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

by Eric Herhuth

Overview

In Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination, Eric Herhuth draws upon film theory, animation theory, and philosophy to examine how animated films address aesthetic experience within contexts of technological, environmental, and sociocultural change. Since producing the first fully computer-animated feature film, Pixar Animation Studios has been a creative force in digital culture and popular entertainment. But, more specifically, its depictions of uncanny toys, technologically sublime worlds, fantastic characters, and meaningful sensations explore aesthetic experience and its relation to developments in global media, creative capitalism, and consumer culture. This investigation finds in Pixar’s artificial worlds and transformational stories opportunities for thinking through aesthetics as a contested domain committed to newness and innovation as well as to criticism and pluralistic thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520292567
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	01/10/2017
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Eric Herhuth is Assistant Professor of Film Studies in the Department of Communication at Tulane University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Aesthetic Storytelling: A Tradition and Theory of Animated Film
2. The Uncanny Integrity of Digital Commodities (Toy Story)
3. From the Technological to the Postmodern Sublime (Monsters, Inc.)
4. The Exceptional Dialectic of the Fantastic and the Mundane (The Incredibles)
5. Disruptive Sensation and the Politics of the New (Ratatouille)
Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Index