Pixar with Lacan The Hysteric's Guide to Animation

by Rösing, Lilian Munk

• ISBN13: 9781628920598
• ISBN10: 1628920599
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2015-12-17
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Lilian Munk Rösing is an Associate Professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Also a literary critic in the field of aesthetics and psychoanalytical cultural criticism, Rösing has published (in Danish): Reading the Child, The Catechism of Gender, and 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. Hey Water, I'm in my Soup: 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. Wall-E: Humanity Stuck in Vacation Hell

12. His Master's Voice: Up

13. Conclusion

Bibliography

Index