“So good I’m surprised it’s not better” sums up how I feel about most Pixar films. They’re so polished that they seem kind of dead: expensive show dogs that have been so primped and groomed that nobody noticed the poor animal expired during its last blow-dry.

Soul is an exercise in box-ticking. It’s hip, diverse, and relevant: featuring an African American protag near the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, and showcasing jazz music when that was having a mainstream moment, too (Whiplash, La-La Land, Adam Neely…). It has an “high concept” tilt, addressing themes of life, death, and fate. It has cute characters that can be turned into toys. It has leavens serious moments with jokes at the correct places. It reaches for the stars, but also has characters that are just like you. It does everything right.

But jazz has something called “blue notes”, where a note is bent a little out of correct pitch. Magic happens on the edges, on the fault lines, on the places where Discordia fights Aneris. Soul really needed blue notes.

I thought the beginning was wonderful. A part-time music teacher is offered a) a permanent position at a job he hates, and b) a seat with a famous jazz quartet. His mom wants him to take the steady paycheck, while he wants to follow his dream (although we wonder whether his dream working for the tyrannic band leader will be as fun as he imagines.) Joe Gardner feels real in a way that most Pixar heroes don’t.

On his way to purchase a suit for the big gig, he falls down a manhole, and enters a permenant vegetative state. His spirit emerges in a kind of celestial mail-sorting room, full of souls. Some are departing for the hereafter, others are going to inhabit newly-born infants. He hatches a plan to sneak back to his body on Earth, using a rebellious soul called 22.

The movie becomes a bit too talky for its own good. A lot of time is spent explaining the mechanics by which souls operate (literalizing things that should be left unsaid), and this is when Soul stopped possessing one. As soon as characters started infodumping about the rules of their fictional universe I became very bored. This should be the part of the movie where it detonates. Joe has essentially died. He’s at the point where the chains of words and language break, the ceiling of the universe is flung open, and he’s staring up infinity’s tunnel. The possibilities should be endless.

Instead, the story gets jammed up in its own turning gears (souls must visit special “Personality Pavilions” to infuse them with personality traits, but there’s also a critical “Spark” that can only be found in the Hall of Everything, and once they have both the Spark and the Personality they can receive an Earth Pass, which allows them to…). I felt like I’d arriving late for a D&D session and the Dungeon Master insisted on explaining the minutia of the past three hours before I was allowed to play.

The best Pixar movie may have been the first. Toy Story had nearly no exposition. Toys are alive. What more do you need? Later Pixar movies held your hand a little, but there was often a reason for it. In Monsters Inc, the joke was that these freaky monsters are living in a rules-heavy bureaucracy, so it sort of made sense. But here? I think Pixar has forgotten how to make movies any other way.

Pete Docter’s 2015 monster Inside-Out seems to have set the tone for latter-day Pixar. A minimalist abstraction, with five tons of exposition clinging to its bones. It might have seemed wonderfully simple to have “anger” and “sadness” as characters. But they couldn’t figure out a way to tell a story visually, so they had to add so much in-universe lore that the movie suffered greatly for it. Docter wanted his film to fly so badly that he crushed it under the weight of huge steel wings, and something similar happens here.

This aside, the movie’s stylistic choices are almost uniformly great. The New York setting is colorful, and the jazz scenes are good. In my opinion, jazz is far more fun to play than to listen to, but it’s also enjoyable watching people play it, even when they’re animated characters.

The jokes are well-judged, with only an extended body-swap gag getting aborted before it grew too irritating. The angels look fantastic. Weird glowing coathangers, or yin-and-yang collisions of positive and negative space. Very creative stuff.

The souls themselves are sickeningly cute moppets with huge eyes, so clearly designed to be plushy dolls that you can almost see a Made in China tag hanging off them. Like much of the movie’s choices, it’s correct, but maybe not exactly good. Part of why I’m cold on Pixar films is that they all seem like a marketing team was set loose on them before a writer ever was. Antz was better than A Bug’s Life, despite its flaws. I don’t want to watch 90-minute toy commercials.

I admire Soul more than I like it. Once, as a child, I tried to make a bowl out of modeling clay. I didn’t know that potters use a wheel, so I tried to painstakingly create the same kind of smoothness with my fingers. I spent hours patting and prodding and shaping clay, until it was covered in my fingerprints. The result was a correct but loveless pot that I couldn’t stand to look at. It hurt me, because I remembered the tediousness of the process.

Soul has a similar affect. When I look at it, I don’t see a movie so much as compacted effort. Dozens of creative people sweating over every decision, trying to create something universally marketable and appealing, afraid to take any risks at all. Afraid that someone, somewhere, won’t like what they’ve made. Consumed by neurosis that they’ll have done the slightest thing wrong. The jazz theme is surface-deep: Pixar in 2020 is as far from Miles Davis as you can get.

The heart-wrenching story of Jack, a simple farmhand who can talk to animals, Forrest Gump gets worse every year. I am not the first to notice its entropic quality: the way it lies rotting in cinematic history like a corpse reeking inside a bog. The movie fluxes and changes as time squeezes its hand, but never in a good way. Its skin grows putrid, its features grows sunken, its bones shine through gaps in its deliquescent flesh. Long, slow death is pulling it down and then tearing it apart. Six Academy Awards, seven hundred million dollars at the box office, and now this. The movie’s hollow, rictus-grinning skull is an urgent warning: you can take none of this with you.

I thought it was a great movie once, when I was eight or nine (I watched it with Mom and Dad, they they fast-forwarded through the part in the burlesque club).

Another thing I did when I was eight or nine was create a superhero called Yarn Dog. He was a dachshund who could rapidly knit complex objects. In one of Yarn Dog’s adventures, the villain hurls him off a cliff, so he whips out a trusty ball of yarn, gets clackin’ with his needles, and knits a fully-functioning helicopter around his falling body. Moments before he hits the ground, he grabs the throttle and flies his yarn helicopter away into the sunset which is actually a profound metaphor for

I hate Forrest Gump. It’s so bad. Its main storytelling choice—to tell the history of late 20th century America from the perspective of a mentally-handicapped man—is tactical: Forrest is too slow to form opinions on anything happening around him, which means the writers don’t have to form one, either.

Forrest Gump takes no stances, advances no arguments, makes no interpretations. It is a movie about nothing. It’s a rapid-fire montage of historic moments (Vietnam, Watergate), with Forrest Gump standing around looking oblivous. I wonder what are you supposed to “get” out of Forrest Gump? That the sixties happened? I already knew that.

This movie thinks you’re abysmally stupid. Every plot point is explained to death, reanimated using a Necronomicon, then explained some more. The first (but by no means last or worst) example comes when Forrest’s mother tries to enroll him in school. The principal says it’s impossible, because his IQ is 75.

This doesn’t need further exposition. Even if you don’t know how IQ scores work, you can infer from context that Forrest is unintelligent. We get it. It’s not necessary for the principle to pull out a chart, and indicate for the audience where Forrest is on the distribution.

While that might seem like a small complaint, it exhibits one of the film’s main problems: it never knows when to stop. Whether it’s explaining the plot, telling a joke, or making a cultural reference, Forrest Gump always goes too far, spoiling its desired affect with crassness.

It’s not enough that Forrest met Elvis as a kid. He inspires Elvis’s stage moves, too! It’s not enough that he stays at the Watergate hotel. He also exposes the plot! It’s not enough that he meets John Lennon. He basically writes the lyrics to “Imagine”, live on TV!

(The film makes Lennon look like an imbecile, with the questions he asks Forrest. “No possessions? No religion?” Lennon had been involved in revolutionary politics for years by that point. Surely he’d heard of China.)

By the end of the film, it’s absurd that Forrest isn’t the most famous person in America, recognized wherever he goes. Literally two dozen things have happened to him that would be the coolest-ever event in the life of the average man. He’s received the Medal of Honor, competed at a historic international sporting event event, foiled a conspiracy, met multiple US Presidents, and that’s just for openers. In real life, a guy from Milwaukee became a national craze just by looking a little like Hugh Jackman.

The movie has no weight or believability behind it. The image of a drifting feather kind of sums up the film.

But it’s a comedy film. So I shouldn’t analyze it seriously or literally at all.

This is the “clown nose on, clown nose off” defense, described by Kevin D Williamson here—when a comedian starts doing serious political commentary, they invariably cover up their mistakes by putting a clown nose on and reminding you that they’re just a comedian.

The fact is, Forrest Gump is only barely a comedy film. It’s sanctimonious Oscar bait, lightened only by Forrest’s oblivious commentary, and huge sections of it are played completely straight.

Sometimes the movie’s just laughable. At the start, Forrest is wearing leg braces, but when he gets chased by some comical “gimme your lunch money” movie bullies, he starts running, and the braces dramatically explode from his legs in a thousand pieces. It has the air of a superhero transformation, like the Incredible Hulk tearing apart a shirt. Those braces couln’t have been cheap. My only thought was “now his mom will have to fuck the orthopedic doctor as well as the school principal.”

A big part of the film’s credit was the special effects—with Robert Zemeckis directing, how could they not be excellent?

But looking back, the effects are quite hit or miss. The effect where they remove Lt Dan’s legs looks great. The entire Vietnam sequence looks fake to me. Rain is generated by a hose held above the actors (you can clearly see no rain is falling in the background). The monsoon season ends, and moments later, the leaves and grass look bone-dry. Forrest narrowly escapes multiple thermobaric bomb explosions…and immediately has a conversation with a wounded soldier? His eardrums haven’t ruptured from the overpressure blasts?

Other shots composite Forrest into archival footage. But it looks “wrong” in a way your brain subconsciously (if not consciously) picks up on. As I’ve said before, people automatically position their bodies to accomodate the presence of others, and it’s obvious when this isn’t happening. You can’t just digitally insert a new human being who wasn’t there in real life. He will conspicuously not belong in the scene.

There were some parts I liked. Lt Dan has a character and a personality. The joke about Forrest making millions investing in “some kind of fruit company” was funny.

But these gains are erased by the soap opera plotline involving Jenny. She’s just a poor moppet, a collection of shameless cliches. An abused child, a drug addict, and on and on.

Here is where it comes closest to actually saying something about the values of the 60s counterculture, and the way—according to some—they were either hollow, or swiftly sold out by the hippies themselves. (I saw a funny joke on Twitter: a picture of Woodstock, captioned with “somewhere in that crowd is the man who invented ATM fees”). But Jenny is such a manipulative cliche of a character that this falls flat.

Forrest Gump does provide an interesting illustration of something.

The “Waluigi Effect” in generative AI describes the tendency for a language model to give the opposite output than expected. Read it for technical details, but basically, if you specifically ask an AI to be smart, you’ve accidentally made it more likely to say something stupid. This is because [positive trait] and [opposite of positive trait] exist close in probability space, and when you push the model toward one, you inevitably push it toward the other.

But this happens to humans, too. What is “Imagine” by John Lennon except the Waluigi Effect? It is clearly trying to be profound and deep and meaningful, but it just sounds really trite. It wants to unite humanity, but it’s surprisingly mean and catty (John’s smug “I wonder if you can…”) It rejects religion, but strives for the stateliness of a secular hymn.

Forrest Gump is an even better case. It wants picturesque authenticity but feels tinny and fake from end to end. I have never seen a movie so utterly the opposite of what it thinks it is than Forrest Gump.

I hate puppets, but like the Muppets. It’s something of a predicament, for the Muppets are puppets.

I’m OK with Kermit and the animalian muppets. But the muppets that are supposed to be human (like Bunsen and Beaker) inspire loathing and horror. I want to mercy-kill them. The way their mouths naturally hang open makes it look like they’re screaming, as if a witch imprisoned the souls of people inside itchy piles of suffering cloth.

Oddly enough, that’s nearly the plot of this movie. The story comes from the Der Froschkönig (lit. “The Frog King”) by the Brothers Grimm: a witch transforms a heroic knight into a frog, true love’s kiss is the only way the spell can reverse, details details details. In effect, it’s another of Henson studio’s “famous story, but with muppets cracking jokes” adaptations.

Henson was a master. Despite this being a cheap TV movie from 1971, he goes balls-to-the-wall, tackling tricky shot after tricky shot. Puppets move around scenes, entering and leaving each other’s space. They interact believably with human actors. We see their feet. We see frog puppets leap and swim, and even a puppet bird flying. King Rupert II’s mouth is perfectly synced up with his words, and his hands gesticulate at the correct moments (I assume there were multiple performers controlling him).

The budget precludes nutso stuff like “Kermit riding a bike” or “Jennifer Connelly exploring an MC Escher castle”, but Henson seems hell-bent on making puppets do things they shouldn’t. Why not? It’s not as if they can unionize and demand overtime and a dental plan.

The star of the dish is Henson’s inspired directing, and the writing is merely adequate. As with Sesame Street, it’s for little kids, with occasional jokes aimed at adults. King Rupert II makes a royal announcement from a castle balcony, and then starts doing hacky stand-up, with a royal advisor reminding the crowd to laugh—that sort of thing. Princess Melora has been cursed by a witch (the same one that transformed Robin) so that she spoonerizes all her words (she says “you’re a wearable titch!” instead of “you’re a terrible witch!”—that sort of thing). Sometimes it’s funny, but they draw from that comedic well a little too much.

The music is fairly weak, and so is the acting. Princess Melora is the movie’s only actress (she would later play a groupie on Pink Floyd’s The Wall—this fact is more interesting than anything she says or does in The Frog Prince). Jim Henson’s Kermit and Jerry Nelson’s Robin are fine, but director Jerry Juhl voices the witch Taminella with an annoying NOOO YAWK accent.

None of the “classic” Muppets appear, aside from Kermit, Robin, and Sweetums. Speaking of the latter, I highly enjoyed the scene where Sweetums goes crazy and smashes a dungeon. It’s hard to go wrong with a good room-wrecking scene, whether it’s Citizen Kane or the muppets. The ending of the film strikes the right sentimental note, and it ends in a cute song.

The strength of the Muppets as a franchise is their adaptability. They could be in anything, and connect with anything. You can have them host a PBS children’s program. You can have them talk to Orson Welles. They had no limits as a franchise, and with a competent director and someone who knew, they could be a reliable money-spinner that stayed relevant for decades and decades.

Weird and disturbing through they could be, the Muppets outlived the man who created them. I wonder how long it took before Jim Henson realized that this would be his legacy—he’d be remembered as the man who shoved a hand up Kermit the Frog’s metaphorical rectum, and little else. How did that make him feel? Defeated, or proud? Or both?

He certainly got to indulge most of his artistic impulses. The Muppets filmography is broad and diverse. Pretty much the only thing they never did was raunchy R-rated comedy (his son Brian directed The Happy Time Murders, which made me tap out 10 minutes in, so maybe Henson Senior’s judgment was correct.)

I’m uncertain as to how well the Muppets hold up for adults.

The Muppet Show and several of the Muppet movies still hold up. The overwhelming, cloying sentiment probably locks The Frog Prince into “kids only”. Although there’s a point where kitsch crosses over and becomes a sort of art in itself.

Here’s Umberto Eco in “Casablanca”: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage:

“When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two cliches make us laugh, but a hundred cliches move us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves and celebrating a reunion. Just as extreme pain meets sensual pleasure, and extreme perversion borders on mystical energy, so does extreme banality allow us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime. Nobody would have been able to achieve such a cosmic result intentionally. Nature has spoken here in place of men. If nothing else, this is a phenomenon worthy of veneration.”

He wasn’t speaking about the Muppets. He was speaking about the Muppets. I don’t believe Jim Henson ever had any connection to Walter Elias Disney, but they seem like similar artists. They both had an extreme connection to magic, and the ideals of the past. Sometimes this manifested as retrogression, but sometimes it makes the past feel preserving. He was never cynical or mean.

But puppets are creepy – I can’t get over that point. They just hit all the “not right, shouldn’t exist” buttons in my brain. Are people seriously able to watch stuff like this without having their skin shudder completely off their skeleton and roadtrip to Kickapoo, Indiana on a journey of radical self-discovery?

But hey, the fact that the Muppets is the most glowing recommendation I can make.