)

As the prequels have shown, new Star Wars movies have the potential to provide massive disappointment to legions of dedicated fans, but the emergence of new inspired filmmakers and the potential return of Luke Skywalker brings new hope to a franchise which had turned to the dark side.

–Dash Gordon

Up’s uninteresting story of an old widower who attaches his home to helium balloons and floats off to Venezuela with an overeager kid in tow follows the same formula as the previous nine Pixar movies.  But artistic standards get trumped by a special feature: sentimentality. Pixar’s price sticker includes enough saccharine emotion to distract some viewers from being more demanding; they don’t mind the blatant narrative manipulation of a sad old man and lonely little boy. They buy animation to extend their childhood like men who buy cars for phallic symbols.

As a child, Carl Fredrickson, already a young fogey, thrilled to the airborne adventures of daredevil explorer C.J. Muntz. But in retirement, Fredrickson sulks; mischief deeply buried beneath blandness. Carl’s not an irascible audience-surrogate like the urban curmudgeon Mr. Magoo. Only Russell, the pie-faced, father-abandoned, 8-year-old scout, is cuter. “Cute” is how Pixar oversimplifies the world.
Even the montage showing Carl’s marriage to childhood sweetheart Ellie (their wedding, companionship, childlessness, then Ellie’s illness and death), is over-sentimentalized. This silent interlude is no more daring than the utterly conventional Wall-E: It concludes with Carl, alone, holding a blue balloon at Ellie’s funeral. Sheesh. Although Chaplinesque music underscores these maudlin scenes, they’re not emotionally pure like Chaplin; they preen. Critics who forget that movies should be about people defend this reduction of human experience.

When Up trivializes Carl and Russell’s loneliness—treating it to the same Journey/Rescue/Return blueprint as Finding Nemo, Cars, Wall-E, Monsters, Inc., A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 1 and 2—the predictability becomes cloying. And the inevitable shift to anthropomorphism—Carl and Russell float to South America, encountering a prehistoric bird and mysteriously “talking” dogs—is very nearly depressing. Almost as depressing as Wall-E. Despite some imaginative imagery (gray-blue night storms, dark yet vivid jungle scenes, compositional values J.J. Abrams knows nothing about), Up drops its emotional elements for chase mechanics and precious comedy. This way, Pixar disgraces and delimits the animated film as a mushy, silly pop form.

Pixarism defines the backward taste for animation. Refuting Chuck Jones’ insistence that he didn’t create his great Warner Bros. cartoon for children, Pixarism domesticates and homogenizes animation—as if to preserve family values. The only exceptions have been Brad Bird’s Pixar movies The Incredibles and Ratatouille—both sumptuously executed in Bird’s belief that animation should show “how things feel rather than are. Indulging in the human aspect of being alive.” Yet their conceptual weak point was cuteness—same as Up’s glossing over Carl’s “public menace” court conviction and that inconsistently imagined dog pack.

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. Last year, elitist film nerds forgot how Hou Hsiao Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon also dishonored Lamorisse’s beautiful tale—as they cynically overrated the entropic Wall-E. All this deflated cinema and Pixarism mischaracterizes what good animation can be, as in Coraline, Monster House, Chicken Little, Teacher’s Pet, The Iron Giant. Up’s aesthetic failure stems from its emotional letdown.
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Up
Directed by Pete Docter, Bob Peterson
Runtime: 96 min.