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Holliday, Christopher. Holliday, Christopher. " Toying with Performance: Toy Story, Virtual Puppetry and Computer- Animated Film Acting." Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature. By Susan Smith, Noel Brown and Sam Summers. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 87–104. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Oct. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501324949.ch-006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 1 October 2021, 07:14 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. 87 Chapter 6 T OYING WITH PERFORMANCE: TOY STORY , VIRTUAL PUPPETRY AND COMPUTER-A NIMATED FILM ACTING C h r i s t o p h e r H o l l i d a y In the early 1990s, during the emergence of the global fast food industry boom, the Walt Disney studio abruptly ended its successful alliance with restaurant chain McDonald’s – which, since 1982, had held the monopoly on Disney’s tie- in promotional merchandise – and instead announced a lucrative ten- fi lm licensing contract with rival outlet, Burger King. Under the terms of this agree- ment, the Florida- based restaurant would now hold exclusivity over Disney’s array of animated characters, and working alongside US toy manufacturers could license collectible toys as part of its meal packages based on characters from the studio’s animated features Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1991), Aladdin (Ron Clements and John Musker, 1992), Th e Lion King (Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff , 1994), Pocahontas (Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, 1995) and Th e Hunchback of Notre Dame (Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise, 1996).1 Produced by Pixar Animation Studio as its fi rst computer- animated feature fi lm but distributed by Disney, Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) was likewise subject to this new commercial deal and made commensu- rate with Hollywood’s increasingly synergistic relationship with the fast food market. To coincide with the North American theatrical release of Toy Story in November 1995, for example, Burger King manufactured a range of collect- ible plastic toys representing the fi lm’s main characters: Woody the Cowboy, Buzz Lightyear, Rex the dinosaur, Hamm the piggy bank, RC the remote con- trol car and the Green Army Men soldiers. However, also available as part of the restaurant’s ‘Kid’s Club’ meal (a children’s meal programme inaugurated by Burger King in 1989) was a set of four collectible hand puppets marketed under the ‘Toy Story Pals’ label and again featuring Woody, Buzz, Rex and Hamm. Produced by the New York- based advertising agency Ammirati Puris Lintas, the fi ve television commercials celebrating Disney’s tie- in with Burger King depicted children excitedly manipulating their puppets’ heads and arms from the ‘inside out’, throwing voices into their models and orchestrating their bodies 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 8877 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:33:49:33 PPMM 88 88 Christopher Holliday into the most dynamic poses within the spectacle of repertory theatre. Indeed, as the exchange between two (presumably fi ctional) Burger King employees in one of these US television adverts proclaimed, some of the children at the res- taurant ‘have been here for hours’ because ‘they can’t put their puppets down’.2 Th e strengthening of cross- promotional activity between the entertainment and fast food industries throughout the 1990s (including the considered target- ing of the child audience beyond the cinema auditorium) suggested, of course, a far from ideologically innocuous version of puppetry operating both in excess of and as a direct consequence to the ‘animated’ activity of the chain’s pre- teen clientele. Fuelling the younger consumer’s collective (and collecting ) mentality, the volume of tie- in merchandise readily available as a result of the Disney/ Burger King union, including the range of Toy Story - themed puppets, not only off ered potent promotion for Pixar’s debut computer- animated feature, but in their new role as controlling puppeteer actually inverted their ideological posi- tion as the puppets of consumer culture. Manoeuvring beyond Disney’s highly visible ‘culture of commercialization’ and profi table merchandising of childhood, this chapter takes its cue from the loaded image of puppetry promulgated as part of Toy Story ’s promotional dis- course, and in particular the vision of its popular toy characters as discrete puppet forms. 3 Most notably, this chapter argues that it is the analogous image of puppet/ puppeteer interaction that recurs throughout Toy Story that readily confronts the vexed relationship between animation and discourses of digitally animated performance, and spotlights how puppetry as a conceptual framework functions as a lever for understanding issues surrounding computer- animated fi lm acting. Whether human (Andy) or non- human fi gurations (Woody, Buzz), all computer- animated fi lm characters are ostensibly virtual marionettes that belong to a new breed of cyber puppetry. Th e jointed segmentation and indi- vidual limbs of computer- animated bodies provide specifi c articulation points for the animator, who remotely operates each character’s armature and steer their complex endoskeletons utilizing a series of avars (animation variables). Th e specifi city of such processes – compared with how animated movement is achieved in cel animation or stop- motion techniques – implicates computer- animated fi lm ‘acting’ into the centuries- long tradition of ‘performing objects’. Understood through Western discourses of puppet theatre and typically held distinct from cinema, performing objects have been defi ned by Frank Proschan as ‘material images of humans, animals, or spirits that are created, displayed, or manipulated in narrative or dramatic performance’. 4 Th e frequent scenes in Toy Story of toys under Andy’s puppet- like manipulation thus creatively ‘doubles’ how computer- animated fi lm performance is engineered through a similar encounter between occluded performer and visible performing object. By acknowledging how the toys are initially acted upon by Andy (before they are puppeteered into another animated life beyond his perception and con- trol by the fi lm’s animators), this chapter argues that Toy Story discloses how performance in the computer- animated fi lm might be conceptualized as an 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 8888 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:33:49:33 PPMM 89 Toying with Performance 89 innovative form of modern puppet entertainment. Th roughout its narrative, Pixar’s debut fi lm ultimately establishes an acceptance of the (digital) puppet as a replacement for the live, lively and living human body, and this chapter sug- gests how Toy Story celebrates – rather than disguises – the on- stage/ off - stage partition fundamental to the stagecraft of computer- animated fi lm acting. Digital Puppetry and Performing Animation Th e advent of digitally assisted or computer- mediated acting within contem- porary Hollywood cinema has prompted widespread critical debate and popu- lar consternation as to digital technology’s intercession into, and corruption of, profi lmic human presence. 5 Th e received narrative telling the history of digital actors, avatars, synthespians and vactors (a neologism of virtual and actors) across moving image culture oft en defi nes the digital as a frustrating prosthesis that obstructs, disguises and reorients the foundational reality of human performance. Several scholars, such as Lisa Bode, Lisa Purse, Chris Pallant and Sharon Carnicke have extended the parameters of digital acting by unpacking the aesthetic and even ethical uncertainty surrounding a type of performance that is ‘digitally enabled’.6 Pallant makes clear that animated per- formances or graphically/ digitally mediated forms of acting tend overwhelm- ingly to move away from the psychology of the ‘method’, which held such sway as an acting style throughout the 1950s following the demise of classical studio- era Hollywood. 7 Yet as a technique that conventionally transcribes and encodes human activity and movement (bodily, facial) through motion sensors (physical avars ) that are relayed via computer soft ware, the technique known as motion- capture is a form of digital puppetry that typically maintains the human body as the primary control mechanism. In this way, motion- capture has dually revised preexisting paradigms surrounding ‘actorly’ performance in cinema, yet equally satisfi ed something of a spectatorial desire for the nuances of human connection and (preservation of) the ‘minutiae of human emotion’ demanded in, and of, cinema’s characters.8 Popularized in blockbuster (oft en franchise) fi lms such as Th e Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson, 2001– 03) and Th e Hobbit (Peter Jackson, 2012– 14) trilogies, but also King Kon g (Peter Jackson, 2005), Th e Curious Case of Benjamin Button (David Fincher, 2008), Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), Tron: Legacy (Joseph Kosinksi, 2010), Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011), Real Steel (Shawn Levy, 2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (Matt Reeves, 2014) and Th e BFG (Steven Spielberg, 2016), ‘mo- cap’ technology has placed computer graphics on a collision course with the alleged sanctity and immediacy of human performance in the digital age. Although contentious among animation purists and still subject to ongo- ing industry scepticism, motion- capture technology
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