Pixars Boy Stories by Ken Gillam

Pixar's Boy Stories : Masculinity in a Postmodern Age **ISBN:** 9781442233584 **Publication Date:** 27 March 2014 Since its first feature in 1995, Toy Story, Pixar Animation Studios has produced a string of commercial and critical successes that include Monsters, Inc., WALL-E, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, and Up. In many of these films, male characters feature prominently, usually as the main protagonist. Despite obvious surface differences, these figures are often hypermasculine types who follow similar narrative paths toward domestic fulfillment and civic engagement. However, these paths just as often lead to postmodern social roles more revelatory of the current "crisis" that sociologists and others have noted in boy culture. In Pixar's Boy Stories: Traditional Masculinity in a Postmodern Age, Shannon R. Wooden and Ken Gillam carry on the tradition of gender analyses of animated films begun by other scholars. In particular, the authors examine how boys become men and how men measure up in films produced by the animation giant. Offering counterintuitive readings of boy culture, this book describes how the films quietly but forcefully reiterate traditional masculine norms, in terms of what they praise and what they condemn. Whether toys or ants, monsters or cars, Pixar's boys and men succeed or fail according to the "boy code," the relentlessly policed gender standards rampant in American boyhood. Structured thematically around major issues in contemporary boy culture, the book discusses-among other themes-domestic conformity, hypermasculinity, social hierarchies, disability, bullying, and the implicit critique of postmodern parenting. Unprecedented in its focus on Pixar and boys in these films, this book offers a much needed perspective to current conversations about gender and cinema. Providing a critical discourse about masculine roles in animated features, Pixar's Boy Stories will be of intere...