Color Alive! Technology and Animation in the Contemporary Children's Playscape

Children’s Literature Association (ChLA) Conference / Columbus, OH / June 2016.

The representation of toys coming to life has recurred as a literary and cinematic trope for over two hundred years, chronicled most prominently within literary texts in Lois Kuznets’ study When Toys Come Alive (1997), and perhaps most recently visible in film culture in Disney-Pixar’s Toy Story trilogy (1995-2010). Although much critical attention has been given to animate toys in literature and film, promotional discourses that evoke the trope of the toy “coming to life” represent a significant but underexamined site at which this concept is perpetually deployed and naturalized. Such proclamations by toy industry stakeholders and within advertising raise a number of questions that remain unanswered. What do toymakers mean when they claim that a toy “comes to life”? What discursive and technological configurations make this animation possible, and how have these changed in the past century? In what ways are technologically enhanced toys that “come to life” figured either as reinforcements of or solutions to the perceived problems of children’s waning attention spans, active and imaginative play, and creativity?

Drawing upon animation studies scholarship, material culture methods, and the work of media archaeology, my paper will examine the category of the animate toy from the late nineteenth century to the present, with particular emphasis on contemporary case studies, such as Crayola’s “Color Alive!” augmented reality coloring books, which animate children’s drawings, bringing them “to life” off the page. Tracing this trope within promotional discourse reveals several key changes in early twentieth-century children’s media culture. The animate toy is no longer restricted to animatronic toys, such talking dolls, but is instead applied to a range of tech toys, such as Crayola’s app-enabled coloring books and contemporary “toys-to-life” game platforms such as Skylanders and Disney Infinity, which combine physical and digital play with near-field communication technologies. Indeed, while the notion of the animate toy extends back for centuries, its twenty-first century incarnations are increasingly entangled with broader aspirations and anxieties associated with children’s technology and media usage. Examining both promotional discourses and these toys’ undergirding technological features, my paper investigates how animate toys are variously positioned as supplementing, enhancing, or replacing children’s imaginative and creative play.