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Welcome To Planet Pixar
gambit3 writes "Wired Magazine has an in-depth article on the growth of Pixar examining how it compares to, and how it became the new Disney: 'Pixar hasn't just turned into the new Disney. It has out-Disneyed Disney, becoming the apprentice that schooled the sorcerer.' Its films have grossed $2.5 billion, making it the most successful film studio, picture for picture, of all time."
Pixar's statistics movie-for-movie are so cool right now because they've yet to release a dud.
Give them time... the law of large numbers will catch up with them eventually.
it puts the creative minds first and in control, not the big wigs...I mean when Roy Disney gets kicked out of Disney itself, you know you have a problem.
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RDF, as in his infamous Reality Distortion Field.
turn it into movies.
oh by the way, his other company happens to have invented the most wanted consumer electronic toy since the Playstation.
for being a horrible manager, he is still pretty effective.
to not be so quick to bust up the partnership between them and Pixar.
Just one of a long string of poor moves by Eisner. No wonder the shareholders are so pissed at him.
bash: rtfm: command not found
I'm glad to see a company like Pixar succeeding. It goes to show that fundamentally, success lies strongly in the structure of the story rather than the images. Pixar succeeds because they take the time to hammer out their scripts rather than retrofitting stories on top of eye candy. Lucky for us, their eye candy is also some of the best out there. Hope they can keep it up.
The Lion King has been toppled by Finding Nemo as the highest grossing animation ever. Links go to box office statistics.
The Lion King was lauded for it's return to traditional hand-drawn animation techniques. In the past Disney has created some of the most stunning and timeless visual effects without the use of computers, and it's use of CGI was critised as they tentatively tried this new technology (most notably the flying carpet in Alladin). It seemed Disney was turning back to it's roots.
But they weren't. Instead, they turned 180 degrees, and their next movie would be 100% CGI.
Disney's early attempts at CGI belied the problems inherent in training their artists to drop the pencil and grab the mouse. The decision to hire Pixar Studios to take over their CGI efforts was made, and will go down in history as a Damn Good Move.
Toy Story was a groundbreaking film. Nothing like it had ever been tried before. Pixar were the pioneers of feature length 3d animated films. Toy Story set a precedent that would be surpassed by each subsequent film from Pixar Studios, and a precedent for others to aspire to.
Almost ten years since Toy Story, Pixar are now in direct competition with Disney. Disney's The Lion King, praised for it's hand-drawn animations, has been knocked off the box-office podium by Pixar's Finding Nemo, 100% computer-generated.
Both companies now make CGI films exclusively.
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
Pixar is doing extremely well thus far because they've released hits, some of these were hits due in no small part to the Disney marketing machine. While I don't think Pixar's exactly on the losing end of the breakup a lot of their success has been tied to their partnership with Disney.
Disney's power comes from its ability to milk their franchises dry. They've got the Disney channel, their retail chain, third party retailers, and their theme parks to generate cash. They can start a media and retail blitz to hype their movies. A movie that doesn't do well at the box office might end up being a DVD darling or have a successful line of toys or collectibles. They've also got the media channel to do animated series or sequels based on their feature films.
Aladdin is an excellent example of their franchise machine. The movie was very successful in the box office and probably one of the better movies they had done in a long time. The movie was supported by a blitz of toys, video games, and collectibles. Following the success of the movie they made a rather popular television series based on the first film. The series was capped with two straight to video sequels, one featuring the return of Robin Williams as the voice of the Genie. Their one movie that might have made a few hundred million in the box office worldwide ended up making them tons more money as a franchise.
Toy Story has turned into the same sort of franchise. There's an animated series based around Buzz Lightyear, a huge line of toys and collectibles, and then a second movie that was more popular even than the first. Pixar sees only a small fraction of the TS franchise revenue.
Because Disney designs all their films to be franchise darlings is not necessarily a good thing. Pixar's strength lies in its ability to make good movies. Disney's films are just shiny enough to sucker little kids into building Disney themed Christmas lists. Pixar's films are entertaining to people of various ages and rarely give you the feeling you're being hypnotized into buying licensed products at your earliest convenience.
I think Pixar and the other non-Disney studios stand a pretty good chance of ending Disney's media reign in the near (10 yrs) future. Dreamwrosk in particular has been honing their art of sniping away at Disney's core audience. Shrek is friendly enough for the Disney core audience yet enticing enough to keep their parents interested. I don't have any doubt Pixar will be able to pull the same stunt once they're out from the Disney mantle. Neither has the marketing machine of Disney but they are both giving the artistic aspects of their companies more creative control than the suited bean counters. There's a huge market of people yearning for some entertainment that isn't the watered down uncreative crapfest that Disney's films have become.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Be mindful of something. Disney in their earlier days enjoyed something that Pixar enjoys now: the way in which their movies are made is in of itself of entertainment value. People, to some degree, are as entertained by the sophistication of the CG animation as they are by the plot, characters, and so on. This will not go on forever, just as cartoon animation became ordinary in time. Not to say that Pixar doesn't rock, but still, their sales are helped by the novelty factor.
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Keep in mind that this isn't much of a move. It's more of a BSD move than a MacOS move. Pixar has been doing rendering on Unix since they first got started. The fact that a Unix now exists which is also an end-user consumer product is probably how they're viewing the move to OSX. Their move is really more of a "Compile our unix software to the version of BSD that's called OSX" as opposed to "Make this a Mac program."
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
As the article points out, Pixar is so concerned with the story that they spend the first two years of a film just on the story, and Pixar employees believe that Disney's early success came from its characters and story lines. So Disney thinks that spending less time and money on a money will help it compete?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Disney is so much more than a few kids movies. To say that Pixar will become the next Disney mean that Pixar will have theme parks and TV-stations and mall-stores and cruise lines. Pixar may be big, but don't mistake a handful of successful movies for an empire.
A lot can change quickly in this business. Disney itself owned the kids movie market 10 years ago with Aladin, Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, etc. Now look at them. They lost it. Pixar can do the same thing.
The reason Disney is what it is today, and the reason nobody will be able to touch them on their pedestal for a long time is because Disney has the ability to do something that nobody else does.
They can bring the movies to life.
Pixar does not have Pixarland. They do not have a whole huge chunk of land dedicated to recreating every single aspect of the movies. They can look as realistic as they do on the screen, but in the end, the magic stops at the screen.
Disney is more than just characters and movies. Disney USED to be just about those things, but now they are more about the experience.
Don't get me wrong, I love Pixar and all the work they do, and they have put out better stuff than Disney as of late, but nobody should be so daft as to think that Pixar is out-disneying Disney. Once Pixar has a couple of parks, then I might start to believe they have a shot.
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I keep hearing and reading all these news stories about how traditional 2D animation is dead, about how Disney is only doing CG animation from now on. I'm amazed at how ignorant these bean counters and suits are: it's not about the technique that produces these films, it's all about the story and the characters.
The animation in "The Lion King" isn't too different than what we saw in "Snow White" almost 60 years earlier. It was the story and the characters that made the movie (and the other Disney classics from the early 1990s) such a great hit and instant classic.
I think that Pixar should surprise everyone and come out with a traditional 2D cell movie and show just how brilliant their storytelling really is. That way the public and media will get over how computer animation alone will make blockbusters.
At Pixar, people come first, and these aren't ordinary people, they are the best people, and thats why Pixar is kicking butt...
"This is you left and that's your left. This is your right and that's your right. You're gonna die!
You touch on what I've come to see as an important point, albeit a little indirectly.
Look at a few other highly successfull, and well liked movies and what they all have in common. Such as The Matrix and all three of the LOTR series.
It's painstaking attention to detail, every detail.
If you've seen the behind the scenes portions of the dvd's you can't help but notice this.
Take for example the armor worn by the king of Rohan in the The Two Towers. It actually had detail in places the camera simply could never see, but the actor did (very sorry, I have an absolutely crappy memory for names). He said it made him feel like a king seeing that. Wanna bet on whether that helped him in his performance.
Another example, look at how detailed and large the models for Elronds home (again names, even of places) was. This paid off later when they wound up using in in some of the blend shots with matt paintings and actual sets, that hadn't originaly planned to do that way.
Or the all effort the small actors spent learning to walk, stand, etc. like the normal size actors.
In the matrix we had the carefull coloring of scenes for feel. getting the reflections in sunglasses right. the subtle uses of consistant themeing for character (notice how cipher and the agents have square-ish sunglasses, yet the good guys have rounded lenses). and so on.
This complete attention to detail just compounds so many ways in movies that the end result is much more believable, even when the movie is pure fantasy.
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Pixar films, on the other hand, are fewer and further between. They are produced with a lot of tender loving care and it shows! All in all, this leaves us on the edges of our seats wondering what their next bundle of joy will be. Certainly Pixar could hire lots of techies and buy/lease plenty of horsepower to render with, but they don't! So each new movie gets its fair mind-share, and so they are fresh, witty, and a joy to watch. To me, that's what makes Pixar great...
"Pixar could hire lots of techies" Or they could just outsource to India! There fellow slashdotters... I saved you some time.
You make art a team sport by having people do it together and fail publicly at it. "You have to honor failure," Nelson explains, "because failure is just the negative space around success."
That is one shrewd, long-term thinker.
<grrr>
I watched Toy Story in 1995, as a 10 year old.
Nine years later, I'm still enthralled by all of Pixar's works. I've done four years of television & Film production classes in high school, so I have a good idea about the whole creative process. And at the level, the STORY is all you have. Pixar starts there. Their stories could be told with bounding boxes and still be interesting (OK, maybe stick figures, but you get the idea).
The stories include a rich, multithreadded plot (something the rest of Hollywood has yet to grasp of late), in-jokes, loveable characters, and the like. All of which take precedence over how it actually looks on screen. After the animators get done with it, you're left with one movie that kicks ass in every possible department (Oscars be DAMNED).
When's the next movie coming out?
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Its about emotional resonance. Pixar know this and have blended technical expertise with storytelling with many other elements in a remarkable way to create emotional resonance. Take Luxo Jr. This short movie was able to convey real human emotion within the framework of a short movie, no human facial expressions, no words and a terribly simple story. It was, and still is, one of the finest pieces of animation ever made because it conveyed emotion. As a member of its audience I was able to observe a "mother" and "child" playing. I could feel her care for the baby and I could see its enthusiasm and wonder at playing with a small ball. The moment when the ball burst was at once amusing and generated sympathy. I empathised so I was drawn in.
Story (and intellectual appeal), characters, rendering (eg mood lighting), music (think Gladiator), acting all blend to create emotional resonance *if* you get it right. But its terribly hard to get it right. A wrong element can easily throw the balance and the film will fail. If the balance is thrown too far, the general public can no longer relate to the movie and it fails. If the atempt to create emotion in the audience is too obvious we feel like its a sickly sweet treat and don't like it. We are smart now when it come to movies, so its getting harder to tell a story and have it appeal widely.
Sure there are story forms to study, derived from Aristotle, to the modern film, there is structure to a successful story. However look at Willow, largely a failure despite one of the writers studying myth and story form with Joseph Campbell (author of Hero with a Thousand Faces). All the technically correct elements are present in Willow but it fails to engage the vast majority of the audience.
Meanwhile look at the wonderful imagery in Final Fantasy. So much work and such great vision. Still a financial failure perhaps because the story had little mass appeal, despite the fact that it follows traditional structure.
This stuff is hard to get right once never mind time after time. Pixar will inevitably get it wrong. In the end, heros of animation or not, they are a film studio now and all film studios get it wrong. If it were easy or a science we would all be getting it right now.
Wroceng
It's also a lot less of a disaster for them if they decide to scrap a scene or add a new one. By this point they've probably also got an instant storyboarding mode, where the director can say "let's see what it looks like with a helicoptor in this scene." They open up their directory of objects and find a helicoptor, drop it into the scene, and render it at low enough resolution that they can view it in real time.
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Few will agree with me, but I think that Disney came out ahead when they dumped Pixar.
Disney holds the copyrights to "Toy Story", "Toy Story 2", "Monsters, Inc.", and "A Bug's Life", and will still make revenue from those properties (think disney-created sequels, toy merchandising, new media releases), all the while Pixar is contractually obligated to make more movies.
The movie business is all about hits, which are inherently unpredicible. Jobs wouldn't even talk to Disney because they refused to sell the rights back to the existing movies. They would have been insane if they had done this, because those properties are worth billions of dollars over the next few years. It's not a wise idea to trade existing hits for only the expectation of new ones.
Final Fantasy: The Movie, anyone? The Squaresoft Hawaii studio did as much R&D on their movies in the hair, skin, and cloth department as any other CG film and that turned out crap. Realism isn't what makes a movie great. It's pure story and script... The technological advances and great animation are a bonus.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
As far as I'm concerned, Pixar IS the new Disney and Disney is dead. Disney has no chance untill Eisner has run it into the ground (more so) and leaves and someone who understands Disney comes in (like Roy Disney).
Eisner is taking Disney, grabbing a killer bee nest, setting in a fire ant hill, smashing it, diggin up the fire ant mound, and juggling gernades all while eating poisin-ivy.
As properties, Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, and the rest are barely even promoted any more. The Disney Channel has turned into crud and doesn't even seem to show the old cartoons anymore, just horribly derivitive designed-by-committe sit-coms.
I used to love Disney. But they aren't even a shell of their former selves as far as I'm concerned.
PS: While posting this, I had to wait because of "database maintence". I've never seen that on /. Cool.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
WTF does "Disneyed" mean in this context anyway?
I think it is pretty obvious. They ARE (or rather, were) known for *GOOD* animated movies. Disney was a creative studio once upon a time - innovators of new technology and artistic storytellers that consistently produced compelling hit movies. It was the secret of their success and made them a powerhouse. They have been riding that initial success for the past 50 years with a brief pale renaissance in the 90's that is now over.
Today Pixar is what Disney was in the 40's and 50's: pioneers of a new medium that aren't so enthralled by that new medium itself that they forget that it is only the medium and that the real point, and beauty is in the story and artistry itself. Pixar has lifted Disney's original culture, it's methods and even it's jargon as Disney has lost them. If Walt were thawed out today he would feel quite at home at Pixar but lost and alienated (and very sad) over at Disney.