ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies the particular fantasy's relationship to animation through the business of computer-animated cinema, and a close examination of the industrial discourses and contexts cognizant to the Disney/Pixar interrelationship. It takes the "fantasy/animation" intersection as specifying connections between form and content that are culturally understood, but also as an index of studio identity that is informed and guided by hollywood's animation industry. By shifting the focus onto the cultural work involved in the formulation of the contemporary animation auteurs, the chapter argues that meaningful discriminations can be made between these animation studios that surface the role played by cultural conceptions of fantasy within the landscape of Hollywood animation. Pixar's film was widely credited as successful variation on the "buddy movie" formula, although this parallel has as much to do with the momentum of the "buddy movie" as a Hollywood genre during the 1980s and into 1990s as it does with the organization of Toy Story's Woody/Buzz narrative.
