Abstract
Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination by Eric Herhuth is an examination of early computer-animated feature films from Pixar Animation Studios. The author brings together film theory and philosophy as well as recent animation theory to investigate animation storytelling addressing aesthetic experience. He argues that this attention to aesthetics can be perceived through how Pixar characters explore invented worlds and how audiences observe and judge that exploration. Furthermore, a focus on aesthetics in political and philosophical context facilitates not only cultural criticism of animation but also of Pixar’s practices, brand, and cultural legacy. Herhuth astutely chooses to focus on four key aesthetic concepts: the uncanny in Toy Story films; the sublime in Monsters Inc.; the fantastic in The Incredibles; and the politics of sensation in Ratatouille. Herhuth is assistant professor of film studies at Tulane University.
In a concise introduction, Herhuth outlines his key arguments and places them within the growing literature on Pixar: from Jerome Christensen’s America’s Corporate Art (2011) to Leon Gurevitch’s article “From Edison to Pixar” (2015). He also explores Pixar’s conception of creativity; how company leadership—most notably co-founder Ed Catmull in Creativity Inc. (2014)—has celebrated the studio as a model for post-Fordist labor and its artists’ unique understanding of human perception. Articulating a connection between perception and judgment in the philosophy of Alva Noë (Varieties of Presence, 2012), Herhuth asserts this is also the aesthetic experience Pixar demands of characters and audiences.
In Chapter 1, Herhuth details a long tradition of animation that addresses aesthetic experience and how the production and reception of these films reveals a tendency to explore aesthesis “through an interrogation of nature and a relief of conceptual burdens.” This not only informs dialectical theories of animation, but it is also central to Pixar’s storytelling—driven by characters who must make sense of their worlds—as well as the creative culture and pervasive branding of the studio.
Chapter 2 explores the uncanny contradictions expressed by the characters in the Toy Story franchise. Not only are Woody and Buzz living toys, but they also express a disorienting uncertainty between nostalgic and digital commodities, product essentialism, and personhood. Herhuth’s incisive close textual analysis reveals how each of the Toy Story films withholds its underlying commodity logics, so that the characters must work these out for themselves. For example, drawing on Paul Flaig’s “comic uncanny” (in Screen, 2013), both Sid and Buzz are forced, through the discovery of living toys, to the understanding that they have been “wrong about the world,” something the audience already knows.
Herhuth’s third chapter turns from the uncanny to overwhelming spectacle in Monsters Inc. Here, he considers how the film traces a transition from the Kantian sublime to the postmodern: the first evidenced by a nostalgic industrialized world inhabited by varied monsters and the second in their comic ignorance of the children they harvest for energy. Again this dynamic leads the characters to a reconfiguration of identity, this time by privileging “the perspective of the exploited other.” Sully “sees himself anew” as monstrous through TV monitors that reveal Boo’s alien point of view. Such narrative representations of the sublime further reinforce the unknowability of both animated bodies and worlds.
In Chapters 4 and 5, Herhuth examines further contradictions between individual superhuman agency and mundane social hierarchies in The Incredibles, and the democratic principle “anyone can cook” against mediated creativity in Ratatouille. Through their abilities, the Parr family transcend mere competition, but not the patriarchal fantasies of achievement that underlie these in modern liberal society. Finally, in Ratatouille, pursuing fairness in sensation leads to an explicit leveling between artist and critic. However, this requires yet another reconfiguration of bodies, as Remy not only becomes increasingly human, but also mediates his creativity through the technological apparatus of Linguini’s body he uses to cook. The aesthetics of this arrangement in particular leads Herhuth to observe parallels with the process of computer animation and the evolution of technological production in general.
The strengths of Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination are numerous, especially its astute combination of film philosophy and political critique. In its strongest passages, Herhuth also draws in industrial analysis, making reference to Pixar’s public facing production culture, and particularly its white male leadership. Furthermore, as a well-referenced and accessible history, Chapter 1 makes a useful contribution to animation theory in its own right. There is some variability in tone, particularly between the comparative simplicity of the introduction and complexity of later chapters. This will likely challenge students without a foundation in theory. Regardless, Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination is a valuable addition to the growing literature on Pixar, cinema aesthetics, and contemporary film philosophy.
By stopping at Ratatouille and Pixar’s acquisition by Disney, Herhuth leaves a great deal of aesthetic work on the table and exposes the potential for a wider investigation of the political charge of 3D animation from Hollywood and elsewhere. Many of the insights and conclusions concerning uncanny commodities, the sublime, the fantastic, and politics of taste extend well beyond character animation, or even digital culture, to broader debates around creative labor and audience judgment. The lasting value of the book likely lies in its persuasive account of Pixar films as a form of “consumerist media culture training” that addresses not only our technological and economic condition but also our aesthetic experience.