’S AMERICA The Re- 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 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31634-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950070

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland 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 pro- foundly infl uenced 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 fi rst seminar as an undergraduate to the comple- tion of this book. I am also grateful to Donald Pease whose sense of pro- fession 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 confi dence 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 indi- vidual 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 environ- ment 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, knowl- edge, and openness have taught me to thrive as an intellectual and as a person. At Palgrave Macmillan I have been lucky to fi nd highly profes- sional support for the book, and thank in particular Lina Aboujieb and Hariharan Venugopal. I am especially grateful for the thoughtful and per- ceptive 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 per- mission 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 hazard- ous and disheartening. I thank Hajo and Kay, for without you, none of this would exist. CONTENTS

1 Exceptional Animation: An Introduction 1 From Failure to Fame: The Pixar Studio and Digital Animation 3 Animating Revolt or Monstrous Beings? 9 All Ages Admitted 19 “Every Line Drawn, Object Moved, and Shape Changed” 20 Animating the Myths and Symbols of American Culture 22 Remediating the Myths and Symbols of American Culture 28

2 “You Better Play Nice”: Digital Enchantment and the Performance of Toyness in (1995) 45 Fearful Sheriff Dolls and Oblivious Space-Ranger Action Figures 47 Stupid, Little, Insignifi cant Toys 50 The Space-Traveling American Adam 52 The Enchanting Performance of Toyness 55

3 An Animated Toast to the Ephemeral: The Multicultural Logic of Late Capitalism in (1999) 61 The Multicultural Myth of Woody, Buzz, and Bill 63 A Postmodern Toy Story 66 The Digital Logic of Late Capitalism 70 A Toast to the Ephemeral 71

ix x CONTENTS

4 A Story of Social Justice? The Liberal Consensus in Monsters, Inc. (2001) 75 Monsters of Plenty 77 The Liberal Consensus of Monstropolis 79 A Good Society of Monsters: Individualism, Meritocracy, and Affi rmative Government 83 Animating the Good Society? 85 The Green, One-Eyed Schlemiel 88

5 “From Rags to Moderate Riches”: The American Dream in Ratatouille (2007) 97 Pixar’s Animated American Dream 100 Class, Space, and the Animated Dream 105 Hyper-White Food Critics and Non-White Chefs: The Villains in Ratatouille 107 Learning to Perform: Middle Class, the Ratatouille Restaurant, and (the Aesthetics of) Ordinary Whiteness 109 An Exceptionalist Rat? 112

6 “Space. The Final Fun-tier”: Returning Home to the Frontier in WALL-E (2008) 119 The Signifi cance of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier 120 Mediating the Frontier: Consumerism, Nostalgia, and Digital Cinematography 122 Gendered Robots: Male Garbage Compressors and Female Drones 124 The Brave, New World Aboard the Axiom 127 Earth. The Final Frontier 130

7 Empire Is Out There!? The Spirit of Imperialism in Up (2009) 139 The Imperial Fantasies of James, Carl, and Charles 142 Adventure Is in Here: Rewriting the Imperial Fantasy 147 The Spirit of the Informal Empire 150 CONTENTS xi

8 “And when everyone is super … no one will be”: The End of the American Myth in (2004) 163 “Celebrating Mediocrity” 165 The Incredibles: A Voluntary Association 166 Victimizing the White, Male Superhero Body 171 From Heroine to Homemaker … to Heroine, Again 173 Leaving Suburbia 175

9 Driving in Circles: The American Puritan Jeremiad in (2006) 187 Narratives of Individual and National Decline 190 Imagined Pasts: The Jeremiad and the Golden Age of the 1950s 195 Imagined Spaces: The American South 198 The Sound of American Myths and Symbols 200

10 Animating a Yet Unimagined America? The Mediation of American Exceptionalism in (2010) 207 Errand into the Daycare Wilderness 210 Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Garbage Incinerator 214 A Yet Unimagined America? 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 buzz- ing 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 immo- bilizing shout of “squirrel!,” the world of Pixar expands “to infi nity, 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 co-founded Pixar Inc. along with thirty-eight other founding members and investor in 1986, however, the world was not Pixar. Actually, outside the fi lm 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 fi ve mil- lion dollars in some forty computer scientists with PhDs. About ten years later, as audiences of all ages fl ocked to the theaters to see the fi rst fi lm pro- duced entirely with the use of computers, the world had begun changing.

© The Author(s) 2016 1 D. Meinel, Pixar’s America, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-31634-5_1 2 D. MEINEL

As personal computers, cell phones, and the internet came to be an integral part of everyday life, in hindsight, a digitally produced fi lm 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 fi gure Buzz, traveling Route 66 with race-car Lightning McQueen, or experiencing global envi- ronmental 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 ani- mation studio, scholars have only gradually engaged with digital anima- tion 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 differ- ences (and shifts in quality) or social signifi cance of Pixar’s fi lms 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 fi lms in their broader cultural, political, and social context. With interventionist sheriff dolls and space-ranger action fi gures liberat- ing oppressed toys, exceptionally talented rodents hoping to fulfi ll their dreams, aging wilderness explorers fi ghting 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 comment- ing 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 tra- ditional American fi gures, motifs, and tropes for contemporary sensibili- ties, and their politics of animation. This book hopes to explore the ways in which Pixar fi lms 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 comput- ers to smartphones or the internet, may have been the prominent theme of a science fi ction novel or, at best, constituted a fringe phenomenon peripheral to most people. The idea of integrating computer-generated imagery into fi lms or even animating an entire movie using computers must have seemed similarly unthinkable. To invest tens of millions of dollars into a fi lm to project previously unimaginable worlds on the sil- ver screen was not a viable option for fi lm companies at that time, as all larger studios still reeled fi nancially 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 develop- ment of digital technology, blockbuster Hollywood cinema, and animated fi lm 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, , 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 fi rst Star Wars (1977) fi lm in which audiences were captivated by the adventures happen- ing 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 fl ocked to the movie theaters time and time again to experience fantastic extraterrestrial worlds and dynamic space fi ghts. Even though audiences and critics celebrated , director and producer of the fi lm, 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 opti- cal compositing system [that] gave the movie an unprecedented feeling of realism” (Paik 19). To further develop and profi t from this integration of fi lm-making and computer technology, George Lucas founded a com- puter division at his fi lm company in 1979 to develop a digital video edit- ing system, a digital audio system, and a digital fi lm 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 4 D. MEINEL of Technology with a PhD in computer science, to lead the Lucasfi lm Computer Division. The small group of digital software and hardware pio- neers Catmull assembled to develop digital fi lm production tools for audio mixing, fi lm compositing, and fi lm editing would eventually become the fi rst cohort of the Pixar company (cf. Price 35). Instead of limiting their work to the development of digital instruments for fi lm 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 pro- duced special effects or computer-generated imagery, Catmull had to fi nd 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 fi lm Andre and Wall B. (1984), “Lucas thought the fi lm was awful […] [which] reinforced his feeling that his Computer Division shouldn’t be making fi lms […] [and gave] him a low impression of ” (Price 59). Facing con- tinuous doubts about the potential of computer-animated fi lm 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 con- vinced Steve Jobs to acquire a computer graphics section which, in 1986, was not generating profi ts. Recently fi red 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 produc- ing extraordinary digital imagery such as computer-animated knights for Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) can never be settled entirely. At fi rst, how- ever, Jobs decided to continue fostering the development of his acquisi- tion into a hardware company, since Catmull and his team had created a computer “that could scan movie fi lm, combine special-effects images with live-action footage […] and record the results back onto fi lm” (Price 62). Named after its fi rst 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 fulfi ll these expectations. Plagued with technological inconveniences and limited commercial suc- cess, the computer became a funding sink for Pixar and Jobs. Although in dire fi nancial distress, Pixar stayed in business because in the late the company had expanded its portfolio by developing fi lm software and producing TV commercials. For example, the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) computer program, useful to color ink-and- paint 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 innova- tion, their 3-D rendering and image processing software remained “niche product[s]” (Price 100). With their technological knowledge and experi- ence, however, Pixar was able to gain a foothold in the market for televi- sion 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 defi cits 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 defi ne Pixar’s technologi- cal superiority in the present, its days of producing commercials are long gone. Today, audiences love, cherish, and admire Pixar for its many feature- length computer-animated fi lms. While the fi rst-ever full-length computer- animated fi lm Toy Story (1995) delivered the company from its fi nancial distress in 1995, in those early years only a few people believed in Pixar as a fi lm 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 anima- tion 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 , in January 1984 a frustrated Lasseter joined the Graphics Group at Lucasfi lm. His collaboration with Catmull proved to 6 D. MEINEL be the creative foundation of the company’s later success. Supported by Catmull in his attempts to explore the technological boundaries of com- puter animation, Lasseter produced several short fi lms throughout the 1980s, each of which contributed to Pixar’s growing esteem in the fi lm industry, demonstrated the ever-increasing possibilities of digital technol- ogy, and allowed Pixar to establish their commercial business. Beginning with Luxo Jr. (1984), Pixar continuously produced short and eventually won the Oscar for in the category of best animated short fi lm in 1988. While these fi lms showcased the potential of Pixar’s rendering software and functioned to advertise their technological capa- bilities, they also helped to gradually position Pixar as a fi lm brand. With the fi nancial dedication of Steve Jobs, Pixar accumulated technological and artistic capital which eventually paid off in the early 1990s when the previ- ously disinclined Disney Studios began to fl oat 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 fi nally set Pixar on its course to become the culturally, commercially, and technologically leading computer animation studio of the present. Teetering on the brink of fi nancial collapse and wrestling for nearly ten years with fi nding a profi table business model, Pixar Inc. had attempted to develop graphics computers for the mass market, invented sophisti- cated rendering software, dabbled in television advertising, and produced critically acclaimed shorts until fi nding its path. Although Ed Catmull’s technological vision, John Lasseter’s creative talent, and Steve Jobs’ busi- ness 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 profi table 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 fi lm digitally, the success of a computer- animation fi lm studio in 1995 needs to be situated within the broader context of a transforming fi lm industry, the renaissance of animated fi lm, and consolidation of The Disney Company in the 1980s and 1990s. In the tumultuous early years of the company, the fi rst cohort at Pixar already established the predominant ideas for which the animation stu- dio 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 fi lms through novel visual imagery coincided with and profi ted 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 fi lm 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 connec- tion to make with the fantasy-fi lm successes of a number of fi lms produced in the 1970s and 1980s. These are fi lms that many of the Pixar staff would be very familiar with, informing their sense of characterisation, plot, tone and subject choice. Indeed, of the fi lmmakers synonymous with the fantasy fi lm, we must cite George Lucas and Steven Spielberg—and, critically, both expressed strong feelings towards the tradition of the Disney studio’s ani- mated fi lms of the 1940s and 1950s. (Clarke 38) 2

Parallel to a thriving fi lm industry invested in refi ning 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 offi ce hits and invigorated the genre with novel appeal. 3 At that time, The Company, however, seemed to have lost its ability to produce appealing animation fi lms—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, com- mercial, and innovation perspective, the Disney tradition so fundamen- tal in shaping the fi lm industry for decades had lost its allure. Only after Michael Eisner became CEO of the company in 1984 and installed as the chairman of Disney’s motion picture division did the company begin to release critically acclaimed and fi nancially successful ani- mated fi lms again. Beginning with The Little Mermaid (1989), in short succession Disney was able to release fi lms which helped recover its fi nan- cial and cultural capital: Beauty and the Beast (1991), (1992), (1994), and (1995) not just (re-)established as a major entertainment business, but also 4 rekin- dled 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 8 D. MEINEL aspirations and ideals at Pixar, beyond the individual training and involve- ment of John Lasseter and his admiration for The Walt Disney Company. In their fi rst collaboration with Disney, Toy Story (1995), the Pixar employ- ees learned a huge amount from their cel-animation heirs, appropriating the fi nancial, organizational, and artistic approaches to a point where sev- eral of Disney’s senior executives professed “that Pixar had made a fi lm that contained more of the ‘heart’ of traditional Disney animated fi lms than they themselves were making at that time” (Price 155–156). In her enthusiastic review of the fi lm 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 fi lm critics celebrated Toy Story for “the purity, the ecstatic freedom of imagination, that’s the hallmark of the greatest children’s fi lms” 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 fur- ther included the technological savvy of the production with its combi- nation 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 fi lm and quickly inspired other fi lm stu- dios to launch or develop their animation department. The last twenty years, therefore, have seen a tremendous increase in computer-animated fi lms as these movies matured into a viable and lucrative avenue for profi t in the industry. Within the diverse and popular fi eld of computer-animated fi lms today, Pixar competes with a variety of other studios for audience attention at the box offi ce. While in the 1990s Pixar profi ted from the novelty of com- puter animation, the last two decades have seen intensifi ed 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 (2010), Wreck-It Ralph (2012), and (2013). Among the numerous competitors to Pixar, the DreamWorks Studios with their Shrek (2001–2010) tetralogy and the Madagascar (2005–2012) trilogy 5 have been particularly successful in developing a recognizable and individual brand of animation. From its fi rst animated feature, Antz (1998), DreamWorks explicitly intended “to pro- EXCEPTIONAL ANIMATION: AN INTRODUCTION 9 duce fi lms that were hipper, smarter, and less sentimental than the tradi- tional Disney animated fi lm, 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 fi lms, just as all previous examples speak to the fl our- ishing and diversity of computer-animated fi lms independent of any particu- lar production company, this book concentrates exclusively on Pixar—not because the studio still maintains a leading position at the box offi ce 6 or in the technological fi eld but because Pixar has, over the decades since its foun- dation, developed into a synonym for animated fi lm. While commercially still the most successful studio, Pixar has also become a cultural icon unmatched by its rivals. The technological innova- tion and aesthetic appeal of the company has not merely created a highly visible brand and household name for animation; in its exhibition on digi- tal 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 fi lm: 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 fi lms, 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 fi lm produc- tions. 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 fi lm industry, and the Disney animation tradition, Pixar not only met with favorable reception. By the late 1990s, after fi rst amazement at the novel visual technology had vanished, the studio increasingly encountered questions and doubts about the moral and political integrity of its fi lms. Particularly when The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar Animation 10 D. MEINEL

Studios in 2006 for 7.4 billion dollars and John Lasseter became chief creative offi cer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation and principal cre- ative 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 fi lms” (Booker Hidden Messages 78). Although not yet charged with disneyfying (or pixarfying) popular culture, 8 the Pixar Animation Studios encountered increasing dis- approval which accused their fi lms of simplifi cation, superfi ciality, sanitiza- tion, 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 fi lm […] 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 fi lm itself is not at all inter- ested 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 innova- tive, and artistically savvy fi lm company. Because of the non-fairy tale set- ting, 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 fi lms for opposing the conventional aesthetics and normative politics of representation often associated with Disney (cf. Price 151–152). The cinematography with its photorealist quality exemplifi es 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] EXCEPTIONAL ANIMATION: AN INTRODUCTION 11 hope, imagination, beauty and a degree of purity and innocence that is countercultural in our age” (Velarde 9) or scorn the fi lms 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) fi lm and of popular culture in general. The medium of hand-drawn fi lm animation provoked such contradic- tory and opposing evaluations right from its early inception in the 1920s. Soviet fi lm- 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 fi lms “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 simi- larly 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 com- modifi cation of life. “[T]he majority of city dwellers, throughout the work- day in offi ces and factories,” Benjamin writes, “have to relinquish their humanity in the face of an apparatus. In the evening these same masses fi ll the cinemas, to witness the fi lm 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” (ital- ics in original, 31). While the fi lm star allegorically symbolized a triumph of the people over their subjugation by modern technology (the factory, the offi ce, etc.) through modern technology (the fi lm), the unruly perfor- mances 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 liberat- ing potential. With the introduction of color to fi lm in the 1930s and the increasingly “gloomy and sinister fi re-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 aes- theticizing quality of colored animation gradually erased its anarchic and disobedient features and exemplifi ed “how easily fascism takes over ‘revo- lutionary’ innovations in this fi eld 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 fi gures, and social subversiveness in the Disney fi lms to “the increasing rationalization of [Disney’s] tech- niques necessitated by his own industrial development” (271). The grow- ing complexity of fi lm 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 fi lms in a system which used Fordist principles of standardized assembly line production to maximize effi ciency (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 psycholog- ical characteristics of humans, and the Disney style had solidifi ed 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 and The Seven Dwarfs (1937) marked the highpoint of this development (cf. James 271–272), concluded Disney’s transition into “a corporate fi lm 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 surround- ing animation, but the idea that animated animals, objects, and fi gures could transport normative ideas about culture and society gained momen- tum 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 fi lms, 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 EXCEPTIONAL ANIMATION: AN INTRODUCTION 13

(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 imperial- ist 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 irre- sponsible 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 infan- tile 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 evolu- tion 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 under- stood 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 fi lms for later genera- tions. For the French theorist, ideological (and state) apparatuses interpel- lated 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).