/Film:
While Pixar Animation is nearly 30 years old, it’s only been 20 years since the company ventured into feature length, computer animated filmmaking with Toy Story. The film was an instant classic in 1996 and it spawned two successful, acclaimed sequels with a fourth installment on the way in 2017, and it was just the beginning of what the animation house had to offer.
In celebration of Pixar’s milestone anniversary this year, editor Kees van Dijkhuizen has paid tribute to Pixar with a supercut of the films they’ve made over the years, from their early shorts to this year’s feature films. You might find yourself getting some tears in your eyes since it’s accompanied by Michael Giacchino‘s score from Up.
I don’t know if I could name a single studio that has moved me to the range of emotions Pixar has over the past 20 years.
They out-Disneyed Disney, and made doing so look easy.
Yeah. I studied, then did some traditional manual cel animation myself back in the ’80s. And I saw pictures of the “multi-plane” animation camera Disney invented to achieve parallax perspective in moving backgrounds. Impressive for its day.
But computer imagery first appeared during that same period. I’ve been working in that medium ever since. I saw its promise of greater speed and flexibility back then, and only in recent years, after almost three decades, do we have computer systems powerful and fast enough to produce the quality of work Pixar has been producing.
John Lassiter once said in an interview, “Story is King.”—at least around that initial “Toy Story” period when production was still under Jobs’ purview. I think THAT in particular is what “out-Disneyed Disney”, not for lack of Walt’s own talent and desire to communicate with us when I was a kid, but for the various facilities and efficiencies offered by computer technology over the primitive technology Disney had to hand in his time.
From what I’ve seen, Walt’s talent was primarily the ability to recognize talent in others, and to organize them into a group that could entertain the public. His storyteling instincts were good, but he tended to aim for middlebrow tastes. If he’d had access to the technology Pixar created, Pixar’s stories would still have taken more risks and stretched more expectations.
Lassiter was correct, and Pixar continues to demonstrate that.
You make some good points.
I think 3D modeling and animation rigging, along with texturing, morphing, etc., as well as virtual sets with their respective cameras and lights, all together freed up design and production staff so that they could pay more attention to details such as facial expressions in ECUs, re-utilize assets, while procedurally randomizing cyclical animations for building convincing crowds and elements such as clouds, waves, grass, hair, etc.
I suppose there’s some sort of boundary, though, which CG animation shouldn’t cross towards achieving more and more realism. The realm of the “cartoon character” should probably remain unviolated.
While the tools get more sophisticated, and that boundary’s getting narrower, it still remains… at least for now. For me, the “uncanny valley” is still something that reminds me I’m watching a cartoon instead of people. There are a few artist teams that have been able to help me overcome it, like Weta Workshop’s Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies.
All of which makes me very happy that Pixar usually has something entirely different in mind.