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[zustifer]

This article mostly makes me sick. This is the movie industry, guys. What the game industry aspires to be. You can't tell, can you? 'Rats must not be hot, because Dreamworks/Aardman's thing didn't do well. The rat content is obviously the only factor worth looking at here.'

I'm not a fan of the Pixar rat character designs, incidentally; I don't see why with Steve Purcell on the team this was the best they could come up with. They're a poor compromise between 'realism' and 'less scary,' I think. People who are scared of rats/mice are scared of
1. fast motion
2. naked tails and paws
3. yellow gnawing teeth
4. beady shark eyes
(And then maybe disease-carrying or whatever, but I'm concerned with visual stuff.) So Pixar removed most of those things (installing white human teeth; did we learn nothing from Stuart Little?), but left a big one, naked appendages. Also, I don't see why all the character designs out of them nowadays have this huge freaking white eye area with a relatively small iris/pupil. Can't we balance this out a little? The feeling of beadiness isn't really alleviated with this approach, either.

Side note: I don't remember the Cars trailers very well at all. I remember having a pretty negative reaction to them, though, but that was in regards to the character designs. Especially in the context of whatever television surrounded the trailer, the characters took a while to even parse, as I recall.

Parting shot: Christ. What did we as a people do to deserve this webpage?

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

They don't seem to consider the possibility that the problem with Cars was the quality of the movie. Everyone goes to Pixar movies because they're usually good.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, the assumption that NASCAR fans will watch absolutely anything with a NASCAR angle is kind of insulting.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

Agreed.
I just really dislike the angle of 'we obviously failed to market Cars correctly, because it wasn't as popular as [some arbitrary thing] so now we need to market extra hard and TELL people they need to see our movies! Except we can't sell toys because who would buy a toy rat! It's like bizarro world!' As you imply, it's just only a marketing problem to them.

[wasta.livejournal.com]

I was pretty disappointed by the rat design from Pixar. The pink and gray is too much for me. I'll probably go see it though. Right after I buy a copy of the Incredibles.

PS: Love your new(?) journal design.

[sanspoof.livejournal.com]

It's a vox default thing, the scheme... I wanted to use the squid one, but in friends-list format it was just really hard on the eyes. This is still not great, but it's better than that one.

I probably will see the rat movie too, although I will even more likely wait to see what people think.