Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: Pixar Animation Studio, the company that invented the computer-animated feature film and has become the Walt Disney corporation's most acclaimed imprint. Their ninth full-length film, WALL•E, opens today.
Pixar 101
Making movies was never what Pixar's corporate overlords had in mind. They intended to sell specialty imaging computers and software for advanced rendering to businesses like advertising agencies and medical equipment manufacturers. But Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith—the tinkerers who started Pixar to explore the use of computers to produce moving graphics—also wanted to produce work with characters and stories. When they hired John Lasseter at a computer graphics conference on the Queen Mary, the laid-off Disney animator hid from his bosses behind the title "Interface Designer" and worked on the short films that would draw gasps and standing ovations at the annual computer technology convention SIGGRAPH.
The first of those shorts to receive acclaim outside of the computer industry was "Tin Toy," a five-minute adventure story about a wind-up one-man band racing to elude a huge, bumbling baby. As Tinny The Toy realizes the child's destructive potential, his initial delight turns to horror, and Lasseter's direction and design captures not only the drama of the situation, but the humor inherent in the character's gradual discovery of his situation. He can't move without his instruments playing—but if his instruments play, he attracts the attention of the baby. The short portrays one of the first computer-generated human characters (though Billy The Baby looks more like a doll than an actual infant), and when Tinny escapes under the couch and the camera cuts to the frightened toys of the household staring at him with their quivering, artificial eyes, it's a early example of Lasseter's crack comic timing. Other computer animators at the time were trying to dazzle with technique, but Lasseter was exploiting the industry-wide interest in new technology to try his hand at being the new Chuck Jones.
"Tin Toy" won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film in 1988, and it looked for a while like the foundation of a one-note Pixar empire. When Lasseter gave Jeffrey Katzenberg the first treatment of a movie called Toy Story, it starred Tinny. The original plan was to follow the wind-up toy from the factory to the store to a little boy's birthday party. Then Tinny would be accidentally left at a gas station and have to find his way (with his buddy, a ventriloquist's dummy) to a kindergarten classroom, where he'd finally find fulfillment in the love of the children. But Lasseter quickly realized that Tinny was too old-fashioned to carry the weight of a feature-length story, so he made the lost toy a "space ranger," and turned his buddy into a cowboy doll named for famed athlete and character actor Woody Strode. With a relatively small budget from Pixar's partners at Disney, hot-and-cold support from Pixar head honcho Steve Jobs, and a merchandising division dubious about the prospects of tie-in toys from the movie, the stage was loosely set for the world's first fully computer-animated feature film. But thanks to Lasseter's insistence that Pixar's technicians serve the creative talent, the film opened on Thanksgiving weekend to rave reviews, and became the number one box office hit of 1995. Audiences discovered a movie with wit, style, and real pathos—all qualities that transcended animation's kiddie ghetto. In a theatrical environment where people were expected to fork over cash to be dazzled by high-tech wizardry, it was Toy Story's attention to characters, story, editing, and dialogue that made it compelling.
For all its wonders, Toy Story was still plagued by Pixar's persistent difficulty with modeling human characters. Unlike the hard plastic surfaces of toys, the pliable skin, hair, and clothing of human beings demanded processing power and software breakthroughs that hadn't arrived in 1995. Making more supple ant-surfaces for Pixar's follow-up film A Bug's Life required the same breakthrough: subdivision meshes, a technique that makes wrinkles and folds look natural. To test the technology, Ed Catmull commissioned a short called "Geri's Game," in which an old man plays chess with himself. "Geri's Game," directed by eventual Ratatouille co-director Jan Pinkava, played theatrically along with A Bug's Life and won the 1998 Oscar for Best Animated Short. Although it may be best remembered for its display of advanced technical tools for skin, hair, and cloth modeling, it's just as important for pioneering a better approach to human characters in computer animation. Geri isn't a realistic human; he's a cartoon. His exaggerated features give him a distinctive but welcoming appearance, in contrast with the rather creepily unstylized Andy in Toy Story. In Geri, Pixar discovered that careful character design, for humans as well as for imaginary creatures, meant a balance between a caricatured artistic style (that allows audiences to project a consciousness into the image onscreen) and a high level of detail (that gives that consciousness a rich, textured world to inhabit).
That particular evolutionary branch matured with 2004's The Incredibles, in which a cartoony superhero family comes out of retirement to save the world. More important than the appealing character design, though was the opportunity for Pixar to branch out into a new genre: comic book adventure. There had always been action setpieces in Pixar features, from the rescue mission into Sid's yard in Toy Story to the mind-boggling door-gag-to-infinity-and-beyond in Monsters, Inc. But The Incredibles was the first Pixar film to make action integral to the premise. Director and writer Brad Bird proved up to the challenge, staging fleet chases and slam-bang fights without losing sight of the internal struggles of its characters. (And though the movie's philosophical underpinning is a bit undercooked, that's a flaw Bird would soon remedy, with Ratatouille.) The Incredibles is also an important piece of the foundational Pixar puzzle because it marked the first time one of the studio's films was helmed by a filmmaker-for-hire. An outsider who had never worked at Pixar before, Bird sought out Lasseter, an old classmate at CalArts, after becoming frustrated by the roller-coaster world of Hollywood development deals (and following the disappointment of Warner Brothers' failure to promote his visionary The Iron Giant). By 2000, when Bird started work on the story of The Incredibles with Lasseter, Pixar was known as a place where story, imagination, and creativity mattered—a place where artists could shoot for greatness.
Intermediate Work
For all Pixar's innovations in rendering and its adherence to classical storytelling construction, it's the studio's heart and sense of play that have distinguished its films in audience's minds. The latter is very much in evidence in Lasseter's second short under the Pixar aegis, "Luxo Jr." A simple two-minute gag about a little lamp destroying the toy ball it's playing with, "Luxo Jr." was impressive on a technical level—on the Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume One DVD, Lasseter describes the amazing feats of mathematics it took just to get the lamps cord to flop the right way—but even more impressive for the puckish ways it makes the inanimate come alive. It's cute, first and foremost; and also funny, with the comedy built on reaction shots. (Reaction shots of a lamp, don't forget.) It's no wonder that little Luxo has remained part of Pixar's corporate logo at the beginning of every film. The childlike spirit and simple humor of "Luxo Jr." is at the heart of what the studio tries to achieve—right up to its current feature WALL•E, with its Luxo-like put-upon robot protagonist.
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