Word: pixar
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...cartoon features he would direct. Except for The Iron Giant, a critically praised fable that didn't do Lion King business, "I was always getting my films on the runway, but I wasn't getting them off the ground," recalls Bird, sitting in the huge playpen that is Pixar headquarters in the San Francisco suburb of Emeryville. "And I wanted so bad to make movies. I also had a family that was getting bigger"--his second son was an infant--"and demanding more attention. I wanted to be a good filmmaker and a good father. If you spend too much...
Wait a minute. This is a Pixar cartoon? Instead of toys, bugs, monsters or funny fish, we get a midlife crisis and, in the first half-hour, enough domestic strife to fill a Mike Leigh film. But yes, this is Pixar, the studio that pretty much invented and perfected computer-animation entertainment, with such spectacular success that it wiped out the traditional approach that its distribution partner, Disney, had virtually patented. (The two animation titans have fallen into a rancorous dispute that's likely to end with Pixar's boss, Steve Jobs, taking the company elsewhere...
...Pixar, though, is also the studio whose previous two blockbusters, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo, were about fathers or father substitutes fretting over their young charges. And it's the place that routinely achieves the unexpected and finds a huge audience to devour it. "Oftentimes people call animation a genre, and that's completely wrong," Bird says. "It's a medium that can express any genre. I often think people stress the technology too much. The heart of the matter is still characters...
...year's wittiest, zippiest adventure, with each knockout action sequence eclipsing the last and with echoes of '60s James Bond films and Fantastic Four comic books. But it's still unusual: in its length (nearly two hours), in its rating (PG for "action violence," a first for G-loving Pixar) and in its cast of human characters...
...simple rule of thumb," says John Lasseter, Pixar's creative director and the auteur of its first hits, Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Toy Story II. "The more geometric a figure is, the easier it is to do with computer animation. The more organic something is, the harder it is. Everything about a human is organic. The audience looks in the mirror every day, so if you don't get it right, it's obvious to them." The solution: comically distort the subjects' features, make 'em cartoony. As Bird says, "You want them to be caricatured and believable...