Brad Bird - SOOOOPER Genius

[acroyear]

Brad Bird: interview - Features - Film - Time Out London:

I never heard one word in Pixar about ‘Will kids get this?’. I don’t think it’s important that they get everything. I think that it’s important that they get engaged, interested. But I think that people confuse between ‘being interested’ with ‘understanding every single thing’. And therefore, if it can’t be understood by a 5-year-old, it’s not worth putting on film. I just don’t agree with that. I think that children are very smart. I also think that, I would love it if people felt about this film how I feel about a lot of my favourite films where I get different things from them at different ages. Certain jokes I laughed at in ‘Bugs Bunny’ when I was 8 years old are different jokes than the ones I am laughing about now. Now I’m laughing about Daffy Duck looking at the camera and going: ‘pronoun trouble!’, you know. But, I’m still laughing at the same cartoon. So I’m hoping that my movie is a movie that you can see more than once, and at different times in your life and get different things from it.

Comments

[fiona64.livejournal.com]

I was fortunate enough to hear Brad Bird speak at Wondercon in San Francisco, doing a presentation on making Ratatouille He made a similar point then, and I agree with it completely. If you make an intelligent, clever film with engaging characters, people *will* want to see it again ... and will pick up more nuances as appropriate.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

and not just "want to see it again" but "want to see it again years later".

Why is there such a demand for Bugs Bunny from the 40s/50s, yet a cartoon network "original program" from just 5 years ago seems so dated as to promote disgust?

Managing the Muppets suffers exactly the same problem, but that was part of the larger rant I had a few months ago, that the TV people would rather target a specific demographic so tightly that the target audience becomes so addicted to the show that they hold onto the remote and don't share it. This is the opposite of GOOD programming, where the material has so much going for it that the family really does SHARE the experience, even as each member may find one or two things boring or unfamiliar.

Jerry Jule (head writer) was a genius. Only he could not only pull out the most obvious and ridiculous puns and japes, but do it in a way that we WANTED to stick around to hear the next one...

[thatliardiego.livejournal.com]

TV people would rather target a specific demographic so tightly

This is what happens when it gets taken away from the "creative people" and handed to "the marketing people."