In praise of Pixar

Western civilisation must feel like a minefield for socially conservative parents. The idolisation of the individual is everywhere. Gone are the days when our institutions and culture imbued ideas of duty, loyalty, probity, frugality and discipline. Such is the indulgence of individual whims that for a brief period children were able to go above their parents to request, and receive, irreversible medical experiments — mutilation might be a better word — before they even reached puberty all because they played with different toys, or had different hobbies to other children of their sex. Even traditional bastions of social conservatism, like the Church of England, seem to have fallen.

To sustain the idea that all children are unique and special has also required the abandonment of another ideal: that of individual brilliance. Children are told that it’s “taking part that counts”, with schools doing everything in their power to deliver equality of outcome. Academic grades are inflated to the point of meaningless, and assessments are moved out of exam halls to ensure that children who struggle under pressure aren’t disadvantaged. Individual brilliance may fit in more tidily with classical liberal ideals than traditional social conservatism, but all social conservatives would surely emphatically reject  “participation trophy” culture and would defend the integrity of objective standards, the necessity of merit, and the moral value of learning how to fail. 

Fortunately for 30 years there has been a welcome respite in modern culture to these trends. With only occasional deviations, a series of films from Pixar (note — not Disney) have promoted the core values of social conservatism with a subtlety and sophistication that belies their status as animated films. A quick journey through the catalogue demonstrates this. In Up, an elderly widower uses helium balloons to transport his house to South America to fulfil a promise made to his deceased wife — a message that our commitment and duties to one another do not terminate with death. The words of Burke should surely ring in the ears of the initiated. In Monsters Inc, the city of Monstropolis is powered by the screams elicited from children by monsters entering their rooms through portals. When a child, Boo, escapes through one of these portals, Sulley, who was previously the best performing “scarer” in the company, becomes responsible for her care along with his friend Mike as personal ambition gives way to parenthood. Sulley and Mike soon discover that laughter is a more effective way of powering Monstropolis than screams and use this knowledge to transform the corrupt, bureaucratic company that was responsible for energy production. Paternal duty, the innocence of children, and suspicion of vast, faceless bureaucracies are the key moral and social themes.

Then there is The Incredibles, whose premise at the very least is explicitly Randian, specifically inspired by Atlas Shrugged. A group of superheroes have been forced to stop using their powers due to society’s uncontrollable envy. The same superheroes are then required to return to save civilisation from the threat posed by an evil tech genius, Syndrome, whose inventions, designed to give everyone capabilities equivalent to superpowers, end up running out of control, threatening to destroy the city. Syndrome and his inventions could be an analogy for government and greater state control, or it could be an analogy for artificial intelligence and big tech. But either way, this story has a more socially conservative denouement than a Randian one. The main character, Mr Incredible, learns by the end of the film that while his and his family’s superpowers shouldn’t be artificially repressed by external actors, he does teach his son, the superhumanly-fast Dash, to be modest and humble in how he uses his powers, with Dash deliberately coming second in a sports day event at the end of the film.

But no films better capture the innate social conservatism of Pixar than the Toy Story franchise

Even Wall-E, the favourite film of environmentalists, is hardly a Zohran Mamdanian, let’s- turn-off our-air-conditioning-and-embrace-net-zero-come-what-may plot. It’s less about energy, and more about rampant, unconstrained consumerism. And the solution comes not from induced poverty, but from further technological innovation.

But no films better capture the innate social conservatism of Pixar than the Toy Story franchise, which now is composed of five films about the perils of aging, the trials and tribulations of parenting but ultimately the deep and enduring meaning of placing duty and responsibility above all other values. In the fifth edition of the film series, when two of the toys realise they are no longer needed by the children that owned them, one says to the other: “All that matters is that we were there at the right time to help her along.” Throughout the five films the toys continuously battle with irrelevance — whether because of a new and better toy arriving, or in the case of the latest film, because of technology arriving, or because the child they belong to grows up. A variety of schemes are concocted to try and achieve immortality, from being placed in a museum where they can “last forever” and “be adored by children for generations” as one character says. Or being donated to a daycare, which will mean never being “outgrown, or neglected, never abandoned or forgotten. No owners means… no heartbreak.” There is an obvious allure to these lines on the page and in the film, but these lines are both spoken by characters who are presented unequivocally as the villains. It is the characters which ultimately return to their owner, do their duty, and accept the ephemerality of life which are the heroes.

What better film to conclude with than Inside Out, which takes place inside the mind of a teenage girl. Five characters — joy, sadness, disgust, anger and fear — are responsible for her emotional reactions and the memories they produce. As she ages, memories previously defined by pure joy, pure sadness and so on are replaced by those which combine elements of multiple. Maturity is learning to temper our emotions rather than indulge them, as we learn to accept the bittersweet essence of life. With 22 per cent of Gen Z reporting mental health issues, it’s a lesson that they could do with learning.