"The Pixar Theory of Labor"

"With the figure of Sadness, the film appears to permit the existence of negative emotions within a broader portrait of mental health, even to the point of validating depressive feelings. Corporate entertainment—the thinking seems to go—seeks to ensure that its audience is kept mindlessly, vapidly content—but here is an exception, from the House of Mouse, no less. This evidence of humane, even progressive, thinking on the part of its writers and directors helps to contribute to the public perception of Pixar as an enlightened production house—still part of corporate Disney, for sure, but somehow authentic in spite of it. New York Times critic A. O. Scott even compared WALL-E’s vision of a ruined earth to Werner Herzog at his most pessimistic...

Pixar has created a stable of films for children that is founded on narratives of self-actualization—of characters branching out, embracing freedom, hitting personal goals, and living their best lives. But this self-actualization is almost exclusively expressed in terms of labor, resulting in a filmography that consistently conflates individual flourishing with the embrace of unremitting work...

At its bottom, this is the logic of pure capitalism. In an economy structured around limitless growth, dynamism must become the natural state of things. Idle capital is unproductive capital and an unproductive worker is a waste of resources. The virtuous citizen cannot only consume but must produce, an imperative that finds its current (and particularly American) incarnation in the entrepreneur, the boot-strapper, the rags-to-riches hero, who is too busy pulling themselves up by their laces to notice that there’s no top to reach. The natural and profitable ideological by-product of this fixation is an abhorrence of collectivism—and therefore organized labor. To be collective, to be one among many, is to no longer be a special individual producer, which is its own kind of death.
http://www.theawl.com/2015/07/the-pixar-theory-of-labor

I find myself feeling like this is an overblown analysis, and then wondering if it's just that every story is about this search for proper work. Or maybe, every search is for proper function in society, and proper function here is working.