Word: pixar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...yells, grinning and waving from down the street. Wine connoisseurs in town to tour Sonoma's vineyards turn to stare. Kids point and giggle. The "bug" turns out to be a Volkswagen painted as a lady bug to promote the Oscar-winning director's other "bug"--Pixar's computer-animated film A Bug's Life. Lasseter's tale of greedy grasshoppers and anxious ants broke the Thanksgiving holiday box-office records with $45.7 million in ticket sales and slaughtered its main competitor, Babe: Pig in the City. Hollywood, skeptical before the release, took note. BUGS LEAVE BACON ACHIN', Daily Variety...
Boasts Steve Jobs, Pixar's CEO and Lasseter's understandably proud boss: "John Lasseter is the closest thing we have to Walt Disney today." Could be. Toy Story, Lasseter's first computer-animated feature, released in 1995, has reaped an estimated $1 billion for Pixar and its production-partner Disney in box-office, video and licensing revenues. But more important, Disney is betting that its heroes Buzz and Woody will endure for generations of kids to come. Says Peter Schneider, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation: "Look at Walt Disney's legacy: he told great stories, with great characters...
Apple floundered for the next decade or so, its market share dwindling to single digits. Jobs resigned himself to swimming in smaller and smaller ponds, founding NeXT, which made an elegant jet-black computer for the university market, but not much money, and buying Pixar, which eventually produced such computer-animated film masterpieces as Toy Story and A Bug's Life. In 1995, just after Toy Story's release, Jobs took Pixar public in an exquisitely timed IPO that made him, for the first time, a billionaire...
...movie's verdant vistas and insect masses presented precisely the sort of complex problems that digital innovators live for--that thrilling "You're kidding!" moment when the boss hands out a visual wish list for the tech guys to make come true. A recent tour of the Pixar studio, hidden in the freeway sprawl east of San Francisco, made clear how projects like A Bug's Life erase the boundaries between technology and art. Model builders sculpt clay facsimiles of the film's characters. Traditional animators act out roles before video cameras to decide just how the characters' limbs should...
...long before A Bug's Life was finished, Pixar was on to a new set of enigmas: how to render photo-realistic hair and skin, how to make fabric crumple with verisimilitude when the character wearing it moves. "Look at how stunningly beautiful this is," says Lasseter, standing in the dirt outside the studio, holding a colorful autumn leaf up to the brilliant midday sun. "Look at the incredible detail. It's spectacular. It's a whole new world you can walk in." Why? Lasseter smiles as broadly as a child, dreaming, no doubt, of movie fantasies to come. "Because...