Satisfying a Spirit of Adventure

The conclusion reflects on the meaningfulness of genre analysis as paving the way for more rigorously formalist approaches to computer-animated films, but also as a way of positioning industry, technology and textuality in relation to each other. The conclusion also argues that the features of the computer-animated film identified in the book engage with discourses of juvenile behaviour to stretch the terms of the adult/child distinction, with many computer-animated films demonstrating a notable fascination with the vicissitudes and values of the childhood experience. The narratives of computer-animated films invite a specific consideration of what it means to be a child within contemporary culture. I challenge directly Judith Halberstam’s notion that certain children’s films appeal to the “disorderly child” and instead look to the fuzzy distinction between adolescents and adults engendered in portmanteau terms pertaining to cultural categories such as “kidult,” “manchild” and “adultescents.” The child/adult distinction is thus not fixed or ‘frozen,’ but flowing, and the conclusion identifies how computer-animated films offer future opportunity to examine how, as a genre, they mobilise questions about the cultural experience and significance of childhood, at the same time as their narratives redefine adulthood.