"I don't get it," my brother said to me at a recent family function. "Every guy on the radio has a Facebook thing or a MySpace page or a blog or something.... Why are you radio announcers all over the place online?"
"What do you think we're doing while the music's playing? We're screwing around online," I told my brother.
Well, I'm all tickled. Over the weekend, we got a big update on Pixar's slate for the rest of the decade. As we all know, Pixar is the animation studio that brought us such brilliant films as Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. Their next one, Ratatouille, comes out at the end of the month. But here's what they have next.
For 2008, their animated epic is called WALL-E. Taking place 2700 years in the future, it's about a robot (the titular WALL-E) who's been given the task of cleaning up the over-polluted Earth. But then, one day, he meets an alien probe, who is a hot girl robot, and he leaves his post to go tooling around the galaxy with her. Now, what makes this interesting is that they just announced that WALL-E won't have a voice. He will express all his emotions and feelings through sound effects. The man providing the sound effects is Ben Burtt, who did the same thing for R2-D2 in all the Star Wars films. This one is the brainchild of Andrew Stanton, who made Pixar's biggest hit to date, Finding Nemo.
In 2009, Pixar gives us Up. This one is being described as "a coming-of-old-age story." It's about a weird 70-year old man who befriends a cluelss forrest ranger, and they have all kinds of wacky mis-adventures. This one comes to us from Pete Docter, the guy who did Monsters, Inc. Docter says it's about a hero who "travels the globe, fights beasts and villains, and eats dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon."
And then, in 2010, it's Pixar's most controversial film to date: Toy Story 3
. Controversial in that people like me don't think we need a Toy Story 3. But, Pixar policy has always been they'll only do a sequel if they have a really good idea, and they tell us that they have a really good idea for Toy Story 3. The man behind this one is Lee Unkrich, a long-time Pixar editor who served as co-director on Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo.
Speaking of all this animation, on Friday, my final DVD came!
I opened up the mailbox to find my copy of Lupin III: Castle of Cogliostro. For those who don't care, Castle of Cogliostro was the first film from the greatest living animator living today, Hayao Miyazaki. I now have the complete Miyazaki collection!
Since Miyazaki cut his teeth on TV animation, it only makes sense that his first film was the feature film version of a TV show. In this case, it's one of Japan's most famous anime franchises, Lupin III.
In the film, our gentleman theif Lupin III gets a tip that he might finally be able to complete a heist that ended badly in the start of his criminal career. But when he arrives in the country of Cogliostro to carry it out, he discovers a princess locked in a tower and decides to play the part of hero.
There's an urban legend in anime circles that Steven Spielberg declared it one of the greatest action films ever made. And it is a pretty darn exciting film.
Anyway, I now have every Miyazaki film on DVD. As promised in a podcast several months ago, I will now watch them all and review them for the website!
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