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Agony and Avoidance: Pixar, Deniability, and the Adult Spectator

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 42; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01956051.2014.881773

1930-6458

Ellen C. Scott,

Digital Media and Philosophy

Abstract:Pixar films expand the limitations typically binding G-rated films by employing a postmodern adaptation of the “principle of deniability,” a producer-designed 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.Keywords:: animationapocalypsecensorshipnoirPixarspectatorship NotesNotes1. Pixar's films are Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999), Monster's, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), The Incredibles (2004, rated PG), Cars (2006), Ratatouille (2007), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009, Rated PG), Toy Story 3 (2010), Cars 2 (2011), Brave (2012), and Monster's University (2013).2. Timothy Corrigan, Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 111.3. Pixar has entered into this pattern of sophisticated representation not primarily out of self-regulatory compulsion, as was the case during the Production Code's Breen era (1934–1955), but rather out of the market-made imperatives to avoid offending a broad audience by adhering to contemporary moral sensibilities while still remaining relevant to adults.4. In a media landscape indelibly marked by HBO's successful branding of unrestrained frankness, and with cinematic images increasingly impelled toward a “realism” premised on permissive representation of sex, violence, and “anti-social behavior” defined as excessive by previous censorship regimes, Pixar has capitalized on the place for a return to suggestion and allegorical presentation—and to the indirect and at times abstract, metaphorical forms of representation that at one time accompanied it. Post-“Production Code” era animation has provided a type of relief not necessary in the Code-era, a relief from the excesses of horrifyingly direct realism (though not a complete escape from its complex and often dark themes).5. Such scary sequences have led Common Sense ratings to alert parents to potential dangers in the Toy Story trilogy but also in previous animated features like Pinocchio (1940), Bambi (1942), Cinderella (1950), and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).6. These pleasures are geared, as Anthony Lane has recently noted, toward applying “fresh cement between the generations: a boy whose viewing habits could not be further from his grandmother's and whose iPod would give her a migraine” can both find interest in Up (2009) (Lane 74).7. According to Brecht “the alienation effect intervenes, not in the form of absence of emotion, but in the form of emotions which need not correspond to those of the character portrayed” (Brecht 92).8. Kristen Whissel has recently argued the importance of questions of scale in her analysis of the digital multitude in film. She asserts that with “the overwhelming force they imply, they often emblematize the epic themes at work in contemporary visual effects films: more often than not, the multitude's appearance heralds ‘The End’—the end of freedom, the end of a civilization, the end of an era, or even the end of human time altogether (91).”9. In Widescreen Cinema, John Belton argues that “because the CinemaScope lens possessed a limited depth of field, filmmakers' continued use of traditional cinematic staging techniques, coupled with the horizontal compositional strategy of widescreen, encouraged spectators both to scan across the width of the frame and to look into depth, positioning them on a bidirectional axis quite different from the one-directional axis of ‘deep focus’ cinema that emerged in the mid-to-late 1940s” (Belton 198). This shifted, quite literally, the spectatorial perspective of the cinema viewer, leading producers like Darryl F. Zanuck, whom Belton cites, to promise audiences that not only would the “curved and enlarged screen” surround them but “the increased scope of the production cannot fail to draw the audience into the action” (Belton 193).10. In this they are like the architectural objects analyzed by Fredric Jameson (Jameson 53–92).11. This follows in the tradition of prior animated films. As Kevin Sandler has noted, citing the “drag queen” Ursula in Ron Clement's The Little Mermaid (1989), and the “effeminate” Scar in Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff's The Lion King (1994), “the ability of Disney cartoons to effect unmitigated ‘happiness’ and unqualified popular success partly lies in their ability to reward ‘real’ gender performance and punish gender perversion” (Sandler 156).12. While it is important to note that Toy Story 3 ends with Andy's toys ultimately finding a happy home with a girl owner, Bonnie remains an underdeveloped character: coming, as she does from a family particularly marked for its maternal nurture (her mother owns a day care center), she is framed as an extension of a pastoral, nostalgically maternal environment. What is more the transition to female ownership, one which Andy initiates, signals the end of the franchise—the end, quite literally, of the toys' story, a fact highlighted by the final shots of the film as the toys look after Andy as he drives away.13. Wells has suggested the importance of the theory of post-human existence that the Toy Story films offers by positing that the toy's status as “plaything…points back to childhood and innocence, and forward to ‘non-human’ formulations which heighten fresh perceptions of what it is to be ‘human'” (Wells 160). For Wells “The characters use their ‘post-human’ status to recall the values and purposes of their representative forms as toys” (Wells 163).14. The theme of bodily dissolutions is prevalent in zombie and horror films but also in comedies like Robert Zemeckis' Death Becomes Her (1992).15. Pixar continually makes films that centralize the old and grotesque. This is most obvious in Ratatouille (2007) (which is about a rat chef) but is also evident in Sid's room in Toy Story (1995) and the centrality of the wizened, elderly protagonist in Up (2008).16. In this film, a taboo love affair between a corrupt Chinese general and a missionary could only be represented through a dream in order to adhere to industry policy, which pushed filmmakers to limit the depiction of interracial sexuality, even when those involved were not black and white.Additional informationNotes on contributorsEllen ScottEllen Scott is Associate Professor of Media History in the Department of Media Studies at City University of New York–Queen's College. Her work concerns the relationship between censorship, textuality, and spectatorship. Her book Cinema Civil Rights (Rutgers UP, Jan. 2015) examines patterns of repression that surrounded the expression of Black freedom onscreen in the Classical Hollywood Era.