Word: pixar
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...characters neatly converge and combust; the gags pay off with emotional resonance. And at the end, the movie tops itself with comic outtakes, undoubtedly the funniest finale of any cartoon feature. Antz may have amused viewers with its sidewise wit, but as a comprehensive vision of computerized moviemaking, Pixar's dream works. And when A Bug's Life hits its stride, it's antastic...
...flick of Rick Sayre's keyboard tells you all you need to know about the future of animation. "We start with a pencil and a paintbrush," says Sayre, senior animation scientist for the digital studio Pixar. On his screen is a graceful line-and-pastel drawing of two ants gazing across an underground landscape, an early rendering from the much anticipated film A Bug's Life, which opens this week. "When we recruit artists," Sayre says, "we still look for people with great hands." Then he hits the return key, and up pops the finished shot, lush with color, aglow...
Even as A Bug's Life debuts this week, Pixar is hard at work on Toy Story 2 and a project dubbed Monsters, Inc., about the creatures living beneath a child's bed. DreamWorks is hoping for Antz-size success with Shrek, set for 2000 and featuring an ogre who pines for a beauty (some things never change). Universal is working on a Frankenstein project with CGI pioneer Industrial Light & Magic. Warner Bros. is readying The Iron Giant, about a machine that befriends a boy in 1950s Maine. And although both of Disney's '99 releases, Tarzan and Fantasia...
That newfound freedom springs from the magic of the silicon chip. Animation is a torturous process; a typical artist draws just three seconds of film a week. By automating tasks that once had to be endlessly repeated by hand (one Pixar program instantly covers a creature's body with pockmarks), computers cut that time dramatically. Such efficiencies haven't yet made animated films much cheaper, of course; actually producing movies for less money would violate the laws of Hollywood physics. "The cost for visual images comes down every year," says Carl Rosendahl, president of Pacific Data Images, which did effects...
...smooth, seamless look, for instance, of Toy Story's indoor scenes and plastic dolls--sorry, "action figures"--counted as dazzling effects in 1995. But before the film was even out, Pixar's digital warriors had moved on to the thornier challenges posed by A Bug's Life. "The more symmetrical the object, the easier it is for a computer to render," says John Lasseter, who directed both films. "The more organic, the more difficult...