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.
