Child's play: The political imaginary of international relations and contemporary popular children's films1

Abstract

Many scholars in International Relations (IR) have drawn from popular films to examine various problématiques that have informed the discipline's main theorisations. As Cynthia Weber remarks, popular films are powerful because they engage in the very ‘serious political work’ of mythologising the ‘truths’ and ‘realities’ which provide the foundation for many of IR's main theoretical envisionings of our world. To date, however, children's films have received very little attention. For the purpose of this paper, three have been isolated: Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life (1998) and Rescue Heroes: The Movie (2003). Children's films, it can be argued, help to craft and restore certain perspectives for each new generation of young minds during the crucial years when the world is being textualised for the first time. The objective of this paper, therefore, is to read these films as working towards producing and sustaining the power/knowledge that seeks to defend contemporary forms of world order while concurrently extending and disseminating the rule of these forms of world order through the medium of children's popular cinema. 1. This paper stems from a series of questions posed to me by my two oldest sons, Alexandre and Nicolas. Their questions were prompted by their recent awakening to various dimensions of our contemporary political imaginary and the massive violence it can tolerate. Making sense of this world in terms other than those presented to them in the films they enjoy motivates my writing both here and elsewhere. I would like to thank my colleague and friend Miguel de Larrinaga for his insightful comments, most notably with regard to his layered reading of Toy Story. I would also like to express my appreciation to the participants of the Cultural Studies Group at Saint Mary's University for their comments and suggestions when the first draft of this paper was presented to them on 26 March 2004. Finally, I am grateful to the reviewers of this journal for helping me clarify my analysis. As always, any errors or omissions remain mine.