Pixar's Conservative Nostalgia

My son enjoying The Incredibles along with his Saturday morning oatmeal.

While my son was watching one of the fake old films Pixar had cooked up for The Incredibles dvd extras, supposedly from the 1940s or so, I overheard a curious thing. Frozone, the only African-American character in the Pixar pantheon, was complaining about the fact that he had been depicted as white in one of the “newsreels.” Also, in those extras is an outtake of the Holly Hunter character defending her status as a stay-at-home mom.  Is this Pixar making up for their films' culturally staid narrative?

I like Pixar and truly admire the artistry and craft in their movies. However, I really find the nostalgia for the mid-20th century annoying. They have refined a visual style that is an anachronistic hodgepodge of fashion and design that stretches from the 1950s to now. They rely on über-American mythical tropes of picturesque small towns and pin-striped big cities, picket fences and boy scouts that really undermine any claim to originality.

Because they are on the very cutting edge of a new technology, Pixar relies upon these clichés in order to package the very newness of what they are doing. And yes, I'll admit that they also sell us the newness and the strangeness of this technology by using masterful story-telling and animation.  However, Pixar also romanticizes a mythical and fictively innocent pre-1960s America, before Civil Rights and feminism made white male identity problematic. In that America, like the dvd, the true voices of the Frozones and the Holly Hunter feminists would be relegated to the special features instead of being central to the main program.

Beginning with 1995's Toy Story to 2009's Up,  Pixar has explored this theme of lost innocence so extensively that they have over-made their point. Ironically, in these films Pixar also eulogizes a bygone material culture of objects and media, using newsreel footage, old toys and tv sets as stand-ins for a world that, as a leading innovator in media and technology,  they have played a big part in dismantling. While these films have been hailed as instant classics, I think that to a future audience they will appear strangely dated, as if they are some anachronistic cgi films from the 1950s.  In that theoretical future, the technology will look run-of-the-mill, and the cultural landscape that they have painted will look much like the 1950s media of nuclear families and picket fences look to us now, not cute, but like an embarrassing and unforgiveable lie.