Pixar's America

Dietmar Meinel is a research and teaching assistant at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany, in the Department of Anglophone Studies. He has published essays with the European Journal of American Culture, NECSUS European Journal for Media Studies, and the Animation Studies Journal as well as in the essay collection Rereading the Machine in the Garden (2014). Meinel has co-edited the volume Black, White, and In-Between (2008) to which he also contributed the essay “White Western: Whiteness and Race Politics from John Wayne to Clint Eastwood.”

• Introduction: Exceptional Animations; The Rise to Popularity: The Pixar Studios and Digital Animation.- Chapter 1; Transnational Aesthetics? The Animation and Mediation of American Culture.- Chapter 2 “You Better Play Nice:” Digital Enchantment and the Performance of Toyness in Toy Story (1995) Fearful Sheriff Dolls and Oblivious Space Ranger Action Figures Stupid, Little, Insignificant Toys.- Chapter 3; An Animated Toast to the Ephemeral: The Multicultural Logic of Late Capitalism in Toy Story 2 (1999).- Chapter 4;  Chapter 9; Driving In Circles: The American Puritan Jeremiad in Cars (2006) Narratives of Individual and National Decline.- Chapter 10; Animating a Yet Unimagined America? The Mediation of American Exceptionalism in Toy Story 3 (2010)