Business

Saturday November 7, 2009

An animator’s treasure

Review by CHOO LI-HSIAN


The Pixar Touch

Author: David A. Price

Publisher: Vintage

If you are an aspiring animator or a fan of movies like Up, Monsters Inc and The Incredibles, then this book is for you.

Based on interviews with dozens of insiders, it is the roller-coaster rags-to-riches story behind the phenomenal success of Pixar Animation Studios. It is also the first to take an in-depth look at the company that forever changed the film industry and the fraternity of geeks who shaped it.

It examines the struggles of the protagonists in the early years when 3-D animation films were considered far-fetched. But more than anything else, it showcases how ideas can be turned into a successful business with the founders remaining true to their ideals.

It is a story that inspires and motivates because today, the pipe-dreams of the people behind the company have propelled 3-D animation into mainstream family entertainment.

Just like a Pixar animated film, it is full of fascinating, endearing characters and “heroes” that, pulled along by their big dreams, find the inner strength to overcome seemingly impossible odds.

“Heroes” such as Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder, who dreamt as a youth of becoming an animator, but could not draw well enough. Instead, he became an early visionary of computer animation as a graduate student in the 1970’s at University of Utah’s computer graphics department.

The university’s impressive alumni include Alan Kay who conceived object oriented programming and the point-and-click graphical user interface; John Warnock, the co-founder of Adobe Systems; Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape; and Nolan Bushland who started Atari, the company that popularised video games.

There is also John Lasseter who joined Pixar when he had just been fired from his dream job as an animator at Disney. He became the first person to apply classic Disney character animation principles to computer animation. Other characters include Brad Bird, the director of The Incredibles and Pixar’s latest outing, Up.

We receive real insights into the secret of the studio’s success; the process that its writers, directors, and animators painstakingly and passionately persevere through to make each of their incredible, and incredibly popular films.

It shows us the perfectionism and pure effort that goes into every single detail of an animated film. The book is peppered with delicious little morsels of information for Pixar animation aficionados. Like the “deceptively simple task of animating cloth” (and fur) which incidentally can only be done in a realistic way because Fitz – a fur-and-cloth programme has been specially written for this purpose.

Did you know that Sulley, the blue behemoth in Monsters, Inc. had 2,320,413 hairs? And that each hair needed to be “self-shadowing” (casting shadows on other hairs) for greater realism?

We also learn how John Lasseter instilled an intense commitment to research in the studio’s creative staff. To prepare for the scene in Finding Nemo in which the fish characters Marlin and Dory become trapped in a whale, two members of the art department climbed inside a dead gray whale that had been stranded north of Marin, California.

To learn how to make a realistic French kitchen, the producer and first director of Ratatouille worked as apprentices at an elite French restaurant (The French Laundry) in the Napa Valley.

Pixar also deliberately avoided making the humans in The Incredibles look too realistic. They knew that as animated human characters became too close to lifelike, audiences would actually perceive them as repulsive.

The phenomenon, known as the “uncanny valley,” had been predicted by a Japanese robotics researcher as early as 1970. Thus, the details of human skin, such as pores and hair follicles, were left out of The Incredibles’ characters in favour of a more cartoon like appearance.

The book gives us the inside story how the studio transformed itself from a hardware outfit to the US$7.4bil jewel in Disney’s crown.

It also explores Pixar’s complex relationship with the Walt Disney Co and delves into Pixar’s corporate feuds between Lasseter and his former ally, Jeffrey Katzenberg (via A Bug’s Life vs. Antz), and between the mercurial Steve Jobs and the manipulative Michael Eisner.

It is interesting to note that it was Pixar, not Apple, that made Steve Jobs a billionaire. In 1986, Jobs, at a time when he was just ousted from Apple, bought Pixar from Lucasfilm for US$5mil.

In 1995, the week after the release of Toy Story, Pixar went public and Jobs’s stock was worth US$1.1bil.

I highly recommend this cheerful read to not just aspiring animators all “geeks” and fans of technology as well as anyone who is simply just a fan of the Pixar films. You will not be disappointed.

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