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Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s by Noel Brown

2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/uni.2021.0020

1080-6563

Rebecca Rowe,

Comics and Graphic Narratives

Reviewed by: Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s by Noel Brown Rebecca Rowe (bio) Noel Brown. Contemporary Hollywood Animation: Style, Storytelling, Culture and Ideology Since the 1990s. Edinburgh UP, 2021. Noel Brown's Contemporary Hollywood Animation, much like his earlier The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter and The Children's Film: Genre, Nation and Narrative, masterfully combines textual, industrial, and cultural analyses to provide a thorough overview of the state of this particular type of film. In particular, Brown traces the stylistic and thematic changes prevalent in animated films created since the 1990s from Hollywood animation studios, with a focus on films created by the big three studios: Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar Animation Studios, and DreamWorks Animation. While Brown focuses on this period, beginning with what scholars have called the Disney Renaissance (1989–99), he historically contextualizes the period by demonstrating how themes (such as the importance of family) remain but have been transformed from earlier animation periods while animation styles, radically changed by the development of computer animation, have also begun to swing back toward the hand-drawn cel animation of pre-Pixar films. In fact, Contemporary Hollywood Animation can best be described as a historical overview of the last few decades of animation industry as Brown explains how technology and culture have affected the animated films so popular today. The central concept of this history is that "animation is now at the centre not only of the film industry, but of contemporary popular culture" (Brown 1). According to Brown, Hollywood's animated films represent many of the most popular American franchises and most successful American conglomerates, meaning that the study of these films demonstrates how media, audiences, and their combined culture work today. The body of Contemporary Hollywood Animation is broken into four chapters that each explore how a different theme and/or style of animation [End Page 251] simultaneously engages both Americanization and globalization. After an introduction that places animation into a wider film history, chapter 2 explores the emphasis on families, both biological and formed, in recent animated films, especially those from Disney and Pixar. Brown argues that this focus on depicting multiple versions of family attempts to reinforce and universalize many traditional American family values. The third chapter, which focuses primarily on DreamWorks films, examines why contemporary Hollywood animated films are so often set in our contemporary world and use postmodern techniques such as parody. He notes that while classic animated films were often based in lands and times different from our (American) own, contemporary animated films are anchored "to recognizable and identifiable situations and events," making the films feel more "relatable" (a term that Brown does use critically) to today's American viewers, further Americanizing the face of animation (78). The fourth chapter analyzes the depiction and valorization of diversity in animation, examining what exactly studios mean when they celebrate "diversity." This chapter, like the ones before it, examines the careful line studios walk between acknowledging everyone's uniqueness and trying to market their materials as universal to an increasingly global audience. Finally, the last chapter examines children's animated horror films and what Brown calls Indiewood animated films (films that exist between Hollywood and Indie productions). This chapter is the only one to study the films that exist at the margins of Hollywood's animation, and Brown analyzes how these films position themselves as existing on those margins in order to access "the perceived requirements of mass audiences and the promise of additional credibility and cachet associated with cult cinema," exploring the line between art and industry (144). While these chapters include substantial textual analysis, Brown places these analyses in an overarching examination of how the American animation industry continues to sell Americanness while simultaneously attempting to court a global (especially Chinese) market. As this synopsis makes clear, Contemporary Hollywood Animation engages several conversations that are important to children's literature scholars, including how these films imagine their child/adult audiences. Brown argues that "The fact that almost all Hollywood animated features are produced for mixed audiences of children and adults … is neither an inconvenient truth nor a minor detail … it...