Escaping To America In Toy Story, A Pixar Film

“Culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part…Under monopoly all mass culture is identical (4). Writing in the 1940s, German intellects, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, coined the term “cultural industry” to describe how in a world dominated by capitalism and consumption, culture has become a standardized commodity for the singular goal of profit. Since their writing in the 1940s, major technological advances have transformed cultural production, thus leading to media professor, David Hesmondhalgh’s creation of a new definition for what he calls the “culture industries”. While Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the “culture industry” is based on commodifying culture through the creation of meaningless and uniform goods that appeal to the masses, Hesmondhalgh states that the “cultural industries” produce social meaning through the dissemination

To exemplify the difference between the “cultural industry” and the “cultural industries”, the success of Toy Story, a Pixar film, will be analyzed from both perspectives.
Escaping to America in the 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer were faced with a world far too similar to the one they left behind in Europe. While the spread of fascism and Nazism dominated German culture, consumption and capitalism were the predominant themes of American life. Understanding that Nazism prevailed due to propaganda’s appeal to the masses, Adorno and Horkheimer recognized that cultural production in America is based on the same notion of universality and mass appeal. Thus, central to their understanding of cultural production is the belief that all culture, whether it be film, television, or radio, are constructed in a standardized and indistinguishable manner for the primary goal of