The care and precision required in rendering a digital universe mandate a level of microscopic vision that not even the cinema’s scrupulous attention to mise-en-scene could produce. The de-cision of Pixar to mirror the techniques of the cinema—to render things not in perfect focus but to invent in the realm of the digital blurry focus, shadow and darkness, is an important part of the emotional and philosophical make-up of these films, and links Pixar with “so-phisticated” cinema, making it a part of a cinematic canon in ways that margin-alized animation has rarely been

One needs only to think of the sequence where, just for the fun of it and with no real narrative purpose, the toys knock over a huge container of bouncing balls in the toy store.

Pixar films fascinate with spectacle.

Much as widescreen cin-ema altered the scale of perception, mak-ing it possible to perceive minute details and epic grandness, digitalization has made possible the careful construction of a cinema of impossible scale—and for the creation of an atmosphere that is graphically “clean” and carefully con-trolled down to the most microscopic, barely perceptible detail.