Combining nemo: Pixar home media and the DVD of narrative integration

Abstract

Within scholarship on contemporary home video formats, the structures of the Digital Video Disc (DVD) have been allied to Tom Gunning’s “cinema of attractions” paradigm that commonly fuels the dialectic between spectacle and narrative. This article argues how developments in DVDs as new media objects are ultimately commensurate with early cinema’s moves towards narrative structure. The DVD of Finding Nemo (Andrew Stanton, 2003) is a rich illustration of this progressive transition towards ʼnarrativised’ DVD content. The menus are ‘animated’ into bearers of narrative meaning. Pixar feature films in particular are found to be demonstrative of this trend, which suggests capabilities of the DVD and Blu-Ray in relation to storytelling-which digital streaming platforms do not yet cater to.