90

animation: an interdisciplinary journal 13(1)

a rapidly accelerating art form (as Meinel stresses in his lengthy introduction), Pixar’s America
deliberately or otherwise overlooks the studio’s more recent films, including Cars 2 (2011). Given
its technologically-heavy spy narrative, Cars 2 would certainly have provided a fertile comparative
piece to the book’s penultimate chapter on the romanticized jeremiad longing of the all-American
Cars and its nostalgic invocation of ‘frontier (auto)mobility’ (p. 194).
As Meinel’s book reaches its climax, some chapters are also noticeably shorter in length, thereby
making quick work of what are complex, fascinating ideas. The majority of chapters are 20 pages,
yet the concluding chapter on Toy Story 3’s connections to the post-9/11 war on terror via the clas-
sifying of Sunnyside Daycare as a ‘totalitarian political regime’ requiring American liberation
(p. 212) feels far too brief, sadly running to only 10 pages. However, the desire to want more is
merely a symptom of the success of Meinel’s overall project. Robust in deepening the critical dis-
cussion of mainstream US animation by accounting for the complexities of the studio’s pervasive
‘national consensus’ (p. 56), Pixar’s America successfully strengthens the growing body of Pixar-
centric work steeped in the durable analytical traditions of story structure and characterization.

References
Dorfman A and Mattelart A (1984[1975]) How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney
Comic, trans. D Kunzle, 2nd rev. edn. Amsterdam: International General.
Herhuth E (2017) Pixar and the Aesthetic Imagination: Animation, Storytelling, and Digital Culture.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Paik K (2007) To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios. London: Random House.
Price DA (2009) The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Vintage.
Rösing L M (2016) Pixar with Lacan: The Hysteric’s Guide to Animation. London: Bloomsbury.
Wooden SR and Gillam K (2014) Pixar’s Boy Stories: Masculinity in a Postmodern Age. Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield.

Author biography
Christopher Holliday teaches Film Studies and Liberal Arts at King’s College London, specializing in film
genre, international film history and contemporary digital media. He has published several book chapters and
articles on digital technology and computer animation, including work in Animation Practice, Process &
Production and animation: an interdisciplinary journal. He is the author of The Computer-Animated Film:
Industry, Style and Genre (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2018), and co-editor of Fantasy/
Animation: Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres (Routledge, forthcoming 2018) for Routledge’s
AFI Film Readers series that examines the historical, cultural and theoretical points of intersection between
fantasy and animation.
Email: christopher.holliday@kcl.ac.uk

Helen Haswell
Queen’s University Belfast, UK

Lilian Munk Rösing, Pixar with Lacan: The Hysteric’s Guide to Animation, Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2015:
192 pp., 15 b/w illus.: ISBN 978 1 628920611

The scholarly interest in Pixar Animation Studios has quietly increased over the last 10 years, with
research ranging from the studio’s production practices and creative culture to the development of
technology and the digital aesthetic, storytelling and storyboards, and the growth of the company.
Book reviews 91

Karen Paik’s To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios (2007) and The Pixar
Touch: The Making of a Company (2008) by David Price have become seminal to understanding
the formation of Pixar and the first 20 years of the animation studio’s history. While the company
is frequently held as an exemplar of business success and attempts to solve the ‘Pixar Formula’
have been debated (see Capodagli and Jackson, 2010, and Finney, 2014, among others), Pixar co-
founder, Ed Catmull’s own Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way
of True Inspiration (2014) offers an insightful first-hand account of how the company built and
sustains its creative culture.
Yet, unlike Disney, the studio’s parent company, there are still only a handful of texts written
specifically about Pixar, and fewer that analyse the films themselves. To date, the thematic approach
to Pixar’s films includes diversity, gender and nostalgia, to name a few. Lilian Munk Rösing’s
Pixar with Lacan falls within this collection of texts, offering a psychoanalytically-informed anal-
ysis of the studio’s animated films, spanning a 15-year period, from Toy Story (1995) to Toy Story
3 (2010). Throughout the book, Munk Rösing introduces complex Lacanian theories using exam-
ples from Pixar’s films to explain concepts such as the voice, the gaze, the Other, symbolic castra-
tion, and desire and drive. In her introduction, Munk Rösing notes that analysing the films in this
way shows ‘what kind of ideas they propagate about being human’ (p. 14). In doing so, the book
addresses not only what animates Pixar’s characters, but also what animates us.
The first three chapters in Pixar with Lacan outline the power of the voice in Toy Story, the
concept of the big Other in Toy Story 2 (1999) and sadism in Toy Story 3. From Chapter 4 onwards,
the book follows a chronological order, which has the added benefit of underlining the develop-
ment of Pixar’s ideology and allows Munk Rösing to explore the progression of computer-gener-
ated animation throughout. Each chapter in the book is contained by an analysis of one of Pixar’s
films, as per the chapter title, which makes the structure of the book clear and concise, particularly
when the subject matter is, at times, difficult to understand. Although the Toy Story chapters are
categorized by the voice, the big Other and sadism, they explore so much more than the chapter
titles indicate.
In the first chapter ‘Beyond the Name of the Father: Toy Story’ (pp.15–23), Munk Rösing
engages with Slavoj Žižek’s concept of the voice as alien, which, ‘according to Žižek (and psy-
choanalysis in general) is at the core of humanity: “Humanity means: the alien is controlling our
animal bodies”’ (p. 16). She analyses this idea in relation to Woody’s ‘coming alive’ in front of toy
tormentor Sid, to explain how Woody’s voice in this scene demonizes him (the voice as alien takes
control of his body) and traumatizes Sid in return. In this chapter, Munk Rösing also introduces
Buzz Lightyear as the incarnation of ‘Lacan’s definition of the psychotic: the one who firmly
believes in the big Other’ (p. 17), in relation to his delusional and fictional mission from Star
Command. She describes the big Other as ‘Lacan’s concept for that place – be it a person, an ideol-
ogy, God, common sense – where I believe the truth about my existence, the meaning of my life,
the guarantee of my identity, to be located’ (p. 18). The analysis and description of Buzz’s journey
(and fall) throughout Toy Story is beautifully and clearly explained through Lacanian theory, and
introduces the idea of the screen as the big O. Munk Rösing notes, ‘this is something recurrent in
Pixar: it is by watching a screen that the characters come to know their desire’ (p. 18), a concept
she returns to later in the book. Chapter 3, ‘Sadism in the Kindergarten: Toy Story 3’ (pp. 37–49),
engages with separation and introduces the concept as ‘the central existential challenge, from the
first separation from the maternal body, to the last separation from life itself’ (p. 44), and language
as liberation from separation. Munk Rösing explains this as ‘the liberation of saying “mother”
instead of being in close wordless contact with mother’ (p. 44). She goes on to discuss object rela-
tion theory and the act of play to learn how to handle separation, and how this is evident, not only
in Toy Story 3, but across the Toy Story series.
92 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 13(1)

While the analysis of the Toy Story films, A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters, Inc. (2001) and Finding
Nemo (2003) in the first half of the book is interesting, at times the more complex psychoanalytical
theory that Munk Rösing tackles is confusing and not fully explained, which undermines her analy-
sis. This could be due to my own prior lack of knowledge on the theories outlined in the book, but
as an introduction to Lacanian theory, small sections of these chapters needed further clarification.
For example, when reading Chapter 5 ‘There is Nothing More Toxic than a Human Child: Monsters,
Inc.’ (pp. 63–74), the outline of Lacan’s discourse as models for social bonds, and the accompany-
ing formulas (p. 67), is dense and unclear, thus the analysis of Monsters, Inc. that follows seems
superficial. Yet, the identification of Mike and Sully’s careers from mailmen to scarers as ‘reflect-
ing the American dream of the self-made man’ (p. 72), and the different meanings of Dory’s motto
in the next chapter, ‘“Just Keep Swimming”: Finding Nemo’ (pp. 75–91) is concise and insightful.
Here, Munk Rösing describes Dory ‘as the allegory of Marlin’s animating principle, as a principle
of pure movement forwards’ (p. 78). In addition, her engagement with the production notes and
DVD commentaries and her linking of them with the narrative of Pixar’s films is wholly satisfying.
In one instance, she notes the theme of ‘technical innovation and individual courage, but also enter-
tainment (the circus troupe) [in A Bug’s Life] is crucial to the process of animation, which may be
seen as a celebration of Pixar’s own qualities’ (p. 51).
Chapter 7 is the turning point of the book. By this stage, Munk Rösing has outlined most of the
key concepts in Chapters 1–6 and is able to make the films the focus of the remaining chapters,
using Lacanian theory (that in most cases has already been discussed) to support and validate her
argument with in-depth sequence analyses. In the remaining chapters, Munk Rösing offers an
insightful and interesting approach by effortlessly linking the film and the theory with production
notes from the studio. In Chapter 7 ‘More than Super: The Incredibles’ (pp. 93–104), the scene in
which Helen Parr explains to her son Dash that he must control his power (his super speed), is sup-
ported with Lacan’s idea that-which-is-in-you-more-than-yourself and then linked with director
Brad Bird’s challenge to animate ‘it without making it too big’ (p. 96). Here, Munk Rösing shows
how the idea of containment follows a thread from the film to the theory to the animation studio
and it is in these moments where she succeeds, not only in making psychoanalytic theory clear, but
also in relating her argument back to a wider study on Pixar. Munk Rösing suggests that ‘the pres-
sure of being super is also the pressure of being Pixar’ (p. 96), offering a space (though not fully
realized) to engage with contemporary debates that challenge the studio’s apparent infallibility,
debates that have been recently reignited following the release of Cars 3 (2017).
Throughout Pixar with Lacan, Munk Rösing integrates a discussion of psychoanalytical theory
with Pixar’s technological accomplishments as the subject of ‘the critic’s pleasure’ (p. 167).
Overall, the book successfully introduces the reader to Lacan’s complicated writings and lectures,
by analysing Pixar’s films through Lacan, while also allowing for further discussions on the posi-
tion of Pixar, and animation, in contemporary culture.

References
Capodagli B and Jackson L (2010) Innovate the Pixar Way: Business Lessons from the World’s Most Creative
Corporate Playground. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Catmull E (2014) Creativity, Inc. Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration.
London: Bantam Press.
Finney A (2014) The International Film Business: A Market Guide beyond Hollywood, 2nd edn. London:
Routledge.
Paik K (2007) To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios. San Francisco: Chronicle Books.
Price D (2008) The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Vintage Books.
Book reviews 93

Author biography
Helen Haswell is completing her PhD on the studio narrative of Pixar Animation at Queen’s University
Belfast. Her research focuses on the development of digital animation technology and its contemporary aes-
thetic, and Pixar’s relationship with the Walt Disney Company and the impact of the 2006 Disney–Pixar
merge. Her article ‘To infinity and back again: Hand-drawn aesthetic and affection for the past in Pixar’s
pioneering animation’ was published in Alphaville Journal of Film and Screen Media in January 2015 and
was awarded the Screen Annette Kuhn Essay Award in 2016.
Email: hhaswell01@qub.ac.uk

Nick Jones
University of York, UK

Julie A Turnock, Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics,
New York: Columbia University Press, 2015: 362 pp.: ISBN 978 0 231163521 (hbk) £90; ISBN 978 0
231163538 (pbk) £27; ISBN 978 0 231535274 (e-book) £14

It is not controversial to suggest that George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and Steven Spielberg’s
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) are major touchstones in the history of cinematic spe-
cial effects. If Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) inaugurated the era of the Hollywood blockbuster (and by
extension led to the demise of so-called New Hollywood and its focus on political realism), then
these two 1977 productions concretized the links between blockbuster filmmaking and dynamic,
visually kinaesthetic special effects. However, the precise manner in which these films shaped a
particular kind of animated visual effects aesthetic, and what kind of an aesthetic this is, has been
a subject long neglected by film studies scholarship. As Julie Turnock puts it in Plastic Reality:
Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics, despite frequent
assertions of the significance of these texts to popular filmmaking, ‘their enduring popularity
(especially Star Wars) means that they have effectively been hiding in plain sight’ academically
(p. 107). Turnock seeks to correct this omission, and her detailed, rewarding account of the tech-
niques and aesthetics of visual effects animation across the late 20th century certainly succeeds in
this ambitious goal.
Special effects (as opposed to on-set effects captured during principal photography) rely upon
animation techniques in their management of the image frame-by-frame, whether that involves
manipulating the existing image or inserting new content. In recent decades, digital production
pipelines have allowed the film image to be more easily and practically worked over, and this kind
of digital animation is currently pervasive in contemporary blockbuster film production. As
Turnock comments in relation to Avatar (2009), the difference between ‘live action’ and ‘anima-
tion’ is increasingly artificial (p. 327, n25). The last few years have accordingly witnessed renewed
academic interest in digital special effects. Monographs and edited collections by Stephen Prince
(2012), Lisa Purse (2013), Kristen Whissel (2014) and Dan North et al. (2015) have all rethought
the importance of digital effects, and explored how their aesthetics must be approached in textual
analysis. Despite exploring optical printing for the most part rather than digital animation,
Turnock’s study is certainly in line with this scholarship. With its focus on a specific historical
period of effects production and its intermingling of industrial history and textual analysis, it also
has much in common with Michele Pierson’s earlier discussion of the beginnings of CGI in Special
Effects: Still in Search of Wonder (2002). Like Pierson’s account of the ‘wonder years’ of CGI