"Spielbergian" isn't always understood as a compliment; Mr. Spielberg is often accused (not always unjustly) of grandiosity, sentimentality and the wanton manipulation of his audience's feelings.
"Croods" is a digital product of about 250 billion pixels, with high-definition sound that, along with the images and story, is designed to maximize emotional manipulation of the audience.
For all the calculated manipulation of the audience — emotional and physical — that goes into the strippers' routines, Mike makes sure that they see themselves in it, and that they're invested in it as a self-representation.
This is not to say that there are not some more direct anthems to vibrate the funny bone such as "Cheese", celebrating his dairy addiction with lines like, "I Camembert it any more!", and "Prejudice", a clever manipulation of the audience who think Minchin is singing about the N-word but is in fact singing about ginger-haired folk: "Only a ginger can call another ginger, ginger".
Finally, in Study 5, an experimental manipulation of an audience's reaction to racist jokes targeting people from the Middle East affected implicit normative evaluations about this group and that these implicit normative evaluations in turn affected discrimination.
He comes across as a sympathetic truth-teller, even as his jeremiads against corporate power, and his critique of the slavish passivity of his audience, serve to buttress corporate power through the manipulation of that very audience.
The mechanics of audience manipulation may be obvious here, but they often work.
Graham Greene, who famously nurtured a "splinter of ice" in his heart, was a master of audience manipulation.
All film-makers are in the business of audience manipulation, it's just that some are better at it than others.
In a way, this is just a more subtle form of audience manipulation, as director Tristan Sharps admits: "When you take away all the traditional rules and break the context in which they are watching a piece of theatre, they have to surrender to it.
