Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination

The Rotoscopic Uncanny: Aku no Hana and the Aesthetic of Japanese Postmodernity

“…Disney’s use of xerography in One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) seemed to make it superfluous, as technology was able to do what would had been impossible to do by hand (drawing each Dalmatian spot). At an aesthetic level, what Disney was trying to do was not to channel reality through animation but to create realism within an ‘animated world’ (Herhuth, 2017: 30) with ‘freedom of a subject … [in] a world made up of things and relations that are not of a person’s choosing’ (p. 35). By combining the cuteness of animated aesthetics (that became the inspiration for Japanese anime) with the realism of the multiplane camera’s illusion of depth, Disney used ‘warm and fuzzy’ (Ngai, 2012: 5) cuteness to suppress the disturbing all-too-real aesthetic of the rotoscope.…”

“…But, unlike the rotoscoping of Aku no Hana, Monsters, Inc. ’s facial features have no commitment to realism and instead are hyper-cute. Pixar attempts to ‘[erase] the viewer’s understanding of the animation as animation, or at least relocating our understandings of the form to an uncanny perceptual purgatory’ (Fore, 2007: 124) and use the ‘comic uncanny’ of audience knowledge and humor to avoid any discomfort (Herhuth, 2017: 74). This is deeply tied into the ideologies embedded within these aesthetics.…”

“…Film has become more animated as computers create the ‘illusion of life’ entirely from code. Animation has become more filmic as the ‘superflat’ anime aesthetic increasingly incorporates CGI backgrounds and CGI character models while the shift from Disney 2D animation to Pixar 3D represents ‘a dialectical bridge that connects not only different modes of animation production but a host of cultural and economic transitions’ (Herhuth, 2017: 5). And as ‘gamification’ becomes increasingly popular in scholarship and business (McGonigal, 2011), the aesthetics of video games, coupled with digital technologies such as smartphones and high quality virtual reality headsets, affects both how films and animations are made and how they are watched.…”

Life Remade: Critical Animation in the Digital Age

“…Despite its growing pervasiveness, the production of digital animation remains, for the most part, extremely capital and resource-intensive. In a media moment partly characterized by democratized access to media production and cheap reality television, feature-length animation represents an expensive, technologically demanding and labour-heavy counterpoint to these trends (see, for example, Herhuth, 2017). Emphasizing the material and infrastructural networks that underpin the apparently ‘ephemeral’ and ‘wireless’ computational technologies we have come to take for granted has been one of the most dynamic areas of contemporary digital scholarship.…”

Book review: Pixar’s America: The Re-Animation of American Myths and Symbols

“…When placed alongside recent book-length accounts of the studio’s maturation and evolving corporate relationships (Paik, 2007; Price, 2009), as well as the wave of recent publications that unpack the studio’s celebrated feature film canon via rigorous ideological critique (Herhuth, 2017; Rösing, 2016; Wooden and Gillam, 2014), Meinel’s book confidently adds to this emergent critical narrative by placing Pixar within the throes of cultural, political and social examination. As its title suggests, Pixar’s America is ultimately geared towards the studio’s animated features as in persistent conversation with American culture, and is therefore strongly enunciative of American tropes and mythology.…”