Pass the Tissue Box ... It's Another Tear-Jerking Animated Movie

Media, Remediation and More During the Digital Age

As a mother watching Toy Story with my children, sometimes I have to remember that it is “just an movie” as the producers pull at my heartstrings. When the beloved Jessie doll is thrust under the bed as her toy owner grows and no longer appreciate her, tears begin to fall … until I realize that it’s a doll! An Animated doll no less.  Or then there was the time the waterworks turned on again as a I watched the feature-length movie UP!, watching the scenic life of the professor pass by and the grief over the loss of his wife depicted on the animated screen. I was actually choked up about the relationship between two animated characters.

Mission accomplished for Pixar Studios as they deftly removed the vehicle of animation and computer graphics from the equation, providing a rich cultural experience.  “They made the settings, the toys and the human characters look as much as possible like live-action film,” said Bolter and Grusin. And this “stripping away of the digital vehicle” is what makes media scholars, professors, media content producers and students of the contemporary era wonder about the impact of this new content.   

The book by Bolter and Grusin cites Marshal McLuhan’s 1964 book, “Understanding Media,” in which he said: “The content of any medium is always another medium.” This tenet perhaps lies at the core of the contemporary definition of remediation, “the representation of one medium in another.”  

Bolter and Grusin’s book sets forth a multitude of concepts regarding remediation, mediation, immediacy and hypermediacy, drawing on historical art theories and “contemporary” streams of thought. The text was a little troublesome, as it provided some historical (read outdated) examples for CD-ROms and other technology forms that have been radically displaced by the web, streaming audio, streaming video and other technology rich solutions.

Nevertheless, the concepts of remediation, immediacy and hypermediacy remain strong today and merit further discussion and evaluation.  As our media habits have matured, we have gone from a fascination with “photography and cinema” to scratching our itch for immediacy with lie, real-time content generated from the Internet.  

The book cites the advent of Microsoft windows, a graphical user interface that fades into the background. It is a tool that constantly pulls the user between manipulating the windows and examining their context. This lends itself to a dramatic multiplicity that hypermediacy perpetuates.

Further, Bolter and Grusin point to the fact that hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding the visual space as mediated and as a “real” space that lies beyond mediation. Some, including Lanham have called this the difference between looking “through” and looking “at”.

So, with all of that said, as moviegoers pack the popcorn and candy, the experience of digitally-animated films provide us not only with a fantastic  entertainment, but a journey-ride through remediation in the digital age. Pass the tissue box!