MoMA's new exhibition Pixar: 20 Years of Animation (Dec. 14, 2005 to Feb. 6, 2006) doesn't belong in one of the world's major art museums. In fact, a show about a company that makes animated films shouldn't be in an art museum at all. Not because the sprawl of popular culture expanding into hallowed cultural spaces pollutes the value of serious art. If you believe that comics and cartoons—or even urinals on museum walls—threaten the immortal beauty and meaning of a Rembrandt or a Matisse, then your relationship to high culture is a lot less secure than you think. No, the Pixar show shouldn't be in an art museum because sophisticated animated films like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles—Pixar's two most successful movies of the six it's made so far—are not so much visual works as visual candidates for the occupation of a literary void. For some years now, a number of American novelists have offered mostly contrived stories and cartoonish characters—Jonathan Safran Foer's or Nicole Krauss' cloying caricatures, Jonathan Franzen's simile-heavy stereotypes, Salman Rushdie's failed attempts to revitalize the novel with deliberately flat characters (they read instead like the author's failures of empathy), and so forth. Maybe one reason audiences flock to Pixar and other animated films is that they'd rather experience cartoon figures who operate with complex psychologies than unachieved literary characters who act like cartoons.