Interview With Head of Pixar Animation Ed Catmull

CowboyRobot writes "Stanford professor Pat Hanrahan discusses graphics with Pixar Animation Studios President Ed Catmull. Hanrahan and Catmull share an Oscar award for developing RenderMan. 'Among the many things that are inspiring about Pixar, and one way you've had a huge impact on the world, is that you changed many people's views of what computing is all about. A lot of people think of computing as number crunching whose main application is business and engineering. Pixar added an artistic side to computing. I've talked to many students who realize that art can be part of computing; that creativity can be part of computing; that they can merge their interests in art and science. They think of computing as a very fulfilling pursuit.'" I liked this, and not just because I spent the last week watching Toy Story 3 multiple times with my kid. Catmull talks a lot about the intersection of science & art and the time before Pixar. Anyone else think Pixar might be the geek Mecca? Do they do tours?

Comments

Re:Adult movie

[somersault]

Did you just use Wall-E as an example of "deep writing"? It's the only Pixar movie I don't consider worth buying on DVD. It's visually pretty nice, but I found the plot pretty hard to take seriously. Graphically it was amazing, but other than that I thought it was one of the worst films I've ever seen..

I can suspend disbelief for toys coming to life, but the sentient robots in Wall-E didn't do it for me. Wall-E developing sentience just from being alive for a long time, and on the flip side his gf suddenly becoming anything other than a hard-assed killer in a short amount of time. Sure, similar stuff happened in Short Circuit and Terminator, but they just did it better.