A couple weeks ago a bunch of Wordle devotees got bent out of shape because the day’s answer was MANGA, and, not knowing anything about the most popular mode of illustration in the world—including the US—they broke their streaks. It was also a slightly tricky word since it has the 2 A’s, and it can be hard to get the info that will get you closer to that answer. If you get to MANGO, and you don’t know the word MANGA exists, you’re screwed.
If you think manga is a reach, isekai will be light years from your world. (Apple Notes in English recognizes manga but puts a little red squiggle under isekai.) But isekai was added to the OED in their March 2024 batch, so, ahem, keep up. It names a broadly available narrative idea—being suddenly transported into another world—that didn’t quite line up with a genre in Anglophone literary or cinematic production but that absolutely did in the anime industry. If Gulliver’s Travels and Tron had both been called “zappers,” “isekai” might not have made the inroads it has. But they weren’t and it has.
X-Men ’97, a continuation of the 1990s animated series, debuted that same month on Disney+. It has been a resounding success with Gen-Xers for whom hearing the opening weedle-eedle-ee-dee-dee of the theme song is the closest I they will ever come to thinking I am they are cool again. There is a lot to like about it: its old school, on-the-2’s animation style; the “adult” themes that the original series emphasized; the sheer speed with which is runs through its plots, creating a kind of whiplash as you try to keep up. Eric Lewald, the original showrunner, called this “the unwritten law of childhood: If you didn’t understand everything in a story that was ‘older,’ you yearned to” (Previously on X-Men, 18). Beyond its nostalgia demo the new series seems to have performed decently, and it will surely be back. Beau DeMayo, the new showrunner, captured a vibe that has utterly eluded Disney up to now. Then he was fired in the midst of the pre-release publicity tour so future installments will probably be a mess.
One thing the new X-Men series got right was its bottle episode, or half-episode, “Motendo.” X-Men ’97 doesn’t have the broadcast-TV runtime discipline of the earlier cartoon, but it acts like it. Dividing its “half-hour” slot into two stories, both even more rushed, triggers a bone-deep, third-derivative nostalgia: not for the characters, not for their stories, not for the storytelling, but for the accommodation of the storytelling to the format. This is something like what the Greatest Generation audiences might have felt when they first saw Raiders and remembered the serials of their youth.
Onscreen-digital Mojo looms over Jubilee and Sunspot. From Marvel’s X-Men ‘97
In this case Jubilee and Sunspot are sucked into a videogame via the “Motendo” system. There they encounter larger-than-life villain Mojo, an alien who lives on ratings. The core mechanic is that Mojo gets bigger and flabbier the more people watch his gladiatorial shows. When we first meet him he is looking thin. Jubilee compliments him on his diet, but he laments, “Actually it’s been a horrible third quarter and it shows. Ratings are down, down, down. Thirsty for the next big thing, dirty girl. That’s why I made the pivot to videogames.” It’s a little flatfooted to say “Disney did the same,” but in February Disney did announce a plan to invest $1.5 billion in Epic Games, albeit without the camp.
Ann Nocenti, the comic artist who came up with Mojo in 1985, explained, “I was studying media at the time, going for a master’s degree up at Columbia's School for International Affairs, and was reading Marshall McLuhan, Noam Chomsky, Ed Herman, [Walter] Lippmann, and others like that, so it came out of reading them; but it also came out of trying to write journalism myself and hitting on the multiple media ownership dilemma. That led to the idea of Mojo, and his need to control all media. I also did a New Mutants story where I literally had a character called ‘Manufactured Consent’ after Noam Chomsky's book. I was working at a magazine, Lies of Our Times, then, and we critiqued the New York Times coverage of stuff. So, it was out of that swirl of stuff that Mojo came.”
Mojo, then, has always been an on-the-nose media industries critic. Showrunner, producer, network owner, galactic megalomaniac—he was a glimpse into the deregulated future of media well before the Clinton administration liquidated the financing and syndication rules. As for his style, he has been pretty Rip Taylor/Tom-Cruise-as-avatar-of-Jewish-Hollywood-Les-Grossman from the start. This is a familiar mode of cooptation: a sincere criticism of the system taken up by the system, displaced into a minoritized identity to be fostered and contained. Bringing Mojo back for ’97 had to be a simple decision.
Yet Mojo’s pivot to videogames creates a complex spectatorial problem. If a tv show draws a mass audience, you can think that viewers are surrendering their will to the program. That’s the Mojo-scenario from the original cartoon; that’s manufacturing consent; that’s “the boob tube.” But when a videogame draws a mass audience, people are playing it; they are not absorbed into the story as spectators; they are all isekai’d into the mechanics, into their processual identities. Motendo is the game system, but Mojovision is, essentially, Twitch. Mojo doesn’t want to sell a billion cartridges; he wants to reconstitute the dwindling TV audience through videogames. Flatfootedly, again, we can say Disney wants the same.
But we are screaming through a 15–minute cartoon, and speed washes away the contradictions. Lewald lamented that the 1994 “Mojovision” episode (s2e11) didn’t have any setup. “There was no personal X-Men story.” DeMayo, fellow writer Charley Feldman, and the rest of the crew have fixed that. “Motendo” has a bunch of fun setup—Magneto, wearing his heavy obligations as leader of the X-Men—simply does not want to celebrate Jubilee’s birthday by going to the arcade at the mall. Jubilee heads to her room to vent; that’s when the isekai plot kicks in.
Trapped in Mojoworld, Jubilee and Sunspot escape with the help of an older Jubilee, a digital avatar who survived the testing phase of Mojo’s “pivot.” And just to make sure we don’t miss the residual televisual logic of the game, Mojo is not simply a conglomerator but a showrunner/head writer. “I don’t want to say something scary like ‘If you die in the game you die in real life,’ but: Stakes.” (The original “Mojovision” also lacked that simple mechanic.)
What is happening here is a new alignment in which the postmodernism of Mojo’s identity form and his medianxieties is itself retro and as such a marker of the continuing Disney/Hollywood industrial crisis. My nostalgia is Mojo’s is Disney’s is the structural role of the Writers Guild: What all of us know is that within our insoluble temporal belatedness we are one poor decision away from being left behind, manga-less wordlers, mojoless worldbuilders. Zapping into the future, even a future past, is training for the now that has slipped, is slipping, will have been slipping away.
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The Inside Out movies are not isekai; but they are lodged at the center of Disney’s continuing quest to coordinate screen entertainment and irl behavior, to find the lever that will allow them to coordinate the mediascape. (I am taking and re-contextualizing the idea of coordination from Christopher GoGwilt, who has written briefly about it here and here.)
I drove across LA to the Culver Theater to see Inside Out 2. Culver City is a media city. The Culver Studios are right next door to the theater—this was Ince, then DeMille, then RKO-Pathé, but even by the 1930s the studio was a flexible, rentable space—not the village-in-the-city that Paramount was. Media owners were as likely to rent the space as use it. It was the home of Selznick, then Desilu, then it was “Culver City Studios,” then Laird, then GTG (Grant Tinker and Gannett (?!)) then Sony but not the main Sony, and then in 2004 a bunch of private equity players.
Hollywood has always been slightly ahead of the financialization curve, but that is difficult to see because such “innovations” transpire in a heavily unionized, heavily nepotized industry. Cutting edge or old school? Emergent or residual? Both, usually. Hollywood has been selling off its lots and leasing them back forever.
The Culver Studios are now owned by Hackman Capital Partners, which also owns Radford in Studio City, (CBS) Television City in Fairfax, Kaufman and Silvercup in New York, and millions of square feet in the UK and Ireland. They lease a ton of Culver Studios to Amazon, which owns MGM, so the place has that classical-Hollywood-meets-tech-giant vibe that sometimes feels like a crappy spray-on stucco nostalgia and sometimes feels like a world realizing some of its temporally syncretic possibilities in ways you can endorse.
The Culver Studios Gate 2, via wikipedia. jengod, photographer
Hackman also developed the “Culver Steps” shopping center around the studio’s front gate, which, like a lot of Culver City, seems nice but not too nice. This part of Culver has some decently protected bus and bike lanes that make me, as a Hollywood denizen, jealous. At the same time the pragmatic commercial tidiness makes me worry that there is a lot of ruthless policing dedicated to keeping it from turning into “Hollywood.” Indeed, the city spends a fortune on cops: $56m to police a population of about 45,000. Culver City is an independent municipality so its businesses—Amazon, Apple, TikTok, Sweetgreen—spin off millions in taxes, and a lot of that money stays right there, making it a city where those businesses want to be.
What I am trying to convey here is that the Culver Theater is precisely—astonishingly precisely—a metonym for its place. Movie theaters don’t have to be that way. They can be ahead of or behind their locales. They can have a strange vibe that causes their neighbors to wonder about the mysteries of real estate. They can be palatial when their surroundings are not; they can be utterly generic. But the Culver Theater is both a perfectly ordinary theater and the home of Amazon’s state-of-the-art postproduction stages.
The 34’ Samsung Onyx screen at Culver Post
And that precise fit is why I went, because the Culver Theater has some of the few Samsung Onyx screens in the US. It was someone from Pixar who told me I had to see Inside Out 2 there. Seeing a 70mm IMAX print is a specific kind of cinephilia, one that seeks out experiences of durable monumentality. The cutting edge of the theatrical industry is far more unassuming.
An Onyx screen is not part of a projection system; it is a giant 4K LED wall. It is bright (300 nits; four times an IMAX). It has incredible contrast. It has HDR. Like a giant tv? Like a giant phone? That’s the question. Because if the LED screen is the future of exhibition and it is like a giant tv then how on earth could it compete with a good home theater/tv setup? At Pixar, this is existential: will people go back to the movies? Because if they don’t—if parents and kids just wait until the movies show up on Disney+—then Pixar can’t make $200m movies anymore, can’t take the time and money to develop its own software the same way, can’t push theaters to raise their standards, and can’t contribute to the waterfall of revenue that props up the conglomerate.
The Culver Theater is not like a home theater. When Joy sits on a pile of repressed memories and gazes out into the black distance, that black is black. And when the lights on the train in the Disney studio logo roll by, they shoot out from the screen like Spielberg beams. There is a Thomas Kinkadean, light-’em-up ceramic village feel to the studio logo, but once those lights are put to work in telling a story that kitschiness wanes. It is a different experience from bounce-back, silver-screen projection, but it is not like a tv. In limited ways it tips from receiving the image—even the giant projected image at an IMAX—to be subject to the image. There is a little more immersion to these moving images, but also a lot more heft-without-the-implication-of-weightiness? solidity-without-the-implication-of-deadness? durability-without-the-implication-of-temporality? These images, on this screen, in this world that spans from deep black to radiant white and through the super-saturations of the emotions to the microtextured surfaces of the ice and Riley’s fraying t-shirt, have an internal life.
As you already know, parents and kids did go see Inside Out 2. It will make more than $500m in the US and almost at least [—ed.] that much abroad (it looks like). It is making money in the US faster even than The Super Mario Bros. Movie did last summer. It won’t make as much money in Japan, but it has made $65m in Mexico, twice as much as the first installment. [It crossed $1bn this weekend and has a decent chance of out-earning Mario.—ed.] For now, Pixar’s unique proposition—ultra-premium animation supported by blockbuster revenues—lives.
Graph from the-numbers.com
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Inside Out 2 is either entirely a workplace movie or not at all a workplace movie. The emotions spend their days hotdesking the big console; they sleep just upstairs; a classic, artisanal, live-work arrangement. Their world comes apart when a construction crew shows up to make room for new emotions. These guys are blue nephroidy solids with cod-outer-borough accents, and they do not work through lunch. In addition to the construction blue dudes, there are filing blue workers and prison guard blue workers, so it seems like Riley’s mind is a workplace, and the construction don’t-call-them-Minions seem to have strong union workrules. But the emotions don’t really have leisure or workrules, so they may not really have jobs, only roles. They do have instruction manuals—a lot of them. Maybe Riley’s brain is a workplace and maybe it’s not.
There are very few extracranial adults. We don’t know what Riley’s parents get up to all day (Dad’s t-shirt business survives only as an easter egg in Riley’s nightshirt). There’s basically one teacher, and she is a hockey coach. There are no Zamboni drivers or UberEats drivers or work-to-rule construction humans or “activist investors” or media buyers or streaming pipeline optimizers or Professors of the Practice in Digital Animation at CalArts or whoever else makes up the Disney-Pixar real world.
But there is a scene where the workplace/playplace incoherence reaches a peak. Deep in the second act, Anxiety has all but taken over Riley; Joy is leading the gang to retrieve Riley’s Sense of Self—let me record scratch this summary to say the thing about the Inside Out movies is that much of their inventiveness emerges from a prior commitment to being literal beyond tolerating; they know this and play it for laughs often enough (the sar-chasm gag is solid); but literalness makes summarizing the thing equally annoying, like describing minimalist sculpture, which is, I think, what actually annoyed Michael Fried so much in “Art and Objecthood”; back to the summary—so Joy and the gang are retrieving the Sense of Self.
Along the way they discover Riley’s old mental pillow fort, but inside it has been remade as an open-cubicle animation studio in which row upon row of blobs of different colors are being forced to draw up negative scenarios for the future so that Anxiety can in turn come up with countermeasures. Joy starts suggesting alternative timelines—ways things might go happily, bits of good luck—until one of the blobs comes up with a positive outcome on his own. It’s a workplace revolt, and it is pitched as political. For Anxiety looms over the space on a giant screen a-la-1984—so “a-la” that when Joy leads the blobs’ uprising the scene becomes a reenactment of Ridley Scott’s legendary Apple commercial, with a chair hurled into the big screen rather than a sledgehammer.
Riley’s animators at work, via Screenrant
Anxiety oversees the room of animators, via Screenrant
The looming Anxiety in Inside Out 2 is not a projection; it is a monitor. When the chair hits it, it cracks in a shardy, angular way that aligns it with Riley’s new, ductile Sense of Self. It does not tear like the movie screen in Saboteur and it does not glitch out like a subpanel of pixels in a digital array might. I didn’t throw anything at the Samsung Onyx LED wall; I don’t know how it breaks.
Disney cracks when it pivots, when it shifts from Joy to Anxiety, when it is besieged by the Nelson Peltzes of the world, when it changes strategies. This spring Disney pivoted away from Pixar-making-series-for-Disney+ back to Pixar-just-making-movies and laid off 175 employees. In the midst of a generally unionized Disney, Pixar is not. Those Pixar workers were reverse-isekai’d out of that now-retro, high–90s world of “fun at work.” When you can’t tell whether you are at a workplace or not, getting laid off cracks your sense of self differently. You thought you were Joy, living for your role; you aren’t even a blue dude with an IATSE–mandated lunchbreak.
Standing around Riley’s control console the emotions look out through her eyes. The world comes at them via a giant screen, the complement to the surveillance setup in the pillow fort. But small screens matter, too. The first thing the hockey coach does at skills camp is take the campers’ phones. The last thing Riley does in Inside Out 2 is check her phone to see if she’s made varsity. It reminds the audience that, hey, guess what, you can finally check yours again, if you haven’t. In between, you have been warned. Ennui’s essential prop is her phone, and we see that when Sadness gets hold of it, she nearly wrests control of Riley.
Inside Out 2 culminates in a celebration of all the emotions, old and new, that go into Riley; the X-Men franchise celebrates all the differences that go into its ragtag bands of mutants. These pluralisms are a refuge for the media corporation working its way through what we might call a coordination crisis. Where will Disney locate its intermedia levers? How will it articulate its commodified experiences?
In X-Men ’97 the videogame plays out on the screen for a neo–TV audience; in Inside Out 2 the artmaking plays out on the screen for a strategic decision-maker (Anxiety); in the Culver Theater, the two find a recombinant entente as the artmaking plays out for a neo–TV audience. In all three the allegory is spectacularized, not played through. For now, there is still enough lure for audiences in the sympathetic witnessing of aesthetic experience that Disney’s pivot to videogames can remain partial. For now, Disney can insist you put your phone aside or zap you into a world where there are no phones to begin with.