How Pixar conquered the planet examines the most successful film studio of all time:
In Hollywood, though, figuring out Pixar’s secret has become a matter of panicky necessity. Since 1995, when Toy Story became the first computer-animated feature film, the company has had an unbroken record of triumphs, as popular with critics as the box office, resulting in 17 Oscars and sufficient millions to make Pixar, movie for movie, the most successful studio of any kind in the history of cinema. (The Incredibles took $70.7m [£38m] in its first three days in America, more than the rest of that weekend’s top 10 put together.) Other animation studios, saddled with a string of flops, have been left to glower from the sidelines – with the exception of Disney, the grandfather of them all, thanks to a deal under which it provided most of the financing for Pixar’s hits.
At Pixar, the work is tremendously technical and time-consuming — yet gleefully childish:
Telling a good story in animated form, though, requires a particularly bizarre kind of personality — an equal mix of childishness and deep, very adult patience. Pixar’s offices are carefully calibrated to nurture the requisite eccentricity. The animation team work not in cubicles but in miniature open-fronted wooden cottages, each individually furnished by their occupants with a clashing variety of leopardskin sofas and extensive toy car collections. (In a detail that epitomises Pixar’s alchemical knack for turning freewheeling creativity into profit, the cottages were actually cheaper than standard-issue office cubicles.)Days begin with an hour-long “sweatbox”, where the movie’s director gathers the animators and critiques their latest shots in front of the others. But for the most part, the nuts and bolts of the work is done inside the cottages, at computer screens, as artists painstakingly manipulate hundreds of points on a character’s body, spending whole days on shots that could last for no more than 10 frames.
So true:
It is an article of faith at Pixar that trying to make your animated characters look as realistic as possible is as pointless as it is difficult. [...] “There is a contingent of the digital-effects community to whom that is the holy grail — to create photographically real humans,” says Brad Bird, the writer and director of The Incredibles and, previously, The Iron Giant. “To me that is the dumbest goal that you could possibly have. What’s wonderful about the medium of animation isn’t recreating reality. It’s distilling it.”
What’s wonderful about the medium of animation isn’t recreating reality. It’s distilling it. More Brad Bird wisdom:
“Really, really little kids should not see this movie ,” says Bird, who wrote and directed the film, and provided the voice for its funniest character, Edna, a fashion designer to the superheroes. “They should wait till they get older. We’re getting some reactions from people who were disappointed that their four-year-old was a little freaked out by it. Well, I don’t want to compromise the intensity in order to please a four-year-old.”Bird makes no effort to disguise his anger at critics who suggest the movie, brilliant though it undoubtedly is, may fail as a result of failing to cater properly to an audience of young children. “I reject that whole point of view — that animation is a children’s medium,” he says. “The way people talk about it is, well, hey, it’s a good thing I have kids, because now I get to see this. Well, hey, no, man! You can just go and see it. There’s no other art form that is defined in such a narrow way. It’s narrowminded, and I can’t wait for it to die.”