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.

Monsters, Synch: A Taxonomy of the Star Voice

This chapter proposes that the ascription of star speech (as a dynamic sound form) to the computer-animated film’s puppet performers contributes to the effect and impact of their many screen performances. This chapter takes the star voice to be a unique instrument of performance that lies at the cornerstone of computer-animated film acting, and begins by implicating the potency of the star voice within wider industrial discourses. These include local dubbing practices, sound technology, and the multiplication of star sound across a range of consumer and multi-media products. The formal and structural importance of the star voice to computer-animated film performance is illustrated through the work of prominent film sound theorist Michel Chion and his work on synchresis, a neologism produced out of the combination of “synchronism” and “synthesis”. By extending Chion’s account, this chapter uses descriptors derived from synchresis to outline three prominent synchretic unions operating at the level of character design. A significant innovation here is the development of a taxonomy of the star voice as it is inscribed formally into computer-animated films—anthropomorphic, autobiographic and acousmatic synchresis—which give new precision to the analysis of star voices in animation.

Pixar, Performance and Puppets

As a way of remedying the wider absence of computer-animated film acting within scholarship on film and animated performance, this chapter makes a significant assertion that, in its production, the computer-animated film genre actually cross-pollinates stop-frame techniques with those associated with marionette theatre as part of its style of performance. In the workable geometry of its virtual bodies (skeletal structure, anatomical coherency, joint segmentation and armature), computer-animated films evoke the wealth of string marionettes (as well as rod or hand puppets) moved within a live performance setting. Such puppet-like forms of acting holds the computer-animated film distinct from performances in popular Hollywood cinema achieved through stop-motion frame-by-frame techniques and traditional hand-drawn methods. However, this analysis not only supports the central concept that puppetry has become a more significant concern of the computer-animated film than in other animated media, but also provides a counter-narrative to scholarship that affords generality to motion-capture as the dominant mode of cyber or virtual puppetry. Puppetry can be understood, I argue, as an altogether more inclusive category, and this chapter promotes puppetry as opening up performance in computer-animated films and revealing the sliding scale of puppet processes involved in its creation of acting.

Towards a Journey Narrative Syntax

This chapter moves forward by unpacking the generic identity of computer-animated films and examines the journey narrative structure as their prevailing syntax and first line of action. In this chapter, two forms of narrative are established that are widely operational within the genre. The first of these are the “flushed away” narratives that rely upon on abrupt geographical disjuncture, and which often requires the protagonist to negotiate and quickly adapt to a foreign milieu. The second journey narrative form advanced in this chapter is the “over the hedge” narrative, which are voyages signalled as altogether more prepared or expected. This chapter explores in detail how computer-animated films deploy these two forms of journey narrative structure to interrogate ideas of mobility, location, destination and tourism through the virtual experiences they offer of travelled space. Chapter Two concludes by positioning the journey narrative within the context of film franchising and the “sequelled” narrative. Computer-animated films rarely exists in isolation, but are supported by a range of sequels, spin-offs and short films. This chapter identifies how narrative structure can be productively entwined with the wider role of film series and cycles that continues to define the franchise mentality of post-millennial Hollywood cinema.

From Wile E. to Wall-E: Computer-Animated Film Comedy

Chapter Eight argues how comedy is worked into the stable, solid genre elements of the computer-animated film in particular ways, leading to a range of comedic orthodoxies that both define, and are defined by, the specificities of these specific screen worlds. Building on pre-existing typologies of animated comedy, and scholarship on the evolution of the American cartoon during the 1940s, this chapter introduces the exceptional comic arsenal of computer-animated films that often departs from ‘crazy’ disruptions of spatio-temporal unity and unorthodox patterns of ‘cartoonal’ behaviour. The chapter argues that in the computer-animated film, exaggerated degrees of physical distortion and degradation of the animated body operate outside the agenda of a Luxo world. The genre instead establishes a new comic modality rooted in other common features: a tendency towards cross-species couplings as a reinvigoration of the “bi-racial” buddy movie popular in 1980s Hollywood; the enhanced role of verbal comedy through performative connections with “comedian comedy” and casting practices of stand-up comedians; and the comic role of multi-faceted personality types in relation to theories of character structure derived from twentieth-century psychiatric therapy and biogenetics.

Notes on a Luxo World

This chapter advances the term ‘Luxo’ as a useful descriptor that awards definition to the unique fictional worlds of the computer-animated feature film. The main body of writing in the initial stages outlines how the Luxo worlds of computer-animated films intersect with (and depart from) other forms of animation and digital world construction, situating computer-animated films against scholarship dealing with world creation. Emphasis is paid to the multiplicity of cinema’s ‘computer-animated’ worlds across popular Hollywood cinema, drawing in comparisons with Rotoscoping and the current effects industry via the virtual backlot. A significant discrimination made here is the idea that a Luxo world operates as a computer-animated film fiction achieved through the act of production, not as a fictional world crafted separately in post-production. Animatedness becomes a term that is developed throughout the chapter, invoked to promote the specificities of this new digital cinema and the richness of its film worlds. By exploring the particular “animatedness” of a Luxo world against other types and traditions of animated fictions, this chapter distinguishes the ways in which technology is harnessed through the spectacle of the digital multitude and how computer-animated films operate in dialogue with the formal style of “open world” videogames.

The Mannerist Game

This chapter argues that mannerism and traditions of mannerist art give greater definition to how computer-animated films playfully dismantle their illusionist activity by making false claims about their relation to live-action cinema. To consider these specific forms of Mannerist humour in the computer-animated film, this chapter plots Mannerism’s cinematic lineage within certain styles and genres (film noir, pop music film, heritage drama, period film and cinéma du look), and notes that despite scholars having employed a vocabulary drawn from European art history to describe the (often digitally-assisted) bravura camerawork of New Hollywood cinema, Mannerism has yet to be employed as a descriptor for digital animation. This chapter therefore re-imagines computer-animated film comedy as strongly Mannerist in its invention, and draws particular attention to their strategies of allusive anti-illusionism. Computer-animated films frequently stage false, illusory discourses of revelation (feigned blooper reels, outtake material, behind-the-scenes ‘actor’ interviews) as a comic flourish that maintains the genre’s illusion. To interrogate the wit of the genre’s Mannerist play, I examine its many trompe-l’œil illusion effects and activities of self-deception.

Object Transformation and the Spectacle of Scrap

This chapter considers metamorphosis and object transformation as underlying elements of animation’s specificity and representational orthodoxy. However it argues that objects in the computer-animated film are altogether more stable, prized instead according to their utilitarian value—that is, their constructive worth or usefulness—whilst animators seek to preserve physical relationships and properties. This assertion runs counter to animation’s more conventional collapsing of an object’s material honesty within the spectacle of metamorphosis. Focusing on the genre’s fascination with everyday mess, this chapter discusses the emergent importance of an aesthetics of trash within the computer-animated film, and situate their formal and narrative preoccupation with rubbish, scrap and cultural detritus within wider traditions of junk art. Several computer-animated films redeem waste products as plentiful bounty, and their attraction to scrap provides the pleasurable recuperation of trash (as art) through its practical inscription as a fully-functioning cityspaces. By connecting the industrious behaviour of characters and inventors (as they manipulate and repurpose everyday junk) to cognitive and social activities of object substitution, this chapter argues that computer-animated films invite spectators to formulate new responses to recognisable objects, and to become acquainted with the widening of junk’s functional possibility.

Falling with Style? The Computer-Animated Film and Genre

Chapter One maintains the genre narrative established in the book’s introduction, interrogating in greater depth the shape of contemporary film genre theory, and its relationship to the study of digital animation to understand how computer-animated films might be conceptualised in generic terms. The interrelationship between animation and genre is identified as a complex series of engagements and negotiations, and drawing on animation scholarship and theories of film genre, this chapter engages with the problem of generic classification when placed within the specific context of animation. Informed by Paul Wells’ work on animation’s generic “deep structures”, this chapter argues that it is in the process of ‘doing’ recognisable genres (similar to notions of genre parody) that computer-animated films both create and announce their own internal structures and attributes, which will be pursued across the book as a whole. Chapter One also works through technological considerations (including current software packages) to identify the computer-animated film genre as a significant attribute of textual structures that are underpinned by technological concerns. Questions of genealogy and the computer-animated film’s potential influence (live-action cinema; videogames) are therefore brought together in a discussion of the ‘computer-animated film’ as a viable critical label.

DreamWorks Animation, Metalepsis and Diegetic Deconstruction

Chapter Nine applies a framework drawn from Gérard Genette’s (1983) notion of “metalepsis” (recently recovered within contemporary animation studies) to explain the behaviour of computer-animated film characters who freely ascend from the fictional world into the surrounding promotional spaces. Although animation has a long tradition of deconstruction and self-reflexive practices, this chapter offers new space to consider how the seamless worlds of computer-animated films can equally be conceptualised according to a deconstructive comedy of metalepsis. This chapter argues that computer-animated film characters are able to abruptly intrude into company logos, corporate signatures, credits sequences and even features of film form. It maps such repeating comic devices onto wider historical developments in studio signification, digitally-assisted logo design and the promotional strategies of contemporary Hollywood cinema. This chapter also affords the specific opportunity to focus on the cycle of feature-length computer-animated films produced by the Dreamworks Animation studio, which exhibit an unprecedented and widely-operational mingling of promotional space with the animated activity of its digital characters.