The notoriously contrarian critic hasn't weighed in with his thoughts on the latest Pixar release -- as birthday boy Roger Ebert joked on his Twitter feed last night, the "world await[s]" White's review -- but if anyone is going to crap all over the Toy Story legacy of critical perfection, White seems like the natural fit. In his negative review of Up -- one of only 5 the film received last year -- he wrote:
Pixarism defines the backward taste for animation. Refuting Chuck Jones' insistence that he didn't create his great Warner Bros. cartoon for children, Pixarism domesticates and homogenizes animation -- as if to preserve family values. The only exceptions have been Brad Bird's Pixar movies The Incredibles and Ratatouille -- both sumptuously executed in Bird's belief that animation should show "how things feel rather than are. Indulging in the human aspect of being alive." Yet their conceptual weak point was cuteness -- same as Up's glossing over Carl's "public menace" court conviction and that inconsistently imagined dog pack.
As you can see, he already kinda trashed Toy Story and Toy Story 2 by omission. The next step can only be a pan of Toy Story 3, wherein he says that Norbit is better. Make the world proud, Armond, and go the extra mile. Fulfill your destiny!
[via @ebertchicago]