Disney.com has started airing full length movies on their website. 1 movie each week. This week it was Monsters Inc (commercial free, and nice, crisp picture).

Now, I love Monsters Inc, but I think my favorite Pixar movie of all time (thus far) is The Incredibles. And so I watched it.

And then I watched some of the extras. Somewhere around the time the head honcho of The Incredibles started talking about how painful it was to cut out good scenes, lose pitch points to make the story stronger, and how the story evolves from pitch to finish, I realized that I can actually learn something from this. These extras were not just entertainment to my easily entertained mind- they were a learning tool.

Pixar creates (or, at least, had created) some of the best stories to come out of the movie industry in years. Whether you like a particular movie or not doesn’t matter- the story is guaranteed to be high quality. Pixar pre Disney acquisition had the same high standards that Disney had pre Walt’s death. We’ll see what happens after the acquisition with Wall-E, which seems to me to be more of a Pixar short, merely extended to fill feature length time requirements.

Anyway. I dug out all of my Pixar movies, and plan to watch the extras and commentaries on all of them to see what I can glean. I watch TV anyway when I’m doing needlework, so I might as well make it productive in more than a few finished cross stitch patterns.

One thing that I highly recommend to any writers, is to watch Vowellet- An Essay By Sarah Vowell. She’s the voice of Violet, and is also a writer. Since I know most of you will not go out and buy The Incredibles 2-disc Collectors Edition just to see a few minutes of a funny, slightly wacked writer/voice actor, I dug up a copy on YouTube. It’s a little on the quiet side, but just wait till you see her open up the action figure box. This is what totally won my heart.