The Pixar Theory of Labor

“A lot of Pixar films come packaged with a quasi-humanist narrative hook that enables the public digestion of their work.”

“It is in the nature of modern capitalism that corporations, especially ones of a certain size and influence, glaze a veneer of enlightenment over a brutal, instrumental value system.”

“Pixar has created a stable of films for children that is founded on narratives of self-actualization—of characters branching out, embracing freedom, hitting personal goals, and living their best lives. But this self-actualization is almost exclusively expressed in terms of labor, resulting in a filmography that consistently conflates individual flourishing with the embrace of unremitting work.”

“The basic Pixar story is that of an individual seeking to establish, refine, or preserve their function as an instrument within a system of labor.”

“It’s possible that Pixar’s obsessiveness about work and employment has somehow been effaced in the public eye by the imaginative diversity of their films’ settings: ant colonies, space, the ocean, a bizarre alternate-world inhabited by sentient vehicles, and so on. But in Inside Out, for the first time, the ground beneath Pixar’s ideological feet comes into view, and it’s the Bay Area, California.”

“This excess, epitomized as the complete entanglement of an individual’s private life with their employment, is at the core of Pixar’s conceptualization of what it is to be a person: In every Pixar film, the protagonist’s arc is oriented toward the ultimate goal of being an efficient, productive worker—whether employment has been thematized as being a father, princess, robot janitor, toy, ant colonist, harvester of screams, adventurer in South America, or otherwise. For Pixar, to live is to work.”

“Pixar conceptualizes death not as the end of existence per se, but as the state of becoming waste. Waste does not work. Waste does not have a function. Waste is obsolete. Waste is undifferentiated.”

“At its bottom, this is the logic of pure capitalism. In an economy structured around limitless growth, dynamism must become the natural state of things. Idle capital is unproductive capital and an unproductive worker is a waste of resources. The virtuous citizen cannot only consume but must produce, an imperative that finds its current (and particularly American) incarnation in the entrepreneur, the boot-strapper, the rags-to-riches hero, who is too busy pulling themselves up by their laces to notice that there’s no top to reach.”

“Inside Out suggests that accommodating the pressures of capitalism is simply part of growing up.”