How Pixar proved Detheux wrong in five minutes of Up.

Detheux accused Disney of being bland, predictable, and tasteless. Detheux views films like The Lion King as what Kurt Cobain might call "Radio Friendly Unit Shifters". When the essay was written, of course, it was absolutely correct.

But then something incredible happened. Pixar made a five minute short film without a single line of dialogue or sound effect, and it told an incredible story with nothing but moving images and a little music. Then they delivered it to the world wrapped in a 2 hour adventure film about a rare bird. I'm talking, of course, about the "Married Life" sequence of Up.

Subtlety? This piece is  loaded with subtlety. Detheux accused Disney of "whispering the plot into our ears", and at no point does this do that. Of course, this is actually following a set of rules in itself, established by Pixar when they first started out:

No songs
No “I want” moments
No happy village
No love story
No villain

Up breaks two of those rules in the course of it's run, as it does tell a love story in those 5 minutes, and it does have a villain in it's final scenes, but the essential idea behind Pixar's rules is to stop telling fairy tales, folklore, and fables. Usually where Pixar falter's is the "no villains" rule, though most of the villains act only in ways that are justified by the story. Randall in Monster's Inc is more concerned with the energy crisis than with humans, Sid in Toy Story is more concerned with how cool explosions look (very) than with the possibility that toys are sentient. All Pixar villains act in ways that are justifiable. They are not pure evil. This gives their stories complexity and depth, which is, I think, something that Detheux is accusing Disney of lacking.

Incidentally, Brave is based on folklore, but still manages to follow all the rules, perhaps in this case it was a matter of choosing a more diverse source material.