The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company (Hardcover)

by David A. Price (Author)
Key Phrases: computer division, secret lab, science faction, Toy Story, John Lasseter, The Incredibles (more...)

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The roller-coaster rags-to-riches story behind the phenomenal success of Pixar Animation Studios: the first in-depth look at the company that forever changed the film industry and the "fraternity of geeks" who shaped it.

The Pixar Touch is a story of technical innovation that revolutionized animation, transforming hand-drawn cel animation to computer-generated 3-D graphics. It’s a triumphant business story of a company that began with a dream, remained true to the ideals of its founders—antibureaucratic and artist driven—and ended up a multibillion-dollar success.

We meet Pixar’s technical genius and founding CEO, Ed Catmull, who dreamed of becoming an animator, inspired by Disney’s Peter Pan and Pinocchio, realized he would never be good enough, and instead enrolled in the then new field of computer science at the University of Utah. It was Catmull who founded the computer graphics lab at the New York Institute of Technology and who wound up at Lucasfilm during the first Star Wars trilogy, running the computer graphics department, and found a patron in Steve Jobs, just ousted from Apple Computer, who bought Pixar for five million dollars. Catmull went on to win four Academy Awards for his technical feats and helped to create some of the key computer-generated imagery software that animators rely on today.

Price also writes about John Lasseter, who catapulted himself from unemployed animator to one of the most powerful figures in American filmmaking; animation was the only thing he ever wanted to do (he was inspired by Disney’s The Sword in the Stone), and Price’s book shows how Lasseter transformed computer animation from a novelty into an art form. The author writes as well about Steve Jobs, as volatile a figure as a Shakespearean monarch . . .

Based on interviews with dozens of insiders, The Pixar Touch examines the early wildcat years when computer animation was thought of as the lunatic fringe of the medium.

We see the studio at work today; how its writers, directors, and animators make their astonishing, and astonishingly popular, films.

The book also delves into Pixar’s corporate feuds: between Lasseter and his former champion, Jeffrey Katzenberg (A Bug’s Life vs. Antz), and between Jobs and Michael Eisner. And finally it explores Pixar’s complex relationship with the Walt Disney Company as it transformed itself from a Disney satellite into the $7.4 billion jewel in the Disney crown.

Little-Known Facts from The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David Price

• Pixar, not Apple, made Steve Jobs a billionaire. Jobs bought Pixar in 1986 from Lucasfilm for $5 million. In 1995, the week after the release of Toy Story, Pixar went public and Jobs’s stock was worth $1.1 billion.

• Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder, dreamed as a youth of becoming an animator, but decided in high school that he couldn’t draw well enough. Instead, he became an early visionary of computer animation as a graduate student in the 1970’s. "Computer animation was sort of on the lunatic fringe at that time," remembered Fred Parke, a fellow Ph.D. student in Catmull’s class at the University of Utah.

• When John Lasseter joined Pixar—which was then the computer graphics department of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm—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.

• Before it became an animation studio, Pixar went through years of struggle and multi-million-dollar losses. It started as a computer company and John Lasseter’s short films, such as Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy, were promotional films to help sell the company’s computers.

• Pixar was almost bought by…Microsoft? Yep: Jobs remained worried about the company’s finances even after Pixar made a deal with the Walt Disney Co. in 1991 to produce Toy Story, Pixar’s first feature film. The Pixar Touch details the effort to sell Pixar to Bill Gates’s company while Toy Story was in production.

• When writing Toy Story, to find inspiration for the relationship between Buzz and Woody, Lasseter and his story department screened classic "buddy" movies, including 48 Hrs., The Defiant Ones, Midnight Run, and Thelma & Louise.

• John Lasseter has 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 in the Napa Valley.

• Pixar 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 favor of a more cartoonlike appearance.

• The signature of most Pixar feature films is characters who appeal to children (toys, fish, monsters…), but who have adult-like personalities and are dealing with adult-like problems.

• Prior to the acquisition of Pixar by Disney in 2006, Lasseter loathed the idea of Disney making sequels to Pixar films without Pixar’s involvement—as Disney’s contract with Pixar allowed it to do. "These were the people that put out Cinderella II," Lasseter remarked.

• Pixar is more than an animation studio. Pixar’s innovations in computer graphics technology pervade movies today. Special-effects houses like Industrial Light & Magic (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) use Pixar’s software to create out-of-this-world places and characters.

(Photo © Simon Bruty)

From The Washington Post

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (May 13, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307265757
• ISBN-13: 978-0307265753
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #132,132 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The magic touch, June 13, 2008

By	Julie Neal "The Complete Walt Disney World" (Sanibel Island, Fla.) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I was glued to this book about Pixar's humble beginnings and inspiring ascension into the firmament. In true Cinderella fashion, the company starts with nothing, gets no respect, but eventually its dreams come true. It's a thought-provoking journey.

Pixar's story interweaves with that of the Walt Disney Company throughout its history. Founding CEO Ed Catmull's college dissertation involved creating a texture map projecting Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh onto undulating surfaces. When Disney decided to replace its ink-and-paint process with computers, it had Pixar test the system with a scene from The Little Mermaid. In 1991, Disney agreed to finance Pixar's first full-length feature film, Toy Story, but production was shut down in late 1993 because the plot dictated that Woody be mean and petty. Disney rewrote the script to make the toy cowboy more sympathetic. And in January 2006, Disney agreed to acquire Pixar for 287.5 million shares of Disney stock.

The story works in the biographies of some fascinating men. Catmull turned down Disney when it approached him to help design the Walt Disney World attraction Space Mountain. Steve Jobs, newly thrown out of Apple Computer, bought Pixar for just $5 million, only to discover he had to spend twice that to keep it afloat. You read how John Lasseter advances from a skipper on Disneyland's Jungle Cruise to the principal creative advisor of Disney and Pixar animation.

The book includes a handful of black and white photos, and eight glossy, full-color pages with images from Pixar movies Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars and Ratatouille.

Here's the chapter list:

1. Anaheim
2. In the Garage
3. Lucasfilm
4. Steve Jobs
5. Pixar, Inc.
6. Making it Fly 1
7. Making it Fly 2
8. "It Seemed Like an All-Out War"
9. Crisis in Monstropolis
10. Emeryville
11. Homecoming

Appendix 1: Pixar Academy Awards and nominations
Appendix 2: Pixar Filmography

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This book went to Infinity and Beyond!!, July 2, 2008

By	Joel Siegel "PIXAR Guru" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am an animator and have always had an affinity for PIXAR. When I heard about this book I knew I needed to read it immeadiately. It goes through the entire history of PIXAR with some detailed background on computer animation itself. Also it gives brief back stories of each of the major players that started PIXAR and/or have been major players since then. I have never found a non-fiction book more interesting in my life. Once you pick up this book you actually will no be able to put it down. There is however a lot of tech talk so if you do not know much about computers or animation you may not like it as much, but it really is a good and fast read. I recommend it to all who are truly interested in PIXAR, computer animation, and even the growth of a small business.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's about the Story, July 4, 2008

By	Hillevi Peterson "Teacher and Storyteller" (Roseville, MN) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am a teacher who uses stories to draw students into an academic concept. I love a good story that teaches. This one exceeds any expectations. It's about the growth of software that I use daily from concept to reality; from the unaffordable to the common man. It's about dreams that percolate FOR YEARS and not just achieve instant stardom. It's about patience and conflict and overcoming some obstacles and being taken down by others. It is about character building while building characters that have become a mainstay of our culture. In short, it's inspirational for those of us who continue to work on our ideas and dreams while others scoff at our million to one odds at success. The Pixar Touch motivates us to reply: "so you mean I still have a chance."
This is a must read for all of those who lead creative teams or who dream to create!