Book review: Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation,Storytelling,and Digital Culture

Eric Herhuth’s Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture takes its place alongside Donald Crafton’s Shadow of a Mouse (2012) and Suzanne Buchan’s The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (2011) in reintroducing the relationship between aesthetics and animation to a readership perhaps less familiar with more canonical publications such as Jayne Pilling’s A Reader in Animation Studies (1997) and Maureen Furniss’s Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics (2008). While some works, like Scott Bukatman’s The Poetics of Slumberland (2012), explore animation history, Herhuth uses phenomenology and aesthetics to examine how, while stimulating and transforming the senses, the digital animations of Pixar Animation Studios offer the possibility of addressing cultural anxieties in today’s society.

Herhuth uses aesthetic concepts such as the uncanny, the sublime, the fantastic, and sensations of taste and becoming (or evolving) to explore various feature-length films, including Pixar’s Toy Story trilogy (dir. Lasseter, 1995; Lasseter, Unkrich and Brannon, 1999; Unkrich, 2010), Monsters, Inc. (dir. Docter, Silverman and Unkrich, 2001), The Incredibles (dir. Bird, 2004), and Ratatouille (dir. Bird and Pinkava, 2007). By considering some of Pixar’s most popular films and the relationship between form and cultural value, Herhuth argues that ‘Pixar narratives, characters, and worlds are engaged in what Jack Zipes calls a “civilizing process,” or the human need to adjust society and adjust to society in the midst of a changing world’ (p. 11). In other words, Herhuth, building on Jack Zipes’s argument, contends that Pixar films are akin to traditional fairy tales in the ways that they offer the possibility of subverting society and shaping cultural behaviors.

Considering the book’s underlying concern with the impact of aesthetic concepts on subjective experience and cinema’s role in shaping social norms, Herhuth uses animation as a means to ‘affirm the value of aesthetic and humanistic inquiry’ (p. 16). His book is thus aligned with recent works in animation and film studies (Andrew, 2011; Leslie, 2014; Sobchack, 2007) as well postmodernism and aesthetics (Ngai, 2012; Shaviro, 2009), which taken together have pursued aesthetics in contemporary art and media. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Herhuth addresses the ‘process of judging, for knowing and evaluating the particulars of the world’ through an aesthetic analysis of contemporary pop-culture animation (p. 25).

Chapter 1, ‘Aesthetic Storytelling: A Tradition and Theory of Animated Film’, provides both the historical and theoretical perspectives through which Herhuth will locate his work in subsequent chapters. Here, he claims that animation has not only a technological or industrial history, but also an aesthetic one (p. 18). He explains this by examining previous works in animation studies that are also concerned with aesthetics, such as Bukatman’s The Poetics of Slumberland (2012) and Tom Gunning’s ‘Animating the Instant’ (2014). Herhuth also provides a brief, second-hand history of the creative process behind Pixar’s animation by citing interviews with animator and film director John Lasseter (chief creative officer of Pixar). By focusing on aesthetics and Pixar’s creative process, Herhuth develops an argument in which animated films allow the possibility of examining real-world issues, and subsequently how film can subvert those issues.

Chapter 2, ‘The Uncanny Integrity of Digital Commodities’, applies the Freudian notion of the uncanny to the Toy Story trilogy to understand the ‘cultural form of digital commodities in relation to previous commodity forms and recent posthuman questions about embodiment, personhood, and the agency of things’ (p. 57). Here, Herhuth shows that the franchise utilizes toys not only as living entities which fulfill basic needs of their human-owners, but also as a means to compare ‘the fetishistic consumer logic of the predigital era to more recent instantiations of commodity fetishism and brand logic’ (p. 14). The relationship between humans, things, and commodities is explored through the toy’s essence, or the purpose for which that toy was created. In Toy Story, for example, the toy’s essence lies in its role of fulfilling the needs of its owner. For the film’s audience, viewing this act and witnessing the toy’s reason for existence in the film plays on the idea of the uncanny because the animated world we are perceiving (which is augmented with anthropomorphic CGI renderings) is designed to remind us of our childhood. As viewers consume this animated world, a franchise is born that creates capital through digital commodities, such as video games, animated film sequels, and television shorts.

Chapter 3, ‘From the Technological to the Postmodern Sublime’, uses the concept of the sublime to analyze Monsters, Inc. Here, Herhuth is using the sublime in two ways: first, in the traditional Kantian sense that ‘emphasizes the integrity of the subject and the superiority of reason or technological progress’ and second, in a postmodern sense that ‘emphasizes the disruption caused by sensation and unknowability’ (p. 100), or, how something with which we are unfamiliar can disrupt our lifestyle. By using the term in multiple ways, Herhuth is able to explore the narrative of Monsters, Inc. through the relationship between unknown others (the humans and monsters) and relate those ideas back to the real world, specifically through the examination of historical transitions. Using the Kantian sublime, he focuses primarily on industrial imagery within the monster factory and the way the animators utilized light to capture emotions felt by the characters in the film, as well as the viewing audience (p. 112). Using the postmodern sublime, Herhuth shows how the child in the film, Boo, represents a character of ‘absolute negativity (unknowability or unfinalizability)’, yet is an ‘empty threat, toxic yet valuable’, which disrupts the normal rhythm of life within the film (p. 116). Both instances of the sublime reflect real-world scenarios in which grandiose systems can be altered via the unknowability of subjects and objects, which Herhuth illustrates with the support of Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of Coca-Cola, in which Žižek posits the unknowability of the nutritional information of the product as positively impacting its sales (p. 120).

Chapter 4, ‘The Exceptional Dialectic of the Fantastic and the Mundane’, examines individual agency and systemic conditions in The Incredibles through the fantastic and the mundane. Herhuth primarily focuses on character development and the role that the body (and the character’s superpowers) play with regard to the individual, the family, and society. He begins with an overview of the society in which the characters live, a ‘liberal society in transition’ that has banned the use of superpowers in an attempt to normalize society (p. 124). This is an interesting approach in itself, as Herhuth, at times, plays devil’s advocate against liberal ideologies by highlighting that the ‘normalized’ superheroes often feel victimized for being different and unable to express their ‘true’ selves through, say, sports, where the heroes would have a significant advantage. While the majority of the chapter focuses on character development and the struggle that their non-normative bodies hold upon their psyche, the brilliance of the aesthetic examination displayed in this chapter is in how Herhuth relates these issues back to the real world. By comparing issues such as gender roles, biopolitics and social order within contemporary family and cultural values, the author is able to present a compelling argument for a ‘market-driven, competitive, liberal society’, or one that is liberally progressive yet economically capitalist (p. 188).

The final chapter, ‘Disruptive Sensation and the Politics of the New’, takes the aesthetic concept of sensation and applies it to the animated film Ratatouille. As the shortest chapter in the collection, Herhuth works quickly to apply sensation to the film’s diegesis and explore how ‘sensorial events, such as fine dining and physical comedy, contribute to radical changes to communities and individuals’ and how sensation can ‘disrupt and reconfigure the systems of meaning that individuals employ to understand the world around them’ (p. 158). Sensation allows Herhuth to show how Ratatouille’s setting mirrors our own world, which is altered by ‘forms of the new’ in two ways: new ideologies and new technologies. These ‘forms of the new’ are illustrated with two examples within the film. First, Herhuth recounts a scene in which the protagonists Remy and Linguini cook a dish of ratatouille so marvelous that it serves as a ‘transformation of character’ to the secondary antagonist of the film (p. 165). This demonstrates how ‘sensation, as a catalyst working in conjunction with a democratic ideology, initiates processes of change; it makes way for the new’ (p. 165). Second, Herhuth points to the ‘Remy–Linguini apparatus’, or the ‘merging’ of both protagonists (the rat and the human) who physically work together through sensorial techniques (such as the rat pulling on the human’s hair to make him move in specific directions) in order to cook. Herhuth reads this apparatus as a metaphor for a technology that helps us ‘recognize how our creative, sensorial relationships with media participate in instituting the political landscape of everyday life’ (p. 173). Perhaps the chapter is best summarized through a quote from the film’s protagonist, Remi: ‘Change is nature.’ Sensations, in both the film and the real-world context, are simply phenomenological vehicles which drive change.

Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination offers an undoubtedly interesting analysis of Pixar Animation Studios, the films it produces, and democratic society in the United States. The interdisciplinary approach taken throughout this work is ambitious, and there are times when Herhuth could have slowed down to clarify technical terms he uses for analysis. For example, he routinely mentions posthumanism without defining the theorist or definition with which he is working. This book may also have benefitted from a more thorough outlining of the author’s theoretical frameworks, namely his use of the sublime in the ‘postmodern context’ when discussing Monsters, Inc. Overall, these are minor limitations that do not undermine the integrity of Herhuth’s analyses. Exploring aesthetic concepts can be a difficult task, but he applies these concepts to various Pixar films in a clear and original way. The book’s most valuable contribution to the field of animation studies is its application of various aesthetic concepts to individual animated films as a way of understanding how Pixar’s animations reflect a range of phenomenological experiences in the real world. The book will thus appeal to a wide range of audiences, notably students and scholars interested in the fields of film studies, animation, critical cultural theory, and digital culture.