The secret heart of The Simpsons

If television is a collaborative medium, then it stands to reason that the greatest television series of all time would also be the most striking example of collaboration we have. And it is. When we try to pin down credit for The Simpsons, it starts to feel like one of those M.C. Escher lithographs composed of countless smaller versions of the same figure—no matter how deep we drill, there’s always another level of complexity to discover, with talent bursting forth at every level. To take a single vivid example: the idea that the animator who designed Krusty the Clown would go on, decades later, to win two Oscars for Best Animated Feature and emerge as one of the most exciting action directors in years might seem farfetched. Yet that’s exactly what happened. And Brad Bird was only one of dozens of creative geniuses toiling away in the background during the show’s golden age, which is the best instance I know of narrative value being added at every stage in the process. If Matt Groening provided the emotional core, it was enhanced throughout by writers, voice actors, animators, directors, and other craftsmen, both sung and unsung. Here are just a few of their names: Mark Kirkland, Travis Powers, David Mirkin, Jon Vitti, Josh Weinstein, Bill Oakley, Susie Dietter. And I could keep typing for days.

Still, we all love our auteurs, and there will always be attempts to award the bulk of the credit to one or two individuals, particularly those whose names we recognize. I’ve heard people cite Conan O’Brien as the crucial figure in the show’s early days, which doesn’t make any sense: even if you think, rightly, that “Marge vs. The Monorail” marked a significant moment in the show’s evolution, O’Brien joined the writing staff only after much of the tone and voice of the series had already been established. Other fans point to John Swartzwelder, the show’s most prolific and mysterious writer, or even Brad Bird, and I’ve argued elsewhere on this blog for the central role of George Meyer. But if we’re going to single out just one person, the case for Sam Simon, who passed away earlier this week, is as strong as it is for anyone. And if there’s a silver lining to his death, it’s that it may end up restoring him to his proper place in the history of the series, from which he has all too often been omitted. (There’s a nod to this in “The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular,” which provides a tongue-in-cheek version of the show’s origin story. The writers originally wanted to represent Simon with a blank screen and the caption: “No photo available.” Simon objected, and he personally drew and faxed over the picture that finally appeared, depicting him as a Howard Hughes figure with clawlike nails.)

Groening may have been the show’s creator, but Simon was its Diaghilev—a maker of junctions between other creative minds. As Hans Ulrich Obrist says:

If you think about these encounters—it was almost like a gesamtkunstwerk [an ideal synthesis of all the arts]. Composers of the importance of Stravinsky would do the sound, artists of the importance of Picasso or Braque or the Russian constructivists Goncharova or Popova would do stage sets. The dancers would be the likes of Nijinksy. Massine and Jean Cocteau were involved. And Diaghilev is the impresario who brings it all together and orchestrates it.

Replace “Stravinsky” with “Alf Clausen,” “Picasso or Braque” with “David Silverman or Rich Moore,” “Nijinsky” with “Dan Castellaneta,” and “Jean Cocteau” with “Brad Bird,” and you’ve got something like The Simpsons. And while Simon may not have been responsible for all those junctions, he enabled them in critical ways. He assembled the initial writing room, hiring the likes of Meyer, Swartzwelder, and Vitti; he put all the voice actors in the same studio, rather than having them record their lines separately, which led to some of the show’s most organic and surprising moments; and he pushed the series past its roots as a family sitcom to develop its world, designing the original models for such key supporting characters as Mr. Burns and Chief Wiggum.

In other words, even if it’s impossible to sift through the various contributions of the myriad parents of The Simpsons, Simon is responsible, as much as anyone else, for putting them all in the same room. The more you look at the resulting synergy, the more you see his fingerprints, and although he left after the fourth—and arguably best—season, his legacy endured for years thereafter. Like Diaghilev, he did exactly what producers are supposed to do, and through some combination of talent, experience, and luck, he did it better than anyone else before or since. And as invisible as he was, he had a lasting impact on the inner lives of millions. I’ve spoken before of the repository of Simpsons quotes that we carry in our heads as a kind of metaphorical language, a common store of references that quietly shapes how we think about everything, and while it may have been the product of countless hands, Simon starts to feel like the keystone without which the rest of the arch collapses. Of course, that’s just one narrative out of many, and other, equally plausible ones will continue to emerge. But if there’s a lesson here at all, it’s how little we can know about the secret life of a television series, or any great gesamtkunstwerk, when we’re on the outside looking in. As Jon Vitti, one of the show’s most influential writers, said of Simon: “He was the guy we wrote for.”

Flight, Wreck-It Ralph, and the triumph of the mainstream

At first glance, it’s hard to imagine two movies more different than Flight and Wreck-It Ralph. The former is an emphatically R-rated message movie with a refreshing amount of nudity, drug and alcohol abuse, and what used to be known as adult situations, in the most literal sense of the term; the latter is a big, colorful family film that shrewdly joins the latest innovations in animation and digital effects to the best of classic Disney. On the surface, they appeal to two entirely separate audiences, and as a result, you’d expect them to coexist happily at the box office, which is precisely what happened: both debuted this weekend to numbers that exceeded even the most optimistic expectations. (This is, in fact, the first weekend in a long time when my wife and I went to the movies on two consecutive nights.) Yet these two films have more in common than first meets the eye, and in particular, they offer an encouraging snapshot of Hollywood’s current potential for creating great popular entertainment. And even if their proximity is just a fluke of scheduling, it’s one that should hearten a lot of mainstream moviegoers.

In fact, for all their dissimilarities, the creative team behind Flight would have been more than capable of making Wreck-It Ralph, and vice-versa, and under the right circumstances, they might well have done so. Flight is Robert Zemeckis’s first live-action movie in years, after a long, self-imposed exile in the motion-capture wilderness, and the script is by John Gatins, who spent a decade trying to get it made, while also slaving away for two years on the screenplay for Real Steel. It’s a handsome movie, old-fashioned in its insistence on big themes and complex characters, but it’s also a product of the digital age: Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump, whatever its other flaws, remains a landmark in the use of unobtrusive special effects to advance the story and fill in a movie’s canvas, and their use here allowed Flight to be brought in on a startlingly low budget of $31 million. At his best, Zemeckis is one of the most technically gifted of mainstream directors, and in some ways, he’s an important spiritual godfather for Wreck-It Ralph, whose true precursor isn’t Toy Story, as many critics have assumed, but Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Similarly, Wreck-It Ralph is the product of a canny, often surprisingly mature set of sensibilities that only happens to have ended up in animation. Along with the usual stable of Pixar and Disney veterans, the creative team includes Rich Moore and Jim Reardon, a pair of directors whose work on The Simpsons collectively represents the best fusion of high and low art in my lifetime, and they’ve given us a movie that appeals to both adults and kids, and not just in the obvious ways. It’s full of video game in-jokes that will fly over or under the heads of many viewers—a reference to Metal Gear Solid represents one of the few times a joke in a movie had the audience laughing while I was scratching my head—but this is really the least impressive aspect of the movie’s sophistication. The script is very clever, with a number of genuinely ingenious surprises, and there are touches here that go well beyond nerd culture to something older and weirder, like Alan Tudyk’s brilliant Ed Wynn impression as the villainous King Candy. (The cast, which includes John C. Reilly, Jack McBrayer, and Sarah Silverman, all of them wonderful, is a modern version of the Disney trick of recruiting old pros like Ed Wynn and Phil Harris to bring its characters to life.)

It’s tempting to say that it all comes down to good storytelling, but there’s something else going on here. Last year, I predicted that the incursion of Pixar talent into live-action movies would represent a seismic shift in popular filmmaking, and although John Carter was a bust, Brad Bird’s work on Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol indicates that I wasn’t entirely off the mark. This weekend’s top two movies are a sign that, at its best, Hollywood is still capable of making solid movies for adults and children that come from essentially the same place—from good scripts, yes, but also from studios and creative teams that understand the potential of technology and draw on a similar pool of skilled professionals. This is how Hollywood should look: not a world neatly divided into summer tentpole pictures, Oscar contenders, and a lot of mediocrity, but a system capable of turning out mainstream entertainment for different audiences linked by a common respect for craft. The tools and the talent are there, led by directors like Zemeckis and backed up by studios like Pixar and Disney. This ought to be the future of moviemaking. And at least for one weekend, it’s already here.

Crossing the digital divide

On Saturday, my wife and I went to the Siskel Center in Chicago to see the engaging new documentary Side by Side, which focuses on the recent shift toward digital filmmaking and its implications for movies as a whole. Despite some soporific narration by producer and interviewer Keanu Reeves—who is not a man who should ever be allowed to do voiceover—this is a smart, interesting film that treats us to a dazzling range of perspectives, many of them from artists I’ve discussed repeatedly on this blog: David Lynch, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, George Lucas, Stephen Soderbergh, Lars Von Trier, and the indispensable Walter Murch, not to mention Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Michael Ballhaus, Robert Rodriguez, the Wachowskis, and many more. And while the interviewees come down on various sides of the digital issue—Rodriguez is probably the most unapologetic defender, Nolan the greatest skeptic—there’s one clear message: digital filmmaking is here to stay, and movies will never be the same.

If there’s one thread that runs through the entire movie, it’s the tradeoffs that come when you trade an expensive, cumbersome, highly challenging medium for something considerably cheaper and easier. At first glance, the benefits are enormous: you can run the camera for as long as you like for next to nothing, allowing you to capture more material, and the relatively small size of digital cameras lets you bring them places and achieve effects that might have been impossible before. Digital photography allows for greater control over technical details like color correction; makes editing far less difficult, at least on a practical level; and offers access to advanced tools to filmmakers with limited budgets. Yet there are tradeoffs as well. Film is still capable of visual glories that digital can’t match, and it’s curious that a movie that features Nolan and his genius cinematographer Wally Pfister lacks a single mention of IMAX. (Despite the multiplicity of voices here, I would have loved to have heard from Brad Bird, who because famous working in an exclusively digital medium but still chose IMAX to film much of Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol.)

Still, as the movie demonstrates, resolution and image quality for digital video is advancing at an exponential rate, and within the next ten years or so, it’s possible that we won’t notice the difference between digital photography and even the highest-resolution images available on film. Even then, however, something vital threatens to be lost. As Greta Gerwig, of all people, points out, when there’s real film running through the camera, everyone on set takes the moment very seriously, an intensity that tends to be diminished when video is cheap. The end of constraints comes at the cost of a certain kind of serendipity: as Anne V. Coates, the editor of Lawrence of Arabia, reveals, the greatest cut in the history of movies was originally meant as a dissolve, but was discovered by accident in the editing room. And as both David Lynch and producer Lorenzo DiBonaventure note, the increased availability of digital filmmaking doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll see a greater number of good movies. In fact, the opposite is more likely to be true, as digital technology lowers the barriers to entry for artists who may not be ready to release movies in the first place—the cinematic equivalent of Kindle publishing.

The answer, clearly, is that we need to continue to impose constraints even as we’re liberated by new technology. That sense of intensity that Gerwig mentions is something that directors can still create, but only if they consciously choose to do so. As I’ve argued before, with a nod to Walter Murch, it’s important to find analog moments in a digital world, by intentionally slowing down the process, using pen and paper, and embracing randomness and restriction whenever possible. Most of all, we need to find time to render, to acknowledge that even when digital technology cuts the production schedule in half, there’s still a necessary period in which works of art must be given time to ripen. David Lynch says he’s done with film, and he’s earned the right to make movies in any way he likes. But when I look at Inland Empire, I see an extraordinary movie that could have been far greater—and central to my own life—if, like Blue Velvet, it had been cut from three hours down to two. Digital technology makes it possible to avoid these hard choices. But that doesn’t mean we should.

Thoughts on a Dark Knight

Let’s talk about scale. For much of the past decade, the major movie studios have waged a losing battle to keep audiences in theaters, while competing with the vast array of more convenient entertainment options available at home. Hollywood’s traditional response to the threat of new media has always been to offer greater spectacle, these days in the form of IMAX or 3D, with an additional surcharge, of course. But as the new formats bring us closer to the action, computerized effects push us further away. No matter how beautifully rendered a digital landscape may be, it’s still strangely airless and sterile, with a sense that we’re being given a view of more megapixels, not a window on the world. Even so immersive a film as Avatar ultimately keeps us at arm’s length: Pandora is a universe unto itself, yes, but it still sits comfortably on a hard drive at Weta. And for all their size and expense, most recent attempts to create this kind of immersion, from John Carter to The Avengers, fail to understand the truth about spectacle: large-scale formats are most exciting when they give us a vision of a real, tangible, photographed world.

This is why The Dark Knight Rises is such a landmark. Christopher Nolan, who cited the films of David Lean as an influence in Batman Begins, understands that the real appeal of the great Hollywood epics in VistaVision and Cinerama was the startling clarity and scope of the world they presented. It’s the kind of thing that can only be achieved on location, with practical effects, real stunts, aerial photography, and a cast of thousands. The Dark Knight Rises is packed with digital effects, but we’re never aware of them. Instead, we’re in the presence of a director luxuriating in the huge panoramic effects that IMAX affords—with image, with music, with sound—when trained on the right material on real city streets. As a result, it feels big in a way that no other movie has in a long time. Brad Bird achieved some of the same effect in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, but while Bird invited us to marvel at his surfaces, Nolan wants us to plunge us into a world he’s created, and he uses the medium as it was meant to be used: to tell a rich, dense story about an entire city.

Even more than The Dark Knight, this final installment makes it clear that Nolan’s twin obsessions with epic filmmaking and narrative complexity aren’t two different impulses, but opposite sides of the same coin: the massive IMAX screen, which surrounds us with images of staggering detail, is the visual equivalent of what Nolan is trying to do with the stories he tells. One thinks of The Last Judgment, of Bruegel, of Bosch. And his narrative skills have only improved with time. The Dark Knight had a great script, but it occasionally seemed to strain under the weight of its ideas, until it came off as two hugely eventful movies packed into one. The new movie doesn’t quite reach the heights of its predecessor, but it’s also more confident and assured: we’re sucked in at once and held rapt for two hours and forty minutes. And Nolan seems to have gotten over his ambivalence about the character of Batman himself. He’s always been shy about the Batsuit, which served as a kinky reminder of the story’s comic book origins, but here, he keeps Bruce Wayne vulnerable and unmasked for as long as possible, until he becomes more of a hero than ever before.

This is, in short, something close to a masterpiece—not just a worthy conclusion to the best series of comic book movies ever made, but the year’s first really great studio film. And yet I do have one big complaint. I’ve spoken before about Hollywood’s weird obsession with secrets, in which it refuses to disclose simple information about a movie for no other reason than a fetish over secrecy for its own sake, when in fact the film itself has no interesting surprises. (See: Prometheus and Super 8.) The same impulse often applies to casting rumors. For The Dark Knight Rises, the studio adamantly refused to confirm who Anne Hathaway would be playing, despite it being fairly obvious, and did the same with the characters played by Tom Hardy and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Yet even at the earliest point in the film’s production, it was made very clear that a certain character was going to be appearing in the film—thus ruining the movie’s one big surprise. In short, Hollywood has no idea what a secret is: it routinely hides information to no purpose, but then, when it really counts for once, it reveals it in a way that utterly destroys the filmmaker’s intentions. And there’s no other living director whose intentions deserve greater respect and admiration.

So what happened to John Carter?

In recent years, the fawning New Yorker profile has become the Hollywood equivalent of the Sports Illustrated cover—a harbinger of bad times to come. It isn’t hard to figure out why: both are awarded to subjects who have just reached the top of their game, which often foreshadows a humbling crash. Tony Gilroy was awarded a profile after the success of Michael Clayton, only to follow it up with the underwhelming Duplicity. For Steve Carrell, it was Dinner with Schmucks. For Anna Faris, it was What’s Your Number? And for John Lasseter, revealingly, it was Cars 2. The latest casualty is Andrew Stanton, whose profile, which I discussed in detail last year, now seems laden with irony, as well as an optimism that reads in retrospect as whistling in the dark. “Among all the top talent here,” a Pixar executive is quoted as saying, “Andrew is the one who has a genius for story structure.” And whatever redeeming qualities John Carter may have, story structure isn’t one of them. (The fact that Stanton claims to have closely studied the truly awful screenplay for Ryan’s Daughter now feels like an early warning sign.)

If nothing else, the making of John Carter will provide ample material for a great case study, hopefully along the lines of Julie Salamon’s classic The Devil’s Candy. There are really two failures here, one of marketing, another of storytelling, and even the story behind the film’s teaser trailer is fascinating. According to Vulture’s Claude Brodesser-Akner, a series of lost battles and miscommunications led to the release of a few enigmatic images devoid of action and scored, in the manner of an Internet fan video, with Peter Gabriel’s dark cover of “My Body is a Cage.” And while there’s more to the story than this—I actually found the trailer quite evocative, and negative responses to early marketing materials certainly didn’t hurt Avatar—it’s clear that this was one of the most poorly marketed tentpole movies in a long time. It began with the inexplicable decision to change the title from John Carter of Mars, on the assumption that women are turned off by science fiction, while making no attempt to lure in female viewers with the movie’s love story or central heroine, or even to explain who John Carter is. This is what happens when a four-quadrant marketing campaign goes wrong: when you try to please everybody, you please no one.

And the same holds true of the movie itself. While the story itself is fairly clear, and Stanton and his writers keep us reasonably grounded in the planet’s complex mythology, we’re never given any reason to care. Attempts to engage us with the central characters fall curiously flat: to convey that Princess Dejah is smart and resourceful, for example, the film shows her inventing the Barsoomian equivalent of nuclear power, evidently in her spare time. John Carter himself is a cipher. And while some of these problems might have been solved by miraculous casting, the blame lands squarely on Stanton’s shoulders. Stanton clearly loves John Carter, but forgets to persuade us to love him as well. What John Carter needed, more than anything else, was a dose of the rather stark detachment that I saw in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, as directed by Stanton’s former Pixar colleague Brad Bird. Bird clearly had no personal investment in the franchise, except to make the best movie he possibly could. John Carter, by contrast, falls apart on its director’s passion and good intentions, as well as a creative philosophy that evidently works in animation, but not live action. As Stanton says of Pixar:

We’re in this weird, hermetically sealed freakazoid place where everybody’s trying their best to do their best—and the films still suck for three out of the four years it takes to make them.

Which only makes us wonder what might have happened if John Carter had been granted a fourth year.

Stanton should take heart, however. If there’s one movie that John Carter calls to mind, it’s Dune, another financial and critical catastrophe that was doomed—as much as I love it—by fidelity to its source material. (In fact, if you take Roger Ebert’s original review of Dune, which came out in 1985, and replace the relevant proper names, you end up with something remarkably close to a review of John Carter: “Actors stand around in ridiculous costumes, mouthing dialogue with little or no context.”) Yet its director not only recovered, but followed it up with my favorite movie ever made in America. Failure, if it results in another chance, can be the opposite of the New Yorker curse. And while Stanton may not be David Lynch, he’s not without talent: the movie’s design is often impressive, especially its alien effects, and it displays occasional flashes of wit and humor that remind us of what Stanton can do. John Carter may go on record as the most expensive learning experience in history, and while this may be cold comfort to Disney shareholders, it’s not bad for the rest of us, as long as Stanton gets his second chance. Hopefully far away from the New Yorker.

Ghost in the machine

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Mission: Impossible franchise, which feels less like a coherent series of feature films than a sandbox for a succession of gifted directors to play with the idea of the spy movie itself. Aside from the title and Lalo Schifrin’s indispensable theme, the movies have little in common with the show of the same name, but these elements, along with a star who seems admirably willing to try variations on his screen persona, have allowed for a wide range of approaches, from impersonal puzzle box to fiery action extravaganza to TV-inspired ensemble piece. And while Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol has the least personal stamp of any movie in the series, it’s perhaps the most culturally significant: along with something of a personal triumph for Tom Cruise, it’s the opening salvo from a generation of Pixar directors who seem destined to shake up the world of live-action film.

To take the most obvious example: the massively hyped action scene at the Burj Khalifa isn’t merely as good as they say, it’s the best use of IMAX I’ve ever seen. As far as I’m concerned, it definitively establishes the supremacy of IMAX over 3D as a medium for generating thrills: the entire sequence, with its crystalline cinematography and breathtaking stunts, is as close to an out-of-body experience as I’ve had at the movies. Like Christopher Nolan, Bird knows how to ground sensational action in what feels like reality—there are only a handful of obvious special effects shots in the entire film. And throughout, he shows a preternatural gift for staging and executing the best kind of action scene: one conceived at the script and storyboard stage, with cleanly defined beats and a real beginning, middle, and end, rather than a Michael Bay-style nightmare of second-unit footage assembled after the fact in the editing room. (In recent years, only the Guggenheim shootout in The International comes close to what Bird offers here in terms of inventiveness and excitement.)

If Ghost Protocol has a flaw, it’s that it never manages to come up with an overarching narrative of the same fluency as its individual parts. It’s true that story has never been this franchise’s strong point—the first installment, in particular, plays like an attempt to spin a feature film from the most gossamer of plot threads. But I’ve always thought that the script for Mission: Impossible II, still my favorite, was surprisingly engaging and self-aware, with a central love triangle profitably copied from Notorious and a lot of witty details. Mission: Impossible III, in turn, was a calculated attempt to humanize the franchise, as well as the only time that J.J. Abrams, as a feature director or producer, has bothered to deliver on the twists that he constantly promises. Ghost Protocol has a lot of cute touches, but it lacks that kind of surprise, and the basic elements have been even more casually assembled than usual, with a vaguely deployed threat of nuclear annihilation and an off-the-shelf bad guy. (The absence of a great villain from Bird, who gave us the hateful Syndrome in The Incredibles, is perhaps the film’s only real disappointment.)

In the end, then, Ghost Protocol comes off as the world’s greatest demo reel, a chance for Bird to demonstrate that he has the willingness and technical ability to do almost anything, as if the real drama here was being played out in the context of the director’s résumé. As I watched it, my mind was curiously divided: while my lower brain was tingling with adrenaline, my higher functions remained relatively detached. For all the film’s excitement, its sense of risk is more visceral than narrative: despite an appealing cast—and this is by far the best team that Ethan Hunt has ever had—the movie never really creates any possibility of danger toward the characters themselves. Still, it’s a movie that I’d happily see again and again, and I doubt that many viewers will complain. As Walter Kerr might have said, this is a machine for exciting the audience, a watch that thrills. And it makes me all the more curious to see the next movie from Brad Bird, who emerges here as a director of great skill and assurance. Once he gets a real story, he’ll be unstoppable.

Andrew Stanton and the world beyond Pixar

Art is messy, art is chaos—so you need a system.

—Andrew Stanton, to the New Yorker

For the second time in less than six months, the New Yorker takes on the curious case of Pixar, and this time around, the results are much more satisfying. In May, the magazine offered up a profile of John Lasseter that was close to a total failure, since critic Anthony Lane’s customary air of disdain was unprepared to draw any useful conclusions about a studio that, at least up to that point, had gotten just about everything blessedly right. This week’s piece by Tad Friend is far superior, focusing on the relatively unsung talents of Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E. And while the publication of a fawning New Yorker profile of a hot creative talent rarely bodes well for his or her next project—as witness the recent articles on Tony Gilroy, Steve Carrell, Anna Faris, or even Lasseter himself, whose profile only briefly anticipated the release of the underwhelming Cars 2—I’m still excited by Stanton’s next project, the Edgar Rice Burroughs epic John Carter, which will serve as a crucial test as to whether Pixar’s magic can extend to the world beyond animation.

Stanton’s case is particularly interesting because of the role he plays at the studio: to hear the article tell it, he’s Pixar’s resident storyteller. “Among all the top talent here,” says Jim Morris, the head of Pixar’s daily operations, “Andrew is the one who has a genius for story structure.” And what makes this all the more remarkable is the fact that Stanton seems to have essentially willed this talent into existence. Stanton was trained as an animator, and began, like most of his colleagues, by focusing on the visual side. As the script for Toy Story was being developed, however, he decided that his future would lie in narrative, and quietly began to train himself in the writer’s craft, reading classic screenplays—including, for some reason, the truly awful script for Ryan’s Daughter—and such texts as Lajos Egri’s The Art of Dramatic Writing. In the end, he was generally acknowledged as the senior writer at Pixar, which, given the caliber of talent involved, must be a heady position indeed.

And while the article is littered with Stanton’s aphorisms on storytelling—”Inevitable but not predictable,” “Conflict + contradiction,” “Do the opposite”—his main virtue as a writer seems to lie in the most universal rule of all: “Be wrong fast.” More than anything else, Stanton’s success so far has been predicated on an admirable willingness to throw things out and start again. He spent years, for instance, working on a second act for Wall-E that was finally junked completely, and while I’m not sure he ever quite cracked the plot for that movie—which I don’t think lives up to the promise of its first twenty minutes—there’s no question that his ruthlessness with structure did wonders for Finding Nemo, which was radically rethought and reconceived several times over the course of production. Pixar, like the rest of us, is making things up as it goes along, but is set apart by its refusal to let well enough alone. As Stanton concludes:

We’re in this weird, hermetically sealed freakazoid place where everybody’s trying their best to do their best—and the films still suck for three out of the four years it takes to make them.

The real question, of course, is whether this approach to storytelling, with its necessary false starts and extensive rendering time, can survive the transition to live action, in which the use of real actors and sets makes retakes—and thus revision—drastically more expensive. So far, it sounds like John Carter is doing fine, at least judging from the trailer and early audience response, which has reportedly been encouraging. And more rides on this movie’s success or failure than the fate of one particular franchise. Pixar’s story has been extraordinary, but its most lasting legacy may turn out to be the migration of its talent beyond the safety zone of animation—assuming, of course, that their kung fu can survive. With Brad Bird’s Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol and John Carter in the wings, we’re about to discover if the directors who changed animation at Pixar can do the same in live action. The New Yorker article is fine, but it buries the lede: Stanton and Bird are the first of many. And if their next movies are half as entertaining as the ones they’ve made so far, we’re looking at an earthquake in the world of pop culture.