Pixar
To Mediocrity and Beyond
“And while I'm in mid-rant I'd also like to question the long-term effects of children's movies like Toy Story and Monsters Inc, which seem to be designed to turn things that used to be astonishing and remarkable into things that are crass and ordinary. In Toy Story, all the toys magically come alive and then…hold bureaucratic meetings about paint erosion. In Monsters Inc, it turns out that monsters aren't actually strange and fabulous beasts but bored clerical staff who spend most of the day hanging around the water-cooler at Monster Head Office. These films aren't made with children in mind, they're made by 'professional' adults who want to feel good about their own petty lives, and as a result the next generation's being primed for clerical work from birth. I think the word I'm looking for here is ‘evil.’”
— Lawrence Miles
“It’s telling that Pixar took off in the 1990s. As a sanctimonious machinic Disney analogue kickstarted from nascent CGI technology, its form perfectly matches its content, given how consistently its films make the fantastic into the banal while foregrounding the PMC values of its creators. Original Recipe Walter was concerned simply with stripmining European fairy tales and scrubbing them clean for commercial content—a business-savvy, art school Bowdler. But Pixar’s films are about the employees of Pixar. Unfortunately, this move from the mythic to the mundane doesn’t achieve any greater depth or complexity, as a standard Romance-to-Realism hop ideally should. While Disney’s Ariel still represents something of an archetypal psychic struggle, smuggling in some of the productive awkwardness of the Andersen fable’s ambiguous gender dynamics, everything in the Pixarverse is pitched at a crude literalist level and has only predictable Correct Thought underpinnings. We’re stuck in a 90s corporate team-building retreat or private therapy session, with all the standard, crassly psychologized emotions (think: Inside Out), appropriation-shallow ‘diversity’ (the Mexican + South American Neo-Decadents among us naturally reserve a special contempt for the plasticine cultural parody of films like Coco), and other greatest sensitivity hits of the burgeoning PMC playbook.
Did we mention how persistently ugly and sonically grating these films are? Try attending one in the theater while hungover with a ‘significant other’ or literal children and you’ll experience a fairly functional Hell sim of constantly flashing colors; bouncy, globular rendered textures; rubbery faces; hammily strident ‘voice acting,’ and the exhausting moral hammering of the eventual ending, all subjected to the editing equivalent of a NutriBullet blender. The eyes of the human viewer are jerked around the screen by the gibbering, cheerily bouncing anthropomorphic fish, insects and automobiles, and the silicon-skinned ‘human’ characters who mouth sitcom banter and timely lessons. While Original Recipe Walter was still able to strain for the ribald mythic abstractions of Fantasia, the capitalist realist, Neo-Passéist Pixar can’t get away from gas cars, corporate offices, overweight consumers, and assembly line production processes: its imaginative space has been thoroughly subsumed by its material circumstances. Even films like Wall-E that reach for something like an auto-critique or implication of the audience are difficult to endure to the end; the ‘point’ is grasped within five to ten minutes of screen time, and we are left to be pummeled into comprehensive enervation by the busy, tweaked-out weightlessness of the animated sprites.
It would be almost Neo-Decadent if it weren’t so neutered.
Tellingly, sexualization of Pixar-derived images proceeds apace on various PornHub analogues, with the rubbery cartoon bodies no doubt preparing Gens Alpha and Beta for their eventual android/gynoid intimacy surrogates, which they will hastily retreat to after any unwanted glimpse of the other furtive human males and females closeting themselves in their tiny apartments for fear of mutual recognition of each other’s repulsive realness. In this sense Pixar presents a true ‘posthuman’ presentiment: curious, then, how nothing about what it presages is as novel, pitiless or exciting as certain Accelerationist types would have us believe.
We do have a certain fondness for the red panda film about menstruation, simply because it is ‘a red panda film about menstruation.’ But even this is more amusing in concept than execution.”
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“Pixar has almost single-handedly made Western animation exotic to the point of necessitating a taxonomic split between ‘3-D/CGI’ and ‘2-D/traditional’ animation. Cel-shaded CGI, despite considerable fan outrage, has become more common in anime even, most notably in the recent Berserk TV adaptation. (Perhaps the only instance where it is executed seamlessly in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, a film roughly a quarter-century old). A bizarre paradox: century-old Fleischer rotoscope techniques often seem more true to life, in an Aristotelian poetical sense, than nearly all Pixar animation released over the past 15 years.”
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“Pixar is a brand synonymous with the most tedious of virtues: competence, that dull garment of the self-proclaimed artist who mistakes the shine of mere proficiency for the blazing glare of the eternal. Their early narrative concoctions (sentient toys grappling with obsolescence, neurotic insects resisting collectivism, monsters powered by the fear they instilled on children, et al) might have possessed the germ, however faint, of the uncanny. But any dormant potential was promptly and swiftly snipped when it was devoured by Disney. The subsequent era reveals not evolution, but a calculated refinement of the formula, and the proliferation of sequels and spinoffs—the ouroboros of franchise management—evidences the capitalist time hole where novelty is suffocated by the relentless exploitation of past successes. This is not creation or continuation, but taxidermy.
Pixar continues to receive acclaim for tackling difficult subject matter to make it palatable for kids and their families, but in truth they only reinforce transactional concepts like blame, validation, and forgiveness, which often only deepen some wounds. Their approach is a shallow simulacrum suitable for pedagogical pamphlets, scrubbed clean of the genuinely strange, the perverse, the dissonant harmonies that echo in the deeper chambers of existence.
Consider the studio’s obsession with closure: its protagonists march—no time for detours—through paths as regimented as IKEA assembly instructions: every conflict bent toward redemption, every shadow dispelled by sunrise, every misunderstanding solved with a hug, and the only decadence allowed is a second scoop of ice-cream. And keep it tidy: no room for frayed endings, no lingering rot beneath the resolution, ignore the thrilling obscurity where meaning might be gloriously ambiguous and forms twist into unsettling, inorganic beauty.
A voice cries out: ‘Pixar is family entertainment, it should not gaze over that darkness.’ This voice underestimates children, who are far more capable of sitting with discomfort than we credit them for—it’s adults who crave the false comfort of tidy endings. Children require bridges, not bubbles.
Addenda: Coco and its faux-Mexican window dressing might be the ultimate example of a certain contemporary malaise: the transformation of profound human experiences and rich cultural tapestries into easily consumable content devoid of the jagged edges, the uncomfortable truths, and the beautiful decay that characterize authentic human existence.”
— Ramon Alanis
“…….and The Incredibles is just family-friendly Watchmen. Right down to the joke about heroes killing themselves with their capes.”
—Andrew McKinney
art by Dan Heyer
Very interesting! Thank you for writing.