Some interesting points on Disney and Pixar –
Telotte, J.P. ’”Better Than Real”: Digital Disney, Pixar, and Beyond’ in The Mouse Machine: Disney and Technology. Urbana & Chicago: University of Ilinois Press, 2008. p159-178
- One of the many reasons the Disney/Pixar films have been so successful is because they have managed to balance off the real and the wondrous, primarily through an approach implicit in that rhetoric of the “better than real”
- It is most immediantely apparent in the fims’ cisual style, which the comments of the animators and filmmakers seem almost invariably to address
- Disney’s move into digital technology has had an impact far betond the realm of its traditional animation projects and has increasingly affected the studio’s efforts in live-action fantasy
Giroux, Henry A., Pollock, Grace. ’Introduction: Disney’s Troubled Utopia’ in The Mouse That Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence. Lantham & Plymouth: Rowman & LIttlefield Publishers, 2010. p1-15
- Disney has a very large influence on children
- Disney imagineers and executives turn children’s desires and dreams into fodder for advertisers and corporate-controlled media
Scott, Ellen. ’Agony & Avoidance: Pixar, Deniability and the Adult Spectator’ Journal of Popular Film and Television, Vol.42, No.3. p150-162
- Pixar films expand the limitations typically binding G-rated films by employing a postmodern adaptation of the “principle of deniability,” a producerdesigned multivalence. This deniability allows adult spectators to identify with the object, to distance themselves from “grown-up” cinema, and to contemplate adult fears through the guise of animation.
- Pixar, as corporate auteur, has developed a sophisticated mode of address to adult viewers, broaching dark existential themes without raising censorship concerns. Though Pixar film don’t attempt to show sex or violence the cultural work they have done redefining family film fare is an important by-product of contemporary regimes of film industry self-regulation
- Animation has been a realm of significant cinematic innovation in the past decade, not only in technology but spectatorial address.
- Digital animators at Dreamworks and Fox’s Blue Sky Studios have created pleasure for parental viewers using copious, often comedic intertexual references to popular and commercial culture. Pixar realized the diminishing value of transient references in the creation of timeless classics and has mined an alternative set of “universal” pleasures.
- One of the distinct pleasures in Pixar’s films is the pleasure of seeing the deepest of human struggles, timeless philosophical questions projected in and through remote forms of representation.
- These films express, in a form angled indirectly at adult viewers, the peculiar self-alienation—and particularly the alienation from the body—experienced by technologically immersed humans.
- Few sequences in contemporary cinema evoke the sense of isolation we get from the sequence where a panicked Jessie refuses to go back into “storage,” one that causes us to imagine what such storage must be like
Flaig, Paul. ’Life Driven by Death: Animation Aesthetics and the Comic Uncanny.’ Screen Vol.54, No.1, Spring 2013. p1-19
- Many approaches to animation underscore a double relationship to life and movement, a relationship that, according to the seminal book Disney Animation: the Illusion of Life, should be expressed in realistic motion, linear narrative and empathetic characterization.
- There is a humour in horror that overcomes this gap through an alliance of kinaesthetic movement on screen with the spectator’s corporeal sensation. Such uncanny movement, both seen and sensed, is figured in the grotesque violence of ghosts, partial objects and undead creatures, their exaggeration and over-driven motion provoking less fear or ironic pleasure than a perverse enjoyment that animates along with these figures’ plasmatic movements and transformations.
