Why pixar is great

Participants also bring in lots of performance data—including metrics such as how often something had to be reworked. Data further stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions based on subjective impressions. Listen to Ed Catmull discuss managing creativity. A few years ago, I had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio, who declared that his central problem was not finding good people—it was finding good ideas. His belief is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product.

The view that good ideas are rarer and more valuable than good people is rooted in a misconception of creativity. In the early s, we were known as the leading technological pioneer in the field of computer animation. Unlike most other studios, we have never bought scripts or movie ideas from the outside. All of our stories, worlds, and characters were created internally by our community of artists. And in making these films, we have continued to push the technological boundaries of computer animation, securing dozens of patents in the process.

Rather, I believe our adherence to a set of principles and practices for managing creative talent and risk is responsible. Pixar is a community in the true sense of the word. We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs: Talent is rare. It must be safe to tell the truth. We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture. The success of our efforts prompted me to share my thinking on how to build a sustainable creative organization.

However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems. A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. The director and the other creative leaders of a production do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every single member of the to person production group makes suggestions.

Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization. The leaders sort through a mass of ideas to find the ones that fit into a coherent whole—that support the story—which is a very difficult task. The process is downright scary.

This means we have to put ourselves at great risk. And our previous movie, Ratatouille , is about a French rat who aspires to be a chef.

Talk about unexpected ideas! To act in this fashion, we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done. In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new.

Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion and accomplishments make the community a magnet for talented people coming out of schools or working at other places.

We had ample funding thanks to the U. At the New York Institute of Technology, where I headed a new computer-animation laboratory, one of my first hires was Alvy Ray Smith, who made breakthroughs in computer painting. Then George Lucas, of Star Wars fame, hired me to head a major initiative at Lucasfilm to bring computer graphics and other digital technology into films and, later, games.

It was thrilling to do research within a film company that was pushing the boundaries. This made it possible to attract some of the best people in the industry, including John Lasseter, then an animator from Disney, who was excited by the new possibilities of computer animation.

Steve gave backbone to our desire for excellence and helped us form a remarkable management team. A number of us have stuck together for decades, pursuing the dream of making computer-animated films, and we still have the pleasure of working together today. It was only when Pixar experienced a crisis during the production of Toy Story 2 that my views on how to structure and operate a creative organization began to crystallize.

So we had to form a new creative team of people who had never headed a movie production. We felt this was OK. We realized early on, however, that having two different standards of quality in the same studio was bad for our souls, and Disney readily agreed that the sequel should be a theatrical release. The creative leadership, though, remained the same, which turned out to be a problem. In the early stage of making a movie, we draw storyboards a comic-book version of the story and then edit them together with dialogue and temporary music.

These are called story reels. The first versions are very rough, but they give a sense of what the problems are, which in the beginning of all productions are many. We then iterate, and each version typically gets better and better. In the case of Toy Story 2 , we had a good initial idea for a story, but the reels were not where they ought to have been by the time we started animation, and they were not improving. Making matters worse, the directors and producers were not pulling together to rise to the challenge.

Given where the production was at that point, 18 months would have been an aggressive schedule, but by then we had only eight left to deliver the film. In the end, with the new leadership, they pulled it off. How did John and his team save the movie? The problem was not the original core concept, which they retained.

The main character, a cowboy doll named Woody, is kidnapped by a toy collector who intends to ship him to a toy museum in Japan. At a critical point in the story, Woody has to decide whether to go to Japan or try to escape and go back to Andy, the boy who owned him. So the challenge was to get the audience to believe that Woody might make a different choice. Writer Andrew Stanton has constructed one near-perfect story after another for Pixar over the years, but with Wall-E, he gets closer than ever, simply by presenting the dystopian future as a product of everyday environmental mismanagement, corporate greed, and out-of-control consumption and wastefulness, and letting the results largely speak for themselves.

Even as it dives into conversation with Kubrick and Sagan, Atompunk and Heinlein, Wall-E never fully feels retro because it never stops asking painfully contemporary questions. We need its dose of clear-eyed, restorative faith, perhaps even more now than we did a decade ago. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

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By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. All 23 Pixar movies, definitively ranked. Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. The Good Dinosaur Even now, five years after its release, The Good Dinosaur can make a claim to being the most beautiful Pixar movie.

Onward Onward takes place in a world that was once enchanted, but where the magic has faded away. Monsters Inc. Toy Story 3 Toy Story 3 is a heartbreaker.

Up One of my favorite things about Up is the delighted conversation my friends had upon its release about Kevin the Bird. Ratatouille Ratatouille is best remembered for its triumphant finale, which serves as a thesis on the nature of criticism — one that almost feels like director Brad Bird is speaking to film critics directly through the intimidating food writer Anton Ego.

Toy Story Rare is it that a film studio gets its first-ever feature just right. The Incredibles Brad Bird is the closest thing Pixar has to an auteur filmmaker, who makes movies with a strong, personal vision that keep returning to the same ideas over and over. Next Up In Culture. Delivered Fridays. Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email. Email required. By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Notice and European users agree to the data transfer policy.

For more newsletters, check out our newsletters page. In toy terms, this is death — haunted by the prospect of dispatch to the refuse heap or, in the fourth film, the junk shop; decrepit, sad afterlives that are the opposite of being alive in the hands of a child.

Pixar understands this theme so well because the birth of the company itself signified a moment of pop-culture obsolescence, of the old pres analogue world, in order to give way to the new digital age of infinite play. Toy Story is suffused with nostalgia, for the era of wholesome postwar entertainment that the likes of Woody and Bo-Peep represent. Maybe depicting that great intangible is the one remaining frontier for its entertainment arm to conquer, irresistible to those with a nagging sense of ontological horror: that if you have the godlike ability to create anything, does that mean that, underneath, is really … nothing?

Whether we carry these lessons into adulthood typically comes down to how much films get us talking, Gudino says. Colin Stokes, a father of two, adheres to the philosophy that movies supplement the other aspects of traditional child-rearing.

Even after two decades, Pixar is only beginning to acknowledge the impact it leaves on audiences. Historically, Pixar's greatest critics have taken issue with the studio's lack of female and culturally diverse characters, a decision that has struck some as odd given how progressive the studios have been in other storytelling domains. Jim Morris, president of Pixar Animation Studios, doesn't deny the problem.

That's why we make 'em," he says. But he also concedes Pixar hasn't taken "as good advantage of opportunities we did have to create a level of diversity in the films. Today, the company is taking measures to improve diversity. One strategy the studio has started using to gauge gender equity in its films is line-by-line analyses of dialogue "to see how male and female characters are represented in the films," Morris says.

Later this year, Pixar will release "The Good Dinosaur," a film that asks "What if the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs missed Earth entirely? That may sound like a wild plot, but audiences should feel confident come November that the story they'll watch will, in some way, ring true. Follow Tech Insider on Facebook and Twitter. For you. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more.