REANIMATING ADULTHOOD

In her essay ‘Pixarvolt—Animation and Revolt’ (2007), Judith Jack Halberstam argues that certain films in the canon of contemporary animated features offer us visions of powerfully transformed worlds. In such films as Over the Hedge and Finding Nemo, traditional normative structures are displaced in acts of revolution and transformation. These narrative themes, in Halberstam’s view, are rarely given such centrality in films explicitly made for adults. The recent box office success of Pixar’s Wall-E attests to the continued popularity of animated children’s films amongst adults, a phenomenon which is cited in the popular media as a disturbing threat to ‘real’ adulthood. This chapter analyses how adulthood as a cultural category has been ordered according to the spatial and temporal scheduling of labour and reproduction, and assesses whether ‘Pixarvolt’ films represent a challenge to these schema. By building on Halberstam’s idea of ‘queer time’ as an alternative to the heteronormative frameworks of adulthood (Halberstam, 2005) and Rosi Braidotti’s work on nomadic becoming (2006), this chapter maps out the evolving imaginaries of adulthood in late modernity. Peter Bansel provides a response to this chapter.

Keywords: Animation, Pixarvolt, adulthood, Braidotti, heteronormative, alternative, temporality, media, labour, reproduction, transformation.