The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company - Hardcover

Price, David A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307265757 ISBN 13: 9780307265753

Publisher: Knopf, 2008

Synopsis

The Pixar Touch is a lively chronicle of Pixar Animation Studios' history and evolution, and the â fraternity of geeksâ who shaped it. With the help of animating genius John Lasseter and visionary businessman Steve Jobs, Pixar has become the gold standard of animated filmmaking, beginning with a short special effects shot made at Lucasfilm in 1982 all the way up through the landmark films Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E, and others. David A. Price goes behind the scenes of the corporate feuds between Lasseter and his former champion, Jeffrey Katzenberg, as well as between Jobs and Michael Eisner. And finally he explores Pixar's complex relationship with the Walt Disney Company as it transformed itself into the $7.4 billion jewel in the Disney crown.

About this title

About the Author

David A. Price was raised in Richmond, Virginia, and was educated at the College of William and Mary, where he received his degree in computer science. He graduated from Harvard Law School and Cambridge University. Price has written for The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, Business 2.0, The Washington Post, Forbes, and Inc. and is the author of Love and Hate in Jamestown. He lives with his wife and sons in Washington, D.C.

Reviews

Reviewed by Rob Pegoraro

A generation of American kids has grown up watching Pixar's movies in theaters, on TVs and now on portable gadgets like DVD players and iPods. But in The Pixar Touch, David A. Price starts this pop-culture giant's story in neither Hollywood nor Silicon Valley, but the University of Utah's computer-science department.

There in the early 1970s a programmer named Ed Catmull decided to branch out into computerized animation, despite the almost total uselessness of the day's slow, expensive computers for that task and the almost total lack of job options for somebody with that skill. Price, a former reporter for Investor's Business Daily, describes how Catmull and a crew of other would-be electronic movie-makers wound up migrating to the New York Institute of Technology's Computer Graphics Lab, a locale that offered the advantages of generous funding for new computers and lax oversight. And then they waited for somebody in the movie business to underwrite their vision of using computers, not pens and ink, to draw each frame of a motion picture. Eventually, "Star Wars" director George Lucas offered Catmull a job, after which he gradually hired away his NYIT colleagues.

At this point, this band of frustrated innovators comes off a bit like a Pixar hero: tugged along by big dreams but held back by an endearing level of cluelessness. Price notes that "the Lucasfilm Computer Division did not yet have a computer, or even a word processing machine. The only typewriter was on the desk of Catmull's secretary," which its staffers used to hammer out "white papers and design documents."

Paper turned into pixels in 1981, when Paramount hired Lucasfilm to whip up a brief animation of a dead planet being brought to life for "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." (On a micro level, computers just make animation more efficient; on a macro level, they have made animation much more of a 3-D medium, in much the same way that ever-more processing power has turned the video game into an increasingly movie-like experience.) Price captures the extraordinary attention the programmers paid to detail in hopes that this clip would serve as a "sixty-second commercial" for their talents: One programmer ensured that the stars visible in the background matched those visible from a real star 11.3 light-years away from Earth.

Additional gigs in movies and commercials, along with animated shorts made to impress others in the business, led to Pixar's birth as an independent company in 1986 -- purchased and bankrolled by Steve Jobs, who had just been forced out of Apple. From this point on, The Pixar Touch can be read in two ways. For fans of Pixar's work, it can resemble the "making of" and director's-commentary bonus features on most DVDs. You could throw a copy of each Pixar release into your DVD player as you read the chapter about its production, and you could recite enough trivia to wow any Pixar completist. (Did you know that Sulley, the blue behemoth in "Monsters, Inc." had 2,320,413 hairs? Me neither.) But the book also must serve as a history of Pixar the company, and there it loses its focus on some critical developments.

Jobs, who apparently did not cooperate with the book, first appears as a sort of distant, cranky godfather to the company and then largely vanishes offstage. This treatment leaves some plot lines hanging: Did his well-documented perfectionism lead to better movies, or did he just annoy the artists?

Some anecdotes fade in and out randomly. A chapter about the making of "Monsters, Inc." opens with seven pages of reporting about an unsuccessful lawsuit alleging that Pixar stole the basic story from an outside author, then switches gears for the next seven pages to chronicle the making of the movie, then launches into a recounting of a different intellectual-property lawsuit. Insights into how much creators can, do or should learn, borrow or steal from the work of others get lost amid the courtroom stenography.

Price also occasionally shows questionable judgment in his sourcing, for example wrapping up a discussion of the success of "The Incredibles" with a page of quotes from the breathlessly enthusiastic reviews at AintItCool.com. And too many of the book's illustrations consist of verbatim reproductions of press releases, hardly the most riveting historical documents.

The book concludes with a chastened Disney -- which had long ago fired future Pixar director John Lasseter from an animator's job -- buying Pixar for $6.3 billion. In one way, it ends too soon, barely addressing Pixar's relatively aggressive moves to distribute its releases online as digital downloads. Will those efforts pan out, or will Pixar's management blow this chance after getting so many earlier technological advances right? We may have to wait for a sequel to find out.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Pixar animation studios, the company behind such blockbuster movies as Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc., and Finding Nemo, started in the late 1970s as a project in a garage on Long Island by a soft-spoken former missionary named Ed Catmull. The computer-graphics researcher possessed the tenacity to follow through on the painstaking process of making 3-D computer characters come to life on the screen; he accidentally fell into the role of business leader when his creations took the world by storm. Price, author of Love and Hate in Jamestown (2003), writes for the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and USA Today, among others. He charts the course of Pixar from obsession to its relationship with LucasFilm, the purchase by Apple Computer’s Steve Jobs, and finally the Disney buyout. It’s an eye-opening account that pulls back the curtain to reveal the process of evolution, the labor of love, and all the business dealings behind the magic of 3-D animation. --David Siegfried

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Still another film was in Pixar’s pipeline during the making of A Bug’s Life. Talk of a sequel to Toy Story began around a month after Toy Story opened, when Catmull, Lasseter, and Guggenheim visited Joe Roth, Katzenberg’s successor as chairman of Walt Disney Studios. Roth was pleased and embraced the idea.

Disney had recently begun making direct-to-video sequels to its successful feature films, and Roth wanted to handle the Toy Story sequel this way, as well. A direct-to-video sequel could be made for less money, with lesser talent. It could be priced cheaply enough to be an impulse purchase. Disney’s first such production, an Aladdin spin-off in 1994 called The Return of Jafar, had been a bonanza, returning an estimated hundred million dollars in profits. With those results, all self-restraint was off; Disney would soon grace drugstore shelves with Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas; Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World; The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride; and still another Aladdin film.

Everything else about the Toy Story sequel was uncertain at first: whether Tom Hanks and Tim Allen would be available and affordable, what the story’s premise would be, even whether the film would be computer-animated at Pixar or cel-animated at Disney.

As with A Bug’s Life, Lasseter regarded the project as a chance to groom new directing talent. In early 1996, once Roth decided that Pixar would handle production of the sequel, Lasseter assigned directing duties. Stanton was immersed in A Bug’s Life; Pete Docter, whom Lasseter regarded as the next in line, was already beginning development work on his own feature about monsters. For Toy Story 2, Lasseter turned to Ash Brannon, a young directing animator on Toy Story whose work he admired. Brannon, a CalArts graduate, had joined Pixar to work on Toy Story in 1993.

The story originated with Lasseter pondering what a toy would find upsetting. In the world of Toy Story, a toy’s greatest desire is to be played with by a child. What, Lasseter wondered, would be the opposite of that–worse, even, than being displaced by another toy?

An obsessive toy-collector character had appeared in a draft of Toy Story and was later expunged. Lasseter felt that it was now an idea whose time had come. Thinking of his own tendency to shoo his sons away from the toys on his office shelves, especially a Woody doll that he prized for its Tom Hanks signature, Lasseter began talking about the notion of a toy collector who hermetically seals toys in a case where they will never be played with again. For a toy, it would be a miserable fate. Brannon then suggested the idea of a yard sale where the collector recognizes Woody as a rare artifact and distracts Andy’s mom to grab him. Out of those ideas, Toy Story 2 was born.

The concept of Woody as part of a collectible set came from the draft story of A Tin Toy Christmas, in which Tinny was part of a set in a toy store and became separated. The other characters in Woody’s set emerged from viewings of 1950s cowboy shows for children, such as Howdy Doody and Hopalong Cassidy. “We started looking at these canonical characters that you find in westerns,” said Guggenheim, who was producer of Toy Story 2 during the first year of development work. “You would find a gruff old prospector. You would find other characters, like an Annie Oakley—Calamity Jane sort of character, a tough frontier girl.”


The development of the cowgirl character, Jessie, was also kindled by Lasseter’s life; Nancy had pressed him to include a character in Toy Story 2 for girls, one with more substance than Bo Peep. Jessie had started in a different form, as Señorita Cactus, a Mexican side- kick to the Prospector; she was to sway Woody with her feminine wiles. When the character of Jessie replaced her, the personality of the female lead became tougher and more direct.

As the story approached the production stage in early 1997, there remained the question of where Pixar would find the people to make it, given the demands of A Bug’s Life on the company’s employees. Part of the answer would come from a production organization within Pixar devoted to computer games. The Interactive Products Group, with a staff of around ninety-five (out of Pixar’s total staff of three hundred), had its own animators, its own art department, and its own engineers. Under intense time pressure, they had put out two successful CD-ROM titles: The Toy Story Animated StoryBook, released in April 1996, and The Toy Story Activity Center, released in October of the same year to coincide with the videotape release of Toy Story. The games featured much of the voice cast of the film, except that the voice actor Pat Fraley took Tim Allen’s place as Buzz, while Woody was played by Tom Hanks’s younger brother, Jim. The company touted StoryBook as the first CD-ROM to deliver full screen, motion-picture-quality animation on home computers. Between the two products, the interactive group had created as much original animation as there was in Toy Story itself.

Jobs had convinced himself that the games would sell ten million copies, like best-selling direct-to-video films. Kerwin, as head of the group, insisted that the market wasn’t there on such a scale. We can make a good, profitable business out of them, she said. (The products had sold almost a million copies combined.) But they won’t be a home run like Toy Story.

If that’s the case, Jobs said finally, then why don’t we just turn all these people over to making another movie? Thus, in March1997, while Kerwin took the assignment of building a short-films group, Jobs shut down the computer games operation and the games staff became the initial Core of the Toy Story 2 production team.



Press Release
TIM ALLEN AND TOM HANKS RETURN
AS “BUZZ LIGHTYEAR” AND “WOODY”
March 12, 1997
The Walt Disney Studios and Pixar Animation Studios announce today that a sequel to the groundbreaking Academy Award—nominated feature film TOY STORY is underway and being created exclusively for home video. The all-new, fully computer-animated sequel will feature the voices of Tim Allen and Tom Hanks, who reprise their enormously popular roles as “Buzz Lightyear,” the space ranger, and “Woody,” the pull-string Cowboy, respectively. Production on TOY STORY II reteams Disney’s Feature Animation team and Pixar’s Northern California studios. . . .
“‘Toy Story II’ is the latest production to be announced in our growing made-for-video film category,” Ann Daly, President, Buena Vista Home Video, said. “With ‘Aladdin and the King of Thieves’ and the debut of ‘Honey We Shrunk Ourselves’ next week, we are now bringing both animated and live-action films into this pipeline with great success. . . .”


Disney soon became unhappy with the pace of the work on the film and demanded in June that Guggenheim be replaced as producer. Pixar complied.

He looked back on his seventeen years with Pixar and Lucasfilm and concluded that he had most enjoyed working with groups that were venturing into new directions, like the EditDroid digital editing project and the original Toy Story effort; with Pixar’s shedding of everything but feature films, he believed the company’s strategy left few entrepreneurial opportunities. Guggenheim, now financially secure thanks to the stock offering, left the company.*

Karen Jackson and Helene Plotkin, who had been associate producers on the sequel, moved up to the role of co-producers. Jackson recalled using the enticement of greater responsibility–the chance to be a big fish in a smaller pond–to compete with A Bug’s Life for the production people they wanted.

“You could go to A Bug’s Life and be one of two hundred, or you could come to Toy Story 2 and be one of fifty or sixty,” she said. “To fill the spots on Toy Story 2, we did a lot of recruitment outside. But there were certain key positions on Toy Story 2 where we wanted to get experienced staff on board, and the way to get them on board was to say, ‘We’ll let you run this department,’ or, ‘We’ll let you be the directing animator.’ ”

In November, Disney executives Roth and Peter Schneider viewed story reels for the film, with some finished animation, in a screening room at Pixar. They were impressed with the quality of the work and became interested in releasing Toy Story 2 in theaters.

In addition to the unexpected artistic caliber, there were other reasons that made the case for a theatrical release more compelling. As it turned out, the economics of direct-to-video for a Pixar film weren’t working as well as hoped. The logic of direct-to-video hinged on low production costs, but low-budget and high-budget projects could not readily coexist under Pixar’s umbrella. The creative appetites of Pixar’s leadership made it anathema to produce a film at less than the highest level visually–one in which corner-cutting could be seen on screen. In computer animation no less than in live action, production values cost money.

More prosaically, Pixar wanted the efficiency of moving crew members from one production to the next, whatever the next one might be, so Catmull and Lasseter deemed it unacceptable to create a second, lower-wage staff for low-budget projects. Since labor costs added up to 75percent or more of the production costs, it was unrealistic to try to make a significantly lower-cost production as long as all the films ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0307265757
• ISBN 13: 9780307265753
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304