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

From Failure to Fame: The Pixar Studio All Ages Admitted 19 “Every Line Drawn, Object Moved, and Shape Changed” 20 Animating the Myths and Symbols of American Culture 22 Remediating the

PIXAR’S AMERICAThe Re-Animation of American Mythsand Symbols

DIETMAR MEINEL

Pixar’s America

The Re-Animation of American Myths and Symbols

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

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Department of Anglophone Studies

University of Duisburg-Essen

Essen , Nordrhein-Westfalen , Germany

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 vidual chapters at our wonderful reading group meetings; my cohort at the Graduate School of North American Studies—Ben Robbins, Dorian

indi-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 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

profes-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 mission to reproduce material here

per-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

From Failure to Fame: The Pixar Studio

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 Toy Story (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 Toy Story 2 (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

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:

Learning to Perform: Middle Class,

the Ratatouille Restaurant, and (the Aesthetics of)

and Female Drones 124

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

8 “And when everyone is super … no one will be”:

The End of the American Myth in 

The Incredibles (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 Cars (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 Toy Story 3 (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

buzz-what these few individuals contributed to the blockbuster trilogy Star Wars

(1977–1983) or why high-tech entrepreneur Steve Jobs invested fi ve 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

Exceptional Animation: An Introduction

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 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

ani-is nothing to say in print about the artani-istic implications, stylani-istic 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

differ-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

FROM FAILURE TO FAME: THE PIXAR STUDIO AND DIGITAL

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, 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 fi rst Star Wars

(1977) fi lm in which audiences were captivated by the adventures 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 George Lucas, director and producer

happen-of the fi lm, for his artistic vision, most happen-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 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

com-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 computer animation” (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 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

con-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 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 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

acquisi-in the hands of a few early adopters and then make their way acquisi-into a vast mainstream market” (Jobs quoted in Price 85)

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 1980s 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 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-

technologi-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 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 Toaster , in January 1984 a frustrated Lasseter joined the

Graphics Group at Lucasfi lm His collaboration with Catmull proved to

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 animations and eventually won the Oscar for Tin Toy 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 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

sophisti-a profi tsophisti-able entertsophisti-ainment business msophisti-ay be hsophisti-ard to imsophisti-agine 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

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 tion to make with the fantasy-fi lm successes of a number of fi lms produced

connec-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 Walt Disney 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 Jeffrey Katzenberg 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), Aladdin (1992), The

Lion King (1994), and Pocahontas (1995) not just (re-)established The

Walt Disney Company as a major entertainment business, but also 4 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

rekin-aspirations and ideals at Pixar, beyond the individual training and ment of John Lasseter and his admiration for The Walt Disney Company

involve-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 nation of “three-dimensional reality and freedom of movement that is

combi-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 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

stu-at the box offi ce While in the 1990s Pixar profi ted from the novelty of puter animation, the last two decades have seen intensifi ed competition in the

com-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) 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-duce fi lms that were hipper, smarter, and less sentimental than the tional Disney animated fi lm, aimed at an audience of children assumed to be more intelligent and sophisticated than Disney had apparently long assumed

tradi-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

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 approval which accused their fi lms of simplifi cation, superfi ciality, sanitiza-

dis-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]

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” ics in original, 31) While the fi lm star allegorically symbolized a triumph

(ital-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 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

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] niques necessitated by his own industrial development” (271) The grow-ing complexity of fi lm sound, color, multiplane camera, and the expansion

tech-of production led Disney to introduce the division tech-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 Snow White 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 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

surround-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

(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 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 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

under-“drum into [the children] […] a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped

in the ruling ideology” ( On Ideology 28–29)

Film scholars would refi ne this notion of a mimetic transfer of meaning from apparatus to subject to suit the particular conditions of fi lm con-sumption at the movie theater Seen in this light, mainstream culture and Hollywood fi lms would mimetically transfer their imperialist or normative ideas onto their viewers through the apparatus of the cinema As Winfried Fluck notes, the entire movie theater experience came to be understood

in terms of an ideological apparatus since “[t]he ideological effect no ger resides in the content of the fi lm, but in its cinematic mode of rep-resentation—its implied spectator position, its ‘transparent’ images and its characteristic forms of narration and editing” (“Aesthetic Experience

lon-of the Image” 26) Laura Mulvey, in her seminal essay “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema” (1975), not merely presumed a mimetic relation-ship between fi lm and ideology, but understood the experience of the fi lm theater, the visual and narrative conventions of Hollywood cinema—what would be seen eventually as the entire fi lm apparatus—to interpellate indi-vidual spectators into a subject position As the viewing and reception of Hollywood fi lm became “the site where the ideological effect takes hold almost imperceptively and, therefore, most effectively” (Fluck, “Aesthetic Experience of the Image” 28), the imperialist reading of Disney cartoons

by Dorfman and Mattelart expanded into a critical assessment of popular (animation) fi lm in general

This sense of an all-pervasive imperial ideology gained particular tion in American Studies in the following decades as scholars engaged with

trac-the Cultures of United States Imperialism (1993) The contributors to trac-the

seminal essay-collection edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease analyzed and questioned “the multiple histories of continental and overseas expan-sion, conquest, confl ict, and resistance which have shaped the cultures of the United States and the cultures of those it has dominated within and beyond its geopolitical boundaries” (Kaplan, “Left Alone with America” 4) These “New Americanists” further maintained that US imperialism could not be comprehended merely by disclosing and analyzing impe-rial practices abroad, but had to be situated within similar procedures at home 9 American culture, in their view, profoundly contributed to the dis-semination and pervasiveness of US imperialism by perpetuating fantasies

of American superiority 10 In portraying America as the bearer of liberty and democracy, canonical and popular texts defi ne the United States as inherently anti-imperial—a country that opposes the expansionist poli-tics of its imperialist rivals such as the Soviet Union (cf Kaplan, “Left Alone with America” 12) America had been exempt from the historical

trajectories of social instability and lapses into totalitarianism, this tionalist logic maintained, because the United States had not experienced

excep-a feudexcep-al pexcep-ast or possessed excep-a lexcep-anded excep-aristocrexcep-acy Formed excep-at excep-an expexcep-anding frontier that fostered a liberal individualism, this “empire of liberty” had been immune to “the inner, dialectical engine of history” (Rodgers 29) From the Monroe Doctrine to the frontier thesis, the absence of class tensions, and the American Dream, intellectuals and the greater pub-lic grouped these individual (at times even competing) notions about American culture under the umbrella phrase “American exceptionalism,”

as the New Americanists assert In consequence, this exceptionalism helps

to frame American imperial expansions as humanitarian interventions to protect or expand liberty, justice, and democracy, in contrast to the totali-tarian motivation of other evil empires Thanks to its wide appeal, in this view, popular culture transmits these imperialist ideas and interpellates citizen- subjects into an exceptionalist ideology

In a Marxist understanding of popular culture, then, the Disney ductions and those of their subsidiaries such as Pixar Animation Studios with their 100 million dollar fi lms qualify as essential instruments of American exceptionalism, since mainstream texts, in this view, promote the cultures of US imperialism (while subversion and opposition would be located exclusively at the social, political, and cultural margins) (cf Voelz 188) Seen from this perspective, Pixar exemplifi es the threat of cinematic interpellation, as the animation studio markets its seemingly nạve and harmless entertainment products to the most susceptible of their all-age audience: children As mainstream popular products, then, the sheriff doll

pro-and the space-ranger action fi gure in Toy Story (1995) or the American explorers in Up (2009) interpellate their viewers into an exceptionalist

and imperialist ideology 11 Indeed, with its portrayal of Carl and Charles as fearless adventurers journeying into a South American wilderness to pur-

sue their masculine fantasies, Up may exemplarily illustrate this imperial

ideology by animating a contemporary version of the Monroe Doctrine 12

Whether considering the imperialist motifs in Up , the portrayal of white privilege in Ratatouille , or the animation of conventional gender roles in WALL-E , scholarship from critical theory to the New Americanists offers

vital approaches to interrogate the norms and ideologies in Pixar fi lms This book, therefore, aims to question these seemingly innocent con-sumer products as problematic cultural, political, and social texts Yet, can

we attribute the international box offi ce and home video success of Pixar

fi lms exclusively to the ignorance of the unenlightened masses dubbed

into an American ideology and willfully spending their money on cultural products that “cram” an imperialist or exceptionalist ideology down their throats without being dismissive (and condescending) towards millions

of viewers worldwide? Does not the disobedience, revolt, and unruliness Eisenstein and Benjamin attributed to early hand-drawn animation con-tinue to survive in present-day computer animation in spite of or in an uneasy closeness with discriminatory norms and conventions?

In recent years, scholarship has shifted from the interpellatory tial of popular culture and mainstream Hollywood fi lm to highlight acts

poten-of appropriation and meaning-production in the process poten-of consumption

In “Circulating Empires: Colonial Authority and the Immoral, Subversive Problem of American Film,” for example, Brian Larkin considers the ways in which the cinema apparatus (in the form of American fi lms and the anonym-ity of movie theater experience) threatened the pervasiveness of British impe-rial rule in India around 1900 Although the British imperial administration considered fi lms as vital tools to promote an ideology of white superiority and non-white inferiority (cf Larkin 158), with its depiction of underprivi-leged, poor whites the increasingly popular Hollywood fi lms were feared to jeopardize British hegemony Their wide-ranging portrayals of “‘backstage’ images of white culture and morality […] undercut the dichotomy separat-ing ‘depraved’ natives from ‘civilized’ rulers” (Larkin 158) and imperiled the prevalent racial hierarchies of British imperialism In making the previously

“visual unavailability” (Larkin 171) of white colonizers “‘available to the native gaze’” (Arora in Larkin 171), the space of the screening, the movie theater, further complicated seemingly stable colonial dichotomies The colonized subject experienced a form of empowerment through the act of seeing, while remaining concealed from the policing of the imperial gaze in the poorly lit cinema 13 As these examples from British India suggest, Larkin concludes, “[t]he cinematic experience is never simply an abstract exchange

of meaning between a technology and its addressee” (178)

In her contribution to Globalizing American Studies , Elizabeth

Thompson also explores the appropriation of Hollywood fi lm within local,

regional, and transnational contexts She examines the reception of Gone

with the Wind (1939) throughout Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria during World

War II to maintain that audiences linked the themes of the fi lm to their social, political, economic, and cultural experiences; “historical context,” Thompson contends, “shaped reception of Hollywood’s universal vernac-ular” (185) As the turmoil of World War II destabilized the established political system of the region, “the reign of the old landowning elite was

crumbling under the wartime pressure of labor, nationalist, and Islamic movements that gave voice to popular grievances” (Thompson 197) Middle and working class audiences found vivid images in the Hollywood production for their hopes and ambitions “to overturn the patriarchal world of privilege ruled by landed elites and to capture the state at inde-pendence” (Thompson 197) 14 The links between life in Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria in the fi rst half of the twentieth century and the cinematic rep-resentation of the US American South in the 1860s, Thompson asserts, were made possible by “[t]he global vernacular invented by Hollywood

[which] opened GWTW to contested local readings” (202) In Beirut,

Cairo, and Damascus the popular cinematographic text helped to establish

“a vital and separate public sphere” (Thompson 202)

Lastly, in his essay “Watching Shrek in Teheran” (2010), Brian Edwards

juxtaposes the popularity of Iranian fi lm-maker Abbas Kiorastami in the United States with the widespread appeal of the Hollywood animated fi lm

Shrek (2001) in Iran The director of fi lms like Taste of Cherry (1997) is

embraced for his nuanced yet critical perspective on Iranian society and the Islamic political regime in the West, while at the same time dismissed

as “an art director whose fi lms are far removed from politics or any sense

of contemporaneity” and as “another pawn in the West’s media game”

(Edwards 5) in Iran Another product of this Western media game, Shrek ,

on the other hand, is a part of the vital Iranian fi lm culture Thanks to its various (illegally) dubbed Farsi versions and its appropriation to a distinct cultural context, the DreamWorks production enjoys immense popularity and, in many respects, “isn’t an American fi lm at all” (2) 15 Indeed, Shrek

in Iran and Kiorastami in America “resonate in ways that their producers

could hardly have predicted” as “[t]he Iranian Shrek and the American

Kiorastami do not represent, in their new homes, what they represent in the fi lm worlds where they originated” (Edwards 8) Larkin, Thompson, and Edwards exemplify transnational approaches to the study of popular

fi lm which do not conceptualize American silent fi lms, Gone with the Wind ,

or Shrek as forms of cultural imperialism Instead, transnational scholarship

explores the various ways in which audiences appropriate the meaning of cinematic texts to their individual experience and environment

From the movie theaters in colonial India to the cinema palaces of North Africa and private screenings in Iran, these examples encourage the understanding of fi lms in terms of the interactive practices they generate Whether participating in the public sphere of a twentieth-century movie theater or watching illegal copies downloaded from the internet on a

laptop in the twenty-fi rst century, spectators link fi lms to their cultural, economic, historical, political, and social context to produce meaning that

is useful in their own world The transnational approach to the study of Hollywood fi lm, then, does not deem popular cultural productions to be seamlessly hailing their audiences into an ideology Rather, scholars con-ceptualize cinematic texts as tools to help create identities In her presi-dential address to the American Studies Association in 2004, Shelly Fisher Fishkin advocated a transnational shift in the fi eld to enable scholars to comprehend American culture and literature “from vantage points beyond its borders” (20) and within broader networks 16 In almost contrary fash-ion to the notion of ideological interpellation, transnational approaches to the study of culture consider reading and viewing as interactive practices and audiences as competent producers of textual meaning

Consequently, a transnational approach to Pixar Animation Studios encourages us to locate the company within international fi nancial struc-tures, to examine the involvement of the multi-ethnic production staff working on an animated feature fi lm, to study its international reception

in various regions or cultures, and to explore the appropriation of its ally disseminated animation fi lms within local, regional, and transnational contexts—a transnational approach to the study of Pixar eventually allows

glob-us to see its products as “social, political, linguistic, cultural, and economic crossroads” (Fisher Fishkin 22) Close readings from a transnational per-spective, therefore, foster an analysis of the illustration of global environ-

mental pollution in WALL-E , the Pan-American and postcolonial context

of Up , and the international community of toys in Toy Story 3 to probe the

contingencies of the “naturalness” of borders, boundaries, binaries, and nations Fisher Fishkin so adamantly envisions

Scholarship tends to conceptualize popular culture either as an ideological apparatus interpellating individuals into a subject position or as a liberating practice fostering its audiences to produce the meaning of texts In anima-tion studies, these competing views celebrate computer-animated fi lms for their “subtle as well as overt connections between communitarian revolt and queer embodiment” (Halberstam 29) and question their normative quality when these fi lms “prefer family to collectivity, human individuality to social bonding, extraordinary individuals to diverse communities” (Halberstam 46–47) The closeness of traditional gender portrayals and environmental

consciousness in WALL-E or the proximity of the wilderness explorer and

a queer transnational community in Up , however, compel us to read each

Pixar fi lm as simultaneously “animating revolt” and as “monstrous beings.”

ALL AGES ADMITTED

With their extensive references to literature written by Maurice Sendak, Chris van Allsburg, or Dr Seuss, the fi lms of the Pixar Animation Studios explicitly draw on a rich literary canon to illustrate and populate their world (cf Clarke 24) Since the marketing strategies for these Pixar prod-ucts and the tied-in merchandizing industry additionally address pre-teen

consumers explicitly (cf Booker, Hidden Messages 98), the public often

perceive Pixar fi lms as products primarily made for children Journalists

have strengthened this assessment in their reviews of, for example, Toy

Story , suggesting that “[c]hildren will enjoy a new take on the irresistible

idea of toys coming to life” (Maslin) and that “[f]or the kids in the ence, a movie like this will work because it tells a fun story, contains a lot

audi-of humor, and is exciting to watch” (Ebert) These writers were, however, also quick to laud the maturity of the fi lm as “[o]lder viewers may be even

more absorbed, because Toy Story […] achieves a three-dimensional reality

and freedom of movement that is liberating and new” (Ebert) and “will tickle adults even more than it does kids” (Gleiberman)

Surprisingly, scholarly writing about Pixar tends to omit the studio’s all- age appeal Instead, as a corporation in the business of generating profi ts off the dreams and fantasies of children, Keith M. Booker believes, “one cannot expect [Pixar] to be too critical of capitalist marketing practices”

( Hidden Messages 98) For Booker, an animated fi lm such as WALL-E

exemplifi es “Hollywood sentimentality” and fails to express a critique thereof because “[t]he whole phenomenon of fi lm-linked merchandising […] makes it clear that, from at least the 1930s, with Disney’s extensive co-marketing of Mickey Mouse, children’s fi lms have been designed to help children develop the kind of consumerist mentality upon which the

U.S economy crucially depends” ( Hidden Messages 109) This assessment

stands in stark contrast to the complexity applauded by journalists and the awe which Pixar inspired Similarly, neither for Benjamin, Eisenstein, nor the curators of the MoMA exhibition did the corporate nature of animation or the (assumed) gullibility of its (presumed) audience preclude the subversive potential in animation; “a cynical reading of the world of animation,” Jack Halberstam reasons in his dismissal of the presumed (consumerist) indoctrination at work in Pixar fi lms, “will always return

to the notion that diffi cult topics are raised and contained in children’s

fi lms precisely so that they do not have to be discussed elsewhere” (52) But a closer examination of these cinematic texts transcends notions of

“revolting animations” since Pixar fi lms “also offer us the real and ling possibility of animating revolt,” Halberstam vehemently asserts (52) Particularly the aesthetics of animation and the intertextual complexity

compel-of Pixar fi lms encourage us to question whether these texts do operate merely as indoctrinations of a young and nạve audience

When the obese spaceship captain in WALL-E , for example, leaves his hovercraft chair for the fi rst time in his life, the extra-diegetic music of Also

Sprach Zarathustra accompanies (t)his step While the low-angle camera

shot of the captain further illustrates the magnitude of this emancipatory act, the scene may appear comical in its visual and musical exaggeration of

normal movement, but the music also refers to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 : A

Space Odyssey (1968) In his fi lm, Kubrick famously accompanies a montage

of human development from the fi rst use of tools to space travel with the

piece by Richard Strauss Due to its intertextual reference to 2001 : A Space

Odyssey , the scene in WALL-E adds an additional layer to this

tongue-in-cheek moment; yet, the initial steps of the spaceship captain also possess

an earnest quality since his act initiates the emancipation of humanity from

its technological subordination in WALL-E and, hence, refers to a similar theme in 2001 17 The intertextual use of the musical score, then, produces multiple readings and exemplifi es an aesthetic complexity appealing to an all-age audience While this may explain Pixar’s broad popular appeal (and com-mercial success), the intricacy of the narrative and aesthetic layers is hardly suited for the immediate transfer of (corporate) Hollywood sentimentalities

“EVERY LINE DRAWN, OBJECT MOVED, AND SHAPE

CHANGED”

While the music, the camera work, the editing process, the voice-acting, and the character performances fundamentally shape the aesthetic quality of ani-mated fi lm, most scholars concentrate on the visible aspects of animation as examples of its subversive potential: “The antinormative nature of animated

fi lm,” Halberstam writes, “arises out of the wacky juxtapositions found in animated worlds between bodies, groups, and environments And the mul-tigendered forms sprout from the strangeness of voice–body combinations, the imaginative rendering of character, and the permeability of the relation between background and foreground in any given animated scene” (181–182) 18 Historically, scholars and intellectuals had always located the subver-sive potential of animation in its fantastical features; Walter Benjamin and Sergei Eisenstein ascribed a rebellious quality to the ubiquitous employment

of anthropomorphized animals and objects against a dehumanizing apparatus and against “spiritual stagnation and greyness.”

Today, as “the aesthetic possibilities afforded by CGI both recall and enhance the ‘openness’ of the language of animation as an interrogative tool” (Wells 154), animation scholars attribute this potential even to the

“quasi-realist context” and aesthetics of computer- animated fi lms For

Wells in Animation and America (2002), however, this observation is part

of a broader understanding of animation that is not limited to the tive quality of particular characters or objects:

[A]nimation in all of its production contexts has the capacity to subvert, critically comment upon, and re-determine views of culture and social practice […] More than any other means of creative expression animation embodies a simultaneity of (creatively) re-constructing the order of things

at the very moment of critically de-constructing them […] every line drawn, object moved, and shape changed is a destabilisation of received knowledge, and in the case of animation in the United States reveals what it is to be an American citizen, and how the “melting pot” has fi guratively and literally become the “kaleidoscope” of nation and nationality In enunciating itself, animation enunciates America: history, mythology, freedom (16–17)

In his assessment of animation, Wells no longer locates its subversive potential in a particular form or fi gure, but attributes an inherent disrup-tiveness to animation—its lines, shapes, and objects Just as any other cul-tural text, animation may manufacture and inscribe normative ideas, but these “are always subverted by the aesthetic which prioritizes its own terms and conditions as its mode of mythmaking and means of construction” (Wells  159) Due to its distinct aesthetics, then, animation transcends notions of any unmediated ideological interpellation

In our contemporary age of digitally enhanced photographs and the extensive use of computer-generated imagery in most blockbuster produc-tion, no image can be treated as a mere representation; not just animations

as Wells maintains, but all fi lms, to appropriate his formulation, age the view that they inhabit a space which is no longer stable, either at the social and aesthetic ‘textual’ level or at the technological ‘extra-textual’ level and, consequently, they are mediations of the bridge between the textual and extra-textual” (160) 19 Cinematic texts—indeed all texts—come to mediate their historical context because their aesthetics foster an openness (or instability) of meaning, aesthetic theory maintains

For Jacques Rancière no text or object allows for an exclusively mimetic interpretation, since audiences can never entirely distinguish its aesthetic (or textual) from its representative (or extra-textual) layers: as producers of documentaries conceptualize, arrange, and frame their work in accordance with various aesthetic preferences, even these seemingly unambiguous texts

do not mimetically represent a social phenomenon (cf The Emancipated

Spectator ) Making it impossible to differentiate the aesthetic from the

rep-resentational due to the dormant presence of one within the other, “[t]hese combinations create forms of pensiveness of the image that refute the

opposition between studium and punctum , between the operative character

of art and the immediacy of the image” (italics in original, Rancière 125) While Rancière concentrates on the ambiguity embedded within cul-tural texts, Winfried Fluck exploits a similar line of thought to describe the inadequacy of understanding the consumption of cultural texts as a

simple transfer of meaning For Fluck, meaning is produced in a fusion of

the imaginary of the recipient and the numerous cultural, political, and

social references available in a text (cf Romance With America ) As

audi-ences create the meaning of a text in the act of reading or seeing, the

“double reference” of fi ctional texts “creates an object that is never stable and identical with itself” (Fluck, “Aesthetic Experience of the Image” 18) and enables infi nite interpretations of texts among different people as well

as by the same person at different times Hence both scholars maintain that the aesthetic and textual references of a text work upon each other to produce an instability of meaning within the text and for the recipient In contrast to evaluative assessments of culture and literature, these scholars

remind us that every text possesses normative and disruptive qualities

ANIMATING THE MYTHS AND SYMBOLS OF AMERICAN

In asserting that “every line drawn, object moved, and shape changed

is a destabilisation of received knowledge, and in the case of animation

in the United States reveals what it is to be an American citizen,” Paul Wells not only describes the importance of the aesthetic in animation but also situates animation within a broader socio-cultural context Whether

“the melting pot,” “the kaleidoscope nation,” or “freedom,” Wells links animation to American myths and simultaneously mythologizes the United States (cf Wells 17) 20 While his perspective refers to the notion

of American exceptionality, we can wonder as to whether only in the

context of American diversity was an animation culture possible—after all, many societies can be described as multicultures—or inquire as to whom America offered freedom Animation in America, therefore, may not draw

on these popular notions about the United States due to some ent correspondence between the art form and the culture Rather, from Walt Disney to John Lasseter, animators—as many other artists and entre-preneurs—illustrated their fantastic worlds in familiar fashion to address broad audiences Looking at the commercial failures Pixar experienced in the 1980s (and thinking of the Disney animation tradition and the block-buster Hollywood culture), this learnt understanding of consumer expec-tations offers another explanation as to why we may fi nd well-known

inher-fi gures, motifs, and themes in Pixar inher-fi lms Although the precise linkage between animation and America continues to be open to debate, when

Toy Story narrates the adventures of a sheriff doll and a space-ranger action

fi gure, when a rat dreams of becoming a cook in Ratatouille , when a robotic entity develops a personality in a garbage wilderness in WALL-E ,

or when an American explorer liberates a South American paradise from

European imperial encroachment in Up , these Pixar fi lms certainly

ani-mate familiar myths and symbols of American culture

The notion of myths and symbols shaping American culture, as Paul Wells reminds us, dates to the early period of animation when the art form seemed to express or correspond to a particularly American experi-ence While numerous animators and producers shaped and advanced the medium, in the 1930s Walt Disney and his animation studio established themselves as the leading company in the fi eld—and by the 1950s, Walt Disney Productions had expanded into producing live-action fi lms and

TV shows Disney entertained America and created a mythical America

in the process—most visibly in its theme park which included the “Main Street, U.S.A.,” “Adventureland,” “Frontierland,” “Fantasyland,” and

revolutions and totalitarian regimes: “Other nations,” this view maintained,

“went through the throes of the twice-born, but the Americans, by the chance conditions of their founding, had slipped free of the underlying motor of historical change” (Rodgers 29) When the United States even-tually emerged as a global superpower from the implosion of the former European empires after World War II, American literary scholars rational-ized its seemingly exceptional status with reference to nineteenth-century writers In their view, the literary works of the nineteenth century (and their intellectual work in the twentieth century) questioned “the popular affi r-mation of industrial progress disseminated by spokesmen for the dominant economic and political elites” in favor of “the less tangible aesthetic, moral, and environmental ‘qualities of life’” (Marx 383) 21

Whereas earlier scholars (and historians in particular) embedded the United States within the broader contexts of European empires or the West, 22 “[t]he generation which launched its work in the 1940s was the

fi rst to take exceptionalism as an American given” (Rodgers 26) Whether

in drawing on, for example, a Puritan heritage or the American Revolution, American scholars found a stable, moderate society not mired in the class- confl icts defi ning its European forebears Indeed, Cold War scholars came

to see the American Revolution of 1776 as a singular historical event in comparison to France in 1789, Russia in 1917, or Germany in 1933—par-ticularly as the terror, oppression, and violence following these “revolu-tions” made the American experience seem to be a modest transformation

of a political system and suggested an American exceptionality in the eyes

of post-War historians (cf Rodgers 28–29)

In this sense, Cold War American Studies scholars imagined American history as a coherent and linear trajectory from its seventeenth-century beginning to the 1950s which coalesced “a series of disparate historical epochs, beginning with the Puritans” (Pease, “American Studies” 63) into a singular narrative 23 Considered as testimonials of American exceptionality, these dissimilar events were linked together by a set of absences—“a landed aristocracy, a feudal monarchy, a territorial empire, a society hierarchized by class, a deeply anchored socialist tradition” (Pease, “Exceptionalism” 109)—and a collection of presences—“a predominant middle class, tolerance for diversity, upward mobility, hospitality towards immigrants, a shared con-

stitutional faith, and liberal individualism” (Pease, Exceptionalism 8) This

retrospective incorporation of dissimilar events and developments of the American past into one coherent yet selective history (cf Pease, “American Studies” 61) helped to establish and popularize a view of the United States

as a just, fair, and stable society free from social tensions—particularly in contrast to the Communist regime of Soviet Russia In the Cold War with this evil empire, American exceptionality justifi ed American imperial inter-ventions (not only) in that period as a liberating and democratizing project Historically, then, American exceptionalism is situated within the context

of the political turmoil of the 1930s, the demise of the European empires

in World War II, and the (ideological struggle of the) Cold War This ascent

to global superpower, then, shaped popular and professional understanding

of American history while American literary scholars attempted to explain the nation’s exceptional role in the world

As the young fi eld of American Studies moved away from tions of the shared networks shaping European and American culture, for its aspiring (literary) scholars the Puritan notion of “a city upon a hill” was “no longer a mid-Atlantic hope, or even Boston; it was now America

examina-itself” (Rodgers 27) Whether F.O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance : Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941), Arthur

M.  Schlesinger, Jr in The Vital Center : The Politics of Freedom (1949)

and The Politics of Hope (1962), Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land : The

American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), David Potter in People of Plenty :

Economic Abundance and the American Character (1954), Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), R.W.B. Lewis in The American

Adam : Innocence and Tragedy in the Nineteenth Century (1955), Perry

Miller in Errand into the Wilderness (1956), Leo Marx in The Machine

in the Garden (1964), or Alan Trachtenberg in Brooklyn Bridge : Fact and Symbol (1965), these scholars established “a substantive consensus on the

nature of American experience, and a methodological consensus on ways

to study that experience,” as Gene Wise explains (306) From the frontier thesis to the Monroe Doctrine, the writing of Alexis de Tocqueville, or the American Dream, these scholars drew on and incorporated a wide variety

of ideas, myths, motifs, and symbols of American culture into a coherent

notion of American society In his seminal work The Machine in the Garden ,

for example, Leo Marx famously describes the sudden appearance of the machine in a pastoral landscape as “the root confl ict” (365) in American society Both, the garden and the machine, function as “master symbols”

(Marx, Machine in the Garden 345) of American culture, “dramatize the

great issue of our culture,” and represent “the most fi nal of all

generaliza-tions about America” (Marx, Machine in the Garden 353) because of their

prominence in nineteenth-century literary culture 24

When WALL-E (2008) concludes with shots of two robots blissfully

wandering the paradisiacal garden of Earth, the fi lm seems to illustrate nineteenth-century popular versions of the assimilation of technological progress into the pastoral and what Leo Marx has described as the myth

of the machine in the garden But whereas for Marx the contradictions between the fantasy of the middle landscape and the economic, political, and social experience of the nineteenth century 25 —the tensions between nature and technology—could not be amended due to the increas-

ing anachronism of the machine-in-the-garden trope (cf Machine in the

Garden 364), the twenty-fi rst-century animated fi lm revives this myth

When the robot transforms Earth into a hospitable planet by cleaning up the human-made garbage, when it later liberates humanity from its con-

fi nement in space, and when it thereby ensures the (re)creation of the

pastoral garden at the end of the fi lm, WALL-E appears to be evoking a

nostalgic longing for a pre-industrial past and an anachronistic yearning for the fantasy of the middle landscape For Marx, an “organic” integration of the machine into the pastoral “enabled the nation to continue defi ning its purpose as the pursuit of rural happiness while devoting itself to productiv-

ity, wealth, and power” ( Machine in the Garden 226) as the nationalist and

imperialist appropriation of the machine in the garden developed into “a reactionary or false ideology […] helping to mask the real problems of an

industrial civilization” ( Machine in the Garden 7) With the harmonious

integration of the robots into an explicitly American garden, the closing

shots of WALL-E seem to further illustrate the triumphant nationalist and

imperialist notions of the nineteenth-century myth Even as the machine had gradually conquered the garden throughout the course of the nine-teenth century, so much so that “our inherited symbols of order and beauty have been divested of meaning […] [and] the American hero is either dead

or totally alienated from society, alone and powerless” ( Machine in the

Garden 364), in WALL-E the American hero not only liberates humanity

from its technological bondage but is personifi ed by the machine

The animated fi lm, then, appropriates the symbols of the machine and the garden to tell a story of global environmental annihilation and restoration

in a twenty-fi rst-century medium As a fi lm programmed on computers,

WALL-E mediates these issues and anxieties through a narrative which

inverts the machine-in-the-garden myth as the garden is not threatened but manufactured by the machine—in the twofold sense of WALL-E fostering the creation of the garden and the computer (machine) producing the

pastoral imagery in WALL-E In this sense, the myth of the machine in the

garden maintains popular appeal in a twenty-fi rst-century science fi ction

fi lm; while the animation of the machine and the garden exemplify the sistence of these Marxian tropes, the inversion of the machine-in- the-garden myth also demonstrates its fundamental transformation in the present In this twofold sense of adaptation and alteration, the Pixar fi lms come to animate and mediate the myth and symbols of American culture

Following the rationale of The Machine in the Garden , the cization of the pastoral landscape at the end of WALL-E —what quali-

romanti-fi es as a form of “sentimental pastoralism” (Marx, Machine in the Garden

10)—seems to fail to critically explore (or offer practical solutions to) the mounting environmental challenges posed by an expanding consumer-ism and the illiberal consequences of an increasing technologization of everyday life so central to the fi lm A myth-and-symbol perspective, then,

enables us to read WALL-E as an escapist retreat from the complexity of

modern life with its celebration of the traditional American hero and the revival of the pastoral garden 26

Since the 1970s, however, academics have similarly emphasized the

“reactionary or false ideology” embedded in books such as The Machine in

the Garden Robert Sklar, for example, questions whether “the analysis of

a literary work […] [can] give an interpretation of the nature of a society” (600) as Marx and his intellectual peers presumed Particularly because of their concentration on what they considered to be canonical literature, the myth-and-symbol scholars favored one privileged group of writers while perpetuating the marginalization of others (cf Sklar 599) In exclusively analyzing the writings of a handful of white male authors, Marx and his colleagues failed to recognize cultural diversity, which would have made any assertion of a coherent national culture or literature diffi cult to sustain (cf Ickstadt 549) This criticism did not necessarily dispute the challenges posed by an increasing rationalization of human life Rather, revisionist approaches to American Studies questioned whether a set of tropes, such

as the machine in the garden, could be representative of American ety—and whether canonical authors could actually offer a “radical resis-tance” against the rationalization of human life as the “[h]ighbrow writers

soci-in the tradition of the American Renaissance […] [were] described as

rac-ist, sexrac-ist, imperialistic and complicit with the system” (Fluck, Romance

with America 79) For the following generation of American Studies

scholars, then, Marx and his peers had failed to see that their assumptions helped to promote those ideologies embedded in canonical literature or

what Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease have described as Cultures of United

States Imperialism (1993) Eventually, “scholars from a younger

genera-tion uttered political discontent with the existing paradigm, in large part because of its very paradigmatic nature, which was interpreted as restric-tive and exclusionary” (Voelz 20) 27

As WALL-E introduces a gun-wielding, technologically superior female

robot—and its male American hero-to-be as a cleaning machine captivated

by Hollywood musicals who longs for romantic love—this Pixar fi lm mates its myths and symbols of American culture in a decidedly popular for-mat and addresses contemporary sensibilities with its portrayal of seemingly inverted gender roles As excessive consumption leads to the environmen-

ani-tal annihilation of Earth, WALL-E further develops an eco- critical narrative

from a transnational perspective to warn about the global consequences of Western lifestyles and foregrounds the ways in which borders are crossed and blurred rather than neatly drawn around a homogeneous garden This

preliminary reading of WALL-E , then, suggests merely one example of the

ways in which Pixar fi lms incorporate contemporary themes—from gender equality to white privilege, questions of a just society, aging and obsoles-cence, and environmental devastation—into their animation of traditional myths and symbols of American culture In these cinematic texts, the nar-rative layers as well as the animated aesthetics shape this mediation of dis-parate, even incongruous, political ideas and cultural motifs

REMEDIATING THE MYTHS AND SYMBOLS OF AMERICAN

From the opening shot of the very fi rst Pixar movie, the animation

stu-dio fi lms appropriate elements of traditional live-action cinema Toy Story

(1995), for example, begins with the cowboy sheriff Woody riding through the sublime space of Monument Valley before the camera zooms out of this establishing shot to reveal that the cowboy sheriff is merely a doll

on the back of a young boy who happens to walk in front of a landscape painting of Monument Valley With their sophisticated computer graph-ics, these fi lms refashion established cinematic conventions to “introduce into animation a consistent Hollywood-style camera technique” (Bolter and Grusin 149), continuity editing, mise-en-scène, dialogues, and sound

to produce a sense of authenticity and realism of the digital text ences consider and experience as authentic and realistic (cf Bolter and Grusin 147): aesthetically, computer-animated fi lms are able “to compete with the ‘realism’ of the Hollywood style” today (Bolter and Grusin 150)