Inside Pixar

Unless the name on your busi­ness card reads ​‘Com­man­der Chris Had­field,’ chances are your office isn’t half as cool as that of the 1,200 or so employ­ees at Pixar Ani­ma­tion Stu­dios. Nes­tled among the work­shops and ware­hous­es that make up the indus­tri­al sec­tor of Emeryville, Cal­i­for­nia, the birth­place of Woody, Buzz and co is a leafy, state-of-the-art cam­pus that fea­tures an out­door swim­ming pool, bas­ket­ball court, on-site gym facil­i­ties and a free all-you-can-eat cere­al bar. A 22-acre plot of prime com­mer­cial real estate that was once the site of the Del Monte fruit can­ning fac­to­ry, nowa­days 1200 Park Avenue is famous for pro­duc­ing some­thing even sweet­er. Yet while it’s easy to be seduced by the sights and smells that greet you upon enter­ing the grounds of this pris­tine dream fac­to­ry – the uncon­di­tion­al­ly friend­ly staff, the fresh­ly cut grass – scratch the sur­face and you begin to notice a dif­fer­ent aspect of life inside Pixar.

“It’s not all flow­ers and sweet smells here – peo­ple wor­ry about stuff some­times,” Pixar main­stay Pete Doc­ter tells LWLies. ​“We’ve only ever had one seri­ous round of lay­offs, but we’ve had enough suc­cess over the years to pro­pel us in the right direc­tion.” Those cuts, which coin­cid­ed with the announce­ment in Sep­tem­ber 2013 that The Good Dinosaur was being pushed back 18 months fol­low­ing the removal of direc­tor Bob Peter­son from the project, affect­ed five per cent of Pixar’s work­force and served as a stark reminder to every­one with­in the com­pa­ny of the fis­cal pres­sure that comes with run­ning a film stu­dio. Doc­ter is quick to stress that he and his fel­low employ­ees are large­ly shield­ed from every­day com­mer­cial con­cerns, but point outs that pre­serv­ing a healthy cre­ative cul­ture at Pixar is only pos­si­ble because of the tire­less efforts of its Hawai­ian shirt-col­lect­ing CCO, John Las­seter. ​“His work eth­ic is unlike any­one I’ve ever met. Hon­est­ly, I don’t know how he does it. John lives the life of 12 ordi­nary peo­ple all at once and yet still is the first one to wake in the morn­ing and the first one to take on new chal­lenges. He just has an intu­itive sense of what’s going to work for the business.”

Along with Las­seter, Andrew Stan­ton and the late Joe Ran­ft, Doc­ter is a found­ing mem­ber of the ​‘Brain Trust’, a now-extend­ed yet rel­a­tive­ly small group of thought lead­ers who over­see devel­op­ment on all Pixar projects. Hav­ing joined Pixar as a wide-eyed col­lege grad­u­ate in 1990, becom­ing only its tenth employ­ee and third res­i­dent ani­ma­tor, Doc­ter has gone on to direct three of the studio’s 15 com­plet­ed fea­ture films to date: 2001’s Mon­sters, Inc, 2009’s Up and this year’s Inside Out. Dur­ing his time at the com­pa­ny, Doc­ter has seen it grow from a plucky start­up oper­at­ing out of a mod­est rental space in Marin Coun­ty just north of San Fran­cis­co – back when Pixar was still in its first major tran­si­tion­al phase fol­low­ing its break­away from Lucas­film – into one of the world’s most cher­ished (not to men­tion lucra­tive) film studios.

Per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant change occurred in 2006 when Pixar’s then CEO, Steve Jobs, nego­ti­at­ed a deal that saw The Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny pur­chase Pixar for a cool $7.4 bil­lion. Doc­ter recalls being in a fair­ly relaxed mood when the news broke: ​“I was actu­al­ly at Dis­ney­land onboard the River­boat when I got a call from [pres­i­dent of Pixar and Walt Dis­ney Ani­ma­tion Stu­dios] Ed Cat­mull,” he says. ​“This was before they announced it to the com­pa­ny, so it came as some­thing of a shock.” Was he at all ner­vous about how Pixar’s future might be affect­ed? ​“A lit­tle, sure. But when Steve sold the com­pa­ny he wrote into the con­tract that there were cer­tain things which Dis­ney was not allowed to mess with. And real­ly, when you think about it, gee, they spent $7 bil­lion, so they’re not going to come in and change every­thing overnight. But for­tu­nate­ly they weren’t inter­est­ed in dis­rupt­ing what we were doing. They just want­ed a piece of what we had.”

It’s fas­ci­nat­ing to chart the respec­tive tra­jec­to­ries of these sis­ter ani­ma­tion stu­dios since that his­toric acqui­si­tion. Where Dis­ney has under­gone some­thing of a mini renais­sance fol­low­ing the glob­al suc­cess­es of Tan­gled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen and Big Hero 6, Pixar has to some extent strug­gled to live up to its own impos­si­bly high stan­dards, pro­duc­ing numer­ous sequels that failed to con­nect with audi­ences on the same lev­el as ear­li­er hits like Find­ing Nemo and Wall‑E. Oth­er stu­dios have upped their game, too. While Dream­Works has been busy win­ning auds’ hearts and minds with the How to Train Your Drag­on films, Uni­ver­sal saw 2013’s Despi­ca­ble Me 2 out­per­form Pixar’s Mon­sters Uni­ver­si­ty at the domes­tic box office to the tune of $100 mil­lion – this despite the for­mer being made for just $76 mil­lion (com­pared with MU’s $200 mil­lion) and with­in a more eco­nom­ic timeframe.

With the com­pe­ti­tion fiercer than ever before, anoth­er stu­dio might be tempt­ed to increase its out­put in a bid to put some dis­tance between itself and the chas­ing pack. Not Pixar. ​“A Pixar movie takes about four to five years to make,” explains Up and Inside Out pro­duc­er Jonas Rivera, who’s been with the stu­dio since 1994. ​“We’ve reached a point now with the tech­nol­o­gy where it’s hard to see how things are ever going to get faster in terms of the ani­ma­tion. But our goal isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly to make movies faster. I would like to, because that means we’d be able to tell more sto­ries, but it’s impor­tant that we con­tin­ue to do things our own way.”

Rivera is a cool cus­tomer with an infec­tious enthu­si­asm for his work. If he does ever feel the heat, he cer­tain­ly doesn’t show it. How­ev­er, as a pro­duc­er, he acknowl­edges that the weight of respon­si­bil­i­ty rests part­ly on his shoul­ders. ​“My whole job is to get the film out to an audi­ence, but when you reach that point there’s a cer­tain reluc­tance that kicks in. You put every­thing you’ve got into some­thing for so long and you want peo­ple to like it, but it’s nev­er a done thing.” He con­tin­ues, before dis­pelling the notion of any rival­ry between Pixar and Dis­ney. ​“Down here in the trench­es of mak­ing the films there’s no bad blood between us and them. At the end of the day it’s just busi­ness. We want Pixar to do well, we want Dis­ney to do well. In fact, I’m friends with a lot of the ani­ma­tors over there, we even share notes from time to time. It’s the same with Dream­Works – direc­tor to direc­tor, pro­duc­er to pro­duc­er, ani­ma­tor to ani­ma­tor, it’s a pret­ty sup­port­ive net­work. Of course, it helps that I admire so much of the work these guys are doing. Even in my house, I’ll say to my kids, ​‘Do you guys wan­na watch Rata­touille?’ and they’ll say, ​‘No, we wan­na watch The Lego Movie’.”

Per­haps the most notice­able com­mon trait among Pixar employ­ees is an appre­ci­a­tion for all types of ani­ma­tion, not just the com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed kind. ​“I love tra­di­tion­al hand-drawn ani­ma­tion,” Rivera says, ​“one of my favourite ani­ma­tors right now is Tomm Moore. Anoth­er is David O’Reilly, he makes some of the cra­zi­est stuff I’ve ever seen but I find it real­ly beau­ti­ful. Ulti­mate­ly, I want to make movies that peo­ple grow up with, just in the same way that I grew up with Peter Pan. When you spend a big chunk of your life on some­thing you want that to have an impact on peo­ple, to be an impor­tant part of their life, their children’s lives. My two kids used to real­ly love Miffy the Bun­ny – they’re nine and six now, so they don’t watch Miffy so much these days. But it’s fun­ny because we were clean­ing out some of the kids’ old toys recent­ly and when I went to throw out the Miffy the Bun­ny house they said, ​‘No, no, no, no! Dad, that’s Miffy the Bunny’s house, we want it!’ That’s so cool, you know, it’s already a part of their child­hood and it real­ly means some­thing to them. It’s corny, but that’s what I want from the movies we make. I want a kid to not want to give up their Inside Out DVD or toy.”

With three fea­ture films sched­uled for release in the next 12 months – Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur and Find­ing Dory – and Toy Sto­ry 4 also in devel­op­ment, Pixar looks well placed to build on its extra­or­di­nary lega­cy. But when LWLies enquires as to where the future of ani­mat­ed sto­ry­telling lies, the con­ver­sa­tion gets even more self-ana­lyt­i­cal. As Doc­ter reflects: ​“On the first Toy Sto­ry, we set­tled on that par­tic­u­lar sub­ject mat­ter because, whether we liked it or not, every­thing looked like plas­tic. So we decid­ed it was best to just embrace that. Since then we’ve been able to do fur and organ­ic cloth, and on Inside Out we’ve been able to cre­ate char­ac­ters who are a lot more flu­id and loose, almost like they’re hand-drawn. But in terms of the actu­al sto­ries we’ve told, some­times I feel like we’re stuck a lit­tle bit in our own for­mat. We make the films that we our­selves would want to see, but that’s accord­ing to the same group of peo­ple who’ve been here now for 20 odd years. So I’m not sure that we’ve real­ly pushed ani­ma­tion as far as we could or maybe should have, but I hope that we’ll con­tin­ue to chal­lenge people’s per­cep­tions of what a Pixar film is.”

“I think about One Hun­dred and One Dal­ma­tians a lot,” adds Rivera. ​“If you watch the four Dis­ney movies lead­ing up to that – Alice in Won­der­land, Peter Pan, Lady and the Tramp and Sleep­ing Beau­ty – it sticks out like a sore thumb. It doesn’t feel like a Dis­ney movie – there’s voice over, the music’s dif­fer­ent, it looks dif­fer­ent. I can’t lie, I do crave some­thing like that for us. We had that when Brad Bird was brought in on The Incred­i­bles. I remem­ber ear­ly on sit­ting watch­ing the sto­ry reels for the first time, some­one men­tioned Pulp Fic­tion, some­thing about how it’s a movie made up of shots that would nor­mal­ly be cut out of the movie. That’s kind of how The Incred­i­bles felt. We’re con­stant­ly look­ing to rekin­dle that, while still mak­ing fam­i­ly enter­tain­ment that’s on-brand.” Amid all this intro­spec­tion, Rivera admits that there’s an even greater chal­lenge fac­ing Pixar, one which could be viewed as being beyond the reach of any one film stu­dio. ​“We don’t see ani­ma­tion as a genre,” he says with just a hint of defi­ance. ​“I hope there comes a time when peo­ple see ani­ma­tion as we see it, which is just as movies. I remem­ber being at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val in 2009 with Up, that felt like a water­shed moment for us and ani­ma­tion in gen­er­al. I was look­ing over my shoul­der at the Pedro Almodóvars and Michael Hanekes and it felt crazy that we were there, but at the same time it also felt like we ful­ly deserved to be there. World cin­e­ma accept­ed us to the table for a minute and we want­ed anoth­er taste.”

Rivera and Doc­ter got a sec­ond help­ing in May when Inside Out pre­miered in Cannes to wide­spread crit­i­cal acclaim. Twen­ty years after Toy Sto­ry first intro­duced us to the awe­some capa­bil­i­ties of com­put­er ani­ma­tion, the studio’s lat­est crown­ing achieve­ment lit­er­al­ly takes audi­ences on a jour­ney inside the human mind to reaf­firm the pow­er of imag­i­na­tion. It is Pixar’s most ambi­tious film to date and an emphat­ic response to those who voiced con­cerns about the studio’s direc­tion fol­low­ing the slight dip in form that pre­ced­ed Toy Sto­ry 3. But more than this, Inside Out proves that great art doesn’t exist in a vac­u­um. It is thanks in part to the resur­gence of Dis­ney, Dream­Works and the rest that Pixar con­tin­ues to tell daz­zling orig­i­nal sto­ries on a spec­tac­u­lar scale while striv­ing to push the bound­aries of their pre­ferred medi­um – what Bri­an Eno coined in 2009 as a ​‘sce­nius’, where­by artis­tic trends emerge not through an individual’s con­tri­bu­tions but through an ecol­o­gy of tal­ent. Pixar is no longer way out on its own, and that’s a good thing. Because the thriv­ing cul­tur­al scene to which the stu­dio belongs may one day engen­der the per­ma­nent shift in pub­lic con­scious­ness it so des­per­ate­ly craves.