DENNIS TYLER
On March 7, 2010, the movie Up took home Pixar Animation Studios’ fifth Best Animated Feature Academy Award; very few people were surprised that Up won. Indeed, all seven Pixar films that had been released since the award was first given in 2001 had been nominated and, with the exception of Monsters, Inc. (2001) which lost to Shrek (2001) and Cars (2006) which lost to Happy Feet (2006), Pixar had not only won the award, but also had been the strong favorite in the category. The website, Rotten Tomatoes, which collects and categorizes movie reviews, had given Up a 98% Fresh rating as of April 5, 2010. The critical “consensus” on Rotten Tomatoes is quoted as “[a]nother masterful work of art from Pixar, Up is an exciting, hilarious, and heartfelt adventure impeccably crafted and told with wit and depth.”1 Obviously, in the minds of critics, Pixar is doing something right, but Up also garnered impressive box office receipts, out-performing all other films in its opening weekend, to bring in $68,108,790. As of February 2010, the film had made over $720 million worldwide.2 This box office success surpassed all other Pixar films except Finding Nemo (2003).
As with all other Pixar feature films, there was general anticipation prior to release, but critic Doug Creutz was not alone in suggesting a concern about the commercial potential of Up. Cruetz said that each of Pixar’s films “seem to be less commercial than the last.”3 Richard Greenfield of Pali Research also expressed concern about Up’s commercial viability, but after the remarkable first week’s returns, acknowledged he was “dead wrong.”4 Concerns like Creutz’s and Greenfield’s were reflected in Thinkway Toys, which has produced toys for most Pixar films, not producing any toys for the film.5 Initially only a handful of novelizations, children’s books, and plush toys of the main dogs in the film were produced. Compared to other Disney and Pixar features, the marketing for Up is remarkably sparse. As detailed in the Pixar Blog, Up’s commercial success has led to more marketing, but it’s still a far cry from other Disney-Pixar films.6 In one of the few mentions of Up in criticism, M. Keith Booker suggests that there is “room seriously to question whether Up is a children’s film at all given the number of serious issues” it addresses.7 Despite these concerns, Up is generally considered a children’s movie.8 What Booker, Cruetz, and Greenfield are all suggesting is that Pixar, essentially, does not make “children’s films” or at least not films just for children, which presupposes the representation of reality that is appropriate for a children’s movie.9
Up has been both a commercial and critical success, as have, generally speaking, all of Pixar’s feature films to date. This record of success has created a substantial body of work with a supposed intent to entertain children and families. As the Movieguy says to John Lasseter, the chief creative officer for Pixar, in an interview on Cars, only Disney and Pixar are producing child friendly entertainment that is suitable for the entire family.10 This essay explores two related questions: first, how has Pixar achieved this success? As David A. Price demonstrates throughout the first half of The Pixar Touch, computer animation had generally been thought of as lifeless and cold before Pixar. With their early shorts, Pixar began to study techniques to bring “life” or “heart” to their animation.11
Second, what reality is Pixar representing? I will argue that Pixar studied, adopted, and adapted the techniques of Disney’s animators in bringing an “illusion of life” to their animation but, in doing so, they were self-aware of some issues of representation and have striven to represent a reality that is remarkably different than Disney in some respects. Pixar’s films may be “family friendly,” but this notion calls into question what a family is. Throughout the Pixar canon, “the family” is not simply the biological entity of the nuclear family, but rather a grouping of individuals who care for each other whether technically related or not. Though heavily invested in representing “safe” family values, Pixar, nonetheless, has managed to respond to the current cultural landscape and the changing nature of family and family relationships. In the fifties and sixties, Disney could casually expect heteronormative nuclear families; even Disney animated features as late as Chicken Little (2005) and Meet the Robinsons (2007) deploy this family structure (though there are signs of other affective affiliations in the unpopular crowd that befriends Chicken Little or the extended kinship of the Robinson clan). From Toy Story forward, the “family” does not just refer to the heteronormative nuclear family, but to a wide ranging affective network.12 Thus, in Up, though all the major characters come from various broken home environments, they find together a family of individuals whose concern for each other bonds them and brings them together. Though Up would thus seem to hold some promise of a progressive representation of difference, in the end, it capitulates to foregrounding and valorizing the white patriarch’s story as the “story.” Ultimately, it becomes a conservative and conserving narrative of containment.
In 1941, the influential Russian filmmaker and theorist, Sergei Eisenstein, apparently had the intent to write an essay on Walt Disney and began taking notes and drafting his thoughts, but they were not published in his lifetime. Eisenstein described Disney’s animated features as being “like direct embodiment[s] of the method of animism.” He goes on to note how we feel that “if it moves, then it’s alive.” Even though “we know that they [animated characters] are drawings and not living beings ... projections of drawing on a screen ... [and] miracles and tricks of technology[,] we sense them as alive ... as moving, as active ... as existing and even thinking.”13 Here then, in a way of speaking, lies an issue for representation in animation; the characters on the screen are not being portrayed by an actor whose actual body must, in some sense be seen, but by a representation that takes on the semblance of reality that is granted to it by the animator’s technique. Though all film is in some senses manufactured illusions of reality, animators have to go a step further and create the illusion of solidity and materiality out of drawn lines, spaces, and colors.
In 1995, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas published the book on the technique of Disney animation that is generally regarded as definitive: Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. Johnston and Thomas detail twelve principles of Disney animation:
1. Squeeze and stretch
2. Anticipation
3. Staging
4. Straight ahead action and pose to pose
5. Follow through and overlapping action
6. Slow in and slow out
7. Arcs
8. Secondary action
9. Timing
10. Exaggeration
11. Solid drawing
12. Appeal14
One key aspect of what Johnston, Thomas, and Disney’s other “Nine Old Men” discovered in devising these twelve principles is that for animation to appear lifelike, it must obey certain laws of the physical universe. Matter has weight and inertia, so all actions have corresponding reactions; in order to depict these in an animated reality, at the extremes of motion, shapes have to be distorted. As examples, the Disney animators would draw a flour sack in various poses so as to get the feel of real weight, or draw a simple bouncing ball to learn to depict the way objects “squeeze and stretch” as they encounter the various forces of their movement.15 A second key insight was in storytelling to ensure that the audience could follow the pertinent action; animators began to make storyboards and rough drawings of an action sequence to ensure the right angle and character poses from which to draw it. Additionally, a proper amount of anticipation and follow through made the action more believable. Disney animators also learned to look toward Nature and study reality before drawing. Animators would film actors reading their lines or acting out various events and use these as guides to animating characters, scenes, and actions. Study trips were arranged to study specific locations and animals were brought in the studio and studied in order to replicate their movements.16 In general, however, what the Disney animators discovered is that the key to successful animation was a certain amount of exaggeration: the mass of objects was exaggerated to give them physicality; the character traits of actors were exaggerated to give the animated characters the quirky individuality of “real” people; and the movements of animals were exaggerated so that their species identity was explicit. At their best, following these principles allowed Disney to produce animated characters that became iconic for their verisimilitude to material beings; at their worst, they produced gendered, racial, and cultural stereotypes. In Snow White when Dopey’s head is clanged between two cymbals, he can briefly become an Asian stereotype; or in Bambi, when puppy love is depicted between Thumper and a young female rabbit, stereotypes of human femininity are portrayed in the drawings and actions of his love interest; Robin Hood and Maid Marion are represented as a wily fox and a sexy vixen in Robin Hood.
Even though we know these are just drawings, these and many other examples throughout Disney’s canon illustrate how these animation techniques can easily tap into and make use of cultural stereotypes and reinforce them by sensually embodying what was, perhaps, only a vague notion before. We may recognize the stereotype of the crafty fox, but not fully realize that in watching Robin Hood (1973) we are treated to a visualized materialization of that idea. Perhaps most tellingly, in this regard are Disney’s princesses, who with excesses of femininity, an innate connection with nature, impossible thinness, beautiful flawless skin, and perfect hair, attire, and poise, always manage to get the prince and “live happily ever after.” Likewise, Disney villains are often misshapen, have speech impediments or racially charged accents. Their “evilness” is a palpable emanation that depends on any number of stereotypical notions of what it means to be “evil.” Because animators are not constrained by the material reality of the actresses who voiced these princesses or the actors and actresses who voiced these villains, they have given them idealized forms so that even though we know they are just drawings, they seem real; they become them.17
Thinking through animated representations leads Eisenstein to suggest that “Disney’s works themselves strike [him] as the same kind of drop of comfort, an instant of relief, a fleeting touch of lips in the hell of social burdens, injustices and torments, in which the circle of his American viewers is forever trapped.”18 This sense of escaping life, this “obliviousness” that Eisenstein sees, is at once the potential and the danger of animation. “And Disney, like all of them, through the magic of his works and more intensely, perhaps, than anyone else, bestows precisely this upon his viewer, precisely obliviousness, an instant of complete and total release from everything connected with the suffering caused by the social conditions of the social order.”19 When this technique can be used to envision escape from oppression, it would serve a progressive purpose in giving encouragement to those whose social circumstances themselves seem to provide little hope; however, pushed too far, this would be an invitation to delusion. In The Little Mermaid (1989), for instance, Ariel’s defiance of her father’s wishes can seem remarkably progressive, suggesting that a sixteen year old girl knows her heart better than her father and should follow it. In The Rescuers (1977), Penny’s rescue by two mice might teach us that we are never too small to offer assistance. Both “lessons,” however, are just as easily distorted. Tyrannical fathers are real, but few daughters have to contend with the god of the sea for a father; likewise, few people can really be helped by a few mice and assorted swamp creatures.
Much of the same pedagogical expectation has been placed on Pixar, but as John Lasseter explains in a 2007 interview with Tavis Smiley about the movie Cars, Pixar is sensitive to more than just this element of an animated feature: “We make movies for the kind of movies we like to watch. We’re reasonably intelligent up there at Pixar. But we love movies, and we love taking our kids to the movies. And to me, there’s so often I’ve been to a movie for my kids that I’m bored to death. And I said, ‘I don’t want that to happen in our movies.’”20 Lasseter goes on to say that, “It’s not just about the cynicism, or getting humor from putting somebody else down. That doesn’t happen in a Pixar film. It’s about heart.” “Heart” is at the heart of what Johnston and Thomas have to say about Disney’s animation technique; at its best, what the illusion of life means is that the audience believes the animated character on the screen has “heart” even though we also know it is just a drawing. Lasseter says, “[c]haracter animation is when an object moves like it is alive, when it moves like it is thinking and all of its movements are generated by its own thought processes.... It is the thinking that gives the illusion of life.”21 Though Lasseter does not credit Johnston and Thomas, it is clear he is referencing their ideas. In Up, care is taken to suggest not only that the characters are acting, but that they are thinking, receiving mental feedback on their environment and adjusting their actions accordingly. Though there are numerous examples, perhaps the most telling is when Carl imagines lowering Russell from the floating house. The entire sequence is a visualization of his daydream that depicts in a graphic way the choices Carl faces.
In a computer-animated film, much of what the Disney animators had to learn to draw can be handled by algorithms that treat an animator’s drawing as a three-dimensional virtual object. Thus, for Pixar, one of the major challenges of making movies was not just understanding how to draw using principles like the ones Disney used, but figuring out the math involved so it could be programmed into a computer and rendered correctly in the film. In Toy Story (1995), care had to be taken so that wooden and plastic toys both remained toys but also had believable emotions and movements; in Monsters, Inc., the monsters had to be scary enough to believably be embodiments of children’s nightmares, but human enough for Boo not to fear Sully.22 Pixar has breathed emotion into computer-animated ants, monsters, cars, fish, rats, and robots. And most famously, the Luxo lamp that is their trademark. In The Pixar Touch, Price quotes Ralph Guggenheim, a Pixar executive, as saying that, “several of [Disney’s] senior execs admitted to me by the end of Toy Story production that Pixar had made a film that contained more of the ‘heart’ of traditional Disney animated films than they themselves were making at that time.”23 Pixar has produced this “heart” by placing the ideas, concerns, and props of children’s lives front and center; broadly speaking, very much like Disney, they have animated the fantasies of children.
Up departs slightly from this approach in focusing its attention on the life of Carl Fredricksen, an elderly widower who chooses to finally pursue a childhood dream. This departure from form is, of course, the basis of the industry’s concerns and the critical acclaim the film has earned. The film begins with Carl and Ellie as children in a fairly typical “cute meet.” Ellie is the proactive and energetic one while Carl is passive. These traits play out again shortly later in their wedding and the montage of their life together that follows. Carl’s family is quiet, Puritanical, and inexpressive. Ellie’s family is loud, raucous, and clearly enthusiastic about the wedding. Once married, Carl and Ellie both seem to settle, literalized in the different armchairs that they inhabit. Their zoo jobs are not ambitious and their income moderate. They are the depiction of normalcy—a white middle income couple. They are “safe,” non-subversive. Though we get no sense of their politics or sexuality, nothing stands out about them; but it is this very comfortable normality that is one of the representational problems of Up. Ellie was a spirited out-spoken child who barely gave Carl time to speak. At their wedding, Ellie leapt on him and kissed the groom, visibly embarrassing him and clearly not amusing his staid family who look as if they are dressed in mourning while her family just as clearly approves.
Just as in Blackstone’s Commentary where a wife is “covered” by her husband, so Ellie’s spirit seems to be tamed or covered by Carl’s more practical and phlegmatic nature.24 Her chair is flamboyant, with impractical curves and decorative wings, but her life has been contained, her voice silenced. Her dream is Paradise Falls; his, as we see them looking up at clouds—fatherhood. As they each describe various things in the clouds above them, he sees a baby; and then all the clouds are babies. His vision takes over and becomes their vision; his quiet unassuming manner becomes hers, and when they prove to be an infertile couple, it is apparently a failing in her. As she sits in the backyard letting the breeze blow over her, Carl brings Ellie her childhood Adventure Book, wordlessly saying that now they can focus on taking a trip. But her dream, a woman’s dream of adventure, is a dream deferred, again and again. It was first superseded and erased by the expectation of parenthood and now every practical use of money—defined in terms of their relationship—must come first. Ellie’s body defines her; she is the catalyst of Carl’s sexual awakening, the would-be womb for his child, and at last, her body succumbs to age just before his grand gesture of tickets to Paradise Falls. In an irony of which the film-makers seem unaware, in Ellie’s final note that indicates she has felt fulfilled with her life, it is Carl’s dream that has satisfied him while she is asking him to go and fulfill hers. By the film’s end, Carl and Russell are sitting outside Fenton’s Ice Cream Parlor sharing ice cream and a game that Russell used to play with his father. This surrogate-fatherhood is what completes the cycle of Carl’s life, returning him to the “spirit of adventure,” the name of the blimp that hovers over them and the words written on the balloon that first creates a connection with Ellie. By living her adventure, his failed dream of fatherhood is also realized. There is little doubt that we are to see that they loved each other and his attachment to her after death is his guilt for not helping her to realize her dream, but Pixar’s depiction as an equal love story leaves something to be desired in that the woman’s dream, which turns out to encompass both his and her wishes, is deferred beyond her ability to pursue it. In its place is substituted a lifelong pattern of repetitive domestic service—she must help him dress—that is presented as fulfilling.25
Ellie’s note truly is a loving gesture, however, and the film does acknowledge that. Releasing Carl from his guilt places her at the heart of Up and breathes life into it. Ellie and Carl are both aware that her life did not turn out as she had hoped. But, apparently, while in the hospital, knowing she will die, she has completed her Adventure Book as a gesture of compassion for her husband. It is significant that Carl, unaware of this gesture, brings his guilt, literalized as the house, with him to Paradise Falls. He fails to read her Adventure Book until then, and then only by chance. In fact, her dying wish for him is fulfilled only by the happenstance of gentrification and urbanization in the first place. Though Ellie’s spirit may be covered by Carl’s, hers is the true “spirit of adventure” in the film, and though the adult Ellie does not have a line—no voice actress was even hired—her voice speaks throughout the movie as home.
If gender difference in Up is conspicuous mostly by its absence, what can be said of race? While the main conflict of the story may be between two Caucasian men, other racial representations populate the margins of this story. Russell, voiced by Jordan Nagai, is an Asian American boy who belongs to the Wilderness Explorers (ironically abbreviated as WE). In The Politics of the Visible, Eleanor Ty refers to the “visible hieroglyphs imprinted on our eyes, our black hair, our noses, our faces, and our bodies, the resonance of another tongue, the haunting taste of another culture, as well as the perception, real or imagined of being from another place.”26 Ty’s point is that Asians in America are marked as Other by their bodies and speech, often negatively. Though voiced by an Asian American actor, Russell has no noticeable Asian-inflected speech patterns. Docter says he picked Nagai for the part because his voice “is appealing and innocent and cute and different from what I was initially thinking.”27 His heavy-set body is based on Peter Sohn, a Pixar animator. Russell’s skin tone and facial features are only vaguely “Asian” in appearance.28
While it is encouraging that Pixar did not rely on racially charged stereotypical features in their representation of an Asian American character, there is another assumption here, which is perhaps equally troubling: the assumption of whiteness. In discussing whiteness, George Yancy says, “Whites have a way of speaking from a center that they often appear to forget forms the white ideological fulcrum upon which what they say (do not say) or see (do not see) hinges.”29 This “forgetfulness” of Whites results in anything not specifically marked out as non-white to be White, thus Russell’s lack of obvious Asian marking causes him to appear to be “white.” Since Carl and Ellie are white, Russell becomes covered by Carl, racially. And by the house that represents Ellie and the guilt that Carl has brought with him. Like a long line of white men before him, Carl enlists others in his projects. His “white man’s burden” is the raison d’etre and central burden in the journey not only for him, but also for Kevin and Dug as well. The patriarch’s concern has covered not only the woman (Ellie), the racial Other (Russell), but domesticated nature (Dug) and the untamed wild nature (Kevin). Just as Ellie’s dreams were deferred throughout their life together, so Carl pays lip service to Russell’s concern for Kevin, Kevin’s concern for her babies, and Dug’s interest both in Kevin and in being his master. The white man must rule them all and his irrational desire to put his house next to Paradise Falls must become their desire as well. This house is for them merely a house, but for him, it is home.
If a distinction is drawn between the notions of “home” and “house,” “home” is clearly a more intimate, and therefore, potentially a more fraught space. “Home” is an ideological space of (dis)comfort, while “house” is merely one’s abode. Though Russell, Kevin, and Dug share quarters under the house with Carl, only for Carl is it a “home” and therefore a space that has expectations beyond that merely of shelter. Nonetheless, as Gaston Bachelard points out in The Poetics of Space, all houses have an intimacy to them. Bachelard says that “the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being.”30 The “house shelters day dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”31 Russell chooses the moment when they are sheltering under the house to share with Carl an intimate detail of his life: his parents are separated and his dad lives with another woman, Phyllis.32 Carl, thinking too typically, refers to Phyllis as Russell’s mother, only to have him reply, “Phyllis is not my mom.” Carl’s quiet “Oh” and embarrassed silence replace any explanation. We are never told what Russell’s home life is really like because he is to find another kind of family with Carl. This quiet moment is the moment when Carl and Russell first bond and start becoming family. Like nearly all other families in the Pixar canon, however, this family cannot be fit into the traditional33 nuclear family mode. It will expand to include the others sleeping under the house—Dug and Kevin.
Because they are not human, Pixar can endow Dug and Kevin with characteristics inappropriate to humans. Dug speaks his mind in the most literal of fashions, to the point of absurdity. Kevin, though wordless, is expressively flamboyant.34 Not only is this family unrelated, they cannot be recontained in the nuclear family as a model, except in that it is a Patriarchal model. There is an unwritten assumption that the white human man will rule this little clan, an assumption that is bolstered by his being the only adult human in the group. Kevin cannot speak and Dug is a willing slave. Both Kevin and Dug show unrelenting love and care for Carl and Russell, even to the point of risking their lives. It is only through these nonhuman companions that Carl learns to become fully human himself. The moment of his realization comes through Ellie’s final note to him in her Adventure Book, but in turning to risk (and lose) his house to save Kevin, he demonstrates the family connection that has been made. He realizes the “cross your heart” vow he has made to Russell should carry at least as much weight as the one he had made to Ellie; by honoring his vow to Russell, he is honoring his memory of Ellie better than in his self-absorbed moping. Up ensures that we are likely to identify with Carl and his change of heart through not only the techniques of Disney life-like animation, but through clever use of what Scott McCloud refers to as icons.
In Understanding Comics, McCloud analyzes the use of realistic vs. cartoon drawing techniques in comic art, and that when a drawn character is too photorealistic, the ability of the reader to identify is hampered; as an example, he presents the classic Hegré comic strip Tintin’s use of “clear-line” style, where a cartoonish character is presented against a realistic background. Disney, he says, has “used it with impressive results for over 50 years.”35 And Pixar is clearly following suit. The tepui-inspired backgrounds of Paradise Falls are beautiful and lush, detailed as only computer animation makes possible; Pixar followed Disney’s process of location scouting, sending artists to the tepuis of Venezuela to research them. The point of placing cartoonish, iconic characters in an otherwise realistic universe, McCloud claims, is to encourage readerly self-identification with the cartoon character: “when you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face you see it as the face of another ... but when you enter the world of the cartoon you see yourself.”36 McCloud bases this theory on the notion that since we do not have our own face constantly in view, we rely on a more generalized or iconic representation of our own features as we converse and interact with others, but since we have their faces in view, we ascribe more photorealistic features to them; thus, any character made up of iconic lines more easily can represent us.
McCloud’s theory skirts issues of stereotypical representation, marginalization, and exclusion. However, McCloud’s reading of iconic cartoon characters suggests that the drawing of a character is more than just a matter of stylistic choice; it can tell us something of who the animator is envisioning as audience for the comic (or film). Though McCloud’s analysis would suggest that anyone can more easily identify with a character that is drawn as a cartoon than a realistic figure, it would also follow that it is easier for someone who is closer to the character being represented to make this identification. I have already mentioned Ellie’s problematic marginalization in Up; if we are to think of Kevin as female, then the main female character in this movie is a squawky bird whose coloration is apparently based on the male Himalayan Monal Pheasant.37 With the notable exception of The Incredibles (2004), however, the lack of substantial female roles seems to be something of a Pixar standard.38 There is less in Pixar films and in Up in particular for women than men to latch onto. There is a sense in which the repetition of a male-centered story throughout the majority of the Pixar canon cannot be seen as incidental, but as telling us something about the stories Pixar finds compelling. It is as notable as Disney’s fascination with Princess stories has been. Recently, Disney has even tried to update and diversify their depiction of the “princess” with an African American princess in The Princess and the Frog (2009); however, despite being set in the Southern past, issues of race-based social marginalization are muted at best if not outright ignored. Though we are supposed to identify with her story, the lack of social realism in Tiana’s story, the skirting of the realities of historical racism, and the sloppy stereotypical depictions of African American spiritualities deracialize Disney’s African American princess to the point where it is difficult to see anything news or different here from other Disney princesses other than skin color. Her race is incidental and plays no significant role in the story.
Though given little narrative space, African Americans in Up are also depicted in roles in which race seems to be simply incidental: one of the attendants for Shady Oaks; the girl who watches the house fly by her window; several of the boys at the end receiving a badge next to Russell. These roles are all drawn with a greater degree of realism than the main characters and thus, though seemingly progressive in their everydayness, they remain part of the background of the story. The contrast I would make with The Princess and the Frog is that we are not “supposed” to identify with the African American characters in Up; this is a white guy’s story, after all. Of course, it’s not just any white guy, however. Carl’s childhood hero—Charles Muntz—is one of the villains of the story. Muntz, like most minor characters, is drawn more realistically and less iconically than Carl, Dug, and Russell. The same is true of his dogs; while Dug is a generic cartoon mutt, Alpha, Beta and Gamma are all recognizable breeds. Muntz, tall, gaunt and angular, contrasts with Carl’s squat, stocky body. Like the construction foreman—the other villain of the movie—Muntz’s lean form signals his allegiance to an adult world of business and prestige and are deliberately alienating, particularly for the children in the audience. In contrast, Carl’s square jaw, Russell’s comically large neck and upturned nose, the cartoony flamboyancy of Kevin, and the larger-than-life snout of Dug encourage the audience to place themselves in these characters’ positions and therefore become sympathetic to their position in the film.
It is the dogs (mostly Dug) that were expected to appeal to young viewers. The negative appraisals of Up, it seems, were predicated only on the expectation that Pixar intended young viewers to find identification with Carl, but the end of his “life montage” as he rides a chair downstairs and goes out to sit on his porch are, like Dug’s doggy attributes, the sorts of activities young viewers are likely to associate with their own grandfathers. Up begins as nostalgia for lost childhood. Disney has done this as well, presenting a nostalgic childhood is from generations earlier. Pinocchio (1940), Peter Pan (1953), Alice in Wonderland (1951), and all the princess films are clearly set in the past, invoking a time when things were, perhaps, different (i.e., better). Up begins with this gesture, but brings its character into the nasty, greedy present. Though brief, the conflict with the contractors who are remaking Carl’s neighborhood into another urban block of office buildings is a clear indication of the thoughtless, faceless greed of modern capitalist America. The boss is clearly motivated by profit and his drumming fingers on Carl’s fence post signify all we need to know of him: his interests are evil and possessive. Again, this is something that the adults in the audience can identify with; evil corporate bureaucrats who take people’s homes away from them are common enough in popular culture. Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles, and Ratatouille (2007) all contain moments of the same sort of boss. In contrast, Disney villains are more often motivated by straight evil, a personal power trip or an attempt to deliberately thwart the destiny of the hero/ine than they are by greed. Even Muntz is not motivated specifically to thwart Carl but opposes him through a differing sense of priorities.
By bringing the idealized past into a contrast with the present, Up achieves what Enchanted (2007) in a different way accomplished and must, like Enchanted, chart a way back to the world of fantasy. In this case, it is the flying house, a nice sideways tribute to The Wizard of Oz (1934) (note, that like in Oz, characters seem to be constantly stuck under the house, but rather than being flattened, they are brought in to safety). It is in this fantastical moment of flight that Up takes on a different character, a change that is signaled by the introduction of Russell shortly before. Until this point, Up has been relentlessly about Carl, and indeed, his quest will continue to dominate, but something unique and different begins to enter the movie with Russell and is reinforced with Dug and Kevin. The white man’s burden simply will not do; in this way, Up gestures toward relinquishing this burden and opening up to the concerns of the racial/sexual other, though the white man’s story co-opts and contains all other narratives. Kevin’s protection falls to Carl and Russell’s and Dug’s stories are “solved” not by a direct approach, but by their assistance to Carl. Up stops short of allowing these narratives of Otherness to speak in their own right.
And so the magic moment of the flying house as the multicolored balloons cast shadows over the bedroom of a young African American girl at play. It is a brief moment, but a signal of unimaginable hope and wonder; the house, multicolored, is a dream home, a house in which there are dreams of what America could have been and of what is was/is. It is the burden of the past we must carry with us whether we will or not. It invokes its Victorian A-frame past as burden. To the girl, standing in the window, it is wondrous. In this moment, Up achieves a brief identification with the non-white/non-male/non-adult Other. This girl is the audience, enthralled. She is us. And we, like her, in this moment can envision anything. Though Up will recapitulate and recontain the energy of this moment, collapsing all story into the narrative of Carl, we are given here just a glimpse of what the future could hold. For her, the girl at play, this cannot be her adventure, but she can also be inspired, perhaps. How quickly does Pixar switch to a typical white heteronormative family window-shopping.
This moment is the crux of the reality Up is depicting; which side of the window are we on? Are we the girl, startled in her play, looking out the window in wonder, washed by a rainbow of possibility or are we the window-shopping family, seeing the house reflected in a pane of storefront glass, flying away above and beyond us? Up, like all art, is a window on reality, and it serves at once to both reflect the social milieu from which it springs and to construct an idealized world of its own.
On one level, Up is Carl’s flight of escape from social problems, but he cannot leave them behind. They follow him and in the world of Paradise Falls, he must come to grips both with all he has left behind and with all he might wish for the future. Though he loved Ellie, her life was voiceless; her act of grace gives him a second chance. As he sits in front of Fenton’s with Russell, her gift has given him the spirit of adventure he always desired but did not possess. Carl must do more than window shop. Ironically, he takes his house with him to Paradise Falls only to leave it there and return to the city to face new adventures with Dug and Russell. It is a family of care not kin. It is family of choice and a family of heart. Though there is potential to read into Up some subversion of white patriarchal centrality, this subversion is safely silenced by the movie’s end. It may be a family of choice, but it is a family based on what is comfortable and familiar to the patriarch and his concerns, ultimately, trump those of anyone else.
1. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/up/
2. http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/2009/UP.php.
3. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/business/media/06pixar.html. Some later Pixar films such as Wall-E (2008), Ratatouille (2007), and the Cars films have also had detractors. For Wall-E, see Stephanie Zacharek’s review for Salon.com at http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/review/2008/06/27/wall_e/; for Ratatouille, see JoBlo’s Movie Emporium review: http://www.joblo.com/index.php?id=16543; and for Cars, see Anthony Lane’s review for the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/06/19/060619crci_cinema. Each of these reviews is notable for suggesting that with the movie in question, Pixar has finally hit a dry spell of creativity. In any case, predicting the end of Pixar’s remarkable successful run has proven to be a hazardous enterprise for film critics.
4. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/wall-street-analyst-belatedly-sees-the-up-side/
5. http://pixarblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/up-toys-and-merchandise.html
6. The Pixar Blog can be found at: http://pixarblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/up-toys-and-merchandise.html. Disney’s online Toy Store which sells Disney and Pixar Toys can be found at http://www.disneystore.com/. A cursory search for any other Pixar film will amply demonstrate the phenomenon. Up has one page of merchandise, most of which are books and T-shirts.
7. Booker, 110.
8. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_children%27s_films#2009. Though Wikipedia is not highly regarded critically, it does a good job of representing prevailing public opinion and is cited here for that purpose alone. Alternatively, Pixar’s films have been described as “family films.” In an interview with Chuck the Movieguy, John Lasseter comments that his wife tells him to make movies not just for an initial viewing, but for “100th time a parent has to suffer through them.” See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9ak_e3U8PI (0:38).
9. Children’s films have received less attention than films for adults, it seems, but The Antic Art: Enhancing Children’s Literary Experiences Through Film and Video (1995) by Lucy Rollin and Ian Wojcik-Andrew’s collection, Children’s Films: History, Ideology, Pedagogy, Theory (2000) seem the places to begin. See also Booker’s Disney, Pixar, and the Hidden Messages of Children’s Films (2009) for application to Pixar’s film specifically.
10. See http://www.smileyyoutube.com/vid.aspx?id=799391.
11. See Price throughout, but particularly pages 1–117 for the prehistory of Pixar Animation Studios. Price provides a detailed history of the major creative forces behind Pixar’s evolution into an animation studio and the creative and technological struggles they faced.
12. The Incredibles is a notable exception to the pattern.
13. Eisenstein on Disney, 55.
14. These principles are first listed on page 15 without commentary and then explored over the remainder of the book with numerous examples and illustrations of how the Disney style evolved over time.
15. Thomas, 17, 19.
16. These various points are illustrated throughout The Illusion of Life; roughly speaking, pgs 303–18 illustrate the importance of anticipation and follow through; and pages 319–66 depict the use of animals and human actors in Disney animation.
17. In passing, let me note that I have picked these examples practically at random as the examples in Disney’s canon are practically endless. Nevertheless, it is not my purpose to demonize Disney or these animation principles. All animated films have made use of them and arguably, must. For all the flawed applications such techniques may be prone to, when used with more sensitivity and care, they have proven to be just as useful in dispelling stereotypes as reinforcing them. Dreamworks’ Shrek is a well known example of using animation to subvert the stereotypical fairy story narrative.
18. Eisensein, 7.
19. Ibid., 8.
20. lhttp://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200701/20070124_lasseter.html.
21. Price, v.
22. See Price throughout, particularly chapters 6–8.
23. Qtd. in Price, 155–6.
24. This is from Book 1 Chapter 15, pg. 430 of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of England: “By marriage, the hufband and wife are one perfon in law l : that is, the very being or legal exiftence of the woman is fufpended during the marriage, or at leaft is incorporated and confolidated into that of the hufband : under whofe wing, protection, and cover, fhe performs every thing ; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert ; is faid to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her hufband, her baron, or lord ; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of an union of perfon in hufband and wife, depend almoft all the legal rights, duties, and difabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage.” From http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk1ch15.asphttp://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk1ch15.asp.
25. In all fairness to Pixar, a similar, but reversed moment occurs in The Incredibles when Mr. Incredible tells his wife that she and their kids have been his greatest adventure.
26. Ty, 3–4.
27. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/28/entertainment/et-jordanpete28.
28. Interestingly, both I and a colleague have noted that over repeated viewings of Up, Russell appears more Asian. Also, it is worth noting that in other depictions, he also seems more Asian. In Wild Life, a coloring book version of Up that tells the story from Russell’s point of view, Russell’s features are much more noticeably Asian.
29. Yancy, 1
30. Bachelard, xxxvi.
31. Ibid., 6.
32. Up never clarifies what the relationship is, whether Russell’s parents married and divorced or what relationship if any pertains between Russell and his mother.
33. What I mean by “traditional” is a family consisting solely of a male father and a female mother and their direct offspring. It my contention that with the notable exception of The Incredibles this traditional family model is not represented in Pixar. See Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 for an exhaustive look at where this “traditional” family arose. Though it is out-of-date and occasionally reaches conclusions that are no longer critically salient, Stone’s work has yet to be superseded in its scope.
34. The website Slashfilm makes the suggestion that Kevin is “a nod to the LGBT community” because of her gender ambiguity in the movie. See http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/06/09/is-kevin-the-tropical-bird-in-pixars-up-a-nod-to-the-lbgt-movement/. I originally intended to read Kevin’s gender as ambiguous as well, contending that we have no evidence of her gender—men must father children, after all, so the existence of babies means little; however, in researching this paper, I came across the coloring book Wild Life in which the reader is asked to decipher a special message to Russell about Kevin. This message is “Kevin is a girl.” See Hands, pg. 27.Wild Life is, of course, separate from the movie, but it is an official Up product. What is troubling about this identification is that the only evidence of Kevin’s gender is the babies, thus strongly associating femininity with children.
35. McCloud, 43.
36. Ibid., 36.
37. See http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_type_of_bird_is_Kevin_from_up. This claim is not based on any statement of fact from the makers of the film, but if it is true, it recomplicates Kevin’s gender.
38. There are female sidekicks, such as Dory in Finding Nemo and Jesse in Toy Story II, but in these two films the plotlines are clearly male-oriented. Finding Nemo is very much about the father-son bond and about how a boy becomes a man; Dory is more comedy relief. Jesse’s role in Toy Story II is slightly more central, but the thrust of the story is clearly the same as Toy Story—the importance of “buddies,” the homosocial bond between men. At the time of this writing, only in The Incredibles of the Pixar canon had a female role been given priority in determining the plot. In A Bug’s Life, even the queen and princess ants are essentially subsidiary characters; the feminine circus bugs, such as the caterpillar and lady bug are played almost as men in drag and the black widow spider is, like Dory, clearly not the focal point of the story in any way. Cars and Monsters, Inc. both potentially have love interests, but, again, the plot of these movies centers on the issues of the main male character.
Answers.com. “WikiAnswers–What type of bird is Kevin from up?” Answers.com. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_type_of_bird_is_Kevin_from_up.
Avalon Project. “Avalon Project—Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England—Book the First : Chapter the Fifteenth : Of Husband and Wife.” Avalon.law.yale.edu. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/blackstone_bk1ch15.asp.
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_____. “Wall Street Analyst Belatedly Sees the Up-side—Media Blog Decoder—NYTimes.com.” NYTimes.com. http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/08/wall-street-analyst-belatedly-sees-the-up-side/.
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Smiley You Tube. “Cars blu ray: John Lasseter interview for the Blu Ray Disc Cars.” Smileyyoutube.com. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9ak_e3U8PI.
Stephenson, Hunter. “Essay: Is Kevin, the Tropical Bird in Pixar’s Up, a Nod to the LGBT Movement?” Slashfilm.com. http://www.slashfilm.com/2009/06/09/is-kevin-the-tropical-bird-in-pixars-up-a-nod-to-the-lbgt-movement/.
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