The Pixar Story

I'd heard this was remarkable, but it seems like a lot of that was hype. Pixar seems like an unbelievably cool place to work, and I loved the message of "quirky small company refuses to give up their personality for financial stability" but there were only a small handful of moments that really felt like big deals. It's amazing how many huge names they wrangled up for the interviews, though, (seriously, you got Steve Jobs and Bob Iger to sit down for a good length of time? That's pretty impressive) and those little chats are the most revealing, interesting moments of the entire documentary. Once the subject of Toy Story comes up, it becomes a tale of "and here's how we made our next big, huge, runaway success." It's also overproduced to the point of distraction. Good but not great.

The documentary of the history of Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar is absolutely a fabulous success story. It has been often spoken of as an overnight success, but as Steve Jobs says in the film, most overnight successes takes years of hard work.

It was interesting to see the evolution of animation and the kind of dedication and vision that goes behind something that is - in hindsight - a no-brainer decision.

For me, I was surprised to see the fat Steve Jobs in here. The images of slim Steve Jobs with his penetrating eyes was so strongly embedded in my mind that every time Steve spoke, I hardly heard what he was saying over the sound of how chubby he looked. :D

Also, I found out Pixar's original foundation, Lucasfilm, had to regretfully let go due to lack of funds. It was once again a surprise for me that George Lucas, the creator of the 'Holy Trilogy', had a cash problem.

It was also surprising that even after an unsurpassed, unimaginable success with it's first feature release, creating a whole new genre, raking in cash, accolades and awards, Pixar still had bureaucratic challenges for almost all of its releases. I guess I don't understand Hollywood executives or production houses. But that's OK - I understand the movies, and Pixar is pure magic.

My review of The Pixar Story allows me to release a theory on the studio's film Toy Story I vaguely established several months back and only came to fully formulate upon watching the documentary. The film details how Pixar was so advanced, innovative, and intimidating to several graphic designers and the animation industry in general, it was somewhat ostracized and manipulated by Disney because they had no idea just what to do with them. Sort of like how in Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear is sort of brushed off and mocked by Woody and several other toys upon his arrival. However, by the end, the toys all learn to work together in unison for the greater good of...the toybox, perhaps? If you allow Buzz Lightyear to represent Pixar, Woody as Disney, and the additional toys as other animated studios and computer designers, the film is sort of allegorical in the regard to the rise of Pixar. Whether this is intentional or not is up for serious debate. I think it was just my brain overworking itself after a long line of average movies.

On the other hand, the documentary The Pixar Story is, like the studio, something to behold. It's a necessary and efficient profile of one of the best and most powerful studios today, and sheds light on the innovators creating the films loved by kids and adults alike. It begins by showing us three men that drove the forces of Pixar as we know it. They are Ed Catmull, a technical officer, Steve Jobs, the late entrepreneur and CEO of Apple, and John Lasseter, Pixar's founding father. We learn that Lasseter was into animation from just a little kid, and relished the thought that he could grow up to make cartoons for a living.

He attended California Institute of the Arts, where he won back-to-back Student Academy Awards for two short films he made while in school. When he finally got a job at Disney, he spent a lengthy time developing ideas for intriguing and innovative cartoons before he was fired because Disney, ultimately, didn't know what to do with such an ambitious soul. He was trying to introduce the wonders of computer animation to the company in the mid 1980's, when the machine was already being feared as a substitute for man. Lasseter tried to implore, however, that the computer is a tool for the artist and that it's inherently incapable of creative thinking. That's where an artist comes in.

Catmull who assisted a lot with the technical side of Lasster's animation and even is credited with creating the first computer animated scene in film history in the 1976 film FutureWorld, while Jobs invested and believed so much in Lasseter's vision he was able to take several financial beatings before even returning any money, leading him to be called the world's most forgiving venture capitalist. In a sense, these men were rebels without a utensil. They believed in a new way to create art enough to further it and churn out film after film, each one a financial and critical success.

After establishing the three men, the film looks extensively at the production of Toy Story. Lasseter claims that making this the studio's first feature was an intelligent decision because he stated early on he did not want to follow in the footsteps of Disney by creating frothy musicals and mythical fairy-tales. Through numerous uphill battles, the film was made and received universal rave reviews. The animation was dazzling, the storyline clicked with young kids and the adults, who didn't see the film as one to endure but one to enjoy, and the immensity of the animated setting and the gravity-defying ways the characters were moving was simply remarkable and never-before-seen. The film also details how the film's release sparked questions about the future of computer animated features and whether or not they would be the future and hand-drawn/traditional animation would later be phased out with the times. The Pixar staff in the film make perfectly clear that time between Toy Story and A Bug's Life, their followup film, was nervewracking because they had to prove that they were the real deal and people weren't just overhyping their work.

On a final note, the latter act of the film concerns the traditional vs. computer animation debate and how after Disney films began to take a loss in revenue, the medium of traditional animation was rejected in favor of its sleeker, more visually dazzling cousin. In my opinion, the two could've coexisted and the demise was the fault of studios like Disney and DreamWorks not updating their stories and not their technology. Pixar raised the bar in animation, but it did the same in storytelling too, and American audiences didn't care to see a film like Disney's Home on the Range, Jungle Book 2, or Teacher's Pet when their sister-studio Pixar was churning out films like Finding Nemo, Monsters, Inc., and Toy Story 2 during the exact same time. Pixar's magical quality stemmed from them allowing the stereotype of animated films being for kids to gradually disappear and get adults, teenagers, and the elderly excited for their latest endeavor. The bar was raised in both departments, and Disney should've realized that films about singing cows and singing jungle animals weren't going to cut it any longer. The demise of the animation the studio pioneered was its own fault - not Pixar, who unfortunately was handed much of the blame.

The Pixar Story is a solid documentary exploring a profound, revolutionary studio, and, in addition to it taking a look at each individual Pixar film (we can try and forgive the huge amount of time the film spends developing Toy Story and how the remaining six features get the cold shoulder in terms of how much time they're allotted on screen) explores a medium that definitely deserves a documentary in its honor.

An informative, inspiring, and important film, spanning Pixar's story, and the story of technological advancement through 3-D animation. The documentary walks us through the pre-Pixar era, covering the rudimentary computer graphics in development through the 1970s and 1980s, when Star Wars and Star Trek's special effects ignited a new era in filmmaking . Then, the film describes the early day of Pixar's early founders (e.g., John Lasseter) in venturing through Disney's territory of 2-D animations in general, and his happenstance with Steve Jobs. Some immersive footage and reports are featured in the film all along, transporting the viewer back to the days covered. Further, the viewer will also become familiar with both the early technological challenges and later psychological roadblocks that appeared from a small company that became, in essence, an overnight success (thanks to films like Toy Story). The company's challenges with Disney were also described, and the recreation of the Pixar's leadership and offerings, featuring films from a number of talented and creative director, are also covered. The Pixar Story, therefore, brings inthe contextual and personal factors that have made Pixar the company it then was in 2007, and the company it has now become. This is a must-see for the curious mind on Pixar and for those interested in the computer graphics and animation revolution that Pixar helped launch.

As a huge animation fan, I like the Pixar films very much. They are funny, poignant and are beautifully animated with lovable characters. In fact, while I prefer some of their films over others there is no Pixar film I hate. I saw this documentary by chance knowing little about it, and I loved it. The Pixar Story was so interesting and even moving. The interviews are well delivered and written, and I found them and how certain scenes were animated and done really intriguing. I also loved the music and the animated sequences featured especially for the door climax from Monsters Inc and the incredibly moving When Somebody Loved Me from Toy Story 2(Tom Hanks summed it up brilliantly). The Pixar Story goes along at a good pace and is a perfect length too. If anything though, I would have liked to have seen more of the Pixar shorts, as some of those are gems. But this is just nitpicking and doesn't take away from the fact that this documentary is wonderful. 9/10 Bethany Cox