From Edison to Pixar: The spectacular screen and the attention economy from celluloid to CG

Abstract

This article argues that Pixar's computer generated (CG) animated features of the past 15 years sit at a crossroads in both the conceptualization of viewers and their socialization to the contemporary digital screen. Embedded within a new aesthetic visual form, almost all of Pixar's movies feature, and talk back to, the emergence of the mythical astonished cinema spectator. At the same time, Pixar's features question the future of digital spectacle and the position of the screen subject. In the contemporary context of the social network and the online video, CG animated features do not simply prepare young viewers for a world of consumer behaviour, they prepare them for a multilayered world of digital screens in which they must learn to function as objects of consumption as well as consuming agents. Beyond this, however, and in contrast to previous Disney features, Pixar movies prepare young consumers for a changed production landscape in contemporary culture. Moving beyond notions of Fordist production that structured previous discourses of the viewing and socialized child, the spectacular specificity of Pixar movies is now structured self-reflexively according to the logic of the attention economy.