Notes on a Luxo world

The impact of digital technologies upon contemporary film-making practice has given rise to a range of fictional film worlds to which the label ‘computer-animated’ might legitimately be applied. But the evident rejuvenation of cinema’s fictional worldhood at the hands of technological advancement are demands that can only be met by a fresh approach to understanding how the digital crafts its unique screen worlds. This article advances the term ‘Luxo’ as a useful descriptor that awards both shape and definition to the specific fictional worlds of the computer-animated feature film. Historically bound to the development of computer-animated film-making within a US context and the release of Pixar Animation Studios’ Luxo Jr. (Lasseter, 1986), this article negotiates the term as a way of examining the intrinsic cause and effect relationship between these worlds’ origins on a computer screen and their arresting, animated activity. By applying the affiliated concept of animatedness to divulge how the animators’ digital thumbprint enunciates the status of Luxo worlds as animation, this article allies the particular industrial considerations with specific textual features involved in the computer-animated film’s fictional world construction.