Animation and Memory

In Pixar’s Inside Out (Docter and Del Carmen, 2015), Joy and Sadness navigate around their host Riley’s long-term memory where coloured orbs representing different events in her past are stored on shelves. The film imagines memory as fixed content that can be recalled as needed. However, developments in the interdisciplinary field of memory studies now consider memory to be much more complex than this. Like the term realism discussed elsewhere in this volume, memory is a slippery thing – it is better understood as always in a state of becoming, as related to the present more than the past, and as a creative, networked process rather than as a simple transmission of historical data. After introducing some of the broad ideas related to contemporary studies of media and memory, this chapter focuses on the ways in which we can remember the past through and with animation, and how the form can represent memory, concentrating particularly on issues of trauma and witnessing, collective memory and identity, and nostalgia.