This article was downloaded by: [Victoria University of Wellington]On: 22 January 2015, At: 16:11Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Click for updates

Continuum: Journal of Media & CulturalStudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccon20

From Edison to Pixar: The spectacularscreen and the attention economy fromcelluloid to CGLeon Gurevitcha

a Deputy Head, The School of Design, Victoria University ofWellington, New ZealandPublished online: 06 Jan 2015.

To cite this article: Leon Gurevitch (2015): From Edison to Pixar: The spectacular screen and theattention economy from celluloid to CG, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, DOI:10.1080/10304312.2014.986062

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.986062

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

From Edison to Pixar: The spectacular screen and the attentioneconomy from celluloid to CG

Leon Gurevitch*

Deputy Head, The School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

This article argues that Pixar’s computer generated (CG) animated features of the past 15years sit at a crossroads in both the conceptualization of viewers and their socialization tothe contemporary digital screen. Embedded within a new aesthetic visual form, almost allof Pixar’s movies feature, and talk back to, the emergence of the mythical astonishedcinema spectator.At the same time, Pixar’s features question the future of digital spectacleand the position of the screen subject. In the contemporary context of the social networkand the online video, CG animated features do not simply prepare young viewers for aworld of consumer behaviour, they prepare them for a multilayered world of digitalscreens in which they must learn to function as objects of consumption as well asconsuming agents. Beyond this, however, and in contrast to previous Disney features,Pixar movies prepare young consumers for a changed production landscape incontemporary culture. Moving beyond notions of Fordist production that structuredprevious discourses of the viewing and socialized child, the spectacular specificity of Pixarmovies is now structured self-reflexively according to the logic of the attention economy.

For much of the previous century, Disney built a merchandizing machine so vast that its

boundaries and the difficulty of quantifying them became the focus of much academic

attention (Wasko 2001; Giroux 2002; Smoodin 1994). Most of this writing either dealt

with the use of ancillary merchandizing in the changing economics of production and

exhibition (Wasko 2001), the role of merchandizing in the consumer socialization process

of its viewers (Giroux 2002; Schaffer 2004; de Cordova 1994) or even the extent to which

popular and academic arguments surrounding the construction of children by Disney are as

constitutive of children as the films themselves (Sammond 1999). In recent years,

however, the context in which both the merchandizing and socializing roles of Disney

production have been evaluated has changed. While the majority of the research

conducted has taken place against a background of traditional cinematic production and

distribution, contemporary computer-generated (CG)-animated features are governed by,

and reflective of, the cultural logic of a more broadly based digital image.

A characteristically self-reflexive scene from the first Toy Story feature is strikingly

indicative of this shift and the change it presents for traditional accounts of cinematic

consumption (Figure 1). After stumbling upon a television in an empty room, Buzz

Lightyear stands in front of an ‘advert’ for Buzz action figures. The resulting scene, in

which he stands dumbstruck before a screen trying to comprehend what he is seeing,

neatly encapsulates the new merchandizing reality ushered in by Pixar’s CG animation at

the same time as it highlights the way in which the CG fabrication processes involved in

the making of Toy Story are intimately connected to a broader, and changed, industrial

logic of contemporary visual culture.

q 2015 Taylor & Francis

*Email: leonthegurevitch@googlemail.com

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2014.986062

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

Situated at a crucial turning point in Pixar’s first feature length animation, this scene

was symptomatic of the convergent paths that arise in the era of the digital screen between

the image, the object and the consumer. In many ways, Toy Story can be seen as

Figure 1. Buzz’s first encounter with the Screen is uncannily reminicent of similar moments inearly cinema.

2 L. Gurevitch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

Hollywood’s first product designed feature, a development that signalled a changed

relationship between the blockbuster movie and traditional notions of product placement

(Gurevitch 2012). Beyond this, however, this scene also self-reflexively encapsulated the

way that emergent digital image forms heralded a wider reconfiguration of the relationship

between the viewer and the screen object; or more specifically the viewer as a screen

object. Buzz’s inability to comprehend what he was seeing sprung from his failure to

understand the reconfiguration of the viewer’s role in a digitally imaged culture as

simultaneously the consuming subject and consumed object.

Such a cultural shift has been described by others, most notably by Sherry Turkle in her

study Life on Screen (1997). However, few have considered the significance of this shift

and its emergence in the CG-animated movies of recent years. In particular, I will in this

article examine the way in which a reflexive recognition of spectacle, the screen and what

Beller (2006) has called ‘the attention economy’ is written into the narrative of Pixar

movies from the outset. Developing Debord’s underlying thesis that ‘spectacle is capital

accumulated to the point where it becomes image’ (1999, 24), Beller argues that cinema is

itself an apparatus of production, or more specifically a site at which the act of looking

constitutes a form of labour. Beller argues that:

cinema is an exemplary form of a generalised system of relations that is fully inscribed in themode of production today, an affect machine inducing new forms of labour for the new stateof capital. In other words it already has been won for the symbolic; that is, cinema is a victoryfor the body waged (via “seduction,” but, more generally, enframing) for the symbolic ofcapital (money, or human attention, depending upon which moment in the dialecticproduction is being thought from). (Beller 2006, 116)

Thus for Beller, capital constitutes the act of looking and therefore human attention in

cinema as a form of productive labour – a development doubly reinforced, he suggests,

with the arrival of the digital media economy in which user attention is not just bought and

sold (commoditized) but also consequently deployed as a form of productive labour in the

process. Cinema is significant, he argues, because it functioned as the precursor to

television and the computer screen and it functioned as part of an ‘emerging cybernetic

complex’ and as a technology for ‘the capture and redirection of global labour’s

revolutionary social agency and potentiality’ (Beller 2006, 13). As we shall see, two key

aspects of Beller’s attention economy (first, the function of seduction in cinema’s

symbolic triumph over the body, and second, the symbolic triumph of capital and its

formulation of attention as productive labour) play a central, and surprisingly self-

reflexive, role in Pixar features. Pixar movies not only seduce the viewer and school them

on the operative processes of the spectacular screen, they also self-reflexively speculate on

where these processes lead both the individual and social.

I have argued previously that Pixar movies are the result of a new image form that

combines advertising, product design and spectacular cinematic attractions in one location

(Gurevitch 2012). In the early days of its struggle for survival, Pixar made anything from

high-resolution images of scanned body parts for the medical industry to similarly

functional visualizations of industrial parts for the car industry (Price 2008, 71). After the

sale of Pixar to Siemens, Phillips and General Motors, respectively, fell through, Pixar

eventually survived by making advertisements and as a result its industrial aesthetic

foundations were constructed from the building blocks of the attention economy: so much

so that the first full-length movie produced by the company functioned as a feature length

toy advertisement.1 In this way Pixar will have discovered, like most successful

advertisers, that the showcasing of a product was less important than the deployment of

aesthetic attractions that could capture the viewer’s attention in the first place.

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 3

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

Thus, Pixar emerged from a graphics industry concerned from the outset with more

than just imaging industrial objects. Like many of its CG industry peers, Pixar was also

focused upon the seduction of newly emergent spectacular imaging, and this naturally

went hand in hand, with the exhibition of arresting aesthetics perfectly suited to

functioning as successful advertisements. The important point here, then, is not the

relationship between the commodity and the image, but rather Pixar’s central role in the

attention economy from its earliest history. In other words, Pixar made advertisements not

only because it could easily render industrial products, but also more importantly because

it could attract the viewer’s attention with its new and seductive computer graphics image

forms. To articulate this another way, the central relationship here was not between

commodity and image but between image and viewer (or more accurately, the image and

viewer’s attention as a commodity).

If, as Debord argues, spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes

image, then Pixar, premised as it has been upon its prodigious capacity to convert costly

skills and technology into image forms directed towards a merchandizing apparatus that

accumulates capital, is a striking manifestation of this reality. In a culture witnessing the

rapid transformation of the private subject into a public object whose actions are detailed

in social network newsfeeds and watched and disseminated through online video links, the

Pixar feature revisits and renovates the viewer’s encounter with the screen anew. Moving

on from the Fordist discourses underwriting Disney films of the past (Sammond 1999),

‘production’ in Pixar narratives is constructed as production of the self in explicit relation

to the screen, recalling Debord’s axiom that the ‘whole life of those societies in which

modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of

spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation’ (Debord

1999, 12). But Pixar features do more than this, acting simultaneously as both cause and

consequence of the attention economy: deploying digital aesthetics brought into being in a

vast industrial labour-based operation symptomatic of Debord’s maxim. Pixar’s spectacle

is nothing if not capital accumulated to the point of image: a manifestation not only of the

hundreds of thousands of highly skilled labour hours required to bring these features into

being, but also of the millions of labour hours that will be invested by children entering

into the attention economy. The possibilities of the attention economy reach their

apotheosis in the remnant human civilization found onboard the Axiom spaceship in

WALL·E but before we turn to this, it is first necessary to consider historical examples in

which cinema, even from its earliest moments engaged in the process of self-reflexively

recruiting willing labourers of the attention economy, not least because it reveals

something of the relationship between seduction, spectacle and self-reflexivity reaching

far back before Pixar.

The country mouse and the cathode ray tube

Astonished spectators, astonishing aesthetics old and new

In 1902 the Edison manufacturing company made a film titled Uncle Josh at the Moving

Picture Show. In a remarkably similar scene to Buzz’s first encounter with the TV, the

Edison short presented a fictive character of Uncle Josh witnessing the moving image for

the first time and entirely misreading its content to comic effect. In one of the many early

examples of cross-promotional culture on screen (for more details of which see Gurevitch

2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2012), the picture show that the incredulous Uncle Josh watches is

made of a clearly signposted set of Edison shorts that audiences of the time would have

been familiar with. After running from The Black Diamond Express in terror Josh then

4 L. Gurevitch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

returns to stare and dance in amazement in front of The Country Couple2 before he

misunderstands the cinematic apparatus completely. Attacking the screen and bringing it

down, Josh reveals the illusion of cinematic projection for an audience that by this point

would have been entertained by the slapstick comedy of a primitive and un-socialized new

cinema viewer.

The comparisons here with Buzz’s screen encounter described above are apparent.

Like the Pixar scene in which Buzz stares at an advert of Buzz-like figures on the screen, in

the Edison scene the advertised film The Country Couple reflects back to Uncle Josh an

image of country bumpkins just like himself. In both scenes, naivety is quickly dispensed

through epiphany (in the Pixar example through a violent cognitive realization, in the

Edison example through a violent physical act) that destroys illusion and leads to

audiovisual socialization.

Clearly, such comparisons should not be bound together too closely, for there are many

points of significant difference betweenUncle Josh and the equivalent moment in Toy Story.

Not least, the two functioned in very different social, cultural, industrial and economic

contexts. The point of such a comparison, however, is not to uncover a ‘truth’ contained

within similarities between these two scenes, so much as it is to understand something of the

relationship between the screen, the spectator and self-reflexive forms of spectacle.

Uncle Josh was not the first short of its kind, but a remake, like many popular films in

cinema’s early period, of an already popular short (The Countryman and the

Cinematograph) produced by English director R.W. Paul in 1901. Like Uncle Josh the

earlier film featured a naive and unsophisticated countryman staring, dancing and running

away from the screen. And like Uncle Josh the film featured a medley of other films

(though without title cards at the beginning, they were not so nakedly and commercially

savvy as to be deployed as trailers), from a ballet dancer to an oncoming train and finally

two country bumpkins. Like the Uncle Josh film, we can find a scene from a Pixar

successor that offers an uncanny comparison: early on in Ratatouille, Remy the rat is

pictured, awestruck, staring at the television where he watches and learns from his

favourite celebrity chef Gusteau. Framed in almost exactly the same dimensions as The

Countryman and the Cinematograph, this scene (we could label it The Countrymouse and

the Cathode Ray Tube) was sticking for its compositional similarities (right down to

similarities in the way the rails of Gusteau’s kitchen work surface work perspectivally to

resemble the rails of the train track from the original short film) (Figure 2).

Comparisons here function beyond the aesthetics of compositional similarities however.

In all cases here, these figures are captured in the process of being ‘seduced’ by spectacle

into the labour force of the attention economy. Humour in all cases comes from their initial

lack of understanding as to how this productive apparatus works. To mix our metaphors

here, we might say that these moments of spectacular attraction function as a gateway drug

that leads directly to the attention economy. Self-reflexive dramatizations of this process are

fascinating not only because they seem to reappear as doppelgangers at opposite ends of a

century, but also because they seem to perform a social function, reflecting the emergence

of the screen as central to the development of subjectivity in the society of the spectacle.

In his article onwhat he calls ‘an aesthetic of astonishment’, TomGunning describes the

emergence of early cinematic attractions and accounts of the incredulous spectator pointing

out that themyth of the naive and/or terrified audience circulated inmany forms at the turn of

the twentieth-century from audiences running screaming from early train films to ‘savages’

shocked and amazed by the advanced technology of archetypal Western colonialist.

Intriguingly, Gunning notes that Metz’s more subtle account of the screen socialization

process calls upon the notion of childhood. Namely ‘Metz describes this panicked reaction

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 5

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

on the part of the Grand Cafe audience [whereby audiences supposedly ran screaming from

the cinema] as a displacement of the contemporary viewer’s credulity onto a mythical

childhood of the medium’ (Gunning 1999, 819). Gunning’s characterization of Metz’s

thesis is particularly salient here. For it shows that despite the many differences between

these two forms, what we have in both Pixar and early cinematic attractions is the acting out

Figure 2. Remy’s first encounter with the screen similarly reflects early cinema’s self-reflexiverepresentation of the attention economy.

6 L. Gurevitch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

of childhood. While Metz might see this as the childhood of a medium, the Pixar moments

suggest that the real fixation is with the childhood of screen socialization.

Building on Gunning’s work in his analysis of the panicking audience, Stephen

Bottomore has argued that self-reflexive films involving dumbstruck and unsophisticated

viewers first encountering the cinematic apparatus fulfilled the role of educating,

entertaining and flattering early audiences on the subject of screen socialization.

Specifically, Bottomore argues that comical figures were held up for ridicule as ‘naive

viewers’ of the newly emergent screen. For Bottomore the experience of watching new

audiovisual material was also a deeply promotional process whereby viewers integrated

new and ever-more sophisticated image forms into rapidly developing, culturally shared

and widely publicized, visual vocabularies. Like Gunning, Bottomore persuasively argues

that anecdotes of the apocryphal ‘train effect’ myth turn out on closer inspection to have

been exaggerated. These anecdotes are interesting, he argues, not because of their historical

veracity (or otherwise), but because the myth itself highlights something more fundamental

about the process by which cultural assimilation of the cinema screen took place.3

What is notable about Buzz and Remy’s positioning as ‘naive viewers’ in these Pixar

scenes then is less their similarity with early films of the same subject than the fact that

their existence marks a persistence in mutated form of both the myth and its self-reflexive

deployment almost exactly a century after its emergence. Equally, their similarity with

early films of the same subject might be limited if we were only to trace such examples to a

few Pixar movies. In fact, such scenes exist in almost every other Pixar feature made.

From Woody’s dumbstruck discovery of his own TV series in Toy Story 2 through to

WALL·E’s awed gaze at the DIY TV screen where he learns the concept of love and

companionship from a dance routine in Hello Dolly, every Pixar feature4 contains pivotal

scenes of socialization before the screen.

Leaving aside themore exaggeratedmyths ofmass panics, bothGunning andBottomore

argue that there were nevertheless genuine physical reactions of astonishment and pleasure

from early audiences of early cinema.BothGunning (1999, 820) andBottomore (1999, 186)

draw upon Melies observations of early audience experience to point out that early

spectators were repeatedly impressed by the footage of ‘complex natural motion’ such as

water, waves, clouds or rivers. Both suggest that what impressed and pleased spectators

most was ‘a vacillation between belief and incredulity’ (Gunning, 823), or as Bottomore

succinctly describes it a feeling of ‘That’s it exactly!’ Here then pleasure was derived from

the experience of watching phenomena rendered in detail and movement that was

technically analogous to the real life event itself: rendered ‘realistically’ yet impossibly on

the space of the cinema screen. Despite the pleasure of beholding what was, for these early

viewers, the breath-taking realism of such images, they argue that a prerequisite for this

pleasure was the simultaneous cognisance that what they were seeing was not real.

While Bottomore argues that contemporary spectatorship of imaged media is likely

still subject to the same driving force – cognitive visual pleasure supplied by ever new

forms of impossible verisimilitude, Gunning implies as much in his analysis of the way in

which cinema itself inherited this reflex towards astonished incredulity from earlier visual

forms such as trompe l’oeil and magic theatre. Indeed, as Gunning asserts, the

magic theatre laboured to make visual that which it was impossible to believe. Its visual powerconsisted of a trompe l’oeil play of give-and-take, an obsessive desire to test the limits of anintellectual disavowal – I know, but yet I see. (Gunning, 821)

Both stop short of an investigation into contemporary examples where this takes place, but

it takes little deduction to see late twentieth-century CG effects as an inheritor of such a

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 7

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

dynamic. As director of Toy Story, John Lasseter stated in a revealing description of

Pixar’s development philosophy:

At Pixar, we like to think we use our tools to make things look photorealistic, but not try toreproduce reality. We like to take those tools and make something that the audience knowsdoes not exist. Every frame, they know it’s a cartoon. So you get that wonderful entertainmentof, “I know this isn’t real, but boy it sure looks real.” I think that’s part of the fun of what wedo. (Lasseter 2003)

With this in mind, the first audiences to behold the oddly hybridized aesthetic of Toy Story

will almost certainly have shared as much in common with the viewer of the trompe l’oeil

as they would the spectator of the early cinematic attraction. In this sense, the Pixar

animator’s aims and the aims of film makers and exhibitors of early visual illusionism

were similar: to awe the spectator with the pleasure of a fabricated image form that reflects

a new degree of ‘realism’ even as it betrays its own construction as a fabricated image.5 In

both cases however, what is fascinating is not the continued way in which this spectatorial

sleight of hand is performed so much as the fact that Pixar movies, so consistently and self-

reflexively, revolve around this moment of astonishment before the screen. As we see in

Figure 3, almost every Pixar movie made6 dramatizes one of the founding moments and

myths of the spectacular screen. To quote George Melies: ‘Before this spectacle we sat

with gaping mouths, struck with amazement, astonished beyond all expression’ (Gunning

1999, 823).

Here, then, we have the attention economy’s primal scene dramatized over and over

again. Here the spectator of Pixar movies watches their protagonists emerge as subjects

socialized and sophisticated in the ways of the screen, but they also witness something

more in the form of a viewing subject made labourer of the image and functionary of the

new productive logic of the spectacular society. All material that these characters watch is

based around promotional spectacle: capital accumulated to the point that it becomes

image.

The repeated prevalence of moments in which characters within the frame stare in

wonder at an awe-inspiring spectacle is not limited to Pixar features and has been

considered by Geoff King in his description of Hollywood blockbusters when he notes that

the awed reaction shot is a staple of live action special effects films:

Much is made of the awesome spectacle within the frame. The mere sight of the spacecraftreduces characters, both major and minor, to a state of gobsmacked, eye-popping andjaw-dropping daze . . . . A similar dynamic underlies the selling of the spectacle of theframe, the movie itself, which is promoted largely on the basis of effects designed toreduce the spectator to a state of awe and wonder in which ordinary life is left behind.(King 1999, 35)

The difference here, however, is that characters in Pixar features explicitly stare at

spectacular screens, whilst awed protagonists of blockbuster films are simply caught up in

awe with whatever particular special effect is showcased within the diegesis. We might

ask why there is a difference between live action and animated features here given that

early cinema self-reflexively featured the screen so much? The answer to this may lie in

part in constructions of ‘spectatorial childhood’. As Metz demonstrates, for right or

wrong, in early cinema everybody encountering the screen for the first time was,

figuratively speaking, constructed as a spectatorial child. In more recent years this focus

has shifted to children’s animated content. As Marsha Kinder has shown, this shift

predates the arrival of Pixar and can be found in children’s television programmes of

the 1980s and 1990s where young viewers were constituted as spectators in need of

audiovisual socialization.

8 L. Gurevitch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

Figure 3. Almost every Pixar movie contains a transformational moment between the protagonistand the screen. Frequently these are depicted as seminal moments of screen socialisation.

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 9

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

Child labour?

‘Subject formation’ in the attention economy

The extent to which children’s films socialize young viewers to be audiovisually literate

consumers is, and has long been, a sticky and indeterminate question. As Nicholas

Sammond has argued, while much public and academic discourse has been devoted to the

socializing effects of cinematic content upon young viewers over the years, this literature

has often been as constitutive of the child as the content that it has evaluated (1999, 35).

Analysing Disney marketing of the 1930s, Sammond describes the way in which publicity

material describing Walt Disney, his workers and the relationship between parents and

children was embedded in early twentieth-century accounts of production line practice,

experience and economics. Sammond argues that conceptions of children, childhood and

familial/societal responses to the job of child rearing underwent a significant shift from the

turn of the twentieth-century through to the 1940s. This change, he argues, can be

summarized in the discursive shift from ‘saving the child’ to ‘managing the child’ (1999,

39). For Sammond, the ‘manufacturing’ of the child from the 1930s to the 1950s involved

an interrelated set of discursive shifts towards Fordist management ideals. Such shifts, he

argues, were located as often in academic study as in the Disney films that were framed at

that time as the agents of socialization. In an analysis strikingly prescient to contemporary

Pixar movies, Sammond points out that mass production and assembly lines7 featured

frequently in Disney films as a part of this discursive shift:

Disney’s foregrounding of its industrial practices and endowment of its characters withFordist impulses speaks to the popularity of scientific-management discourses in the quasi-professional, management-oriented child-rearing programmes of the time. What made that actof discursive identification meaningful to consumers, moreover, was that animation was anapt metaphor for child-rearing, in which parents attempted to invest children with values andbehaviours for developing well-rounded characters. (Sammond 1999, 47)

By the mid 1980s, however, such a construction of both the child and nature and location

of ‘production’ had changed. In her study of early morning cartoons in the mid 1990s,

Marsha Kinder undertook an analysis of children’s television content. This marked a

departure from other work in articulating an intersection between processes of consumer

socialization and the intertextual relationship between different forms of audiovisual

production. Considering the role of various Saturday morning television cartoons in

constituting children as consumers, Kinder framed the analysis of her chosen cartoons in

terms of commercial intertextuality. Here she argued we can approach:

Saturday morning television, as if it were teaching young viewers not only how to gainpleasure by pursuing consumerist desire, but also how to read the intertextual relationsbetween television and cinema as compatible members of the same ever-expandingsupersystem of mass entertainment. (Kinder 1991, 40)

Kinder moved beyond the initial issue of consumer formation through a specific text,

arguing that there was a necessity to look beyond individual texts to more general

questions of genre and form. She argued that the process of consumer formation ‘cut[s]

across movies, television, comic books, commercials, video games, and toys’ (Kinder

1991, 47). She then went onto demonstrate that the programmes she focused on (primarily

Garfield and the Muppet Babies) incorporated elements into their narratives of the

different forms she identified. For Kinder then, not only did consumer subject formation

cut across different forms (characters featuring in a TV show and then a commercial in the

subsequent ad break for instance), but also equally, different forms could be found within

individual texts (‘commercials’ featuring as a narrative subject within the TV show itself).

10 L. Gurevitch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

Furthermore, Kinder argued that not only did these programmes aid the formation of their

younger viewers as consumers, but also their narratives actually dramatized the process of

subject formation (Kinder 1991, 47).

If, for Sammond, the early Disney films constructed subject formation of the child

viewer through modernist discourses of Fordist production, for Kinder animated TV

cartoons did so through postmodernist discourses of transmedia consumption. By the same

token, a similar discursive dynamic, adapted by Pixar to reflect the shifts towards digital

production and consumption cultures, now governs the contemporary CG animation film.8

As with Sammond’s Disney films, Pixar movies have emerged from a cultural context in

which notions of the child are fluid and changing. If quasi-scientific discourses of Fordist

management techniques formed the backdrop for constructions of the child in early Disney

films, and transmedia consumption formed the backdrop of Kinder’s Saturday morning

television, then, contemporary Pixar films emerged during a turn to post-industrial

constructions of the child as enmeshed in overlapping networks of digital media and the

transformative capacities of the socially oriented spectacular screen. Reflecting this,

almost all Pixar plots hinge on a transformative event of screen socialization. As we have

seen, in most cases Pixar films present the viewer with self-reflexive dramatizations of

protagonists encounters with the screen. The socialization these characters gain from the

screen is, in all cases, embedded within the complex networks of promotional visual

culture that now constitute screen economies. From characters sitting down to watch

adverts and shows explicitly featuring themselves (Toy Story, Toy Story 2,Monsters, Inc.,

Cars, Cars 2) to characters gaining their motivation by viewing promotional material

focused upon their hero’s/hero’s companies (Ratatouille, Up), screen socialization is

associated with the capacity to access and accurately read the spectacular screen and its

promotional relationship to the self (Figure 3).

In her recent work on what she calls the ‘queer art of failure’, Judith Halberstam argues

that Pixar movies are similar to other children’s animation in dramatizing subject

formation. For Halberstam Pixar, features can be characterized by a genre that she

describes with the neologism ‘Pixarvolt’: a combination of Pixar and revolt that

foregrounds themes of revolution and transformation that ‘make subtle as well as overt

connections between communitarian revolt and queer embodiment’ (Halberstam 2011,

29). However, Halberstam articulates the revolution and transformation at the heart of

these subject formation narratives in relatively traditional industrial terms. That is to say

that while the role of self-reflexively looms large in her analysis, the role of the self-

reflexive ‘socializing screen’ as opposed to the traditional production line does not.

Pixar’s characters are constructed, however, as subjects that must negotiate not only

processes of consumption as much as production, but also processes of being a consumer

object as much as of being a consumer. In Pixar films, production is a concept reconfigured

explicitly in relation to the spectacle and with the ultimate end of producing oneself or of

accepting one’s position as an object of spectacular consumption. The centrality of this

point cannot be emphasized enough.

Returning to the first encounter with the screen that marked the first formulation of

this recipe, Buzz hears what sounds like a generic science-fiction radio call and walks

through a door into a darkened room reminiscent of a cinema. Buzz attempts to respond

to a television with a ‘star command’ logo on screen before standing dumbstruck as the

screen reorients him within a larger field of commercial signifiers. What appeared to a

naive Buzz to be a call that reinforced his delusional reality turns out to be an advert

that reduces him to his various selling points: revealing his flashing light ‘laser’ and

his fake spring action ‘wings’ for what they are. It is important here that Buzz witnesses

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 11

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

an advert, for it is symptomatic of the way in which industrial processes in Pixar

movies are, time and again, reconfigured at their ultimate end point: as a promotional

spectacle.

Though Buzz engages with consumer culture by witnessing the advert, this scene

complicates the process of viewer/protagonist identification described by Kinder not least

because the spectatorial position he assumes (and the viewer is obliged to identify with) is

unstable and alienating. The ‘advert’ presents an inanimate Buzz under the controlling

hand of a child in the process of play. Constructed of numerous shots which foreground the

child’s hand, the viewer’s identification is aligned with Buzz via a point of view shot of the

advert he watches. At the same time, the content of the advert denies the possibility of a

Buzz that is anything other than a consumable product and therefore blocks identification.

This moment for Buzz (and by extension the viewer) could be read as a reversal of Metz

and Baudry’s now infamous theoretical comparisons between the spectator in the cinema

and the mirror stage (Metz 1986). Here, Buzz, as a spectator, sees himself onscreen, but

rather than beholding a unified autonomous self, fully in control, his body is instead broken

down into its component parts in order to display his consumable features. Confronted

with a vision of his body entirely inanimate and constitutitively alienated from his self,

what Buzz sees forces him back to the initial ‘lack of being’ (manque a etre) described by

Lacan as preceding the mirror stage (Lacan 1989).9

Alternatively, this moment could be read as a self-reflexive critique of the society of

the spectacle. Buzz’s moment of identificatory dysfunction has as its nexus the negotiation

of the different roles that arise in, and as a result of, contemporary spectacular screen

culture. What is encouraged here is more than a simple identification with on-screen

consumers. Buzz’s breakdown is presented as a complex consequence of both a failure to

understand his position as consumable object and his failure to understand the interrelated

links between audiovisual, promotional and industrially manufactured culture. While at

first he appears whole and independent, he is then reconfigured as an object whose

capacity for independent agency is diminished with each accompanying shot that flashes

up on the screen to emphasize that his actions are carried out by the controlling hand of a

child (chopping, shooting, ‘flying’ doubly emphasized with a comic notice that flashes up

stating ‘Not a flying toy’). As Buzz watches his image contextualized across numerous

environments and communicated in ways beyond his control, the reconfiguration of his

identity echoes the way in which a user might log on to a social network or video website

to find new photos or footage of themself recontextualized in their absence. Buzz’s

experience serves to literalize with uncanny precision Debord’s assertion that the

‘spectacle’s externality with respect to the acting subject is demonstrated by the fact that

the individual’s own gestures are no longer his own, but rather those of someone else who

represents them to him’ (Debord 1999, 23).

Here, then, we have a very different representation of the ‘industrial’ and its place in

the hierarchy of Pixar’s world. This is not to say that the notion of industrialism does not

figure, far from it, but it does so through the lens of the society of the spectacle. It is not just

subject formation through the consumption of products (and consumption of the self as

object) that is dramatized here but also subject formation mediated specifically through an

understanding of the self situated within a wider audiovisual network of promotional and

consumer culture manifested in the screen as spectacle. Here Andrew Wernick’s

description of promotional culture as a vast communicative industrial meta-structure in

which products and texts refer endlessly back to each other is apt. For Wernick, each

‘promotional message refers us to a commodity which is itself the site of another

promotion.’ This, he argues results in ‘in an endless dance [of industrial products and

12 L. Gurevitch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

signifiers] whose only point is to circulate the culmination of something else’ (Wernick

1991, 121). In many ways, Pixar features are the epitome of this endless dance.

Partly as a result of the production practices required to bring them to fruition and

partly because of the market savvy approach of their design crews, these features are often

an exercise in knowing cross-promotionality. More observant or obsessive viewers notice

the frequency with which props and whole sets from other features reappear in new ones.10

In some cases, the motivation on the part of the designers is less promotional and more

practical, and underlines Wernick’s point about contemporary industrialization: it can be

quicker and easier to use already constructed, rendered and animated object forms that

exist in the archive than to construct entirely new ones. In other cases it is just as likely

however that this is the result of a playful self-referentiality located in Pixar’s audiovisual

consumer object-centred production logic inherited from its particular past. Pixar survived

in the late 1980s in part as a result of a number of successful advertising commissions.11

Thus, many of Pixar’s early outputs were advertisements that referenced other visual

cultures. Here, we see the significance of the shift from traditional processes of animation

to those of CG animation. What changed in CG animation was the way in which the

objects and spaces that populate such forms were fabricated in a manner that reflects the

industrial processes of promotional culture. In this sense, Pixar animation literally marked

the coming of the fully fabricated product design engineered feature (Gurevitch 2012).

In 1995, after exactly a century of mechanical reproduction, Toy Story marked a move

beyond a logic of Fordist production in which image and industrial objects have literally

become interoperable.

In this sense, Wernick’s conception of contemporary capitalist industrial culture as

more than ‘just an apparatus for the mass generation and transmission of value-laden meta-

messages, but a dense communicative complex which envelops all imaged goods plus

whatever symbiotic material these draw in’ (Wernick 1991, 94 and 95) applies to CG

features in a way that it could not to traditional cel animation. To this end, current CG-

animated features reconfigure consumer socialization within a more complex set of

audiovisual dynamics that blur the boundaries between the industrial object and the screen,

and between the diegetic and the non-diegetic world.

In Toy Story 2 the narrative focuses on Woody when he discovers his origins and value

as a vintage toy after being bought in a yard sale by a toy collector. Upon arriving at the

collector’s apartment, Woody asks Jessie the Cowgirl (a part of the ‘Woody’s Round Up’

gang) how she already knows his name. To which she replies ‘Everyone knows your name,

Woody. Why you don’t even know who you are, do you?’ In order to show him who he is,

Bullseye the horse then puts on a tape of an originalWoody’s Round Up episode complete

with its own cross-promotional breakfast cereal endorsement: ‘Cowboy Crunchies

Presents.’ This scene is similar to the scene of Buzz’s epiphany from the first film in the

way that it reconfigures Woody within a network of commercial and cross-promotional

signs, forcing him to re-evaluate his conception of himself as a consumer/consumed

product. In the opening five minutes ofMonsters, Inc., Mike and Sully, the protagonists, sit

down to watch ‘their advert’ in which they are not only the centrepiece stars given

identities that set the tone for the rest of the movie but they are also treated to an

explanation of the difficulties they face in their jobs: the result of the fact that increasingly

screen-socialized children are getting harder to scare (Figure 4). Later in the movie, Sully

only comes to learn how frightening he is when, after scaring Boo, he is confronted with a

video replay of his actions from her point of view. Finally, at the end of the movie,

Waternoose’s corruption is exposed for himself and all to see on a giant bank of video

capture screens. In Cars Lighting McQueen features as the star of his own Rusteze advert

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 13

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

before later rolling onto the speedway to be greeted by a giant screen broadcasting his

image to the stadium. In Ratatouille Remy the rat watches a promotional feature about

Gusteau the chef on television, learns to cook and dreams of being a chef before actually

ending up working in his Paris restaurant and saving it.12 InWALL·E, WALL·E learns the

concept of love and so is socialized onto the path of both humanization and saving

humanity when he watches a dance scene (notably the form that Tom Gunning points out

continued the spectacular cinematic attraction following the arrival of narrative) from

Hello Dolly! Similarly, inUp, Carl Fredricksen has the ambition to explore instilled in him

when, at the beginning of the movie, as a young child, he watches promotional news

footage of his daring hero Charles Muntz.

All of these scenes fulfil similar, pivotal roles in their respective narratives. They

represent a turning point in which the central characters occupy multiple positions as

consuming agents and consumable objects at the same time, integrated in a complex

audiovisual web of promotional culture. This represents a development on the early short

films which only presented naive viewers amazed at the effect of the cinematic illusion

itself and not the miraculous incorporation of their image into the screen itself. This is one

of the ways in which both viewers and characters onscreen become labourers of the image:

they labour not only to decode the spectacular content of the screen, but also to transform

themselves into functioning objects of that screen.

It would be a mistake, though, to suggest that all screens in Pixar movies, or even all

moments of screen socialization, are equal. They are not. Indeed, for all its striking

similarity, the second occasion of audiovisual epiphany in a Pixar movie (Woody’s

encounter with the roundup gang in Toy Story 2) conveys much of the differences in screen

types and experiences of characters. Like Buzz, Woody stands awestruck before the

television in a reference to the equivalent scene from the first film. However, Woody’s

epiphany does not present him with an image of himself as less than his unified whole.

Though he is presented (in a pastiche of the 1950s children’s programmes) as a puppet on

strings, Woody is presented as the unifying hero of a narrative rather than purely the

consumer object of an advert. Consequently, the product tie-ins that he browses through do

Figure 4. The future of the attention economy imagined in WALL·E.

14 L. Gurevitch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

not reduce him simply to a commercial sign but instead add to his self-image through a

proliferation of varied signs rather than (as with Buzz) a multiplication of identical but

bodily dislocated signs. For Woody, each of the images he sees is different, and each

promotional representation he sees of himself depicts him in the singular. By contrast,

Buzz’s advert repeatedly emphasizes his mass production with images of thousands of

Buzz Lightyear’s stacked on shelves, while Woody’s experience of himself as a

commercial product is mediated through a romantic vision of a pre-plastic age in which his

wooden, artisinal construction apparently singles him out as unique.13

Here then we have different types of screens and different types of socialization

experiences based upon the nature of the spectacular content accessed through the screen.

In both cases, the help or the harm that the content delivers to the characters says much

about Pixar’s attitude towards the cultural forms it comments on and is embedded within.

While Buzz’s character-destroying experience leaves him in no doubt as to his function as

an object of consumer capital in a mass-produced disposable culture, Woody’s affirming

experience is quite the contrary. Pixar asserts an unintentionally ironic and paradoxical

nostalgia for an age less corrupted by hypercapitalism and its industrially fabricated

commodities. This nostalgia is not something that simply plays out between Toy Story and

Toy Story 2. In WALL·E, the critique of the spectacular image only stretches as far as the

digital holographic screens with their endless appeals to consume. By contrast, the Hello

Dolly video that WALL·E watches provides his first introduction to humanity:

a socializing experience that propels him through the movie on a collision course with

the Axiom’s futurist brand of spectacle. While the infantilized and immobile inhabitants of

the Axiom are enslaved and alienated by the screen (and, like Buzz earlier, reminiscent of

the cinema-goer), WALL·E is (like Woody) comforted and liberated by the more

televisual screen. What at first appears to be a radical critique of the screen as an apparatus

for spectacular enslavement in WALL·E can also be seen as a more conservative nostalgia

for a particular moment in the spectacular and productive relations of contemporary

capital: namely the 1950s. Likewise in Ratatouille, the passing of Gusteau leaves the

restaurant vulnerable to the crass commercialism of a marketing manager keen to exploit

the brand name in order to produce a new range of microwave meals: all a far cry from the

homely, familial, black-and-white television show hosted by Gusteau himself and based

on the mantra that ‘anyone can cook’. In all cases the lost age for which Pixar films betray

nostalgia can be notably located around the same historical period. Woody the cowboy,

Hello Dolly, homely black-and-white TV chefs all saw their heyday around the period that

most of Pixar’s directorial management just so happened to have been children. Even Cars

– a film that Debord would surely have held up as the epitome of the society of spectacle

where the ‘dictatorship of the automobile’ is interrelated with the spectacular veneration of

the commodity – adheres to this nostalgic formula. In Cars the relegation of the county

highway and the destructive rise of the freeway form the backbone of the narrative that

only sees Lightning McQueen become a true winner when he eschews his amped up self-

promotional ways to reconnect with the values of a simpler age through a rejection of the

soulless and destructive state highway and a return to the small town community.

Postmodern times

The politics of the spectacular screen

By way of conclusion I will turn finally toWALL·E. More than any other of Pixar’s stable,

WALL·E sets itself up as a deeply self-reflexive critique of contemporary consumer society

and the direction in which the supremacy of spectacle is taking us. Similarly, more than

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 15

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

any other Pixar movie, WALL·E reads like the audiovisual manifestation of Debord’s

‘society of the spectacle’. On a space liner cruising through the galaxy, the human race

have not only become alienated from their origins, they have become the ultimate

alienated spectators, existing only in mediation with the digital holographic screens that

hover inches from their faces, allowing communication with others whilst simultaneously

enforcing a zone of exclusion that alienates them even from their own bodies and

constitutes them, literally in one scene, as beings ‘alone together’ (Turkle 2012). Here the

transformation from early twentieth-century structures of production to futurist structures

of spectacular consumption is complete. So close is civilization to the ‘society of the

spectacle’ that Debord’s analysis reads like a description of the remnant, immobile society

of morbidly obese gluttons, engorged on an enforced feast of the spectacle that WALL·E

finds in deep space:

Owing to the very success of this separated system of production, whose product is separationitself . . . an individual’s principal work is being transformed . . . into a realm of non-work, ofinactivity . . .There can be no freedom apart from activity, and within the spectacle all activityis banned – a corollary of the fact that all real activity has been forcibly channelled into theglobal construction of the spectacle. (Debord 1999, 21 and 22)

Curiously then, WALL·E appears to make a radical critique of a potential future that is

based upon the very processes of audio-visual socialization into the society of the

spectacle that Pixar has been engaged in from before its first feature. In his work on

WALL·E, Hugh McNaughton identifies a criticism inherent in the anti-consumerist

message of WALL·E when he argues that Pixar is not only aware of its precariously

compromised position at the pinnacle of the merchandizing mountain, but also that the

apparent critique of consumer capitalism this engenders ultimately results in a validation

of it (McNaughton 2012).

Just as McNaughton points out that Pixar self-reflexively nods towards its own role

creating the giant junk piles that WALL·E is left to clean up (in the form of Disney Store

plastic Pixar toys that feature amongst the rubbish), so too doesWALL·E feature an explicit

acknowledgement of audio-visual socialization of young consumers into the society of the

spectacle from the earliest age. When WALL·E takes his first wander on-board the Axiom,

we are treated to a vista of spectacular screens.

In short order the viewer is treated to a scene of young children in a creche in front of a

holographic screen undergoing their audio-visual socialization as inevitable consumers of

the monopolistic corporation of ‘Buy N Large’: a Wal-Mart/Disney-like hybrid that

trashed planet Earth (literally) before heading out to the stars.

In keeping with this satire, WALL·E functions in this movie like an anarchic Charlie

Chaplin figure and was frequently described as such on the film’s release (Duralde 2008;

Brooks 2008; Strike 2008). It is perhaps no accident that the character that Pixar should

choose to liberate humanity from a future enslavement in a dictatorship of the spectacle –

the roots of which are planted within DisneyPixar’s own server farms as any other – would

be so reminiscent of Chaplin. There is a whole article to be written on the relationship

between WALL·E and Charlie Chaplin, but in the absence of such an opportunity, here a

few brief comments must be made instead. First, parallels between these two figures could

be seen as the consequence of a genre which, as Halberstam notes, ‘offer an animated

world of triumph for the little guys, a revolution against the business world of the father

and the domestic sphere of the mother’ (Halberstam 2011, 47). The unique way in which

children (and therefore the characters that come to represent them) are both in a constant

state of rebellion and at the same time ‘not masters of their own domain’ (2011, 47) must

have pointed Pixar animators towards Chaplin’s bumbling, confused and accident-prone

16 L. Gurevitch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

character. There are, however, some revealing differences between these characters too.

As Beller points out, Chaplin’s Modern Times marks one of cinema’s most extraordinary

representations of Taylorist conceptions of the production line worker as extension of the

industrial machine. Here humans are subordinated slaves of industrial modernity, the

fabric of which Chaplin unwittingly disrupts. InWALL·E however, there appears at first to

be an absence of production line and the main protagonist is a machine rather than a

human. On a second consideration, however, the component parts of Chaplin’s original

satire are all present, but the relations between them are subtly reconfigured. Here humans

are not slaves to the productive apparatus, rather they are its product. Production lines in

the strict Fordist industrial sense have been replaced, ironically, by ordered lines of

hovering automobiles that turn their raw material of human potential into passive products

of the society of the spectacle. While the production line is replaced by automobility and

spectacle, humans are not subordinated to the machinery but the other way around. In an

inverse of Taylorist principles, the machinery of the Axiom struggles to respond to their

human cargo’s already efficient, minimal and labour-saving movements (effected, for

instance, when they casually toss aside a used soda cup).

WALL·E functions in many respects like a Modern Times remake (we might call it

Postmodern Times) that envisages the key features of Debord’s revolutionary call to arms.

Not only is WALL·E’s most revolutionary and defining act to draw the Axiom’s

inhabitants attention away from their screens, breaking their somnambulistic spell and

setting in motion the sequence of events that ultimately leads to collective rebellion

against the dictatorship of the spectacle, he also acts out another of Debord’s prescriptions

for revolutionary uprising. Just as WALL·E distracts the Axiom inhabitants’ attention

from their spectacular holographic screens, he also disrupts the flow of perfectly organized

and coordinated traffic on-board the Axiom.

In his work on psycho-geography and urban space, Debord ([1955]2008) argued that

the opening up of Paris under the second empire served the function of enabling the rapid

circulation of military personnel and vehicles. In the contemporary context, he argued,

private automobiles had taken the place of military units. Like many other cultural

theorists since (Wernick 1991; Charney and Schwartz 1995; Singer 1995; Friedberg 2002;

Bennett et al. 2002; Featherstone, Thrift, and Urry 2005) Debord explicitly connected the

car, the spectacle and the operative processes of capital here (as he did in The Society of the

Spectacle). Debord’s answer to the unthinking and counter-revolutionary urban flow was

to champion the ‘derive’: an unplanned tour through the urban landscape that generated

new experiences and understandings of the city at the same time as it disrupted the

accepted patterns and behaviours performed without conscious or reflexive thought. While

such a disruption of flow was, for Debord, one of the few revolutionary acts available to a

populous of the urban space, for WALL·E it is a process he unwittingly sets in motion

within minutes of arriving on the Axiom as he continually acts as an considerational

spanner in the works of a highly efficient and perfectly organized automated traffic system.

Ultimately, WALL·E’s actions result in a domino effect of chaos, anarchy and revolution,

but these effects are not the result of deliberate action. The net-effect, then, is that

WALL·E has a revolutionary and disruptive influence, but he himself is not a

revolutionary (which in a Disney universe may come too uncomfortably close to being

troublemaker). WALL·E is the epitome of the apolitical revolutionary of the society of the

spectacle: disrupting and destroying an old order all the while without conscious or

deliberate political action.

The question then presents itself as follows: how do we view Pixar and its paradoxical

rendering of the society of the spectacle and its own role in the attention economy? At risk

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 17

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

of appearing to side step the problem, it is tempting to call on Geoffrey Sirc’s excellent

articulation of the complexities one faces when dealing with ‘the difficult politics of the

popular’. For Sirc (2001), it is reductive to reduce one’s reading of a contemporary popular

text simply to a matter of progressive or reductive, revolutionary or reactionary. In our

own case it seems difficult to ignore both the seemingly radical self-reflexivity at work in

Pixar’s movies, at the same time as it cannot be denied that, however self-reflexive these

films may seem, they are instrumental (at every level) in effecting the attention economy

they seem to critique.

What we can more adequately evaluate and articulate, however, is the manner in which

Pixar’s movies mark a move beyond Disney’s constitution of its child viewers as potential

Fordist producers. Here, the nature of the production envisaged has changed from Fordist

factory to the decentred, individuated spectacle of the modern multifaceted screen. From

the shocked and comic countryman and the cinematograph, to Chaplin’s bumbling,

accident-prone disruptor of modernity, from early comedic attraction to early narrative

satire, Pixar continues a tradition that has characterized ambiguous and self-reflexive

encounters with the screen from the earliest time, taking up the baton in which Pixar

characters become the naive viewers learning, not only to recognize the spectacular

apparatus when they see it, but also to understand and negotiate their role as labourer

across multiple screen economies.

Acknowledgements

As always, this article was the product of much input and feedback from many people. First andforemost I would like to thank Karen Lury at Glasgow University. The seeds of this article lay in afantastic children’s animation class she ran almost 15 years ago. I would also like to thank ProfessorsMillie and Emmett Petty for their long and detailed discussions on screen socialization and earlychild consumer development. Finally my thanks go to the usual suspects: Sue Irwin, SteveMcCormick, Suzanne Buchan, Laura Jolly and the reviewers of this piece who were particularlyhelpful in their comments.

Notes

1. As the Mattel Corporation discovered to its cost after rejecting a place for its Barbie toys in thefirst Toy Story feature, Pixar movies are not something companies can afford to ignore.

2. Like Buzz attempting to contact star command, or the Maori warriors of Jane Campion’sPiano.

3. Supporting our earlier metaphor of the spectacle as gateway drug to the attention economy,Bottomore even speculates on spectacular pleasure as a delivery mechanism thatneurologically stimulates and provides pleasure in much the same manner as drug taking(Specific Ref here).

4. With the exception of A Bug’s Life and the most recent movie Brave.5. Interestingly, William Schaffer’s articulation of what makes Pixar’s aesthetic unique in

contemporary cinematic terms is strikingly familiar. Schaffer argues that it is, ‘the convergenceof impossibility and verisimilitude in a totally integrated, synthetic context that produces aspecific sense of magic, effectively rendering the appeal to “realism” subordinate to the recalland provocation of imagination.’ Schaffer is not the only one to identify this aspect of thecontemporary Pixar Aesthetic (Schaffer 2004).

6. And a good number beyond Pixar.7. Bringing to mind the ‘scare floor’ of Monsters, Inc. amongst others: for more detail on the

factory logic of CG-animated movies see Gurevitch 2012.8. Indeed, the changing nature of animation, and therefore its metaphorical relationship to

childrearing, is one of the central premises of Toy Story. While Buzz’s plastic aesthetic ofindustrially fabricated aesthetic is presented as replacing Woody’s naturalistic form, hisaesthetic prowess is accompanied by an incongruous but comic naivety. Though Woody

18 L. Gurevitch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

struggles in vain, like a parent attempting to educate his child, to enlighten Buzz as to hisfunction in the world, it is not until Buzz sees for himself, through the screen, that he is a toy,that he can begin to fulfil his required role as both consumer and consumed object within across-promotional world.

9. Furthermore, the one major distinction that Metz made between the mirror stage and cinematicspectatorship (that the cinema, unlike the mirror, does not reflect back the spectator’s image) iscontradicted in this scene as Buzz does see himself reflected onscreen. For the viewer, thehumour of this scene comes from the discrepancy between Buzz’s belief system and the realitythat is so painful in its comical revelation. Buzz sees an apparently inconsequential visual text(an advert for a children’s toy) which shatters his illusions and destroys his ego resulting in anervous breakdown. The humour arises from the disjunction between the seeminglyinconsequential (a toy protagonist in a child’s film watches a child’s advert) juxtaposed withwhat in narrative terms becomes highly consequential (the advert causes a collapse in the toyprotagonist’s ego and forces a crisis of identity which leads to a nervous breakdown). ForLacan, Beller argues, ‘the screen is that surface on which the subject negotiates his appearance,the illusory space of the masquerade’ (Beller 2006, 170). Beller quotes Lacan discussing thescreen and its relation to the negotiation of subjectivity directly in a passage that is worthrepeating in its entirety:

Only the subject – the human subject, the subject of desire that is the essence of man –is not, unlike the animal, entirely caught up in this imaginary capture. He maps himselfin it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is thegaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation. (Lacan quoted in Beller 2006, 170)

10. InMonsters, Inc. Boo hands Sully a Jessie the Cowgirl doll and a Nemo toy when he takes herhome (at the time Finding Nemo had not yet been released). Similarly, one scene in A Bug’sLife features a caravan from Monsters, Inc., and a car from Toy Story.

11. In 1989, Pixar began a string of successful commercial television advertising commissions forTropicana, Listerine and Lifesavers.

12. Similarly, in Over the Hedge Spike the porcupine sits on a remote control triggering his firstexperience of the audiovisual realm. In both Shrek 2 and Toy Story 2, characters in the narrativecome to the rescue of protagonists after locating them through adverts on television.

13. This sets up a dichotomous tension between ‘natural, hand crafted and pre-industrial’ on theone hand, and ‘synthetic, manufactured and industrial’ on the other that is central to the ToyStory features in a number of ways. Not only is this tension played out in the narrative throughthe opposition between Buzz Lightyear as a modern, plastic consumer product and Woody asan older more ‘innocent’ form of toy, but it also stands as a metaphor for the replacement ofolder forms of hand-drawn animation by newer, more technically reproduced automated formsof CG imaging.

Notes on contributor

Leon Gurevitch is Director of Programme, Royal Society Research Scholar and Senior Lecturer ofcomputer-generated culture at the University of Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand. He haspublished widely and is an Associate editor of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. His researchfocuses on software culture, new media, design, science and technology. His current research projectis a major three-year study of visual effects industries and the migration patterns of code and coders.

References

Beller, Jonathan. 2006. The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society ofSpectacle. London: University Press of New England.

Bennett, B., F. Botting, P. Palladino, I. Tyler, and S. Wilson. 2002. “How It Feels.” In CrashCultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material, edited by J. Arthurs and I. Grant, 23–35.Bristol: Intellect Books.

Bottomore, Steven. 1999. “The Panicking Audience?: Early Cinema and the ‘Train Effect’.”Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 19 (2): 177–216.

Brooks, Xan. 2008. “WALL·E Review.” The Guardian, July 18. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2008/jul/18/animation

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 19

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

Charney, Leo and Vanessa, Schwartz. 1995. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. London:University of California Press.

de Cordova, Richard. 1994. “The Mickey in Macy’s Window: Childhood, Consumerism and DisneyAnimation.” In Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin,203–213. London: Routledge.

Debord, Guy. [1955]2008. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” In CriticalGeographies: A Collection of Readings, Translated by Ken Knabb, edited by Harald Bauder andSalvatore Engel-Di Mauro, 23–27. Kelowna, BC: Praxis (e)Press.

Debord, Guy. 1999. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books.Duralde, Alfonso. 2008. “‘WALL·E’: If Charlie Chaplin were a Robot.” MNBC http://www.

nbcnews.com/id/25374861/site/todayshow/ns/today-entertainment/t/wall-e-if-charlie-chaplin-were-robot/#.UTAt3FIR-uI

Featherstone, Mike, Nigel, Thrift, and John, Urry. 2005. Automobilities. London: Sage.Friedberg, Anne. 2002. “Urban Mobility and Cinematic Visuality: The Screens of Los Angeles –

Endless Cinema or Private Telematics.” The Journal of Visual Culture 1 (2): 183–204.Giroux, Henry. 2002. “Children’s Culture and Disney’s Animated Films.” In Breaking into the

Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics, edited by Giroux, Henry, 100–135. Oxford: Blackwell.Gunning, Tom. 1999. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator.”

In Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, edited by Leo Braudy andMarshall Cohen, 818–832. 5th ed. New York: Oxford University Press.

Gurevitch, Leon. 2009. “Problematic Dichotomies: Narrative and Spectacle in Film and AdvertisingScholarship.” Journal of Popular Narrative Media, Liverpool University Press, Liverpool 2 (2):143–158.

Gurevitch, Leon. 2010a. “The Cinemas of Interactions: Cinematics and the ‘Game Effect’ in the Ageof Digital Attractions.” Senses of Cinema Journal, Online Journal AFI/RMIT, Melbourne,December, Issue 57.

Gurevitch, Leon. 2010b. “The Cinemas of Transactions: The Exchangeable Currency of GCAttractions Across Audiovisual Economies.” Journal of Television and New Media, Sage,New York, 11 (5): 367–385.

Gurevitch, Leon. 2012. “Computer Generated Animation as Product Design Engineered Culture orBuzz Lightyear to the Sales Floor: To the Checkout and Beyond!” Animation: AnInterdisciplinary Journal, Sage, UK, 7 (2): 131–149.

Halberstam, Judith. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. London: Duke University Press.Kinder, Marsha. 1991. Playing with Power in Movies, Television and Video Games. London:

University of California Press.King, Geoff. 1999. Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster. London: I.B.

Taurus.Lacan. 1989. Ecrits: A Selection. London: Routledge.Lasseter, John. 1996. Toy Story DVD, Disney/PixarAManovich, Lev (2001). The Language of New

Media. London: MIT Press.Lasseter, John. 2003. “Interview with John Lasseter.” The Guardian Online. http://www.guardian.

co.uk/culture/2001/nov/23/artsfeatures7McNaughton, Hugh. 2012. “Distinctive Consumption and Popular Anti-Consumerism: The Case of

Wall·E.” Continuum Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 26 (5): 753–766.Metz, Christian. 1986. “Identification, Mirror.” In The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the

Cinema, edited by Christian Metz, 42–57. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Price, David. 2008. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Vintage.Sammond, Nicholas. 1999. “Manufacturing the American Child: Child-Rearing and the Rise of Walt

Disney.” Continuum Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13 (1): 753–766.Schaffer, William. 2004. “The Importance of Being Plastic: The Feel of Pixar.” Animation Journal,

Special Issue: The Rotoscope and Its Descendants 12: 72–95.Singer, Ben. 1995. “Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sensationalism.” In Cinema

and the Invention of Modern Life, edited by Leo, Charney and Vanessa, Schwartz. London:University of California Press.

Sirc, Geoffrey. 2001. “The Difficult Politics of the Popular.” Journal of Advanced Composition,21.2: 421–433.

Smoodin, Eric, ed. 1994. Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom. London: Routledge.

20 L. Gurevitch

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015

Strike, Joe. 2008. “Wall·E is a Real Character.” Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/wall-e-real-character-article-1.294713

Turkle, Sherry. 1997. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon &Schuster.

Turkle, Sherry. 2012. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from EachOther. New York: Basic Books.

Wasko, Janet. 2001. Dazzled by Disney? The Global Disney Audiences Project. London: LeicesterUniversity Press.

Wernick, Andrew. 1991. Promotional Culture: Advertising, Ideology and Symbolic Expression.London: Sage.

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 21

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Vic

tori

a U

nive

rsity

of

Wel

lingt

on]

at 1

6:11

22

Janu

ary

2015