“Universal themes” in Pixar movies

From a discussion in my current “Pixar and the Craft of Storytelling” class, Ben O’Rourke raised the subject of affect images: images that bypass logic and thinking and hit us right in the gut. My response:

“Affect images” is an interesting idea connecting to writing of any sort, but perhaps especially in relation to Pixar. After all their background as storytellers is grounded in animation, so they are visual by instinct and training.

That might go a long way toward explaining a basic relationship to “images.” But what about the “affect” part?

Here when you talk about images that “hit us right in the gut,” I think what we see going on in large part with Pixar movies is their use, most likely consciously so, of universal themes, or what Jung called “archetypes”.

Here is a nice overview of Jung’s ideas in this regard:

Archetypes constitute the structure of the collective unconscious — they are psychic innate dispositions to experience and represent basic human behavior and situations. Thus mother-child relationship is governed by the mother archetype. Father-child — by the father archetype. Birth, death, power and failure are controlled by archetypes. The religious and mystique experiences are also governed by archetypes.

The most important of all is the Self, which is the archetype of the Center of the psychic person, his/her totality or wholeness. The Center is made of the unity of conscious and unconscious reached through the individuation process.

Archetypes manifest themselves through archetypal images (in all the cultures and religious doctrines), in dreams and visions. Therefore a great deal of Jungian interest in psyche focuses on dreams and symbols interpretation in order to discover the compensation induced by archetypes as marks of psyche transformation.

The collective unconscious is an universal datum, that is, every human being is endowed with this psychic archetype-layer since his/her birth. One can not acquire this strata by education or other conscious effort because it is innate.

We may also describe it as a universal library of human knowledge, or the sage in man, the very transcendental wisdom that guides mankind.

The themes [or archetypes] are universal not only because of their omnipresence in the human experience, Jung claimed that we all share them as a “universal datum” — the collective unconscious — since our birth.

So when we as writers use certain narrative images in our stories, those images can elicit a response — or ‘affect’ — in readers or viewers based on their own individual life experience and their connection to this collective unconscious.

Whether you subscribe to this latter notion or not, the simple fact is universal themes are powerful narrative agents. Just one quick look at Pixar movies demonstrates their embrace of this idea with themes like life, death, family, father, mother, The Other, and so on laced throughout their stories.

In Friday’s lecture, we will consider a universal theme that is present in almost every Pixar movie: separation.

Perhaps the theme that is most central to Pixar movies is identity. Think about their movies in relation to the question: Who am I? This is a question with which we deal as human beings our entire lives, but perhaps most especially as a child when we go through so many changes on all fronts. Pixar movies are always aimed at children, then at everyone else, so it should not be surprising they traffic in this fundamental question of self-identity.

But a further key to how they handle this particular universal them is the fact they almost always frame the question through relationships. That is one reason why, I think, they have so many stories with strange sojourners [Lecture 4], characters finding self-definition in relationship to other characters [you will note how often Mary Coleman uses the word “relationship” in our conversation].

So to sum up, this idea of “affect images” is a good one re Pixar for at least two reasons. First “images” speaks to the visual nature of movies. Second “affect” opens a door to how stories resonate with us and Pixar’s use of universal themes to do precisely that.

Because Pixar movies are animated and they are rated PG, people may tend to think of them as “family” movies in the sense that they are skewed young. I think we can flip that take on the term “family” in relation to Pixar to mean universal in that their films speak to the human family: boys, girls, men, women. It’s a plus, I believe, that their target audience is children because that forces them to deal with concrete, identifiable story themes and narrative dynamics. That doesn’t mean they are simple, rather in Pixar’s hands they burrow deep into basic themes to find a universe of meaning.

By the way, if you are not a parent or somehow have bypassed Pixar movies because you may think they are skewed young, I encourage you to check them out. And if I may make a suggestion, start with Up or Finding Nemo which deal with some big themes in a uniquely Pixar way: directly and yet with sophistication.

Comment Archive