There was a pleasing logic to the suggestion that Santa’s elves would need desk-top computers and digital displays, and yet the film retained a sprinkling of traditional festive wonder.Ĭorporate scaremongers … Monsters, Inc. Ten years later, a similar combination of the industrial and the magical did the trick in Aardman’s Arthur Christmas. You can’t beat the sight of furry and/or slimy creatures cheerfully clocking in at a factory where they bottle children’s screams in yellow canisters. in 2001 – and it’s still one of Pixar’s most delightful cartoons. In animation, the gamechanger was Monsters, Inc. To be fair, this sort of comedy has an illustrious history, ranging from Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (in which Peter learns that heaven has filing clerks) to Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (in which the newly deceased Maitlands visit an afterlife information desk). Take a mysterious, metaphysical concept, add a crowd of bean-counters and pen-pushers, and you’ve got yourself a film. ![]() ![]() But in 2022, the contrast between the ethereal and the boringly bureaucratic is as much of a cartoon cliche as zany talking animals. The idea that something as intangible as luck might be governed by otherworldly workers is a fun one – and, 20 years ago, it might have seemed like an original one, too.
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