Once a bouncing, bright lamp, Luxo Jr., the mascot for Pixar Animation Studio, has dimmed. The studio’s latest film, Elemental, released this month, had the lowest box-office opening weekend of any Pixar film: a $29 million return on a $200 million budget. It’s the latest blow to the company’s status as one of Hollywood’s premier studios, making the path forward no longer as luminous.

Perhaps it was an anomalously brilliant run the studio had, starting with Toy Story in 1995 and ending with Up in 2009. And now expectations for its films need to be adjusted. Perhaps there is currently not a healthy appetite for adult films in American cinemas, and Pixar’s children’s movies are too heady. Still, the studio’s first layoffs in a decade are a window into what has been its primary challenge: a deteriorating brand and ethos.

The Disney Corporation purchased Pixar in 2006. Success for both Disney and Pixar has been astronomical since. But right now Hollywood is struggling and the company is in upheaval. CEO Bob Iger’s stated goals for the company in 2023 are to eliminate thousands of jobs and cut billions of dollars in costs. Pixar’s recent layoffs included the departures of: Angus MacLane, a 26-year animator and member of the senior creative teams for Toy Story 4 and Coco, and 28-year veteran Galyn Susman, who was responsible for saving Toy Story 2 when she had an extra copy of the film after its data accidentally was deleted in studio.

Both were involved in last year’s box office dud, Lightyear, with Maclane directing and Susman producing. But that film was a product of the Disney imperative, which demands Pixar deliver films that earn a billion dollars and throw off theme parks, televisions shows, merchandise and more sequels. Their firings verged from Pixar’s founding principles, which made it the jewel of the industry: telling original, creative stories with innovative technologies and fostering community among its employees in an environment where they could trial and err with confidence.

The artistic vision of a progressive production company like Pixar, and the commercial goals of a media giant like Disney, were always going to grind at one another. While both want to reach audiences, one hopes that people leave in conversation, while the other wants to sell out concessions. Their partnership has been successful according to every metric that matters. However, consider that since 2010, Pixar has released seven sequels to eight originals. Of those originals, only Inside Out (2015) and Coco (2017) have been major box-office successes comparable in ROI to those sequels and in quality to earlier originals.

Pixar’s creative work has clearly suffered these last 13 years. It’s fair to wonder if the company can ever recapture its storied past.

Unless Disney and Iger prioritize film over finance, the original Pixar brand and process will continue to erode. By paring down operations to save on expenses, while simultaneously continuing to pursue scalable, lucrative features and TV, Disney has set a nearly impossible standard for all of its creative studios to accomplish.

For this fan, the best path forward would be for Disney to recalibrate its relationship with Pixar to what it was immediately post-acquisition, when Disney supported Pixar with its resources and reach, but Pixar retained its creative autonomy.

The three year stretch of Ratatouille (2007), Walle-E (2008) and Up (2009) was remarkable and represents the high watermark point in the company’s relationship: delivering huge box-office returns, award recognition and cultural resonance. All the while, the films also broke new ground in animated storytelling and felt incredibly fresh. There have been exceptions and successes since, but the can’t-miss quality and reputation of Pixar has consistently slipped.

If Disney continues to push Pixar this same direction to remain competitive, fans won’t ever say goodbye to Woody but will to what made the studio special.

It’s become abundantly clear that the differences in people are under a microscope more than ever, and more and more, they lead to rather angry public displays against one another.

Sonoma County-based filmmaker George Dondero has sort of concentrated this notion into War of the Wills, a dark comedy about a fraught relationship between a young man and his distant, absentee father. The film chronicles who can earn each a multimillion-dollar inheritance if they can spend a month together in a house without leaving the space or committing bodily harm to one another. Co-written alongside Donedero’s partner, Bethany Browning, and directed by Dondero, the film was made in Sonoma County for a mere $20,000 and is now available to stream on Amazon Prime.

When asked how the seeds for the story germinated, Healdsburg High grad Dondero says, “A lot of this movie was autobiographical, the idea that we all take on things from our parents. Circular things. And then the question of how to break these cycles.” He also notes inspiration sprang from “an idea about what would it be like if I had to spend a month in a house with just my dad.”

As is often the case with trying to manage a very personal story, the outline and script became a bit lengthy, which was where Browning came in. “Bethany is a professional copywriter, and I’m a much more visual person, so I needed someone to come in and help me round it out, structure-wise,” Dondero says.

War of the Wills is a solid indie film that’s clever in that there’s a built-in clock in terms of the time the men, who genuinely dislike one another, must spend together to gain their inheritance. But as the film goes on, layers are introduced where viewers learn more about father and son, many of which are unexpected.

Dondero says he and his team were initially going to make a much larger movie, both in the story and in the cast, but then the COVID lockdown happened. Still wanting to shoot something, the filmmaker decided a more scaled-down approach with very few actors in fewer locations was the way to go. Luckily, they found a beautiful Victorian home in Petaluma, which serves as the major setting throughout the film and becomes a character in its own right.

In the film, Kot Takahashi plays William Hadeon III, who is a young man riddled with a variety of issues, including anxiety and anger that he blames on never getting to know his father, played by Steven David Martin. Martin also serves as Healdsburg’s Raven Players’ artistic director.

Dondero found his cast locally, having worked with Martin previously. “Steven and I met about 15 years ago on a commercial project and just kind of hit it off. We’ve been talking about making something together since then,” he recalls.

Interestingly, Dondero met Takahashi while shooting a project for Creative Sonoma, where victims of the 2017 Coffey Park Fire spoke about their experiences. “Kot had pulled his family out [of the fires], and when I was interviewing him on camera, I just saw his charisma and strength and the way he held himself,” notes Dondero.

As War of the Wills progresses, the film reveals more about father and son, who have more in common than either would like to believe. The two men are an almost literal yin and yang, with young, toned and dark-skinned Takahashi squaring off mentally and sometimes physically with his older, thinner white father.

When asked about shooting films in Sonoma County, Dondero says he can’t think of a better place. “Aside from a strong urban setting with big buildings and alleyways, Sonoma County has everything you could want,” he says. After leaving the area to earn a film degree with an emphasis in animation from San Francisco State, Dondero recalls, “I left and came back because I recognized what I was missing.”

As ‘War of the Wills’ eases its way onto TV screens locally and abroad, upcoming projects, both cinematic and written, can be followed at Dondero and Browning’s website, SonomaFilmWorks.com.

Forty-five years before Red Hot Chili Peppers headlined BottleRock, Napa hosted a legendary rock concert with a very different flavor.

We Were There to Be There, a new documentary, looks at when punk icons The Cramps and The Mutants played a free concert in June 1978 for psychiatric patients at the Napa State Hospital.

Directors Mike Plante and Jason Willis share archival footage from the show alongside new interviews with band members, promoters and Joe Rees, the videographer who documented the concert. The riveting film raises as many questions as it answers while chronicling how the concert came to be, how it was filmed and who the audience was.

Opening with a look at the political and social climate of the Bay Area in the 1970s, Rees and Target Video collaborator Jill Hoffman-Kowal talk about meeting at California College of the Arts. San Francisco’s punk music scene arose in tandem with its performance art scene. As a student, Rees could borrow state-of-the-art video cameras, which he used to document performances.

“The [National Endowment for the Arts] was giving a lot of grant money to people with good proposals for alternative art spaces,” Hoffman-Kowal said.

For art-punk band The Mutants, this meant playing concerts in popular clubs like The Mabuhay Gardens, but also for deaf children at the Oakland School for the Deaf and at The Temple, a former synagogue next door to Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple.

Punk promoter Howie Klein said he wanted The Mutants to play Napa State Hospital because everyone had a good time at their shows and got on stage with the band to sing and dance. Klein also invited The Cramps, who regularly performed at CBGB and came from New York to play the free concert.

The film never explains who at the hospital greenlit the concert or who allowed it to be filmed, but Alan Gill, a former psychiatric technician for the facility said it was an anomalous show. Rees released his black and white footage of the show as a Target Video VHS called Live at Napa State Mental Hospital, which went a sort of analog version of viral for its day.

“Somebody told me you people are crazy, but I’m not so sure about that,” Cramps vocalist Lux Interior says to the crowd. “You seem to be alright to me.”

Plante remembers buying the tape from a skate shop as a teenager. Growing up, the infamous performance seemed dangerous to him.

When he began interviewing sources for We Were There to Be There, Plante says that what came through was how much love and perceived fellowship the bands felt with the patients in the audience. The footage of the concert is wild and energetic, with band members jumping into the crowd and audience members walking on stage to scream into the mic.

Plante said that one of the people in the film who is often thought to be a patient of the hospital was actually a friend of The Mutants who had just come for the show.

The bands and promoters insist the show was never intended to be ironic. Rees says it was one of the best things he’s ever been a part of, and Sally Webster, then a member of The Mutants, says it was an adventure for everyone. Multiple people called it life-changing.

Gill, who worked with paranoid patients, says the people he brought had a good time.

Less than six months after the concert, San Francisco was rocked by Harvey Milk’s assassination and the Jonestown massacre, which might have happened in the city, had Jones not moved his followers away to evade media investigation. Within a couple years of the concert, Ronald Reagan was elected president.

We Were There to Be There closes with an indictment of Reagan’s impact on mental healthcare in California and the country. At the time of the concert, people could commit themselves to state hospitals. Reagan’s budget cuts as California governor and later as president resulted in program closures that Gill says pushed many psychiatric patients with no safety net onto the street.

‘We Were There to Be There’ can be streamed at fieldofvision.org/shorts/we-were-there-to-be-there.