Pixar Animation Studios

Offers a number of original analyses across many of Pixar’s films, looking at previously under-explored aspects such as screenwriting, urban studies and performance

• Argues for a consideration of Pixar and its work within the contexts of film ‘authorship’, in terms of a distinctive and coherent filmmaking vision at work across the studio’s films
• Makes critical and analytical use of Pixar’s own production histories and documentary output, as well as memoirs from former studio personnel
• Argues that we view Pixar’s own construction of an authorial identity as both crucial to its initial survival as a studio (even after the release of Toy Story), and no less relevant to its endurance today, in a changing and challenging cinematic market
• Situates Pixar’s work historically, within a continuum of technological and artistic experimentation, linking it to the histories and philosophies of cinematic and Silicon Valley innovation in the late twentieth century and beyond
• Identifies the importance of ‘creativity’ as an overarching focus of both Pixar’s films and its own self-promotion and histories, connecting this same concept to historical and cultural currents of the later twentieth century and beyond

Pixar Animation Studios: Authorship, Creativity and the Mouse explores the role of key themes and aesthetic approaches in Pixar’s films, arguing for the importance of Pixar’s ‘authorship’ as a studio to its initial growth, emerging identity and survival. Focusing on several dominant and interweaving themes, including the significance of ‘creativity’, of innovation and a focus on ‘realism’, and situating Pixar’s work in the history of recent cinema and technologies, the book shows how constructing an idea of artistic distinction in the cinematic marketplace both was and remains crucial to Pixar’s enduring success.

Combining analysis of Pixar’s own in-house narratives, together with detailed case-studies across a range of its films, the book shows what it really means to talk about a ‘Pixar film’ and why this matters, both to the audience and to the studio itself.