Today I saw both “The Incredibles” and “The Polar Express” and I was so impressed with the animation on both that I was inspired to start this thread.
I was going to make this thread more specific by adding “Pixar” somewhere in the thread title but I figured it’d make more sense to keep the thread open to other CG animated films.
Please keep your contributions in spoiler tags! We will probably be posting about several films and it’s unlikely that a poster will come in having already seen all the films mentioned.
Finding Nemo
[spoiler]Near the beginning of the movie, there is a scene where Marlin tells a joke (unsuccessfully) to some friends–dads of other students at his son’s school. The three fish are at first very interested in hearing the joke, but as Marlin’s focus is lost and the listeners lose interest, the eyes of the fish on the left diverge outward.
Ehh… you kind of need to see it to know what I mean.[/spoiler]
I notice several of these kinds of things in Pixar movies. These tiny details are such strong indicators of how much hard work and love for the art Pixar’s animators put into their movies.
“The Incredibles” was excellent, by the way. It may even be my favourite Pixar movie of all time, which is a surprise because I was unimpressed when I first saw the teasers.
In Monsters Inc, there is a bit where Sully is going through Boo’s toy box.
He pulls out several toys that were featured in their earlier films. The ball with a star on it. and Jessie the Cowgirl from Toy Story 2 and he also pulls out Nemo and that film hadn’t come out yet.
You know, since there are not major plot points I don’t think the spoiler boxes are necessary.
I can’t think of any specific examples at the moment, but I do know exactly what you mean. This hit me at some point in my childhood. I was watching Tom and Jerry, and while I can’t remember what the specific thing was, it was something along the lines of Tom’s whisker being curled as a result of something. The curl could have been left out, but it added just a little extra “oomph” to the joke, and I remember realizng (I was young!) that if the curl was there, it was because someone had put it there, indicating that someone had thought through the joke well enough to think to add that little extra thing in there.
Ever since, I’ve always noticed such things.
Unfortunately, I just can’t recall any at the moment.
My favorite nuance is from the adult anime Dragon Pink. A band of D&D type heroes pull to a halt in a clearing in the woods. The leader, Santa, jumps on his slavegirl, Pink, strips all her clothes off and ties her hands behind her back.
Here’s the nuance: as he’s doing this, Pink cries: “It’s too early!”
The nuance lies in what she didn’t say: she didn’t say, “No, please no!” or “Not in front of the others!” The implication being that this was someting that happened to her regularly, and in front of the others, but later in the evening, and that she was used to it.
Nice. (Turns out Santa was tying Pink up to use her as bait for a monster – she didn’t much care for that either.)
In the first episode of Futurama when Fry falls over into the freezer, we see Nibbler’s shadow. We later learn that Nibbler deliberately brought Fry to the future.
In a later episode the professor invents the ‘what if’ machine. Fry asks what if he had never come to the future. We see the same scene again, only this time no Nibbler’s shadow, and Fry doesn’t get frozen.
In the Incredibles; Elastigirl’s trying to evade the missles in an jet (that looks remarkably like a Gulfstream, btw…), her call sign was India George 99 (IG99), another Brad Bird film, the Iron Giant, was released in '99
when the missles are locked on the Gulfstream, she calls out multiple times “Buddy Spike, Buddy Spike!” which is fighter pilot lingo meaning the missle launcher has a radar lock (spike) on a freindly target
when the aircraft is destroyed, unlike other films, where the debris of the aircraft just dissapears, in this film, they have to deal with the falling debris…
just subtle details i appreciated as an armchair pilot…
Again in Futurama, in fact in the very first episode, there is some point where the robot Bender is frightened by something and literally shits a brick, which clunks to the floor under him. It happens so fast that it’s hard to notice. My sister, her husband and I, who were watching the show on tape, all looked at each other and said at the same time, “Did you see that?” We ran the tape back, and sure enough, that’s what happens.
A common thing that teenagers who own older Toyota pickups seem to do is remove the first two and last two letters of the “TOYOTA” decal on the tailgate so that it reads “YO” instead. In the first Toy Story film, the tailgate of the pizza delivery kid’s pickup clearly shows this modification.
