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When eleven-year-old Michael Frederickson first saw the brontosaurus in that film, he was awestruck. For those in the world of CGI (computer-generated imagery), that slow-moving, tree-trimming dinosaur is an act of Iris Murdoch’s “good art,” allowing “pure delight in . . . what is excellent.” It is, for CGI artists, like the Lascaux cave paintings, Giotto’s frescoes, the Dutch masters’ portrayal of domesticity and light, Hokusai’s paintings, and Cézanne’s cubism-inspiring apples: a new way of seeing the world. With the magic special effects, Spielberg and his team created tyrannosaurs, triceratops, stegosauruses, and brontosauruses that we, as viewers, feel are real.

To explain to his parents how Jurassic Park moved him so, Michael bought the film’s soundtrack and played it one night during dinner. As they sat listening, Michael burst into tears. His parents thought he was depressed. A year later, in sixth grade, Michael was given this essay prompt: What is the best day you could ever have? Michael’s answer: “After lunch, do computer animation for Pixar.” After studying computer science, where he often found digital awe in the patterns and systems of code, he would in fact make his way to Pixar and begin a career in visual awe.

Today, Michael is a “set artist” at Pixar. He uses the latest advances in computer graphics, big data, and machine learning to create the visual worlds of Pixar films—the streets of Paris in Ratatouille, the reef life in Finding Dory, and the interiors of Riley’s mind in Inside Out.

For Michael, Inside Out allows its viewers to reflect upon loss and the search for identity. Working on it led him to insights about his own life, but once it was released in theaters, he felt adrift. As he tells me this, he quotes from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: “in landlessness alone resides highest truth.” Awe does leave us in a “landless” place, unmoored and unconstrained by the default self and society’s status quo. He began giving a talk around Pixar, which he shares with me over a cup of coffee. After some pleasantries Michael opens his laptop to his first slide, “The Sixth Emotion.” That emotion is awe.

For Michael and so many others, a point of visual art is to evoke awe. Art allows us to transcend, in Murdoch’s words, the “selfish dream life of the consciousness.” Or within the framework we have been developing here, art can quiet the oppressive excesses of the default self and lead us to “love in the highest part of the soul,” feelings of joining with others in an appreciation of what is meaningful and life-giving. The slides in his talk offer one kind of proof of the centrality of awe to visual art. He shows a slide with dozens of awe expressions from films. Steven Spielberg cast Drew Barrymore in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, he notes, because of her awe face. He then produces a convincing Keanu Reeves imitation from The Matrix—“Holy shit, this shit is amazing”—and then exults that The Matrix “is all IT.” Luke Skywalker is “the galactic purveyor of awe,” and here Michael covers Joseph Campbell’s treatment of awe-guided heroic journeys in myth, an inspiration of Star Wars. It is a dizzying tour of how film documents awe.

The archaeological record suggests that we started creating visual art about 100,000 years ago, when we began beautifying our bodies with ocher paint, decorating shells for necklaces, burying people with sacred objects, and eventually—60,000 years ago—painting and engraving on rocks and rock walls, often in caves. Today, the passions we feel from visual art are many, and range from feelings of beauty, to astonishment, to comic absurdity, to the sense of being mocked. And let’s not forget boredom as you slog through a museum wondering what the point of art is. The question we take on here is: How is it that a painting, or the design of a building, or a textile, or a film, can move us to feel awe?

Life Patterns in Room 837

In 1977, my family made a pilgrimage to the Louvre before crossing the channel to Nottingham, England, for a sabbatical year. Rolf and I, then fourteen and fifteen, sprinted through the museum, snapping photos—with Kodak Instamatics—of Mona Lisa. Security guards told us to calm down—Tranquille! Not a lot of awe, I must say.

In room 837, things changed. My dad suggested we stand for a minute in front of the Dutch masters, in particular Johannes Vermeer, Pieter de Hooch, and Jan Steen. Visitors crowded around Vermeer, and softly oohed and aahed in tones of reverence. His work, as luminous as it is, struck me as too staged and controlled; too much “perfection of form” for my teenage eye hungering to redeem the wild. I was moved by Vermeer’s predecessor, de Hooch, a painter of “quietly revolutionary” paintings, in the words of art historian Peter Sutton.