SmartShanghai | Art Shots: PIXAR @ MoCA

Art Shots: PIXAR @ MoCA

By Morgan Short, Aug 10th, 2011 | In Art

Was expecting to outright explode into tears of poignant sadness and then life-affirming joy at the PIXAR exhibition at MOCA. Didn’t, but came real close. It’s pretty good. Just BE YOURSELF, dammit! Be yourself, for God’s sake! Celebrate humility, friendship, and honesty with ever fibre of your being and everything that you do, and all good things shall always come to you. This is what PIXAR teaches us.

But, yeah, down at the MOCA is this exhibition, “PIXAR: 25 Years of Animation”, which is an internationally touring show, opened in Shanghai on August 1, featuring an exhaustive and multi-faceted behind-the-scenes look at the PIXAR animation studio’s various films. PIXAR is the animation studio that can do no wrong -- they’ve had the Academy Awards on lock-down for as long as anyone can remember -- they even get nominated for outright “Best Picture”, not just the animation stuff -- and are behind virtually all the genre-defining, big studio animation movies of the last twenty years or so. Finding Nemo, Monsters INC., the Toy Story franchise, A Bug’s Life, The Incredibles, Cars, Cars 2, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, not to mention a series of award-dominating short animation films -- unfailing critical successes, box office smashes, movies that teach nice lessons to kids but also reduce their adult audiences to tears and make them think, “gosh darn it, I should start being a better, kinder person, what’s wrong with me.”

Remember these scenes? WALL-E holding his iPod girlfriend’s hand in that storm, the mean critic from Ratatouille delivering that “friend to the new” speech at the end, the first ten minutes or so of Up, with that montage of the main character’s entire life with his wife, up until she dies…

SIGH. SIGH. SIGH.

With previous runs in UK, Finland, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong
Kong, “PIXAR: 25 Years of Animation” in Shanghai features two floors of stills, sketches, sculptures, layouts, scene plots, and paintings separated into sections by movie title -- artwork from the movies and inspired by the movies, with the exhibition centerpiece being this whirling animation Toy Story installation thing that is fabulous. There’s a variety of styles of material as well, reflecting the studio’s predilections to incorporate different forms of animation in their films (i.e. the cut-out title sequences in The Incredibles), and along with the works themselves, there’s lots of company background, tracing PIXAR's development from a little (ish) Lucasfilm 45-person computer animation studio in 1979 to, aside from Disney who now owns it, the most recognizable and definitely the most revered name in animation today.

The exhibition is primarily for the fans -- PIXAR fans who have taken these characters into their lives and are looking for more of the story of how they all came into existence. There’s lots of sketches, replete with notes on these characters, illustrating how finely-wrought everything is. If you value these characters and these stories, it’s interesting… nay, it’s heart-warming, of course … to see that same value mirrored on the other side of it, in their creation, and that’s the reason to go.

So yeah, *SOB*. It’s great! *SOB*

“PIXAR: 25 Years of Animation” is on at MOCA until October 30. You have to pay to get in. 70rmb on weekdays. 100rmb on weekends. Accompanying booklet with the show is 30rmb. Yeah.

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