Word: pixar
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This was to have been the first feature assignment for Pinkava, the Czech-born director of Pixar's Oscar-winning short Geri's Game. But after a few years, says Lasseter regretfully, "it was just not working out. The leadership and vision in the story were not there." Bird, who had been away from the Ratatouille meetings for a year, finishing The Incredibles, now inundated the group with appealing story ideas. Eventually, he took over the project, and Pinkava, who still receives story credit, left the company...
There's a porous nature, too, to the company's power structure. Swapping ideas, stepping in, hanging out are at the root of what has to be called the Pixar culture. The studio has working methods more in common with the dotcom companies in nearby Silicon Valley than with the movie industry down in Los Angeles. For a start, everyone who works there, from the executives to the cooks at Luxo Cafe (try the excellent sushi), is encouraged to take a filmmaking class and make a short film. This is part of Pixar president Ed Catmull's belief in "lifelong...
Most movie directors have individual contracts with their studios; the Pixar directors are employees of the company, contributing on all studio projects. The so-called Brain Trust--Lasseter, Bird and Stanton, along with directors Lee Unkrich, Bob Peterson, Brenda Chapman, Pete Docter and Gary Rydstrom and one recent recruit, Little Miss Sunshine writer Michael Arndt--convenes regularly to spitball ideas and, Lasseter says, "help one another make these films. We're very honest...
...often, Lewis says, he must force people to go home. "This was the first and only job for a lot of people here," says Bird, who as director of the 1999 animated feature The Iron Giant and as one of the developers of The Simpsons, is the rare Pixar Pooh-Bah who came from the outside. "I think they're under the delusion that things are this nice everywhere...
...Lasseter, the jolly round fellow (any cartoonist could draw him in two seconds and three circles) with a weakness for assaultively colorful Hawaiian shirts. In the mid-'80s, this Disney renegade began making computer-animated shorts, one of which, Tin Toy, won an Oscar six years before he finished Pixar's first feature, 1995's Toy Story. That movie changed animation history, as Walt Disney had in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Like Walt in his early genius period, Lasseter saw that the secret of an animated movie is story and characters--and the enemy of innovation...