mental manifestations

There is something very special about Pixar films that captured my mind since I saw the original Toy Story movie Thanksgiving Day in 1995. I remember it being a special family occasion that we did together. I was in the sixth grade at that time, still very young and still growing. I remember Toy Story was the first major motion picture that was entirely computer-generated that I saw in my life.

I remember the film was one of the most visually appealing things I had seen. I had no previous exposure to Pixar except for Sesame Street shorts that featured their little lamp. The other thing I remember about the film was that it had a very engrossing plot. Anytime a Pixar film came out, I would always be eager to go to the movie theater and watch their latest film. At some point, Pixar started screening shorts right before the movie started. As this became a regular feature, I looked forward to seeing these short films as part of my movie experience. I didn’t understand what it was about the film that made me like it so much until I was in my late teens and early adulthood.

What makes Pixar so fun to watch and experience is in how they present their content. The storytelling aspect is what draws the viewer in and is what captured me when I saw the first Toy Story movie. What they did was open up a world and invited everyone into it. It was stuff of pure imagination and somehow they were able to tap into the childhood recesses of the mind that had been displaced by the reality of growing up.

Pixar’s films are really stories for adults and not just children. It has a universal type of feeling to it, that everyone can connect personally with the film deep down inside. They don’t resort to fart jokes, toilet humor, and cheap thrills like in other movies produced by other mainstream animation studios. I think those things are very insulting, and watching those kinds of movies is the visual equivalent of eating junk food. Even Pixar’s bad films are still good compared to other movies.

Somehow Pixar doesn’t try to one-up themselves and upstage their previous films. I believe that is what hurts sequels more often than makes them better. More importantly, Pixar also manages to find a balance between art and entertainment (which I associate the terms “film” and “movie” with respectively)  and still be marketable a pleasurable story for everyone.

With Toy Story 3, Pixar took me back to the world that I felt when I was young. That was 15 years ago, and the premise of the Toy Story 3 is that the toys have to contend with growing up and facing reality. Seeing old characters was exciting and disheartening when others were not present anymore. It is one of the more emotional movies Pixar has produced because it represents how we all have to deal with change and growing up. It’s about ending and beginnings, letting go of the past but not forgetting it either

I’ve been itching to see a bunch of movies, but haven’t due to lack of time. Most movies I don’t see in theaters generally because most movies are not worth seeing. There are specific ones I will pay to see in theaters even if they are tremendously horrible only because I’m a sucker for them (or extremely bored). For most of my life, my family had always gone to Blockbuster or other local stores for video rentals. When I was in college, I started collecting DVDs of movies and films that I liked, but there was always someone who had some movie you wanted to see lying around. Now that my lifestyle has changed once again, I began looking into a new outlet of consumption.

I have a sufficient amount of bandwidth for streaming videos, however I am hugely disappointed by the supplied quality. It’s okay at best and a huge disappointment that suppliers can’t provide the purported better quality technology over a medium that is changing the way people interact. People are becoming more and more mobile which means that data will have to be compressed or reduced in order to satisfy technical requirements. That irks me on a huge level since entertainment echnology is turned into a cheapened video and audio experience for the sake of convenience. That is why I have turned away from streaming video. The price point of renting a poor quality streaming video online is not worth it either.

My cable/Internet supplier does provide video on demand and pay-per-view options which seemed like an initial attraction but extremely overpriced for what it is. I would have to upgrade my package and pay more out my pocket per month for a service that I would have to pay more money for should I choose to actually use it. That’s a huge no for me. That basically left Blockbuster and Netflix. For a while, I had been considering the advantages and disadvantages to both services. Blockbuster has a physical store in a very close proximity to me, but also an online service to compete with Netflix.

I decided to sign up for a one-month free trial of Netflix, and I was hooked on it instantly. I never found the service to be all that attractive, but my lifestyle has changed greatly over the last ten years, and now I finally understand its popularity. It’s nice to have a queue of movies to watch on DVD that are automatically mailed to you with no late fees, free shipping, and all the time you want to watch it. Having a queue gives me more motivation to actually watch the movie and receive the next since I can only take out one movie at a time (which is Netflix’s most basic plan). The time factor and having a physical disk is more incentivizing to watch than having some file downloaded onto my computer and sit there. The price is a good deal that would make it worthwhile for me to pay the for the service.

Blockbuster is also competing with Netflix now in the online business. Their plan is roughly the same with a few extras. I’ll probably sign up for a one-month trial with them after my Netflix trial expires to see what their service is like. I imagine it won’t be hugely different on the surface. Either one should be able to satisfy my need for media consumption.