‘Take Me Back’- The Fantasy of Childhood in Modern Pixar Films

For a long time, the work of Pixar Animation Studios was routinely presented as something of a gold standard for animation. A critical darling and box office juggernaut, Pixar’s run of early films from Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) to Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, 2019) were mostly unquestioned hits delivering nuanced meditations on everything from emotion to connection to self-actualisation. Audiences flocked to the cinema, eager to see not simply whether Pixar’s new film was any good, but rather to see what was good about it. However, the story today reads a little differently. A slew of muted reviews and uninspired reactions on social media have hinted at a perceived decline in Pixar’s creative powers. Wendy Ide, for instance, dismissed Pixar’s latest Lightyear (Angus Maclane, 2022) as “an aggressively adequate film which gives the sense that Pixar are, for once, just going through the motions” (Ide, 2022). Yet, it is important to recognise that these criticisms arise from a point of comparison, often made by people who first engaged with Pixar’s canon as children but who are now, potentially, parents themselves. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that adult audiences now find the experience of watching a Pixar film somewhat less impactful than when they were children. In this blog post, I raise questions regarding childhood perspectives and spectatorial experience to explore the ways in which Pixar’s latest computer-animated feature films address these changing encounters and engage (aged and ageing) audiences, ultimately constructing an external fantasy of childlike innocence.

In June 2021 Darren Mooney, writing for The Escapist, went so far as to brand the current era “Post-Peak Pixar” (2021). Though severe, Mooney’s comments are typical of the current critical landscape. The latest offerings from Pixar at the time were Onward (Dan Scanlon, 2019), Soul (Pete Docter, 2020) and Luca (Enrico Casarosa, 2021), which were to be followed by Turning Red (Domee Shi, 2022) and Lightyear. To varying degrees, each of these films was met with lukewarm responses centred on a theme of mediocrity. Frequent and familiar terms across the critical spectrum include ‘adequate’, ‘generic,’ ‘disappointing’ and ‘disposable,’ operating on a recognition that, compared to earlier animated films, Pixar has lost its edge, despite the fact that the aforementioned films are all original, creative stories introducing new voices, even placing people of colour in the director’s chair.

Fig. 1 - Turning Red features key representation of menstruation and female issues.

Any perceived diminished quality in Pixar’s work, therefore, must arise from comparison to their earlier films. In fact, this is not the first time comparison with earlier Pixar films has sparked debate regarding declining creative authenticity. Similar concerns were expressed when Pixar released sequels such as Cars 2 (John Lasseter, 2011) and Monsters University (Dan Scanlon, 2013), but the addition of this focus on blandness appears to be a uniquely post-2019 phenomenon, highlighting the ways in which the spectatorial experience of consuming films has changed between Toy Story and Lightyear. The Covid-19 pandemic forced Pixar to release the majority of their films during this period on streaming service Disney+, instead of via a major theatrical exhibition. A home-based release naturally detracts from the sense of a Pixar release as a cinematic event and encourages a different kind of engagement. Furthermore, Pixar no longer stands as a single example of excellence in CGI-animation. In their post-Pixar merger era, Disney is enjoying what might be considered a Third Golden Age. Due to advances in the field of computer animation, Pixar no longer operates in an environment in which the technical, creative innovation it displays is enough to assure the film achieves significant resonance with its audience. In other words, Pixar has lost its individuality, consigned to a single part of a bigger success story. Take, for example, Adam White’s review of Turning Red, which fails to distinguish between the studios, stating “that it becomes a loud and action-driven spectacle seems disappointingly inevitable for a Disney film” (White, 2022).

Yet, Mooney’s article, after delivering a scathing assessment of Pixar’s trajectory, toes a cautious and understanding line, praising the studio for treading new creative ground while lamenting the lack of audience-grabbing emotional heart for which Pixar is so famously known. Focusing on this creativity, rather than abject comparison, allows us to locate a mode of reading these films as an act - however unintentionally - of deliberate simplicity designed to reengage an increasingly adult audience. While Turning Red was not particularly praised for narrative or technical achievement, it was lauded for the progressive, culturally-salient conversations it began around representations of menstruation and puberty in young women (Fig. 1). Soul, on the other hand, was heralded by Variety as a “whimsical, musical and boldly metaphysical dramedy” (Debruge, 2020). Crucially, it was also identified as “not a kid’s movie.” Both films encourage meditation on serious, perennial, adult concerns explored through a lens of childhood naivety. Understanding this impulse ultimately allows us to re-examine and recontextualise the lack of narrative or conceptual complexity identified in Luca and Lightyear.

Of course, it is not unusual that these films centre on adult perspectives given they were made by adults. Ewan Kirkland, in Children’s Media and Modernity, suggests that the notion of childhood is a “social category” (Kirkland 2017, 48). The children’s perspective from which many animated stories are told arises not from a biological experience, but represents a constructed aesthetic designed to convey a specific mood. Kirkland argues this perspective is not drawn from children but crafted for them, resulting in an adult storyteller informing the child audience how they should see the world. Logically, however, recognising the centrality of adult creators in children’s media also implies that such media simultaneously informs adult audiences on how to think and act in a prescribed, culturally defined ‘childlike’ way.

In the emerging symbiosis of children’s media made apparent by Kirkland’s thoughts, we find echoes of Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional reader response theory. Though discussing literary texts, Rosenblatt offers a way of reading media in which the ‘reader’ builds their own text in a “reciprocal, mutually defining relationship” (Rosenblatt 1994, 62). They do this, Rosenblatt suggests, by bringing their own memories, interpretations, and viewpoints to the engagement. The meaning of the film therefore forms in the mind of the reader, it is not contained within the initial data encoded in the images onscreen. However, if the spectatorial experience truly is transactional, it would seem probable that the text has the power to guide, or at the very least encourage, a particular attitude or approach from its reader. In the case of Pixar, logically this ideal approach must be the very perspective of childhood advocated by Kirkland.

Fig. 2 - Soul features overtly metaphysical themes and acts as a blueprint for utilising childhood perspective.

Such encouragement can easily be sensed within the last four Pixar films, which taken together can be read as a redirection into a childlike perspective defined and dominated by curiosity, enthusiasm, and acceptance. While all four use fantastical elements to convey their plot, the fantasy is, as many of the reviews concedes, somewhat generic. This is not necessarily detrimental, but instead offers a simple, easy to engage with premise upon which a more transactional, internal fantasy can take place. Specifically, the fantasy of re-enacting childhood or entering into that constructed aesthetic to recalibrate the ways in which the subjective adult self engages with the surrounding world.

Soul is the perfect place to begin considering this transaction because it introduces concepts that are embellished in the subsequent films released by the studio. Soul’s denouement, in which protagonist Joe Gardener returns from the afterlife imbued with a new love of life, hinges on the deliberate exchange of jaded cynicism (adulthood) with curiosity and enthusiasm (childhood). The film’s fantasy elements, centred on concepts of the afterlife, function as a Netherspace in which adult and child perspectives can coexist within one subject, their dominant traits ultimately the result of self-actualisation rather than the accumulation of experience. 22, an unborn soul initially reluctant to begin her life on Earth is eventually convinced to do so by being introduced to ‘jazzing,’ a euphemistic phrase for the joy of living in the moment. Her eventual self-actualisation is not a natural condition of her physical, temporal state but an intentional engagement with a specific aesthetic mode. Soul is, therefore, essentially a blueprint for choosing to utilise this aesthetic (Fig. 2).

Fig. 3 - Luca and Alberto are eyes through which the fictional city of Porto Rosso are explored.

Luca, Pixar’s next film, presents a fantasy about sea-monsters discovering the human world, but it uses this fantasy to defamiliarize the familiar. The fictional town of Porto Rosso is a treasure map of discovery for the character and his friend Alberto (Fig. 3). The fact the majority of the plot is preoccupied not with the clashing of worlds, but the outcome of a pasta-themed triathlon, betrays the very ethos of the film. Mundanity, when unfamiliar, can appear as magical. Spectators are invited to explore the magic of this very aesthetic world alongside Luca, but to do so they must heed the lessons laid down in Soul and engage with Porto Rosso on the terms of the child protagonist. A similar, though redirected, approach occurs in Turning Red. Here, the fantasy elicits different reactions from the central characters, Mei and her mother. Much like Soul, a dichotomy is produced in which distinct viewpoints regarding a family curse are attributed to particular life stages. However, an early scene relates all the fantasies regarding transformation and ancient magic to the far more human, grounded realities of menstruation and familial tension. The challenge of the film seems clear. The spectator is called upon to hold these two viewpoints together in their head, sympathising with the young protagonist while extrapolating a juvenile perspective on real-world issues through the eyes of a preteen girl. Mei’s chief characteristics are not derived from her semi-lycanthropy, but rather from her priorities and experiences as a middle school student. The question, therefore, is less how the audience would cope with her fantasy troubles, but how they would react to her very real societal position.

Recent Pixar films, therefore, cultivate a potential spectatorial fantasy in which adult audiences can extrapolate an aesthetic mode related to concepts of childhood. Such a cultivation reaches its peak in Lightyear. The opening crawl informs spectators that they are watching the very film Andy watched prior to the events of Toy Story. Despite the perceived blandness of the space-opera that follows, Lightyear fundamentally completes the fantasy, encouraging the spectator to fully immerse themselves. No longer required to interpret a construction of the child’s perspective, they are invited to occupy that space, watching this film as the subjective child itself (Fig. 4). The surface-level pastiche of the space-ranger story serves to enable this fantasy, an uncluttered attempt to extrapolate the sense of wonder filmmakers from Walt Disney, to Hayao Miyazaki and Brad Bird have been evoking for the best part of a century.

Fig. 4 - Though devoid of child protagonists, Lightyear encourages viewers to position themselves as a child watching the film.

It is perhaps an overstatement to imply this intensification of the child’s perspective represents an intentional creative direction for Pixar. They have, after all, always utilised children, from Andy in Toy Story to Riley in Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015). However, a careful reading of their last four films alongside a consideration of Kirkland’s notions of childhood as an aesthetic, social perspective, reveals an impulse towards mobilising the child spectator in order to give the adult audience an experience of childhood. Furthermore, the particular children featured in Soul, Luca, and Turning Red are witnesses to the world around them, not necessarily the catalysts for the action as has previously been the case. Essentially, children are no longer merely the subject of Pixar films but the object, the very thing through which the film is constructed. The child’s perspective, as an aesthetic mode, dominates the film and is therefore immediately available for assimilation and adoption by the adult audience. No longer content with fantasies onscreen, we seek solace in recapturing the fantasy within ourselves. 

**Article published: August 12, 2022**

References

Debruge, Peter. 2020. “’Soul’ Review: From the Minds Behind ‘Inside Out’ Comes an Even Deeper Look at What Makes People Tick.” Variety, December 6, 2020. https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/soul-review-pixar-disney-1234843312/

De Semlyen, Nick. 2021. “Luca Review.” Empire, June 16, 2021. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/luca/

Ide, Wendy. 2022. “Lightyear review - a trudge through outer space.” The Guardian, June 19, 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/jun/19/lightyear-review-a-trudge-through-outer-space

Kirkland, Ewan. 2017. Children’s Media and Modernity Film, Television and Digital Games. Oxford: Peter Lang.

Mooney, Darren. 2021. “In Defense of Post-Peak Pixar.” Escapist Magazine, June 21, 2021. https://www.escapistmagazine.com/in-defense-of-post-peak-pixar/ 

Rosenblatt, Louise M. 1994. The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Illinois: Southern Illinois University.

White, Adam. 2022. “Turning Red review: A refreshingly un-queasy puberty movie that can’t be divorced from the Disney machine.” The Independent, March 10, 2022. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/turning-red-review-disney-plus-pixar-b2032763.html

Biography

Markus Beeken graduated with a BA in English Literature from Brasenose College, Oxford and an MA in Film Studies from King’s College London. He is now studying for his PhD at King’s College London.