The care and precision required in rendering a digital universe mandate a level of microscopic vision that not even the cinema’s scrupulous attention to mise-en-scene could produce. The de-cision of Pixar to mirror the techniques of the cinema—to render things not in perfect focus but to invent in the realm of the digital blurry focus, shadow and darkness, is an important part of the emotional and philosophical make-up of these films, and links Pixar with “so-phisticated” cinema, making it a part of a cinematic canon in ways that margin-alized animation has rarely been

. One of the distinct pleasures in Pixar’s films is the pleasure of seeing the deepest of human struggles, timeless philosophical questions projected in and through remote forms of representation.

Not only do they bear the ar-chitecture of our social world but, as computers and robots, they have bod-ies, “characteristics,” personality, and style.

These Pixar films challenge adult viewers to closely consider their relationship to “friendly,” “soulful” objects.

One needs only to think of the sequence where, just for the fun of it and with no real narrative purpose, the toys knock over a huge container of bouncing balls in the toy store.

Pixar habitually leaves behind the playful in its adult address and gives sustained attention to dark musings traditionally minimized in the G-rated

Pixar films fascinate with spectacle.

These films imagine the possibility of love, beauty, commu-nity, and meaning through object sur-rogates, and in the face of apocalyptic circumstances.

Cen-sorship became a productive force, re-channeling the censored material symp-tomatically across the text in a nascent, uncrystalized form (Foucault 4–11).

Woody was meant to be a sorry specimen—“a slob in a cowboy hat, bleary of eye and dark of jowl” (Lane 86).15

That is, Pixar’s films encourage adult audiences to both encounter and deny each film’s veiled dark content and its implications for them.

The films frankly admit that the toys are fighting a losing battle

This paper explores how Pixar films (Wall-E and the Toy Story trilogy [1995, 1999, 2010]) expand the limitations that have traditionally bound “family enter-tainment” under the G-rating by em-ploying a postmodern adaptation of the “principle of deniability,” a producer-designed multivalence that flourished in Hollywood from 1930–1968 under the Production Code (Vasey 104–13).

3Important scholarly work in studies of contemporary censorship has gone to the “stigma of the X rating” (Sandler, Lewis)

in an effort to engineer Buzz “getting lost” behind the desk so that Andy will take Woody on his expedition to Pizza Planet, Woody ends up accidentally pushing Buzz out the window

Much as widescreen cin-ema altered the scale of perception, mak-ing it possible to perceive minute details and epic grandness, digitalization has made possible the careful construction of a cinema of impossible scale—and for the creation of an atmosphere that is graphically “clean” and carefully con-trolled down to the most microscopic, barely perceptible detail.

All That’s Plastic Melts: Pixar Noir

This paper explores how Pixar films (Wall-E and the Toy Story trilogy [1995, 1999, 2010]) expand the limitations that have traditionally bound “family enter-tainment” under the G-rating by em-ploying a postmodern adaptation of the “principle of deniability,” a producer-designed multivalence that flourished in Hollywood from 1930–1968 under the Production Code (Vasey 104–13).3

Few sequences in contemporary cin-ema evoke the sense of isolation we get from the sequence where a panicked Jessie refuses to go back into “stor-age,

WALL-E not only anthropomorphizes but Westernizes our robot hero and the loving sequences between WALL-E and the two loves of his life, EVE and his pet cockroach, are loaded with Disney’s signal sentimen-tality

New Hollywood block-busters were often made to fit into the PG category that would draw and thrill teen audiences (think Steven Spielberg’s Jaws [1974] or Raiders of the Lost Ark[1981]). But Pixar has helped to revive the idea that the cinema should address everyone—and has restored audience interest in the G rating.

They feel, move, and have their being better than humans, who are often characterized as sadistic, careless, and preoccupied. They become not sur-rogates for human emotions but the ori-gin of a purer form of emotion than the corrupted or marginal human ones

(Wall-E and the Toy Story trilogy [1995, 1999, 2010]) expand the limitations that have traditionally bound “family enter-tainment” under the G-rating by em-ploying a postmodern adaptation of the “principle of deniability,” a producer-designed multivalence that flourished in Hollywood from 1930–1968 under the Production Code (Vasey 104–13).

Although on the surface Pixar’s Toy Story (Dir. John Lasseter, 1995) and WALL-E (Dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008) are “innocent” animated film about ob-jects, their value as cinema lies in their ability to complexly address human—and sometimes wholly adult—fears about meaninglessness, apocalypse, and oblivion.

However, Pixar’s features ground themselves—and their adult specta-tors—in a set of “traditional” binary oppositions between male and female, good and bad, servant and master.

The use of “innocent”-looking films to address complex issues is not new to Hollywood but originated during the era of the Production Code, when studios used ambiguity and indirection to connote censorable issues onscreen.

the peculiar self-alienation—and particularly the alienation from the body—experienced by technologically immersed humans

Pixar has made over the twenty-seven years since its inception, it has garnered not only ex-tremely high box office figures but also (at least until 2011 with Cars 2) aston-ishingly uniform critical praise.

Pixar’s stories are original (not recycled or reworked fairy tales) and its technological innovations intro-duce fresh phenomenologies in viewers, pleasurably alienating viewers from the adult subject matter so frequently cen-tralized in the cinema

New Hollywood block-busters were often made to fit into the PG category that would draw and thrill teen audiences (think Steven Spielberg’s Jaws [1974] or Raiders of the Lost Ark[1981])

Presenting objects with a utopian kinesthetic, they grant them just a bit more fluidity and less gravity than they have in reality. These films have therein shifted spectatorial possi-bilities—and enabled additional payoffs with repeat viewing (Belton 198).

The de-cision of Pixar to mirror the techniques of the cinema—to render things not in perfect focus but to invent in the realm of the digital blurry focus, shadow and darkness, is an important part of the emotional and philosophical make-up of these films, and links Pixar with “so-phisticated” cinema, making it a part of a cinematic canon in ways that margin-alized animation has rarely been.

Pixar’s Toy Story (Dir. John Lasseter, 1995) and WALL-E (Dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008) are “innocent” animated film about ob-jects, their value as cinema lies in their ability to complexly address human—and sometimes wholly adult—fears about meaninglessness, apocalypse, and oblivion.

riveting mounds of metal dramatically revealed through the birds-eye shots that rival the buildings in height—are actually mile-high piles of trash.

Pixar’s Toy Story (Dir. John Lasseter, 1995) and WALL-E (Dir. Andrew Stanton, 2008) are “innocent” animated film about ob-jects, their value as cinema lies in their ability to complexly address human—and sometimes wholly adult—fears about meaninglessness, apocalypse, and oblivion.

Sharing with Toy Story the trope of mounting an overwhelming set of ethi-cal tragedies and concerns beneath the veneer of fun, kinetically-driven enter-tainment, the first several minutes of WALL-E underscore the literal massive-ness of Earth’s problems

As Ju-dith Halberstam has noted, Pixar films are also doing curious cultural work, in their “preoccupation with revolt, change, cooperation, and transforma-tion” (Halberstam 79)

Censorship and Dense Narratives

By Ellen ScottPixar, Deniability, and the Adult SpectatorPixar, Deniability, Toy Story 3 (2010) be-gins with Andy’s toys playing pretend

Pixar realized the diminish-ing value of transient references in the creation of timeless classics and has mined an alternative set of “universal” pleasures.

In WALL-E, the humans have converted themselves into floating objects—mounds of flesh laden with too many conveniences to move for them-selves.

This spec-tatorial distance, “making strange,” as Brecht would have it, allows the paren-tal viewer to process these narratives as an “other,” “unintended” audience and thus relieves them of the burden of full-frontal spectatorship (Brecht 93).

resonant with the his-tory of slavery. Jessie tries to convince Woody that he is “valuable property” (a virtue we don’t know quite how to take) and that although he will be sold away from his “owner,” this is a good thing because he will be sold as “a set” with herself, Bullseye, and Pete—mak-ing him part of a new family with which he was always destined to belong. There is much anxiety about being sold away from the “set”—and about being left be-hind. In the same sequence, Stinky Pete even asks Buzz if Andy “broke” him, a double entendre that takes on a disci-plinary resonance within the surround-ing discourse on ownership, auctioning and captivity.

Giving the audience a taste of the film’s “navigable space,” this shot evinces the phenomenological power of the digital to depict scale of a breathtaking breadth (Manovich 248; Whissel, 91).8

we live with our objects intimately—that they “people” our world.

Toy Story 3 (2010) be-gins with Andy’s toys playing pretend. The setting is the Old West. Sheriff Woody fights the Potato Heads-cum-bandits to rescue a moving train full of orphan trolls. The Potato Heads escape the train in Barbie’s dream car. But the train is headed toward the precipice at the end of a dynamited trestle. Despite Woody’s efforts, the train plunges off the edge. We hear it thud below and see smoke rise from the chasm. Cow-girl Jessie’s jaw drops in utter disbelief and disappointment. For several long seconds as the energy of the action se-quence diffuses, we believe that Woody has failed. Then Buzz lifts the train out of the hole. But the threat is not, as we had imagined, contained but is instead reanimated and escalated. The toys are assailed by a mushroom cloud of “death by monkeys” and finally an unnamed threat behind a red button in Evil Dr. Porkchop’s dirigible.

“The visual and nar-rative incoherence that often arose from the effacement and displacement of sen-sitive subjects encouraged audiences to become active interpreters, obliging them to make their own sense of contra-dictory evidence” (Vasey 127–28).

Stinky Pete even asks Buzz if Andy “broke” him,

Alongside this sheer pleasure in ma-teriality and movement, Pixar operates with a nostalgia that is both regressive (in its reliance on traditional notions of gender, class, and morality) and liberat-ing (in its embrace of an ironic, detached view of the present).

They also cause them to ponder their relationship to “the end”

If identification with the object is ex-hilarating, it is also, at moments, fright-ening. The Toy Story films and WALL-Ealso generate important, though embed-ded, insights on both human and inani-mate objectification

If “veiling something from sight turns out [as it did] to inspire as signifi-cant an erotic reaction as the unveiled event would have done...If the film screen works like a kind of censoring, elaborating the effect of what it covers, how will you censor that?” (Cavell 83)

making strange,” as Brecht would have it, allows the paren-tal viewer to process these narratives as an “other,” “unintended” audience and thus relieves them of the burden of full-frontal spectatorship (Brecht 93).

If identification with the object is ex-hilarating, it is also, at moments, fright-ening.

Nostalgia is one of the central pleasures of the Pixar films, which not only focus on “classic,” vintage objects (the world worn, low-tech WALL-E and his collection of ephemera, and timeless classic toys in Toy Story), but also on a nostalgia for Hollywood

it has un-wittingly led to an increasing attention to the body: “information technologies have turned the body into property in a particular way” and it is this concern about the body that these films express (Nakamura 96).

Not only do they bear the ar-chitecture of our social world but, as computers and robots, they have bod-ies, “characteristics,” personality, and style. WALL-E and the Toy Story films suggest that they, like us, have a soul.

Pete’s unnamed new girl owner never directly addresses Pete but tells her Barbie doll that Pete “needs a makeover,” one she will presumably perform herself, as she has on Barbie, with the help of markers, stickers, and (a final marker of drag) glitter.

Toy Story and Toy Story 2 strongly sug-gests the danger of girls, as do EVE’s destructive, gun-happy tendencies in WALL-E. I

servant and master.

they are more reflections on movement—stud-ies of movement and its dynamics—than exhilarating thrill rides bent on effacing mechanics as most action films are.

Toy Story 3 (2010) be-gins with Andy’s toys playing pretend. The setting is the Old West. Sheriff Woody fights the Potato Heads-cum-bandits to rescue a moving train full of orphan trolls. The Potato Heads escape the train in Barbie’s dream car. But the train is headed toward the precipice at the end of a dynamited trestle. Despite Woody’s efforts, the train plunges off the edge. We hear it thud below and see smoke rise from the chasm. Cow-girl Jessie’s jaw drops in utter disbelief and disappointment. For several long seconds as the energy of the action se-quence diffuses, we believe that Woody has failed. Then Buzz lifts the train out of the hole. But the threat is not, as we had imagined, contained but is instead reanimated and escalated. The toys are assailed by a mushroom cloud of “death by monkeys” and finally an unnamed threat behind a red button in Evil Dr. Porkchop’s dirigible.