For the week of March 2nd, Walt Disney Home Entertainment is giving a number of Pixar films 4K Blu-ray updates. With them, it's possible to chart over twenty years of fluctuating creative development in the life of the famed animation house. Something like A Bug's Life seems aesthetically primitive today; CGI circa 1998 had a plastic, synthetic look, and the forced smoothness of the insect character designs clashes against the lush, organic surroundings. But if Pixar couldn't deliver perfect digital effects, they could excel in story, and A Bug's Life has a humdinger. It repurposes Seven Samurai's super-structure to show how a colony of meek ants contracted a motley crew of offbeat "warriors" in order to protect them from a horde of vicious grasshoppers. This might be the best Seven Samurai remake, so warm is the character work and so thrilling is the action. 2001's Monsters, Inc., by comparison, is a sweeter, more amiable comedy - we follow two genial monsters as they're forced to care for an adorable human toddler - but it represents an advancement in Pixar's technical and emotional vocabularies. The Sully animation revolutionized CGI fur; the character has a tactile quality that makes him almost immediately approachable (and the great John Goodman vocal performance certainly helps, too). But it's his relationship with young Boo that lingers. By the end of the film, their union has the power of something like the Jackie Coogan and Charlie Chaplin pairing in The Kid. That Chaplin connection carries over to Pixar's 2008 masterwork WALL•E, which still feels like a watershed movie for the company. It remains the closest thing Pixar has ever made to an experimental art film. The first forty minutes, a wordless, lyrical immersion into the life of the title robot, distills all of Pixar's strengths into bold, graphic (as in, design) totems: movement, behavior, and action. That this sequence is also able to break your heart while saying nothing only enhances its power. Others may disagree, but WALL•E marks the exact moment when Pixar seemed capable of anything. How else would we have gotten a movie like Up a year later? Structurally, this isn't one of the studio's strongest venture - the plotting often resembles a billion-dollar "And, then...?" exercise, so manically does the film slingshot from floating houses to thought-extinct super birds to talking dogs to dirigible battles - but after a dozen or so viewings, I still find myself wondering what's going to happen next. Plus, I defy you to find someone not moved to open-mouthed sobs after the film's wrenching first act. Like the rest of the movie, you don't see it coming. But nothing gold can stay, and eventually Pixar transitioned from exceptional to consistently "solid." It's why we get far more these days like Monsters University, a Monsters, Inc prequel that offers nothing more than a kid-friendly gloss on Revenge of the Nerds. It's fun enough, I guess. But it isn't essential, which isn't something I thought Pixar could be.
From Kino Lorber comes a box set of Sergio Leone Westerns, which compiles his five masterworks in the genre. First up are the "Man with No Name" entries: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Despite the slight inaccuracy of that label (Clint Eastwood's central cowboy actually does have a name in each entry, though the fact that it changes from film to film suggests a certain degree of impermanence), these three pictures remain the iconic Spaghetti Westerns, the ones with which Leone has secured his legacy in screen history. They really demonstrate the old, "it's the telling, not the tale" adage; Leone and his screenwriters crib equal parts from Yojimbo, Lawrence of Arabia, the oaters of Budd Boetticher, and even Hollywood adventures like Gunga Din to craft the narratives for A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. However, it's the style that makes these features feel like more than crass ripoffs. Leone might appropriate parts of other films with abandon, but he recasts them in a harsh, unforgiving light. These aren't the fun Westerns that John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and the Cisco Kid headlined – Leone's "heroes" are venal, petty, and cruel, and if Eastwood's character comes off as more likable than the rest, it's only because the people he kills are so much worse (shades of Richard Stark's "Parker" character). Everything, from morals to geography (while the three films are set in Mexico and the American Southwest, Leone shot them primarily in Spain and Italy), is off-kilter in Leone's world, and that dislocation makes his Westerns fascinating to consider. For many, though, Leone's masterwork is Once Upon a Time in the West, a Western phantasmagoria that uses the battle between a proud frontierswoman (Claudia Cardinale) and a vicious hired gun (Henry Fonda, demolishing his "Aw, shucks" screen image) to pay homage to what feels like every screen Western ever made. The film doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but it doesn't have to - Leone is working in widescreen images and glorious setpieces, none better than the storied opening sequence, which waits, and waits, and waits as a group of outlaws steel themselves against Charles Bronson's mysterious gunman. By comparison, Leone's A Fistful of Dynamite can't help but suffer. It's a lot of nonsense involving Rod Steiger's Mexican revolutionary and James Coburn's IRA bomber. Yet Leone maintains his eye for the mythic west, all the way through the surprisingly downbeat finale.
Of A Fistful of Dollars, Brian Orndorf wrote that Leone "reinvented the [Western] genre, delivering extraordinary tension and cinematographic intensity, finding special stylistic magic with his first effort in the future "Dollars Trilogy," which turned Leone into a legend and star Clint Eastwood into an icon." Orndorf then called The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly "the most famous of the Spaghetti Westerns, the picture that shot Clint Eastwood to worldwide fame, and remains arguably the finest movie Sergio Leone ever directed...A power play among three morally dubious characters remains at the heart of the feature, all chasing the elusive promise of gold, but the effort is really more of a showcase for Leone's inimitable style, which becomes an unstoppable force as the endeavor unfolds." Martin Liebman echoed those ideas in his review of Once Upon a Time in the West, writing of the film's "breathtaking cinematic framing, pacing, and emotional and thematic manipulation through moving imagery...a masterwork within not only the Western genre but throughout the entire cinematic landscape...one of admittedly many practically faultless films to be sure but nevertheless one of a relatively small grouping when compared against the entire history of motion pictures."