What makes a Pixar movie a Pixar movie? First its roots are based in the work of Walt Disney.
Story is king, story is the most important thing. You want it to
really resonate with the audience. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston always talked
about pathos, is the emotion that you they always are striving for with the movies.
You want the movies to touch people, and that really is kind of a hallmark of Walt.
Make them funny, make it beautiful, make them scary, but in the end you want that heart of the movie to be so strong.
You want to make things that
you just haven't thought of before, yet it's familiar to you.
When Steve came into buy our group, he was so blown away by the talent, of the group that's what he was investing in.
We had the Pixar image computer, was hardware we had all
the software and stuff and but he also bought into Ed's dream which is computer animation.
Ed always had a dream to do an animated feature film with computer animation one day
and that's why I was there. I loved animation but I was so
excited about the idea of doing computer animation. I, we knew that it could be
something great for in the feature film world. But initially we were a technology
company, and it was a slow evolution over those first nine years until Toy Story
came out that we kind of evolved from a hardware and software company to an animation studio.
But I came into this technology company this group, the smartest guys in the world
and I was like I'm gonna boy I'm going to need to learn how to program the computer
but it came in and I looked at these guys and they're all PhD's.
I'm never going to know what they know about the technology, and I thought
you know what? I'm not going to worry about that. I'm just going to sit next to
them and work in collaboration with them. Because they don't know what I know and
then it's how to bring a character to life and give it emotion and personality
through pure movement. That's what I was taught by the great Disney artists so
I'm just going into collaboration and that started this foundation of the way
we work at Pixar is that the art challenges the technology and technology inspires the art,
and that's what set Pixar apart. We've added technology to do
fur and hair of clothing. Incredible advances in in effects like water and
fire and smoke and you know all all those things that come with these
advances and incredible advances in how we can render skin. The realistic bounce
light that comes from the reality of things and so you can get a movie like
now The Good Dinosaur, which is just breathtaking. You look at it and you it's
real as as any movie that's ever been made it looks so believable and but it's
all based upon these early advances that Pixar did. Because what we were striving
to do is to study what the audience is used to seeing up on the screen.
Say let's get that into our system and then we were able to, you know to make things
that the audience knows doesn't exist but boy it sure looks real.
We all know, that when when were kids we left the room our toys came alive. We knew that!
That was a truth but and also then when we started developing Toy Story, we
thought about that truth but we also said we want to pull in the toys that we
were familiar with as kids, but then show the world that we know but from a toys point of view, and now its all new.
What's special about Pixar is that people are
so dedicated to the studio as a whole. It's a studio of pioneers. People love
working on our films because they're always doing something new. It's not the
same old same old. We're always challenging them to do
something new, technically and artistically and a lot of that comes
from the years and years of us at the leadership being dedicated
to quality is the best business plan. I remember fondly tho wrap a party for Toy Story
As being really one of the great moments in Pixar history because
it's something no one else had ever done before and we did it and it was a small
group of people too. You know? And we did it. It was really exciting and we were so proud of the film.
I think A Bug's Life was a highlight because that was being
successful with our second movie. You know? Not failing on the second one that was exciting.
I love, I love the movie Cars and seeing Cars come alive as an entire land at Disneyland.
That was really special because I grew up about a
half an hour from Disneyland and worked during my college days at Disneyland
as a ride operator on the Jungle Cruise. I remember my family I took my
family to Walt Disney World right after Toy Story had come out and
so we were flying back from Orlando to San Francisco and we changed stopped in
the Dallas Airport and we're changing planes and as we're getting off of the
plane there was a little boy with his Mom standing there at the gate waiting
for his Dad to come off the plane. He was holding a Woody the cowboy doll.
And I realized at that moment that that character didn't belong to me anymore it belonged to him.
It really means that hum...
The you've touch people, that you've created a work of art, you created a movie you've
created a character, that really entertained someone or really touch
someone to where now it's a part of their life, it's a part of their family.