Hollywood Animation, Late Modernity and Contemporary America

One of the primary distinguishing features of post-1990s Hollywood animation is its foregrounding of contemporary culture and society. While many of the ‘classic’ Disney films are set in fantastical or fairy tale landscapes geographically and temporally removed from everyday life (‘once upon a time…’), most animated features from the early 1990s onwards are self-conscious artefacts of late modernity. There are two primary manifestations of the foregrounding of contemporary culture in post-1990s Hollywood animation. The first, and most immediately visible, is (a usually comic) intertextuality that takes the form of an intensified referentiality to other works of popular culture and modern life more broadly. The second form is that of social commentary, which is often satirical in nature and tends to be a more abiding thematic focus than the intertextual allusion. This chapter argues that both forms serve a similar function: they are strategies of proximation that anchor films to recognisable and identifiable situations and events.