Toy Story and the Hollywood Family Film." Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature
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Brown, Noel. "Toy Story and the Hollywood Family Film." Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature. By Susan Smith, Noel Brown and Sam Summers. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 21–38. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 23 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501324949.ch-002>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 23 September 2021, 15:01 UTC. Copyright © Susan Smith, Sam Summers and Noel Brown 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 21 Chapter 2 TOY STORY AND THE HOLLYWOOD FAMILY FILM N o e l B r o w n Not unreasonably, much of the scholarship on Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) has focused on its technical innovations as Hollywood’s fi rst computer- generated (CG) animated feature. But Toy Story is also a keynote of the con- temporary Hollywood family fi lm. Like the majority of Hollywood animated features, it explicitly targets so- called family audiences, utilizing a range of textual strategies to mobilize consumers of diff erent ages and backgrounds. Its cross- demographic, ‘family’ appeal was widely observed by domestic and international critics upon initial release. Th e New York Times called it ‘a parent- tickling delight . a work of incredible cleverness in the best two- tiered Disney tradition. Children will enjoy a new take on the irresistible idea of toys coming to life. Adults will marvel at a witty script and utterly brilliant anthropomor- phism.’1 Newsweek thought it had ‘something for everyone on the age spec- trum’. 2 Th e Washington Post called it ‘an amazing animated feature that will captivate everyone from age 4 on up’.3 Th e Toronto Star advised parents to ‘Take your child, your grandmother, your great- uncle’ and, ‘above all, give yourself the gift of Toy Story ’. 4 Th e St. Petersburg Times lauded its ‘age- spanning wit’.5 Th e Philadelphia Enquirer called it ‘a triumph of storytelling, a thrilling comic- adventure with a theme of friendship and community that speaks to children and adults alike’. 6 Variety called it ‘a clever mix of simplicity and sophistication that cuts across all age barriers with essential themes’.7 Th e Age called it ‘a classic example of “two- tier” entertainment’. 8 Th e Daily Mirror highlighted its appeal to ‘the child in everyone’. 9 Finally, the Independent deemed it ‘utterly assured in its fl icking back and forth between the modes of adult and childish pleasure’. 10 Toy Story ’s dialectical relationship with earlier Hollywood family fi lms – both live- action and animated – was also highlighted. In its review, the Washington Post wrote: More powerful than all the Power Rangers combined, ‘Toy Story’ fl ies higher than anything starring Aladdin or Batman and is at least as far- out as ‘E.T.’ In 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 2211 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:31:49:31 PPMM 22 22 Noel Brown fact, to fi nd a movie worthy of comparison you have to reach all the way back to 1939, when the world went gaga over Oz.11 Its technical innovations were also situated against its ‘family’ sensibilities. According to Bruce Stockler, editor of Millimeter magazine, ‘Up until now, computer animation has been cold and “high- tech” looking. Th is is a warm family movie.’ 12 For Stockler, as a ‘family movie’ Toy Story possesses an appeal- ing intimacy lacking in earlier ‘computer animation’. Lasseter himself has repeatedly spoken of his desire to appeal to audiences of all ages. Before the release of Toy Story 2 (1999), he admitted: ‘We aim to make a great family fi lm that’s great for kids but that’s even better for their parents and young adults that don’t have kids.’ 13 Th e point is that to fully understand Toy Story we need to appreciate its placement within broader traditions of family entertainment. Th is chapter aims to do two things. First, it situates Toy Story within the industrial context of post- 1970s Hollywood cinema, a period in which family fi lms (and multime- dia family entertainment more broadly) have become central to Hollywood’s industrial infrastructure and creative identity. Second, it considers some key areas of continuity and innovation in relation to the wider generic context of the Hollywood family fi lm. In so doing, it explores Toy Story ’s inherent ‘double- ness’, analysing the strategies through which it engages with mixed audiences of children and adults. Hollywood and the ‘Family Audience’ Hollywood’s interest in tapping the so- called family audience dates back to the 1900s, a period of increasing formalization in the US fi lm industry.14 Th e pro- totypical defi nition of the ‘family audience’ was parents and children watching together, but routinely the term has been used to describe mass audiences in the larger sense. Most silent- era Hollywood fi lms were constructed for ‘every- one’, with little distinction between fi lms for children and for adults. Th is changed decisively aft er the coming of sound, when a cycle of adult- orientated fi lms – including crime thrillers, courtroom dramas and sex comedies – over- took movie theatres between 1930 and 1934. While vastly popular, these fi lms aroused a huge backlash against the cinema concerning its potential ability to corrupt young minds. What we now refer to as the ‘family fi lm’ – a produc- tion explicitly designed for the dual consumption of children and adults, and marketed and received as such – emerged in the mid- 1930s. Initially, most major studio family fi lms were child- star vehicles for performers like Shirley Temple or Jane Withers, or adaptations of child- friendly literary classics, such as Little Women (George Cukor, 1933), David Copperfi eld (George Cuko, 1935), Th e Little Princess (Walter Lang, 1939) and Th e Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939). 15 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 2222 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:31:49:31 PPMM 23 Toy Story and the Hollywood Family Film 23 Th e Walt Disney Company’s fi rst animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand et al., 1937), was the second highest- grossing fi lm of the decade at the North American box offi ce. Disney was Hollywood’s only major studio that geared all of its productions to the ‘family audience’, and between the 1940s and the 1970s it was the dominant force in the fam- ily fi lm arena. However, the latter- day structural centrality of the family fi lm in Hollywood, and that of family entertainment more broadly, can be traced to George Lucas’s and Steven Spielberg’s late- 1970s blockbusters. Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Th ird Kind (1977), along- side Warner Bros.’ Superman (Richard Donner, 1978), represented a new type of family fi lm. As Peter Kr ä mer puts it, ‘most of Hollywood’s superhits since 1977 are basically, like Star Wars , children’s fi lms; more precisely, they are chil- dren’s fi lms for the whole family and for teenagers, too.’ 16 Star Wars and E.T. Th e Extra- Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982), in particular, mobilized the now- vital teenage and young adult demographics. Th ey repackaged the unpreten- tious action- adventure of Hollywood’s ‘poverty row’ serials of the 1930s and 1940s within a blockbuster aesthetic that drew on new technological potenti- alities while retaining the emotive and didactic qualities of classical- era family fi lms such as Th e Wizard of Oz . Equally important was these fi lms’ scope for ‘ancillary’ revenues, specifi cally licensing, merchandizing, pay- TV sales, and, slightly later, home video. Family Entertainment and Contemporary Hollywood Th e structural centrality of family entertainment in Hollywood is closely related to the wave of multimedia conglomeration during the 1980s and 1990s. In this period, all of the major Hollywood studios – except Disney – were either acquired by larger multinational corporations or merged with other media companies. In 1985, Turner Broadcasting purchased MGM and News Corporation acquired Twentieth Century Fox. In 1982, Columbia was bought by Coca- Cola, which then resold it to Sony in 1989. Th e same year, Warner Bros. merged with Time Life to form Time Warner. In 1990, Universal was acquired by Matsushita Electric, and then sold to Seagram, which in turn sold to Vivendi; since 2004, the fi rm has been owned by General Electric. In 1993, Viacom acquired Paramount. Th is list is cursory, but it is suffi cient to say that the industrial process of sales, acquisitions and mergers began in earnest in the mid- 1980s and continues to this day. Among the ‘classical’ Hollywood majors, only Disney has resisted takeover. Th is is due, in part, to the fact that its expansion and diversifi cation has usually been based on the ‘family’ enter- tainment model, a fact demonstrated in recent years by its acquisition of Pixar in 2006, Marvel in 2009 and Lucasfi lm in 2012. It is no coincidence that these media mergers coincided with an upsurge in the production of fi lms possessing 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 2233 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:31:49:31 PPMM 24 24 Noel Brown purportedly ‘universal’ appeal, with franchise potential, that could be realized across multiple media platforms. Contemporary ‘family’ entertainment, as I have argued elsewhere,17 can be understood at least as much in terms of cor- porate infrastructure as consumer products. It is the material manifestation of a broader universalistic agenda; international conglomeration, expansionism and synergy are the equivalent corporate manifestations.