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

Abstract

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

Acknowledgements

As always, this article was the product of much input and feedback from many people. First and foremost I would like to thank Karen Lury at Glasgow University. The seeds of this article lay in a fantastic children's animation class she ran almost 15 years ago. I would also like to thank Professors Millie and Emmett Petty for their long and detailed discussions on screen socialization and early child consumer development. Finally my thanks go to the usual suspects: Sue Irwin, Steve McCormick, Suzanne Buchan, Laura Jolly and the reviewers of this piece who were particularly helpful in their comments.

Notes

^1. As the Mattel Corporation discovered to its cost after rejecting a place for its Barbie toys in the first 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's Piano.

^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 that neurologically 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 convergence of impossibility and verisimilitude in a totally integrated, synthetic context that produces a specific sense of magic, effectively rendering the appeal to “realism” subordinate to the recall and provocation of imagination.’ Schaffer is not the only one to identify this aspect of the contemporary 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 of industrially fabricated aesthetic is presented as replacing Woody's naturalistic form, his aesthetic prowess is accompanied by an incongruous but comic naivety. Though Woody struggles in vain, like a parent attempting to educate his child, to enlighten Buzz as to his function 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 a cross-promotional world.

^9. Furthermore, the one major distinction that Metz made between the mirror stage and cinematic spectatorship (that the cinema, unlike the mirror, does not reflect back the spectator's image) is contradicted in this scene as Buzz does see himself reflected onscreen. For the viewer, the humour of this scene comes from the discrepancy between Buzz's belief system and the reality that 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 a nervous breakdown. The humour arises from the disjunction between the seemingly inconsequential (a toy protagonist in a child's film watches a child's advert) juxtaposed with what in narrative terms becomes highly consequential (the advert causes a collapse in the toy protagonist's ego and forces a crisis of identity which leads to a nervous breakdown). For Lacan, 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 the screen and its relation to the negotiation of subjectivity directly in a passage that is worth repeating 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 himself in it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here the locus of mediation. (Lacan quoted in Beller 2006, 170)

^10. In Monsters, Inc. Boo hands Sully a Jessie the Cowgirl doll and a Nemo toy when he takes her home (at the time Finding Nemo had not yet been released). Similarly, one scene in A Bug's Life 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 for Tropicana, Listerine and Lifesavers.

^12. Similarly, in Over the Hedge Spike the porcupine sits on a remote control triggering his first experience of the audiovisual realm. In both Shrek 2 and Toy Story 2, characters in the narrative come 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 the one hand, and ‘synthetic, manufactured and industrial’ on the other that is central to the Toy Story features in a number of ways. Not only is this tension played out in the narrative through the opposition between Buzz Lightyear as a modern, plastic consumer product and Woody as an older more ‘innocent’ form of toy, but it also stands as a metaphor for the replacement of older forms of hand-drawn animation by newer, more technically reproduced automated forms of CG imaging.

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Leon Gurevitch

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