The Pixar Touch - history of Pixar

Macintosh's 25th Birthday

Twenty-five years ago today, a bowtied Steve Jobs let the Macintosh out of the bag at the Flint Center for the Performing Arts in Cupertino, California. The machine embodied the talents of top Apple engineers, whom Jobs had persuaded to work 90-hour weeks on the project in the hope of building something great. Another crucial ingredient was the user-interface innovations created by Alan Kay's group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Lastly, there was Jobs's own near-maniacal perfectionism. All this came together and the result was lightning.

Check out this video of the unveiling, with Jobs's showmanship on display. This 1984 Macintosh brochure is a terrific example of marketing a highly sophisticated product to consumers in an engaging and approachable way.

Two years later, Jobs would be out of Apple . . . and signing a check for a little computer graphics hardware company called Pixar. In writing The Pixar Touch, I really liked the fact that Jobs's background with Apple gave me the excuse to write a little about the history of personal computers, which he had done so much to shape by that time.

Career Advice From A Pixar Animator

Carlos Baena joined Pixar in 2002 and has been an animator on a half-dozen Pixar features and shorts, most recently Ratatouille, and he's on the crew of Toy Story 3. Before Pixar, he was an animator at ILM, where, among other things, he worked on several of the computer-animated characters of Stars Wars: Episode II--Attack of the Clones. 

Those of you who are animators or aspiring animators may be asking yourself: How do I get that job? Carlos recently offered his answers to that question, and the question of how to thrive in an animation job once you have it. A few samples:

• Be professional at work. Don't be stuck up, and don't have an attitude/ego or no one will wanna work with you again. There is a fine line between confidence and arrogance.
  
• Help your peers. They'll help you when you need them.
  
• Make your environment fun. Simply have fun with what you do...and try not to look at it as a job. I know it's hard...especially with deadlines. I've been there. But try to find the fun aspects of what we do as it'll make the journey a lot more fun and less stressful.
• At one point, be ready to call your shot done. We can polish things to death...but some places/productions will need you to move on.

It's not bad advice for us non-animators to think about, either.

"The Incredibles" Designer on "Kung Fu Panda"

I was intrigued by this recent comment from Lou Romano, production designer of The Incredibles (one of Pixar's best films, IMHO).

I hope Kung Fu Panda sweeps this year’s Annies and Oscars. I found it more entertaining than WALL-E and in terms of design, it is hands down the boldest looking animated feature released this year, period. WALL-E is impressive but the Kung Fu design is truly inspired. Surely the best looking movie to come out of Dreamworks. I hope it at least sweeps in the design categories. In this case, I think Pixar can take a lesson from Dreamworks. Kung Fu Panda is a great CG “cartoon”, with design that is caricatured, appealing and not limited by photo-realism. Kudos to the Panda crew. Having worked on Incredibles, I know that trying something different can be a huge challenge. I don’t know how you guys did it. But you raised the bar.

Historically, there has been a lot of mutual respect between design and production people at Pixar and DreamWorks Animation (less so at the executive levels). Nonetheless, it's pretty unusual to see a public statement of support from somebody at one company for the other.

(Btw, on his personal blog, Lou posted some of his concept art for The Incredibles a few months ago--check it out if you're an Incredibles fan.)

Bad Oscar News for WALL-E?

A lot of WALL-E fans have their fingers crossed for the little robot to win a "best picture" Oscar nomination when the nominees are announced on January 22.

Last month, the Los Angeles Times asked an unscientific sample of critics and Oscar-watchers whether WALL-E would get one of the five nominations. There were strongly-felt opinions pro and con, but no consensus. 

Any halfway serious animation fan knows that the last animated film to be nominated for best picture was Beauty and the Beast back in 1991. Conventional wisdom has it that the odds are always against an animated film, no matter how good, because the Academy's voting membership is dominated by folks who work in live-action.

The likelihood of WALL-E beating those odds seems to have gone down in the past couple of days with the announcements from the major film guilds of their award nominees. The award voting of guilds like the Directors Guild, the Producers Guild, and Writers Guild West often (but not always) foreshadows top Oscar awards. In the marquee award categories, WALL-E came up empty.

Nominations for the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film went to Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire; David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon; Christopher Nolan, The Dark Knight; and Gus Van Sant, Milk. The noms for the Producers Guild of America Darryl F. Zanuck Producer of the Year Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures recognized ... the same five films. 

 

Whatever happens in "best picture," WALL-E undoubtedly will be nominated for Best Animated Feature along with Bolt and Kung Fu Panda (brave prediction). 

 

One Academy Award for Pixar, in any event, is already in the bag. The Academy announced this week that Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, will receive a technical Oscar, the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, "for his lifetime of technical contributions and leadership in the field of computer graphics for the motion picture industry."

UPDATE: Today (1/22/2009), the Academy released Oscar nominations. The "best picture" nominations went to the five films that had been favored by the Directors Guild and the Producers Guild, except that The Reader took the place of The Dark Knight. The Best Animated Feature nominations went to the three films listed above (admittedly, the list wasn't hard to predict). WALL-E also received a nomination for Best Original Screenplay and a few others. Congratulations to all.

Ed Catmull's Ph.D. thesis

In the fall of 1974, at age 29, Edwin Earl Catmull found himself with a freshly-earned Ph.D. in computer science--and no place to take it.

His thesis, which set out several important innovations in 3-D computer graphics, was a stepping-stone to . . . nothing, at first. He hoped to land a job doing research on computer animation and, from there, make progress toward his ambition of creating computer-animated feature films. But he couldn't find that job. Ohio State, which had a small academic group working on computer animation, turned him down for a faculty position. 

It was an inauspicious start for the future co-founder of Pixar. A few months later, however, his graduate work on computer graphics and computer animation (including one of his course projects, an animation of a hand) brought him to the attention of an unlikely character: an eccentric multimillionaire who was creating a computer graphics lab on a Long Island estate. Catmull's two-decade-long journey to Toy Story was underway.

The dissertation itself is mostly tough reading for the uninitiated, as you might expect. Nonetheless, when writing the book, I found it an interesting window into the opening days of 3-D computer graphics, of which Catmull was one of the founding fathers. The techniques he described in the language of mathematics are used today in videogames, special effects, and, of course, computer-animated films. Take a look.

Ed Catmull's Ph.D. thesis (PDF, 2.8 mb)