Pixar’s america the re animation of american myths and symbols

PIXAR’S
AMERICA
The Re-Animation of
American Myths
and Symbols

DIETMAR MEINEL


Pixar’s America



Dietmar Meinel

Pixar’s America
The Re-Animation of American Myths and Symbols


Dietmar Meinel
Department of Anglophone Studies
University of Duisburg-Essen
Essen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany

ISBN 978-3-319-31633-8
ISBN 978-3-319-31634-5
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31634-5

(eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950070

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
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For my Friends



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In many ways, the following words of gratitude cannot do justice to the
immense support, encouragement, and inspiration I have received from so
many people in the writing of this book. While writing is a rather solitary
endeavor, the intellectual work behind it never is. The assistance, care,
and sustenance of an amazing community brought the following pages,

indeed the writer of these lines, into being. I am grateful and indebted to
all of you.
First and foremost, I thank Winfried Fluck. His thinking shaped the
very idea of the book and his intellectual rigor enabled me to develop a
voice of my own. In particular his insistent encouragement to explore the
aesthetic and narrative complexity of the cinematic material became an
essential tenet of this book and my work in general. Similarly, with her
keen observations and her sharp theoretical thinking, Laura Bieger profoundly influenced the content of this book, from its structure to its close
readings. As a scholar and an instructor Laura fostered my intellectual
vocation—from my very first seminar as an undergraduate to the completion of this book. I am also grateful to Donald Pease whose sense of profession taught me an unprecedented passion for intellectual exchange. His
generosity in wholeheartedly engaging with my work from the beginning
of the project onward provided me with confidence during moments of
doubt; his dedication to my journey also offered me opportunities and
experiences which I hold dear.
Ahu Tanrisever and Sonja Longolius read and commented on individual chapters at our wonderful reading group meetings; my cohort at
the Graduate School of North American Studies—Ben Robbins, Dorian
vii


viii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Kantor, Florian Plum, Kate Schweißhelm, Lina Tegtmeyer, Natalia
Klimina, Nathan Vanderpool, Rebecca Brückmann, and Ruth Steinhoff—
lifted me up when spirit, health, or faith were low. The Graduate School
of North American Studies and the John F. Kennedy Institute gave me
the opportunity to write my thesis in an intellectually stimulating environment in Berlin, Germany, and abroad. With her heart-warming presence
and her patience, Gabi Bodmeier often saved me from my bureaucratic
incompetence.

At the Department of Anglophone Studies of the University of
Duisburg-Essen, I am indebted to Barbara Buchenau for her faith in and
support of my work. Of my friends and colleagues at the University of
Duisburg-Essen, to all of whom I am grateful for creating a stimulating
and supportive environment, I particularly acknowledge Elena Furlanetto,
Zohra Hassan, and Courtney Moffett-Bateau. Their astuteness, knowledge, and openness have taught me to thrive as an intellectual and as a
person.
At Palgrave Macmillan I have been lucky to find highly professional support for the book, and thank in particular Lina Aboujieb and
Hariharan Venugopal. I am especially grateful for the thoughtful and perceptive comments provided by the anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions
of Chaps. 6, 7, and 8 were previously published in Animation Studies,
Volume 8 (2013), NECSUS European Journal for Media Studies (Spring
2014), and European Journal of American Culture, Volume 33, Issue 3
(2014), respectively. A section of the introduction appeared in the volume
Rereading the Machine in the Garden (2014) edited by Eric Erbacher,
Nicole Maruo-Schröder, and Florian Sedlmeier. I am grateful for the permission to reproduce material here.
The friendship of many wonderful people has inspired and uplifted me
during the research and writing. I deeply appreciate their belief in me. My
parents and my sister supported me even when my path appeared hazardous and disheartening. I thank Hajo and Kay, for without you, none of
this would exist.


CONTENTS

1

1 Exceptional Animation: An Introduction
From Failure to Fame: The Pixar Studio
and Digital Animation
Animating Revolt or Monstrous Beings?
All Ages Admitted

“Every Line Drawn, Object Moved, and Shape Changed”
Animating the Myths and Symbols of American Culture
Remediating the Myths and Symbols of American Culture

3
9
19
20
22
28

2 “You Better Play Nice”: Digital Enchantment
and the Performance of Toyness in Toy Story (1995)
Fearful Sheriff Dolls and Oblivious Space-Ranger Action Figures
Stupid, Little, Insignificant Toys
The Space-Traveling American Adam
The Enchanting Performance of Toyness

45
47
50
52
55

3 An Animated Toast to the Ephemeral:
The Multicultural Logic of Late Capitalism
in Toy Story 2 (1999)
The Multicultural Myth of Woody, Buzz, and Bill
A Postmodern Toy Story
The Digital Logic of Late Capitalism

A Toast to the Ephemeral

61
63
66
70
71
ix


x

CONTENTS

4 A Story of Social Justice? The Liberal Consensus
in Monsters, Inc. (2001)
Monsters of Plenty
The Liberal Consensus of Monstropolis
A Good Society of Monsters: Individualism, Meritocracy,
and Affirmative Government
Animating the Good Society?
The Green, One-Eyed Schlemiel
5 “From Rags to Moderate Riches”:
The American Dream in Ratatouille (2007)
Pixar’s Animated American Dream
Class, Space, and the Animated Dream
Hyper-White Food Critics and Non-White Chefs:
The Villains in Ratatouille
Learning to Perform: Middle Class,
the Ratatouille Restaurant, and (the Aesthetics of)

Ordinary Whiteness
An Exceptionalist Rat?
6 “Space. The Final Fun-tier”: Returning Home
to the Frontier in WALL-E (2008)
The Significance of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier
Mediating the Frontier: Consumerism, Nostalgia,
and Digital Cinematography
Gendered Robots: Male Garbage Compressors
and Female Drones
The Brave, New World Aboard the Axiom
Earth. The Final Frontier
7 Empire Is Out There!? The Spirit of Imperialism
in Up (2009)
The Imperial Fantasies of James, Carl, and Charles
Adventure Is in Here: Rewriting the Imperial Fantasy
The Spirit of the Informal Empire

75
77
79
83
85
88

97
100
105
107

109

112

119
120
122
124
127
130

139
142
147
150


CONTENTS

8 “And when everyone is super … no one will be”:
The End of the American Myth in 
The Incredibles (2004)
“Celebrating Mediocrity”
The Incredibles: A Voluntary Association
Victimizing the White, Male Superhero Body
From Heroine to Homemaker … to Heroine, Again
Leaving Suburbia
9 Driving in Circles: The American Puritan Jeremiad
in Cars (2006)
Narratives of Individual and National Decline
Imagined Pasts: The Jeremiad and the Golden
Age of the 1950s

Imagined Spaces: The American South
The Sound of American Myths and Symbols

xi

163
165
166
171
173
175

187
190
195
198
200

10 Animating a Yet Unimagined America? The Mediation
of American Exceptionalism in Toy Story 3 (2010)
Errand into the Daycare Wilderness
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Garbage Incinerator
A Yet Unimagined America?

207
210
214
215

Bibliography

219

Index

231


CHAPTER 1

Exceptional Animation: An Introduction

“It’s a Pixar World. We’re Just Living in It.”
Roberta Smith

From anxious sheriff dolls, obnoxious race cars, bleeping and buzzing garbage compressors to irritable old men; from cities powered with
the screams of children, rat-infested cottages to post-apocalyptic garbage
landscapes; from the elaborate sounds of “speaking whale” to the immobilizing shout of “squirrel!,” the world of Pixar expands “to infinity, and
beyond.” As soon as the little desk lamp Luxor Jr. hops onto the screen,
audiences of all ages eagerly await to be drawn into an oddly familiar, yet
unexpectedly distinct, universe. As Pixar’s digital animation is so beloved,
even ill-tempered ogres, singing princesses, and sabre-toothed squirrels
obsessed with acorns are often assumed to populate their world as well.
When Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith co-founded Pixar Inc. along
with thirty-eight other founding members and investor Steve Jobs in 1986,
however, the world was not Pixar. Actually, outside the film industry, few
people had heard of the small company and its previous work. Even in
Hollywood, many would have probably been hard-pressed to describe
what these few individuals contributed to the blockbuster trilogy Star Wars
(1977–1983) or why high-tech entrepreneur Steve Jobs invested five million dollars in some forty computer scientists with PhDs. About ten years

later, as audiences of all ages flocked to the theaters to see the first film produced entirely with the use of computers, the world had begun changing.
© The Author(s) 2016
D. Meinel, Pixar’s America,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31634-5_1

1


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D. MEINEL

As personal computers, cell phones, and the internet came to be an integral
part of everyday life, in hindsight, a digitally produced film seemed to be
the logical consequence of the increasing technological interpenetration of
human life. And an additional ten years later, as the Museum of Modern
Art opened its venues to host a show about digital animation, the curators
opted to dedicate their entire space to the work of the Pixar Animation
Studios. When The Disney Company bought the studio for 7.4 billion
dollars only two years later, Pixar and its worlds had become the pinnacle
of contemporary American culture. Today, another ten years later, an entire
generation of young people have grown up watching the adventures of
the sheriff doll Woody and the space-ranger action figure Buzz, traveling
Route 66 with race-car Lightning McQueen, or experiencing global environmental annihilation with the cleaning robot WALL-E along with their
parents and grandparents. Today, indeed, we live in a Pixar world.
Notwithstanding the immense critical and popular acclaim of the animation studio, scholars have only gradually engaged with digital animation and primarily published essays or dedicated single book chapters to
Pixar. While the perception, as Roberta Smith wrote in 2005, “that there
is nothing to say in print about the artistic implications, stylistic differences (and shifts in quality) or social significance of Pixar’s films or their
place in the animation continuum is little short of ludicrous,” may not
be entirely true today, book-length analyses of the Pixar worlds continue

to be few and far between. This book aims to bridge this gap and situate
the animated films in their broader cultural, political, and social context.
With interventionist sheriff dolls and space-ranger action figures liberating oppressed toys, exceptionally talented rodents hoping to fulfill their
dreams, aging wilderness explorers fighting for South American freedom,
or Mid-Western small town values forming an all-American champion,
these cinematic texts particularly draw on popular myths and symbols of
American culture. As the following chapters examine, whether commenting on the American Dream in light of white privilege, the frontier myth
in light of traditional gender roles, or the notion of voluntary associations
in light of neoliberal transformations, these close readings analyze two
interdependent notions: the (aesthetic and narrative) refashioning of traditional American figures, motifs, and tropes for contemporary sensibilities, and their politics of animation. This book hopes to explore the ways
in which Pixar films come to re-animate and remediate prominent myths
and symbols of American culture in all their aesthetic, ideological, and
narrative complexity.


EXCEPTIONAL ANIMATION: AN INTRODUCTION

3

FROM FAILURE TO FAME: THE PIXAR STUDIO AND DIGITAL
ANIMATION
In the late 1970s, the notion of digital technology, from personal computers to smartphones or the internet, may have been the prominent theme
of a science fiction novel or, at best, constituted a fringe phenomenon
peripheral to most people. The idea of integrating computer-generated
imagery into films or even animating an entire movie using computers
must have seemed similarly unthinkable. To invest tens of millions of
dollars into a film to project previously unimaginable worlds on the silver screen was not a viable option for film companies at that time, as all
larger studios still reeled financially from the breakup of the lucrative yet
monopolistic Hollywood system. As Pixar Inc. (which would later become
Pixar Animation Studios) developed within a rapidly transforming cultural

industry shaped by novel technological advances and business models, to
write about the Pixar Animation Studios entails writing about the development of digital technology, blockbuster Hollywood cinema, and animated
film of the last forty years. But even as the Pixar company may be one of
the pinnacles of contemporary popular culture, without the technological
savvy, the creative vision, and the commercial gamble of Ed Catmull, John
Lasseter, and Steve Jobs, this story could not have been told.
Almost all histories of the development of the contemporary Hollywood
blockbuster system begin with the surprising success of the first Star Wars
(1977) film in which audiences were captivated by the adventures happening in a galaxy far, far away. While the narrative told the familiar, fairy-tale
inspired story of the battle between the forces of good and evil, most
viewers flocked to the movie theaters time and time again to experience
fantastic extraterrestrial worlds and dynamic space fights. Even though
audiences and critics celebrated George Lucas, director and producer
of the film, for his artistic vision, most of the captivating space scenes
depended on two novel technological inventions, “a computer-controlled
camera that allowed for dynamic special-effect shots and an elaborate optical compositing system [that] gave the movie an unprecedented feeling
of realism” (Paik 19). To further develop and profit from this integration
of film-making and computer technology, George Lucas founded a computer division at his film company in 1979 to develop a digital video editing system, a digital audio system, and a digital film scanner and printer
(cf. Paik 20). For this Graphics Group, Lucas hired Ed Catmull, a young
and aspiring computer graphics researcher from the New York Institute


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of Technology with a PhD in computer science, to lead the Lucasfilm
Computer Division. The small group of digital software and hardware pioneers Catmull assembled to develop digital film production tools for audio
mixing, film compositing, and film editing would eventually become the
first cohort of the Pixar company (cf. Price 35).

Instead of limiting their work to the development of digital instruments
for film production, however, Catmull and his team were determined to
explore the visual and narrative potential of digital programming from the
beginning. But as George Lucas did not trust the potential of digitally produced special effects or computer-generated imagery, Catmull had to find
and develop projects to demonstrate the capabilities of digital animation.
Although the team was successful in producing some scenes for Star Trek II:
The Wrath of Khan (1982) and the highly celebrated short film Andre and
Wall B. (1984), “Lucas thought the film was awful […] [which] reinforced
his feeling that his Computer Division shouldn’t be making films […] [and
gave] him a low impression of computer animation” (Price 59). Facing continuous doubts about the potential of computer-animated film from within
his company, by 1985 Catmull hoped for a buy-out of his small section.
In need of a potential investor, the Computer Division eventually convinced Steve Jobs to acquire a computer graphics section which, in 1986,
was not generating profits. Recently fired from his position as executive
vice president at Apple, Steve Jobs had the time, vision, and money to
invest in the idea of digital graphics that, in his words, “could be used
to make products that would be extremely mainstream. Not tangible,
manufactured products, but something more like software—intellectual
products” (Jobs quoted in Paik 51). Whether the ambition to monetize
the digital potential of computer software was a brainchild in hindsight
or born out of the work the Computer Division had done in producing extraordinary digital imagery such as computer-animated knights for
Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) can never be settled entirely. At first, however, Jobs decided to continue fostering the development of his acquisition into a hardware company, since Catmull and his team had created a
computer “that could scan movie film, combine special-effects images with
live-action footage […] and record the results back onto film” (Price 62).
Named after its first device, Pixar Inc. was supposed to do what Macintosh
had done for the personal computer: “Graphics computers would start
in the hands of a few early adopters and then make their way into a vast
mainstream market” (Jobs quoted in Price 85).


EXCEPTIONAL ANIMATION: AN INTRODUCTION

5

But the Pixar Image Computer could never fulfill these expectations.
Plagued with technological inconveniences and limited commercial success, the computer became a funding sink for Pixar and Jobs. Although
in dire financial distress, Pixar stayed in business because in the late 1980s
the company had expanded its portfolio by developing film software
and producing TV commercials. For example, the Computer Animation
Production System (CAPS) computer program, useful to color ink-andpaint cells, was an immediate success with the Disney Studios. Later, the
RenderMan and IceMan software—developed to enable the rendering
of 3-D graphics and the digital processing of photographs—eventually
came to transform computer animation and special effect productions.
Even as the programs established Pixar as a leader in technological innovation, their 3-D rendering and image processing software remained “niche
product[s]” (Price 100). With their technological knowledge and experience, however, Pixar was able to gain a foothold in the market for television advertisements—having acquired some reputation for their software,
the company produced several TV commercials. Starting in 1989, Pixar
was able to create and increase revenue in this way to offset its losses in the
hardware and software business. But by 1991 the annual deficits compelled
Jobs to shut down the hardware production entirely and to concentrate
all of the company’s resources on expanding its software development and
advertising productions.
While the RenderMan software continues to define Pixar’s technological superiority in the present, its days of producing commercials are long
gone. Today, audiences love, cherish, and admire Pixar for its many featurelength computer-animated films. While the first-ever full-length computeranimated film Toy Story (1995) delivered the company from its financial
distress in 1995, in those early years only a few people believed in Pixar
as a film company: Ed Catmull possessed the technological vision, Steve
Jobs provided the funding (although Jobs did not believe in the idea of a
cinematic endeavor [cf. Price 104]), and John Lasseter offered the creative
talent. A former student at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArt),
Lasseter had been trained in the late 1970s by those artists he admired
most: longtime Disney animators. Although Disney employed Lasseter
in the early 1980s, his growing fascination and passion for digital animation found no resonance at the studio.1 When his superiors persistently

ignored the ideas of the young animator and eventually shelved his project
The Brave Little Toaster, in January 1984 a frustrated Lasseter joined the
Graphics Group at Lucasfilm. His collaboration with Catmull proved to


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be the creative foundation of the company’s later success. Supported by
Catmull in his attempts to explore the technological boundaries of computer animation, Lasseter produced several short films throughout the
1980s, each of which contributed to Pixar’s growing esteem in the film
industry, demonstrated the ever-increasing possibilities of digital technology, and allowed Pixar to establish their commercial business. Beginning
with Luxo Jr. (1984), Pixar continuously produced short animations and
eventually won the Oscar for Tin Toy in the category of best animated
short film in 1988. While these films showcased the potential of Pixar’s
rendering software and functioned to advertise their technological capabilities, they also helped to gradually position Pixar as a film brand. With
the financial dedication of Steve Jobs, Pixar accumulated technological and
artistic capital which eventually paid off in the early 1990s when the previously disinclined Disney Studios began to float the idea of a cooperation
for a full-length theatrical release. With the support and know-how of the
animation studio in Hollywood at that time, Catmull, Jobs, and Lasseter
had finally set Pixar on its course to become the culturally, commercially,
and technologically leading computer animation studio of the present.
Teetering on the brink of financial collapse and wrestling for nearly ten
years with finding a profitable business model, Pixar Inc. had attempted
to develop graphics computers for the mass market, invented sophisticated rendering software, dabbled in television advertising, and produced
critically acclaimed shorts until finding its path. Although Ed Catmull’s
technological vision, John Lasseter’s creative talent, and Steve Jobs’ business acumen had primarily shaped this improbable course, the liberty and
the opportunity to re-position a company in various competitive markets
over the course of a decade from a cutting-edge technology developer to

a profitable entertainment business may be hard to imagine outside the
cultural, economic, political, and social atmosphere of California, Silicon
Valley, and Hollywood. Even as the people at Pixar pursued a clear vision
of producing an entire feature film digitally, the success of a computeranimation film studio in 1995 needs to be situated within the broader
context of a transforming film industry, the renaissance of animated film,
and consolidation of The Disney Company in the 1980s and 1990s.
In the tumultuous early years of the company, the first cohort at Pixar
already established the predominant ideas for which the animation studio would become famous. As Pixar developed cutting-edge animation
software and hardware from the beginning, the studio could offer novel
cinematic experiences previously unseen on the silver screen. This strategy


EXCEPTIONAL ANIMATION: AN INTRODUCTION

7

to stir interest in films through novel visual imagery coincided with and
profited immensely from the shift to the blockbuster production system
in Hollywood in the late 1970s. With Jaws (1975), the Indiana Jones
(1981–1989) and the Star Wars (1977–1983) trilogies, Steven Spielberg
and George Lucas had fundamentally transformed the film business—and
the people at Pixar were deeply shaped by (and had shaped) the transition
from the New Hollywood period to the blockbuster era, as James Clarke
reasons in The Films of Pixar Animation Studio (2013):
In understanding the allure of the Pixar movie, there’s a rewarding connection to make with the fantasy-film successes of a number of films produced
in the 1970s and 1980s. These are films that many of the Pixar staff would
be very familiar with, informing their sense of characterisation, plot, tone
and subject choice. Indeed, of the filmmakers synonymous with the fantasy
film, we must cite George Lucas and Steven Spielberg—and, critically, both
expressed strong feelings towards the tradition of the Disney studio’s animated films of the 1940s and 1950s. (Clarke 38)2

Parallel to a thriving film industry invested in refining their blockbuster
formula, from the mid-1980s Hollywood also experienced a renaissance
in animation. Films such as the Spielberg-produced An American Tail
(1986) and the Spielberg and Lucas co-produced The Land Before Time
(1988) were surprise box office hits and invigorated the genre with novel
appeal.3 At that time, The Walt Disney Company, however, seemed to
have lost its ability to produce appealing animation films—during the
1970s and early 1980s the studio had slipped into a creative and economic
slumber after the death of its founder, Walt Disney. From a cultural, commercial, and innovation perspective, the Disney tradition so fundamental in shaping the film industry for decades had lost its allure. Only after
Michael Eisner became CEO of the company in 1984 and installed Jeffrey
Katzenberg as the chairman of Disney’s motion picture division did the
company begin to release critically acclaimed and financially successful animated films again. Beginning with The Little Mermaid (1989), in short
succession Disney was able to release films which helped recover its financial and cultural capital: Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), The
Lion King (1994), and Pocahontas (1995) not just (re-)established The
Walt Disney Company as a major entertainment business, but also4 rekindled the popular fascination with the animation genre (cf. Clarke 36–37).
While this renaissance prepared audiences for a computer-animated
viewing experience, the Disney tradition also profoundly shaped the artistic


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aspirations and ideals at Pixar, beyond the individual training and involvement of John Lasseter and his admiration for The Walt Disney Company.
In their first collaboration with Disney, Toy Story (1995), the Pixar employees learned a huge amount from their cel-animation heirs, appropriating
the financial, organizational, and artistic approaches to a point where several of Disney’s senior executives professed “that Pixar had made a film
that contained more of the ‘heart’ of traditional Disney animated films
than they themselves were making at that time” (Price 155–156). In her
enthusiastic review of the film for The New  York Times, journalist Janet

Maslin welcomed this dedication to the Disney animation tradition as “[t]
he computer-animated Toy Story, a parent-tickling delight, is a work of
incredible cleverness in the best two-tiered Disney tradition” (Maslin).
In fact, many film critics celebrated Toy Story for “the purity, the ecstatic
freedom of imagination, that’s the hallmark of the greatest children’s
films” and its appeal to an all-age audience: in the words of Entertainment
Weekly, its “spring-loaded allusive prankishness […] will tickle adults even
more than it does kids” (Gleiberman). This fascination with Toy Story further included the technological savvy of the production with its combination of “three-dimensional reality and freedom of movement that is
liberating and new” (Ebert). Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger
Ebert described his viewing experience as “a visionary roller-coaster ride”
and foretold “the dawn of a new era of movie animation” (Ebert).
With the immense critical and commercial success of Toy Story, Pixar
blazed a trail for computer-animated film and quickly inspired other film studios to launch or develop their animation department. The last twenty years,
therefore, have seen a tremendous increase in computer-animated films as
these movies matured into a viable and lucrative avenue for profit in the
industry. Within the diverse and popular field of computer-animated films
today, Pixar competes with a variety of other studios for audience attention
at the box office. While in the 1990s Pixar profited from the novelty of computer animation, the last two decades have seen intensified competition in the
market: 20th Century Fox has produced the tetralogy Ice Age (2002–2012),
Sony Picture Animation Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and a sequel
(2009, 2013), Universal Pictures Despicable Me and two sequels (2010,
2013, 2015), and Walt Disney Animation Studios Tangled (2010), Wreck-It
Ralph (2012), and Frozen (2013). Among the numerous competitors to
Pixar, the DreamWorks Studios with their Shrek (2001–2010) tetralogy and
the Madagascar (2005–2012) trilogy5 have been particularly successful in
developing a recognizable and individual brand of animation. From its first
animated feature, Antz (1998), DreamWorks explicitly intended “to pro-


EXCEPTIONAL ANIMATION: AN INTRODUCTION

9

duce films that were hipper, smarter, and less sentimental than the traditional Disney animated film, aimed at an audience of children assumed to be
more intelligent and sophisticated than Disney had apparently long assumed
children to be” (Booker, Hidden Messages 142). While DreamWorks may
seem similarly well suited for an exploration of the aesthetic and narrative
complexity of animated films, just as all previous examples speak to the flourishing and diversity of computer-animated films independent of any particular production company, this book concentrates exclusively on Pixar—not
because the studio still maintains a leading position at the box office6 or in
the technological field but because Pixar has, over the decades since its foundation, developed into a synonym for animated film.
While commercially still the most successful studio, Pixar has also
become a cultural icon unmatched by its rivals. The technological innovation and aesthetic appeal of the company has not merely created a highly
visible brand and household name for animation; in its exhibition on digital animation, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exalted the Pixar
Animation Studios to canonical status. As Roberta Smith summarizes
the Pixar: 20 Years of Animation exhibition in The New York Times: the
MoMA “has mounted the largest, most object-oriented exhibition in its
history devoted to film: a show about the runaway phenomenon of digital
animation. Well, some digital animation. O.K., the digital animation of
one hugely successful, pioneering company, the Pixar Animation Studios”
(Smith). In addition to the numerous feature-length and short films, the
MoMA also exhibited “more than 500 drawings, collages, storyboards
and three-dimensional models by some 80 artists” (Smith) to display the
variety of visual designs and art integral to (Pixar’s) animated film productions. Since the show traveled to Great Britain, Japan, Australia, Finland,
South Korea, Mexico, and Taiwan—and its follow-up exhibition Pixar: 25
Years of Animation went to Germany, China, and Italy (cf. Pixar: 25 Years
of Animation 182)—the retrospective celebrated the studio as a mediator
of high art, innovative technology, and commercial success globally.7

ANIMATING REVOLT OR MONSTROUS BEINGS?
Fundamentally shaped by American popular culture, the Hollywood film

industry, and the Disney animation tradition, Pixar not only met with
favorable reception. By the late 1990s, after first amazement at the novel
visual technology had vanished, the studio increasingly encountered
questions and doubts about the moral and political integrity of its films.
Particularly when The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar Animation


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Studios in 2006 for 7.4 billion dollars and John Lasseter became chief
creative officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation and principal creative advisor at Walt Disney Imagineering (a section working closely with
the Walt Disney theme park division), people increasingly perceived the
previously independent studio as “convey[ing] an ideology that is rather
similar to the mainstream ideology of Disney films” (Booker Hidden
Messages 78). Although not yet charged with disneyfying (or pixarfying)
popular culture,8 the Pixar Animation Studios encountered increasing disapproval which accused their films of simplification, superficiality, sanitization, and trivialization. For example, in his Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden
Messages of Children’s Films (2010), Keith M. Booker condemns Pixar’s
A Bug’s Life (1998) for expressing conventional and conservative ideas:
The film […] delivers a message about the power of collective action and
even potentially yields a radical class-oriented political message, with the ants
playing the role of the exploited proletariat and the grasshoppers playing the
role of the bourgeoisie, who feed on the labor of the workers without doing
any productive work of their own. The ant victory thus becomes a virtual
workers’ revolution except, of course, that the film itself is not at all interested in delivering this message, instead focusing on the very mainstream
American story of the lone individual (Flik) who makes good and saves the
day, delivering independence to the ants (who maintain their own royalist
internal political structure). The political issues raised by A Bug’s Life are
thus unlikely to deliver an effective radical message to young viewers. (82)

While such assessments exemplify the increasingly dismissive tone towards
Pixar, others celebrated Pixar as an independent, technologically innovative, and artistically savvy film company. Because of the non-fairy tale setting, the explicit avoidance of “cartoony” appearances (cf. Clarke 18), the
disregard for trademark musical numbers, and the portrayal of “adultlike
characters with adultlike problems” (Price 155), people also embraced and
applauded the Pixar films for opposing the conventional aesthetics and
normative politics of representation often associated with Disney (cf. Price
151–152). The cinematography with its photorealist quality exemplifies
this more adult approach to animation, as John Lasseter and his team
opted to use “many live-action aesthetic techniques, such as the use of
shallow focus, whereby foreground characters are placed in focus and the
background is indistinct, thereby allowing the audience to concentrate on
the characters above all else at a given moment” (Clarke 16). When critics,
therefore, either wholeheartedly celebrate Pixar productions as “offer[ing]


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11

hope, imagination, beauty and a degree of purity and innocence that is
countercultural in our age” (Velarde 9) or scorn the films for utterly failing
to articulate a profound message of change, this dichotomous assessment
of the Pixar Animation Studios rehearses broader debates surrounding the
function and potential of (animated) film and of popular culture in general.
The medium of hand-drawn film animation provoked such contradictory and opposing evaluations right from its early inception in the 1920s.
Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein, for example, considered Walt Disney
and his work to be “the greatest contribution of the American people to
art” (1), because his films “are a revolt against partitioning and legislating,
against spiritual stagnation and greyness” (4). In exploiting the creative and

imaginary potential of animation, Eisenstein maintains, Disney provides the
suffering and oppressed millions in the factories with a sense of escape from
the monotony of menial work at the assembly lines. The unruliness of the
animated animals, their uncontainable forms, and the disobedience of the
drawn lines provide optimism to those facing the drab, gray realities of an
alienating and exploitative capitalist system (cf. 4). Walter Benjamin similarly applauded actor performances in general and the early Mickey Mouse
productions in particular (1928–1937), because both offered people the
opportunity to assess notions of humanity in the face of increasing commodification of life. “[T]he majority of city dwellers, throughout the workday in offices and factories,” Benjamin writes, “have to relinquish their
humanity in the face of an apparatus. In the evening these same masses fill
the cinemas, to witness the film actor taking revenge on their behalf not
only by asserting his humanity (or what appears to them as such) against the
apparatus, but by placing that apparatus in the service of his triumph” (italics in original, 31). While the film star allegorically symbolized a triumph
of the people over their subjugation by modern technology (the factory,
the office, etc.) through modern technology (the film), the unruly performances and physical disruptiveness of a Mickey Mouse prepare its human
audiences for the survival of this form of civilization, reasoned Benjamin (cf.
338). In this anarchic, disobedient, and uncontrollable animated mouse,
“the public recognizes its own life” (Benjamin 338) and, hence, a liberating potential.
With the introduction of color to film in the 1930s and the increasingly
“gloomy and sinister fire-magic” of the Mickey Mouse shorts, however,
Benjamin also perceived a threat to animation (Benjamin 51). Severely
disturbed by the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, Benjamin wrestled
with the power of popular art forms to strengthen or challenge these


12

D. MEINEL

political (mass) movements. Because “[t]he logical outcome of fascism is an
aestheticizing of political life” (italics in original, Benjamin 41), the aestheticizing quality of colored animation gradually erased its anarchic and

disobedient features and exemplified “how easily fascism takes over ‘revolutionary’ innovations in this field too” (Benjamin 51). Although similarly
interested in the transformations animation went through in the 1930s,
David E.  James in The Most Typical Avant-Garde (2005) attributes the
demise of unruly narratives, disobedient figures, and social subversiveness
in the Disney films to “the increasing rationalization of [Disney’s] techniques necessitated by his own industrial development” (271). The growing complexity of film sound, color, multiplane camera, and the expansion
of production led Disney to introduce the division of labor into his studio,
as his highly specialized workers began to manufacture films in a system
which used Fordist principles of standardized assembly line production to
maximize efficiency (cf. Booker, Hidden Messages 34–35). By 1937 the
Disney animations were mirroring this standardization of the production
process, as “animals had been endowed with the emotional and psychological characteristics of humans, and the Disney style had solidified around
codes parallel to those of the live-action commercial feature, abandoning
the medium’s utopian potential and establishing realism as the norm in
animation” (James 271). The release of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs
(1937) marked the highpoint of this development (cf. James 271–272),
concluded Disney’s transition into “a corporate film factory,” and initiated
“the end of Disney as a pioneer in the exploration of genuinely new artistic
territory” (Booker, Hidden Messages 15). Scholars subscribed to this view
of Disney and (hand-drawn) animation well into the next millennium (cf.
Giroux, The Mouse That Roared).
Benjamin’s fear of fascism did not play a vital role in debates surrounding animation, but the idea that animated animals, objects, and figures
could transport normative ideas about culture and society gained momentum with the global expansion of American popular culture in general
and the Disney Studios in particular. In their Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1944/2002) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno famously decried
the totalitarianism of the culture industry as a form of mass deception.
For the German intellectuals, popular culture, from jazz music to radio
shows and films, entrapped “the defrauded masses” in a capitalist system
of exploitation and seduced the people to “insist unwaveringly on the
ideology by which they are enslaved” (Horkheimer and Adorno 106). In
their dismissal of all forms of popular culture, Horkheimer and Adorno

explicitly refer to Donald Duck as one symbol of this mass delusion


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(cf. Horkheimer and Adorno 106) that a later generation of scholars
trained in critical theory continues to elaborate.
In How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic
(1975), Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart not merely seem to refer to
the Dialectic of Enlightenment in their title but develop a more detailed
criticism of the American culture industry and its perpetuation of imperialist ideologies particularly in Disney comics. They maintained that Disney,
exploiting the potential of hand-drawn cartoons,
uses animals to trap children, not to liberate them. The language he employs
is nothing less than a form of manipulation. He invites children into a world
which appears to offer freedom of movement and creation, into which they
enter fearlessly, identifying with creatures as affectionate, trustful, and irresponsible as themselves, of whom no betrayal is to be expected, and with
whom they can safely play and mingle. Then, once the little readers are
caught within the pages of the comic, the doors close behind them. The
animals become transformed, under the same zoological form and the same
smiling mask, into monstrous human beings. (Dorfman and Mattelart 41)

For Dorfman and Mattelart this entrapment extends beyond its young
audience as the “‘American Dream of Life’” (95) imposes its “monstrous”
view of other cultures and countries upon their (reading) inhabitants. In
this logic, Latin Americans, for example, come to see themselves as infantile and unruly due to their illustration as infantile and unruly in Disney
comics. Following a Marxist perspective, Dorfman and Mattelart conclude
that “Disney expels the productive and historical forces from his comics
[as much as] imperialism thwarts real production and historical evolution in the underdeveloped world” (97–98). With their often compelling

reasoning, Dorfman and Mattelart fostered a Cultural Studies tradition
of reading cartoons and comics—and mainstream American culture—as
imperial texts promoting cultural, political, and social norms.
This Marxist analysis developed within an academic tradition that understood popular culture to be an essential part of an ideological apparatus.
The work of Louis Althusser in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with its
notion of interpellation, not only came to mold the study of culture at that
time but fundamentally shaped the study of popular films for later generations. For the French theorist, ideological (and state) apparatuses interpellated individuals into subject positions as these “cram every ‘citizen’ with
daily doses of nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism, [and] moralism” and
“drum into [the children] […] a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped
in the ruling ideology” (On Ideology 28–29).