Pixar's Realism

This chapter serves as an introduction to Part IV which deals with US visual culture. Instead of merely focusing on the production aesthetics, this chapter analyzes Pixar&s;s imagery in terms of its visual aesthetics. Pixar&s;s imagery is often attributed to Disney and John Lasseter. In contrast, this chapter demonstrates how Pixar&s;s image aesthetics can be related to the historical computer graphics developments instead, concluding that Disney emulated Pixar&s;s style in return at a later stage. This also indicates that Pixar&s;s imagery, for the first time, made visible on a surface level the concepts of imagery that are on a production-aesthetical level have been shaping for the development of computer graphics. It is in Pixar&s;s imagery that production aesthetics and visual aesthetics are fully aligned. To illustrate this, in this chapter references to US paintings are made. This first visual impression, which can show how a certain visual style is reproduced in the Pixar films, shows why it is important in the following chapters to dive deeper into a style-historical analysis.