Still, Pixar's success at making literate cartoons is a seminal moment in the culture. American life is so crazy-quilted that animation's figures—these symbolic particularities—might be the only way to encompass not only the way we live, but also thoughts and feelings that have become lost to us in all the mad velocity we are surrounded by. Go ahead, laugh, but Pixar's creations have a lot to teach novelists. They might start with Finding Nemo—that fairy-tale-like story about the death of a mother, the loss of a home, the cruelty of the outside world (and the occasional kindnesses that make the cruelty even harder to bear), and a father's and son's search for each other. Yes, yes, they're fish. But the Greek gods who transformed themselves into animals, and the Greek poets who invented those transformations, did so in order to refresh the imagination by slipping into something a little less comfortable and a little more strange. Intelligent cartoons are yet another powerful form of imaginative refreshment. They'll serve until words learn a new lesson from images and come fully to life again.