I am currently writing my thesis on Pixar films, especially with regard to parenting and the depiction of home life in Pixar movies.
I am hoping for any insights that you may have. My second chapter (the first being a general overview of Pixar’s history with Disney, Steve Jobs etc) is going to be focused generally on Toy Story, A Bugs Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc, Cars and Ratatouille… looking at things like Mike and Sully acting as surrogate parents to Boo, or Woody and Buzz looking after Andy for example…
The third chapter will focus on case studies of The Incredibles and Finding Nemo as I percieve these to be the films that focus most directly on family and are basically polar opposites of the same continuum. Finding Nemo revolves around a single fathers search to find his lost son, who he has not let mature and has protected him from learning life skills, also we find other characters like Crush, a laid back parent, and Gil who plays like a demi-father to Nemo and allows him to learn things on his own. The Incredibles depicts the nuclear family with the father being the protector (strong and muscly) and the mother taking care of the house and rearing the children (flexible).
I am going to post this thread on all the feature forums so please feel free to comment about any of the films on this one or go to the relevent thread and discuss it their.
Please please please only constructive feedback only, this is pretty important for me.
I’m curious, what exactly is your view for your paper? Are you trying to show Pixar’s tendency of family films and the roles of families? If I had just a little more information on why you are writing the paper and your goals for it, I could offer some criticism or advice - if you wanted it.
All in all, be blessed with your writing!
I am trying to show how Pixar uses the depiction of family in its films to aid the narrative… I’m reading alot of books on America’s fear of single parent families and divorce etc and am going to try to apply some of these fears to the Pixar films, like single parent in Finding Nemo, the safety of the Nuclear family in the incredibles, the new-male parent taking care of a child in Monsters inc for example… obv that is a really brief explanation of what I plan to achieve…
through doing my research it has become clear that the families depicted in the Pixar films are not the cultural views of the Pixar team, and there appears to be no direct chronological pattern of family depiction as I had sort of expected.
I am by no means finsihed yet and my opinions may change so don’t qoute me on what I have written but that is where I am right now.
