Afterword: Why Does It Matter?

In the early 1990s Pixar (the image-computing company, pre-Toy Story) was contracted by Disney to help render a dollying camera simulation through a digital environment in the ballroom scene of Beauty and the Beast. Those techniques have since evolved so much that when a so-called "live-action" version of the same musical came out in 2017, filmgoers and -makers alike took that label at face value-even though the only "live-action" consists of heavily composited appearances by humans. Movies of global cultural gravity-from Marvel Studios' universe to The Lord of the Rings to Star Wars (and on and on)-may not be promoted as computer animation, but perceptive viewers and filmmakers alike had best understand: they are precisely that, they are animated. The real passport-the empathy, emotional connection, trust, and goodwill-appeared not in the government travel documents but in the incantation of that title, evoking the transformative power of its art felt by those who had seen it.