Pixar with Lacan: The Hysteric's Guide to Animation

by Lilian Munk Rösing

Overview

The films from Pixar Animation Studios belong to the most popular family films today. From Monsters Inc to Toy Story and Wall-E, the animated characters take on human qualities that demand more than just cultural analysis. What animates the human subject according to Pixar? What are the ideological implications?

Pixar with Lacan has the double aim of analyzing the Pixar films and exemplifying important psychoanalytic concepts (the voice, the gaze, partial object, the Other, the object a, the primal father, the name-of-the-father, symbolic castration, the imaginary/ the real/ the symbolic, desire and drive, the four discourses, masculine/feminine), examining the ideological implications of the images of human existence given in the films

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501320170
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	06/29/2017
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Lilian Munk Rösing is Associate Professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and a literary critic. In the fields of aesthetics and psychoanalytic cultural criticism, Rösing has published (in Danish) Reading the Child, The Catechism of Genderand The Return of Authority.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Beyond the Name of the Father: Toy Story 1

3. Big O is Watching You: Toy Story 2

4. Sadism in the Kindergarten: Toy Story 3

5. Entertainment as Warfare: A Bug's Life

6. There is Nothing More Toxic than a Human Child: Monsters, Inc.

7. Just Keep Swimming: Finding Nemo

8. More than Super: The Incredibles

9. The Mother Road: Cars

10. Man is a Puppet, Soul is a Rat: Ratatouille

11. Humanity Stuck in Vacation Hell: Wall-E

12. His Master's Voice: Up

13. Conclusion

Epilogue: Animation and Capitalism

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Everyone has always felt that Pixar films revolutionized animation, and this revolution seemed due simply to technological and narrative inventiveness. With the appearance of Lilian Monk Rösing's Pixar with Lacan, we now know the true reason for the Pixar revolution. The greatness of Pixar films stems directly from their profound engagement with Lacanian theory. The animation that Pixar creates is, as Rösing shows, the animation of the subject itself. Through a series of groundbreaking readings of all the major Pixar films, Rösing provides us with the definitive account of the reason for the Pixar revolution. If we watch Pixar films closely enough, we will have in ready to hand all the central concepts of Lacan theory, and Rösing shows us this is a breathtaking fashion.
Todd McGowan, Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Vermont, USA, and author of The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan

I found the book imaginative, engaging and unusually perceptive about the linkage of Pixar's animation to what drives us psychologically, economically and ideologically. Munk Rosing takes on all of Pixar's films, from Toy Story to Up!, demonstrating her depth of knowledge of the techniques and innovations in animation that she then analyzes beautifully by the light of psychoanalytic theory after Freud and Lacan. This is a tour de force, a must-read for all students of contemporary culture.
Juliet Flower MacCannell, Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, USA

What makes the book so charming is its humor, and its absolute commitment to Pixar's films as important contributions to modern man's self-understanding.
Dixikon (Bloomsbury translation)

From the Publisher