As our blogging session draws to a close here, I'm left to wonder if anyone here will ever end up reading what I'm saying. Fligwit! Nawrton! Floot! See, I just remixed the English language past the point of referential understanding! Hahahaha!

Okay, I'm done abusing my assumed individual authorial privilege. What I had intended to share and remark upon was a video I came across today that is sure to make anyone with a soul tear up.

What I found made this video more noteworthy than the average fan-made mash-up is its being situated through John Lasseter's opening quotation, "Animation is the one type of movie that really does play for the entire audience". Along such a trajectory, the video suggests a conflation of the typical Pixar narrative structure, encapsulating a standard narrative formula, from an "odd coupling", to a "quest narrative" to a tearjerking climax which ends on a laugh - thus, making the video literally convey a condensed version of the emotional arcs a Pixar film would yield.

As such, the video demonstrates the potential of a remix text to transition from juxtaposing referents to actually providing a self-reflexive comment on the referent itself. Assembling copious footage from multiple Pixar texts for the sake of identifying story trends would normally function as a criticism in remix, but here, the editing artist uses it to articulate Pixar's process of "playing to the entire audience" as a positive (because, let's face it: few could likely find it in their hearts to criticize Pixar). In this sense, the video actually remixes one of the more common remix practices itself (critique through re-editing), which, although I may be spitballing, suggested to me the idea of a remixed response to traditional remix discourses - a celebratory, non-mocking reassembling of referents for the sake of both elucidating and championing the referents. Rather than attempting to forge a new narrative or artistic idea out of recognizable elements, the editor reassembles the recognizable elements for the sake of exposing how and why the referents themselves work.

I like the thought of closing our term's worth of tense discourses over the ethics and morality of remix by positing that remix can, as in this example, ultimately just serve to comment on how and why individuals are drawn to such referential texts in the first place. Farewell everyone, and thanks for a fun and stimulating term!