Just forget the words and sing along

Friday, October 03, 2014

Two Trailers: Inside Out and Big Eyes

Hey!

There's a couple of trailers I've been wanting to sit and blog about for a while, but tonight, I finally have a chance to sit down and do so!

Inside Out Teaser poster.  The tagline is "Meet the Little Voices Inside Your Head."


First up, let's take a look at Pixar's latest, Inside Out.  Let's be honest, Pixar's been in kind of a slump lately.  We had the abysmal Cars 2, the disappointing Brave, and the "eh, it could've been worse" Monsters University.  The slump caught up with them, as this year's originally scheduled film, The Good Dinosaur, ran into production delays and got pushed back to next November.

So, fingers crossed that Inside Out is a return to form.  Returning to the director's chair is Pete Docter, the writer and director of the Pixar classics Monsters, Inc. and Up.  When we first told of the project back in 2011, all we were told was that it takes place inside a little girl's mind.  As time goes on, we're told that it takes place inside the mind of a little girl named Emily, who's coping with her family's big move to San Fransisco.  And it's told from the point of view of the personifications of her emotions, who guide her through this journey.  Those emotions are:
  • Joy, voiced by Amy Poehler
  • Anger, voiced Lewis Black, the stand up comic whose made anger an art form
  • Disgust, voiced by The Mindy Project star Mindy Kaling
  • Sadness, voiced by Phyllis Smith; probably best remembered as Phyllis on The Office
  • and Fear, voiced by SNL alum Bill Hader

Roll clip!




Honestly, I'm not quite sure what to make of it yet, as we see precious little of the film.  It reminds me a lot of the first trailer for Wall-E, because that one also relied heavily on clips from other Pixar films.  It looks bright, it looks colourful and...yeah.  All I can do is get mildly excited and remain cautiously optimistic.

Inside Out comes out on June 19.  





Next up,we have Big Eyes, the latest from one of my favourite directors, Tim Burton.  Burton is another guy who seems to have been in a slump lately, as he seems to be stuck in this cycle of big screen reboots and adaptations starring Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter.  So I'm glad to see that Big Eyes looks to be Burton scaling things down a bit, and doing away with his safety net of Depp and Carter.

Burton re-teams with his old Ed Wood screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski to bring us another biography of quirky American individuals, Margaret and Walter Keene.  Margaret Keene is the painter who gave us those infamous paintings of children with really big eyes.  Thanks to the marketing savvy of her husband Walter, the paintings became a pop culture phenomenon in the 1960s.  However, Walter began taking credit for the paintings himself, much to the chagrin of Margaret.  The question of the true authorship of the paintings became an intrinsic part of their bitter divorce.

Amy Adams plays Margaret Keene, and Cristoph Waltz plays Walter.




This looks interesting.  Given the timing of the release and the subject matter, it's definitely Oscar bait.  I'm really enjoying Burton scaling things down and doing something smaller than his recent work.  It think it's worth a look-see.

Big Eyes comes out on Christmas Day. 

No comments: