Abstract
Since the release of its groundbreaking debut, Toy Story, Pixar Animation Studios has been the undisputed leader in popular animation. Indeed, much like The Walt Disney Studios and hand-drawn cel-animation, Pixar has become synonymous with the medium of computer-generated imagery (CGI) which now dominates the industry. Praised for its singular achievements in CGI innovation, Pixar’s narratives are what have truly set the studio apart from its competitors. From Toy Story onwards, Pixar’s wry yet heartfelt contemporary fairytales have explored questions of meaning in a manner which at once transcends and stands in tension with the sort of escapism commonly associated with ‘family entertainment’. These are films which exemplify Bettelheim’s thoughts on ‘the uses of enchantment’: ‘nothing can be as enriching and satisfying to child and adult alike as the folk fairy tale’.1
It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental, nor is it accidental that today only within the smallest and intimate circles, in personal human situations, in pianissimo, that something is pulsating …
Max Weber, Science as a Vocation
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Notes
Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Vintage Books, New York, 1977, p. 5.
Paul Wells, Animation and America, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, 2002, p. 122.
Kathy Merlock Jackson, ed., Walt Disney: Conversations, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 2006, p. 55.
Scott Bukatman, ‘There’s Always Tomorrowland: Disney and the Hypercinematic Experience’, October, vol. 57, Summer 1991, pp. 55–78.
Leigh Harline and Ned Washington, ‘When You Wish upon a Star’, EMI, London, 1940.
David A. Price, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, Random House, New York, 2008, p. 142.
Rieff argues that social order rests on a clear sense of both the ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’: a Burkean formulation roughly equating to hierarchy, on the one hand, and fraternity, on the other. See especially Rieff A**., ‘By What Authority?’ The Feeling Intellect, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1990, pp. 330–350.
For a cinematic interpretation of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker ballet, see Carroll Ballard, dir., Nutcracker: The Motion Picture, Atlantic Releasing Company, 1986. The essential narrative about toys coming to life has been retold many times in children’s literature, films and television.
Two enduring examples are Charles Swenson and Fred Wolf, dirs., The Mouse and His Child, Murakami-Wolf, 1977;
and Gus Meins and Charley Rogers, dirs., Babes in Toyland, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1934.
See, as a key contemporary example, Richard Sennet, The Culture of the New Capitalism, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006.
Pat Williams and Jim Denney, How to Be Like Walt: Capturing the Disney Magic Every Day of Your Life, Health Communications, Florida, 2004, p. 49.
Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: Art, Science and Productive Industry, Continuum, London, 2002.
Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, Basic Books, New York, 1977.
For an exploration of rational progress as quasi-religious fundamentalism see John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, Penguin Books, London, 1992.
For a fuller outline of this critique see Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, W. W. Norton and Company, London, 1991, pp. 162–165.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus, Oxford University Press, New York, 1980.
This term, used very loosely here, was coined by Austrian-American economist, Joseph Schumpeter, to describe the necessary destruction of capitalist growth. See Schumpeter A**., Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Routledge, London, 2010.
David Fincher, dir., Fight Club, 20th Century Fox, 1999.
Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, From Max Weber, eds. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Oxford University Press, New York, 1946, p. 155.
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien, Penguin Books, London, 2005, p. 39.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1984, p. xxiv.
Max Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, From Max Weber, eds. Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Oxford University Press, New York, 1946, p. 155.
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© 2015 Marcus Maloney
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Maloney, M. (2015). Just a Toy. In: The Search for Meaning in Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137499295_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137499295_2
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