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.

Pixar has made so many blockbuster hits, each just about being almost better than the last in terms of anticipation translated to box office receipts, that it's tempting to speculate whether an upcoming movie will be the one infamously credited to bringing the juggernaut to a temporary halt. Going by what The Pixar Story presented, so long as the team stays hungry, focused and passionate with transforming their ideas into films stemming from the heart, then it's probably a formula that would be difficult to break, and computer animation fans will be in for a treat, for a long time to come.

The Pixar Story is a documentary charting the meteoric rise of the company we all have probably in one way or another, come to love, with its groundbreaking effects and animation taking the world by storm with each new release. It's tough for any studio to build upon and better the success of its previous release with the new one, but somehow Pixar always managed to come through unscathed. But as the documentary reveals, it's never plain sailing, and thank goodness most of the cockups, especially weak stories, get junked and reworked, rather than the company crossing its fingers that a mediocre work could cut it. Technological advances also meant that animators get constantly challenged to break new ground, and the film systematically presents these challenges so that we the audience could take a step back, and appreciate the efforts.

Most history buffs will already know that Pixar has its first origins from Lucasfilm (and you can sense George Lucas reeling from letting this opportunity run away), where a division with a mixed expertise of computer scientists and animators spun off to do what they love, and that's to explore the possibilities of combining their skills to make animation. And with angel investor Steve Jobs providing seed funding and despite the studio being in the red in the first few years, one short clip lead to a short film, and with Disney on board in an initial uneven partnership, Toy Story was born, and as they say, the rest is history.

The first parts of the documentary devoted quite a lot of time to John Lasseter, who's credited with making things work with his direction of the first crop of movies coming out of Pixar. It traces his professional start as an animator with Walt Disney, the run ins and the unfortunate firing, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise on hindsight. We see how he, and the rest of his co-workers, had to undertake pressure to perform, each pouring in copious amounts of personal sacrifice to turn their dream into reality. And with each success, the director taking over the reins for the next movie, will no doubt feel the pressure of its predecessor's success, especially Pete Doctor coming off Lesseter's impressive track record, and others like Brad Bird coming from outside the company culture.

We take a sneak peek into the facilities at their swanky company grounds, admiring the grounds in which Pixar creations are conceived, but what is of extreme value here is the tons of archived footage, most of which are unseen because they never see the light of day, be it rough storyboard sketches or skeletal computer animation, most of which contain early stages of the characters with whom we've been acquainted with. The Pixar Story spent significant amount of time on Toy Story (since it's the first movie), and you can witness how the early Woody character and storyline was rejected because they didn't seem right. And it seems that Pixar doesn't compromise on quality - that plans do get trashed if they don't measure up, even with a fixed deadline looming. Talk about grit, determination and perfectionism all rolled into one.

With plenty of interviews with the creators, big name CEOs past and present, and the stars sharing their experience with providing the voices for their digital counterparts, director Leslie Iwersk also provided a brief look into the political wrangling behind the scenes, just for completeness sake, making The Pixar Story well suited for anyone curious to know how it call started, and how the energy is sustained until this very day.

Wow...what a great and thorough film. This is the story of Pixar Studio--from its earliest days to the present (which was 2007 at the time). It offers so much more than you might expect from such a film--wonderful access to the folks who built the studio who you might think were too busy or too important to participate--but they did. So, in addition to seeing lots of great films being made, you get to meet folks like John Lasseter and Steve Jobs and see them as people--very excited and creative people, but still people. Amazing access, however, isn't all. You also get a great sense of excitement and fun--and it's practically impossible to watch this film without feeling this and feeling inspired--and the music sure helps with this as well. For fans of CGI...heck, for ANYONE, this is a must-see film and you learn a lot and have a great time learning. See this film.

It is basically about how pixar came to be through its hardships and successes. It is a very interesting and informative documentary. It taught me a lot about the history of computer animated movies that i had not known before seeing it. Im not usually a big fan of documentaries but something about this just kept me watching the whole way through. I definitely would recommend this.

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.