Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E

9. The Pixar Reality: Digital Space and Beyond

203 9 THE PIXAR REALITY Digital Space and Beyond The groundbreaking Pixar animated film Toy Story (1995) opens on a curious note of what I have elsewhere termed “surface play” (Mouse 168). As the narrative begins we see a pattern of very white clouds set against a bright blue background, the clouds all evenly spaced and stylized , the blue “sky” far too consistent and bright to be real, and the overall image, lacking in any depth cues, unnaturally flat. It is, we soon realize, a fake sky, actually the wallpaper in the child Andy’s room, as the tracking camera reveals by showing us the various toys with which Andy is playing, buildings he has artlessly constructed of old boxes, a baseboard horizon, and, a bit later, a sharply contrasting view through an open window of “real” clouds and a hazy, “real” blue sky. The trick here is a wonderfully resonant one, not only because of the way it evokes the workings of a child’s imagination—showing how easily he can construct worlds within worlds for his own amusement—but also because of the manner in which this surface play directly addresses the work of animation and especially the perceived power of the new digital regime to offer a different level of realistic reproduction, a major leap beyond traditional 2-D animation. In opening with this trompe l’oeil effect, Toy Story quickly signals its own attitude toward that reality effect I discussed earlier. On the one hand, it is somewhat disarming in the way it seems so forthrightly to address what digital animation might do, how nearly it might, even in this first fully computer-animated feature, be expected to approach the Animating Space 204 The artlessly constructed narrative world of the child at the start of Toy Story (1995). real and catch us up in its simulacrum effect. In fact, we might even see the flat, evenly spaced, and stylized images, along with the clumsily constructed world of old boxes and cardboard pieces that Andy has put together as “sets” for his game playing, as a kind of joke about those expectations—one in keeping with the various other self-referential or inside jokes that we find scattered through our first glimpses of Andy’s room, such as the lamp from Pixar’s Academy Award–nominated short Luxo Jr. and the various books on Andy’s shelves that bear the titles of previous Pixar films, such as The Adventures of André and Wally B., Red’s Dream, and Knick Knack (1989), or the later reflexive effects in the film, including references to other Disney movies, such as The Lion King (1994). Yet, on the other hand, that self-conscious imagery also pointedly contrasts with the world we eventually see through Andy’s window and that the narrative later explores in greater detail when Woody, one of Andy’s toys, is forced to leave the safe space of Andy’s house to rescue another toy, Buzz Lightyear, from the neighboring child Sid. That reality is indeed impressive, a striking indication of what Pixar was already able to achieve with its RenderMan software, which was quickly becoming an industry standard.1 A convincing sense of depth because of its built-in multiplane effect; varied image textures; complex figure and structure modeling, thanks to its lighting effects—these are all hallmarks of that “outside” space that the narrative increasingly puts on display as it takes us deeper into its world, and as it unfolds its more complex vision of what lies behind those naive and childish images on which the film opens. Perhaps more important, in laying out two very different sorts of constructed imagery, and in playing on both the lowest and highest The Pixar Reality 205 expectations that its audience—or at least its adult audience—might have entertained for this landmark animated film, Toy Story quickly establishes a level of dialogue between these different expectations, between different possibilities for the new digital art it was heralding. Certainly the makers of Toy Story ultimately did not want to play down what they were up to, what they hoped to achieve, and what a decade of creating experimental animated shorts had tantalizingly suggested they could achieve. But they also recognized that the text they produced, one that is, as we have already suggested, highly self-conscious on a number of levels, needed to stay aware of both...