One of the worst things to happen to pop culture over the last 10 years or so is the rise of the plot hole. There are YouTube channels and message boards dedicated to pointing out the inconsistencies in Raiders of the Lost Ark (timely!), Cats (???), and Jingle All the Way (finally), to use three recent examples from a popular sinful source. It’s fair game to criticize a movie when it breaks or contradicts an established rule about its own universe (that’s good criticism!), but if you’re annoyed that Monsters, Inc. doesn’t show what Boo’s parents are up to when she’s in Monstropolis? To quote Pete Docter, who cares.
The Soul, Up, and Monsters, Inc. director was asked by the Huffington Post to discuss the Boo dilemma that continues to keep Reddit users up at night. “This is one of these questions that we asked ourselves. And we went through a lot of different machinations of writing scenes,” he said. “We didn’t actually board any, but we felt like, OK, the audience doesn’t need to know this because Sulley doesn’t know. And we’re with Sulley. So who cares?” He also discussed the “plot hole” of Buzz pretending to be an inanimate object around humans, even though he doesn’t think of himself as a toy, in Toy Story.
“We went through a lot of discussion on Toy Story, the first one, about like, ‘If Buzz doesn’t know he’s a toy, why does he go rigid when a kid walks in the room?’ We had a lot of explanations and talk about that, too. And in the end, nobody cared,” Docter said… “I think the short answer is you just have to kind of try to guess where the audience is going to find importance, or at least push their interest there,” Docter said.
I don’t need the talking toy movie to offer a real-world explanation for every minor detail; I just want to spend time with my friends Buzz and Woody. So, the next time you consider tweeting about a magic xylophone, remember: “And in the end, nobody cared.”
(Via the Huffington Post)
