Welcome To Planet Pixar 247
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."
Undefeated... (Score:3, Insightful)
Give them time... the law of large numbers will catch up with them eventually.
Re:Undefeated... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Undefeated... (Score:2)
Re:Undefeated... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Undefeated... (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest threat to Pixar, I think, is if all these other studios, racing in to cash in on the money delivered by 3D films like Finding Nemo, and Shrek 2 (just as studios in the mid 90's all started up 2D animation divisions to make the next Lion King). With all of those companies out for the money, you're going to get more Final Fantasy type movies, with nice looking graphics, and lousy story/acting. This might take some of the shine off of 3d films, and possibly damage Pixar's ability to get wide distribution in the short term following a glut of bad 3d films.
Re:Undefeated... (Score:3, Insightful)
default to a much higher quality. Producers HAVE to make sure that storylines
are solid, make sense and have wide audience appeal. Otherwise, 4 years of
computational time is wasted. Plus, since more time is spent computationally,
it gives creators more time to create and be creative.
Re:Undefeated... (Score:2)
But for the most part, 3d movies are built to appeal to wide audiences to ensure that they make enough money to pay for the movie.
It has become the best studio because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:3, Interesting)
(Technically Roy wasn't kicked out, but resigned on his own; he was going to be forced out due to his 'age,' but left first) See his site [savedisney.com].
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:5, Funny)
They're all Satan. Try to think of it as a sort of unholy trinity - The Bastard, The Scum, and The Holy Shit. You can figure out which is which. ;)
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:5, Informative)
Remember Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King?
Although I do agree some decisions have been less than beneficial as of late.
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:5, Insightful)
Eisner turned Disney around in the eighties by turning its focus on movies and new characters. Remember Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Lion King?
Sure, I remember them. Now, which of them were new characters, and which were recycled folklore?
Pixar is creating new content. Disney is still stuck slapping (C) and (TM) over the commons. See the difference?
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:5, Interesting)
Eisner is responsible for Touchstone Pictures (e.g. movies for adults), and for their revived enthusiasm for animation ("The Little Mermaid", "Beauty and the Beast", "Aladin", and "The Lion King" -- all solid flicks).
I suspect Disney in this case has repeated the classic IBM blunder with Microsoft -- they outsourced their 3d animation to Pixar in the early days, thus allowing Pixar to fund its own development. Now Pixar has gone off on their own, and Disney is left with a gutted animation department. Also, Eisner has been in power far too long -- he's probably tapped out for ideas, and greed is skewing his view of the world.
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's because it's new and young. Disney is old, rich, successful (in the long run) and powerful. You know the proverbs; power corrupts, success breeds complacency, etc.
Someday Pixar will get old and crotchety too, but lets hope they have a good run while their youth lasts.
Re:It has become the best studio because... (Score:2)
One of my old profs used to be an ex-pixar animator. He left because of exactly what you describe above. Lack of artistic freedom.
Of course, this was back when pixar was doing tv commercials
obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds a bit like... the recording industry's relationship to its artists, doesn't it? To make an stretched analogy, pretend Pixar is some starving young band, and Disney is the dreaded RIAA member copmany. It is all about how much money comes back to the originator - sure they might be more succesfull with Disney, but then 25% of the pie might be less than 100% of a smaller pie. Pixar feels it is getting screwed out of money and would rather finance itself and then pay for distribution...
Of course nobody stays on top forever. The important thing is profit - 5 movies that have grossed 2.5 billion. They don't have to hit grand slams all the time to succeed. Plus, without Disney they get all of the money for associated marketing tie-ins like toys.
Sure, dumping Disney is a bold move, but that's how you get rich: take some risks.
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's guaranteed minimal funding or risky gigantic profits. They chose the risky route. I believe the future will prove them right, as evidenced by the fact that all the talent in writing and animating these movies has been Pixar's work, not Disney's.
These days computer animations are everywhere. Pixar started it but they are no longer the only player in that market. But what they do have is better writing, and better in-jokes. They have been very successful at making movies that BOTH children and adults find entertaining (as opposed to typical Disney crap, where the adults are only bothering to go because their kids want to see it.) When Disney says "family movie" they really mean "children's movie." When Pixar says "family movie", they mean it.
Pixar will outlast Disney, precisely *because* they aren't afraid to take a risk when it's necessary (like this move was), while Disney is too conservative - preferring to follow established trends instead of starting them.
No, I'm not a Steve Jobs fan. I'm a Pixar fan, and have been since before I knew who the hell Jobs even was. I've been a fan since their animated short days, when I was using their Renderman(tm) software (a little bit) and going to animated film festivals and going ga-ga over seeing what they were doing with it. That's how I can tell they are where the creative talent was coming from, not Disney. Shorts like "Gerry's Game" and the mother-and-child desk lamps show all the same style of creative scripting as can be seen in Toy Story and Monsters Inc.
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:5, Interesting)
That's not quite the same as saying that Disney comes out ahead. By letting Pixar go, Disney doesn't GAIN anything they weren't already entitled to under the old contract. But, as you point out, they're not losing anything either. No one's denying that the old contract was absurdly lucrative for Disney. In retrospect, Pixar gave up too much. But of course no one knew that at the time, who could have predicted that CG films could draw in that kind of money?
Anyway, my only point is that you're saying that Disney is somehow "winning" by severing ties with Pixar. They're not. They're simply keeping their winnings from the negotiations several years ago.
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, not technically. But they "lost" all of the future revenue they would have had from future Pixar films. They lost the *potential* for revenue from future films, which is what companies are based on after all - revenue potential, not current revenue. A company with no future is not a company for very long, pretty much by definition.
So Disney did give up a lot, quite a lot. I really doubt Pixar will keep up this run of massive hits forever, but assuming they even put up half the gross over the next five movies, that's still $1.25 billion in gross Disney just threw away.
Was Disney put in an impossible position by Pixar's demands? I don't think so. Pixar had become Disney's animation business and they knew it. Disney's in-house animation has stunk up the business for years and it's only getting worse - that's of Disney's own doing. It was Disney's mis-management that put Pixar in the position they were in, where they could make such demands, and in my opinion Disney was in no position to refuse them, even as unreasonable as they sounded.
If you run an ice cream stand, it's not you or your stand that people are coming for, it's the ice cream you're selling. And you need to get that ice cream from somewhere, whether it's by making it yourself or by buying it from someone else. Without ice cream people want to buy, you may as well not have an ice cream stand, right?
The question is, does Disney want to be in the animation business or not? Letting Pixar go suggests to me that they don't - otherwise, there's really no price that would have been too high to pay. This was their source of ice cream. Without Pixar, there is no animation business at Disney anymore, and they need to rely even more on their theme parks (which are nothing without their animation business) and ABC. Eventually, the theme parks cannot really survive without the animation, as it's all based on Disney's "branding".
I don't usually like to sound too dramatic about these things, as most companies can survive events like this, but I really think Disney threw away their core business here, first by letting their own animation division fall apart, then by throwing away their only remaining source of reliable animation revenue. They no longer have anything they can really market as Disney animation with a straight face. (Personally, I think their Studio Ghibli contract has left them with some films better than either their own *or* anything Pixar has ever done, but they'll never use them to their potential - they're too hung-up on 3D right now). Without that animation, their theme parks decline, and then the whole company crumbles. Disney cannot survive just as ABC.
This was not a win for Disney. The deal Pixar wanted was not a very good one for Disney, but it was the lesser of two evils.
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:4, Insightful)
Disney wants to be in the animation business - but on their terms. You can see this kind of thinking with their live action films, where they refuse to pay big-name star salaries, or authorize large budgets. This can bite them in the ass (ie, The Alamo) but Disney is able to exert tight control over production costs.
Ironically, Disney's failures in animation stem from NOT exerting tight control over production costs, and allowing them to run high on films that lacked the story to bring in the blockbuster revenues that Disney was counting on. This lead to films like Lilo and Stitch, which had good story, but had to make do with a relatively shoestring budget, as compared to say, Treasure Planet.
Disney has a 3D unit. They've been working feverishly the past year on a couple of films (one of which was scrapped, if I remember correctly.) Disney also tried to get into the business a few years ago by buying Secret Labs, and using that core to build a production team that they used on Dinosaur. They've since assembled a new team, with some animators being pulled from the ashes of what was once Disney Feature Animation. The problem is, if they don't get their script and storyboard down pat, not even the novelty of 3D (which is getting less novel as time passes) is going to save them. They've just wasted too much of their goodwill for audiences to go to a Disney film on brand name alone.
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:5, Insightful)
2: Again, two. Two.
3: At least according to some, past performance is a good indicator of future success. Those movies may net a few mil--I think a few billion might be pushing it, but I don't know the numbers in Hollywood all that well (the existing five Pixar movies have gotten about $2.5billion so far, for some comparison)--but if they continue to be popular, it'll be because there's a market for this stuff. Guess what? That's what Pixar churns out!
4: Probably true, but if the existing franchises continue to be profitable, it seems a safe bet that so will future movies, no?
My impression was that Disney truly wanted Pixar back. But Pixar themselves would have to be nuts to sign on to another exploitative deal with a man like Michael Eisner. Sure, it makes sense when you're an upstart nobody has heard of, and you need Disney's distribution network just to get heard, but now Pixar is the big name and Disney, as this article points out, is the one getting schooled.
Can't say I'm sad, though.
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, they'll pick up the merchandising from Toy Story, Bugs Life, Nemo etc. but that stuff doesn't hang around in the stores very long UNLESS you get another movie sequel to
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:2)
This seems to make sense, but then again, when was the last time you saw Mickey Mouse in anything? I seem to still see an awful lot of Mickey Mouse branded toys, etc...
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:3, Insightful)
2. But only 2, so far this is a company that has yet too miss. I think this has much less to do with Jobs, than it does their creative staff. If Disney had been supplying the creative ideas, and Pixar just making the movies then yeah, it would be bad for Pixar.
3. See above. And, from what I have read (obligatory grain of salt), it was about future movies, not past. Steve wanted to turn Disney into a distribution and ma
I think you've got that backwards... (Score:2)
I can think of one non-Pixar animation that's been a hit for Disney in recent years - The Lion King - and plenty of turkeys that barely made back their money (if that) - Prince of Egypt, etc.
And that one hit is a movie that's almost a decade old: clearly, Disney's in-house animation team isn't scoring touchdowns of the Snow White, The Jungle Book or Bambi variety, so what makes you think that the
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:2)
I know my niece can't wait for the new Pocahontas/John Smith plush dolls so she can have something for practice kissing when she listens to Justin Timberlake.
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:2)
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:2)
Disney is going to hang on to those Pixar franchises all the way to the grave, and t
Re:*Disney* came out ahead when they dumped Pixar (Score:2)
"from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee" -Khan
While it is true that he said this, you might want to know that originally, Captain Ahab said it in Moby Dick.
plussing (Score:2, Interesting)
You gotta love english (Score:5, Funny)
What I love with English is the ability to turn nouns into verbs and vice-versa without shocking anybody (and without even needing to be in Soviet Russia).
Re:You gotta love english (Score:3, Interesting)
WTF does "Disneyed" mean in this context anyway? I can think of a number of things that Disney is famous for: merchandising, theme parks, corporate bullshit, animated movies. Am I to assume that we're talking about animated movies then? Disney's not known for *good* animated movies -- they pioneered animation for TV and movies, so they get the credit and the association. But this still do
Re:You gotta love english (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
New Disney? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:New Disney? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:New Disney? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:New Disney? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Steve figured out how to "monetize" his RDF (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Perhaps Disney would have been wise (Score:4, Insightful)
Just one of a long string of poor moves by Eisner. No wonder the shareholders are so pissed [savedisney.com] at him.
Less BS more Product == $$ (Score:2, Insightful)
How much do the movies net? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How much do the movies net? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 directo
Re:How much do the movies net? (Score:2)
So we could see what reported net profits were, but it would be difficult in the extreme to figure out what the actual profitability is per film--except to l
Finding Nemo tops Lion King in the box office. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Finding Nemo tops Lion King in the box office. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have a few problems with this.
Pixar is (not "are" -- there is only one Pixar) not in direct competition with Disney. At least, not yet.
To date, Pixar has never released a major motion picture on its own. Toy Story, Bug's Life, Monsters Inc, and Nemo were all
Re:Finding Nemo tops Lion King in the box office. (Score:2)
From the Article:
Pixar makes the movies, and Disney distributes them; they cofinance the films and split the profits.
I realise that this is splitting hairs, yet since they are cofinancing Pixar's films, Disney are technically producing them. I assert that Disney's role is to distribute, and they leave the production to the (currently) sympathetic and benign Pixar. (Refer to article).
Reading the article, it's clear that the Pixar folk have quite alot of respect for
Re:Finding Nemo tops Lion King in the box office. (Score:3, Informative)
Only if you fall into the usual mistake of not adjusting for inflation and compare Lion King's 1994 $319 million with Nemo's 2003 $340 million. But just because in-numerable economics incompetents make this comparison, it doesn't mean it's meaningful.
If you correct for inflation, then things look quite different.
In adjusted terms, the highest grossing animation film is... (drum roll) The Jungle Book [the-movie-times.com]. It's $206 millio
Re:Finding Nemo tops Lion King in the box office. (Score:2)
I doubt that. Shrek 2 is great on the first watch, but it doesn't have much staying power. What made finding nemo so big was that even adults could watch it over and over without getting bored, meaning they would take friends who hadn't seen it back to see it another time. That creates a long-term ticket sales market, and I just don't see shrek 2 doing that.
Don't get me wrong, shrek 2 is going to rake in t
This really isn't surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
Take a look at Finding Nemo. First off, an interesting tidbit: My atmospheric dynamics professor knows another fluid dynamics professor that was working on fluid dynamics in the college setting but has since switched to films to employ Navier-Stokes equations in movies...
Look at Nemo, those shallow waves (found near-shore) are actual mathematical simulations based on nondispersive wave equations. Pixar employs scientific concepts to its movies. I have not heard of Disney/non-Pixar movies doing this. This minor tidbit adds to the quality of Pixar films versus Disney/non-Pixar films.
Pixar uses the best voice actors (and comedians), mathematical/real-time physics, and, most importantly... a well developed plot that is interesting. This is why I think it has been so successful versus others.
Go Pixar!
Re:This really isn't surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This really isn't surprising (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This really isn't surprising (Score:2)
Here's a good start [stanford.edu]
Shield Guardian (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Shield Guardian (Score:2)
Oh how right you are. I have a four-year old daughter, and she's simply nuts about Disney Princesses (Snow White, Belle, Sleeping Beauty, etc). It doesn't help that her mum is similarly taken with Disney films in general. Between that, and Barbie, I'm probably keeping a couple of executives in ivory back-scratchers...
Novelty factor? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Novelty factor? (Score:3, Insightful)
To six- or even nine-year-olds, CG animation isn't a novelty. It's been around for their entire lives. (Makes you feel old, doesn't it?) How old are television programs like Reboot, now? Toy Story came out quite a while ago, too.
To the people that aren't computer animation wonks reading Sla
Re:Novelty factor? (Score:3, Insightful)
If Monster Inc. was not funny and well done, I would not have recommended people to see it or gone to it myself three time (with various different people).
The most ground breaking CG (for its time) I had ever seen was "Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within" but the movie was pure crap. I regretted the purchase of the ticket and recomended the movie be skipped to all my friends a
Only TWO companies? (Score:4, Informative)
"There's this part of Steve that most people don't understand," says Catmull. "He's a very loyal person - he's invested in only two companies his entire life.
Lessee.... Jobs co-founded Apple, was ousted from Apple, founded NeXT, Apple boughtNeXT, and somewhere in between, Jobs got involved with Pixar.
Historically, that's three companies, all of which have accomplished some seriously badass things in their fields. Though I suppose if you look at it in the Now, Jobs is currently invested in only two companies....
Re:Only TWO companies? (Score:4, Informative)
Pixar started off as a software development group within George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic. It was going nowhere, despite some cool tech. Steve Jobs bought the group from Lucas and formed a software and services company, Pixar. They created Renderman from their original "REYES" (renders everything you ever saw) project, made a clustered version of Renderman (NetRenderman), wrote a few 3D graphics programs for Macs, and even did the animation for some TV commercials (remember the dancing lifesavers in the late 1980s?). Today they "only" do movies and the Renderman suite.
Under Jobs, they've been almost constantly profitable and always creative.
Re:Only TWO companies? (Score:2)
I don't know. But I do know Ross Perot invested $20 Million or so early on. (I wonder if he got a cut when Apple bought NeXT?)
Has Disney learned anything? (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Re:Has Disney learned anything? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hardly the new Disney. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Hardly the new Disney. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have a very small DVD collection, only nine titles, two of which are classic Disney animations, because they are damned fine movies.
It's about the movies, all the movies, and nothing but the movies.
If the parks all drie
Re:Hardly the new Disney. (Score:2)
Re:Hardly the new Disney. (Score:2)
You have the cart before the horse.
Before you can be successful at bringing in people to your amusement park to "experience the characters", you have to have the characters that will bring people into the park.
Without a widely popular and successful movie (or series of movies), you won't have the character draw for your park. I don't see any "Black Hole" references around Disneyland, let alone a couple of cute floating robots going around giving photo-ops to kids.
Re:Hardly the new Disney. (Score:2)
My point is that Pixar is getting the characters/movies now, but unless they have something the equivelant of the parks, they don't stand a chance of ever out-disneying Disney.
Re:Hardly the new Disney. (Score:2)
As long as they have movies that the kids want to see brought to life. They can only coast on past successes for so long, after that it'll be decline and fall. So they either need to produce good movies themselves, or sign agreements with those who can.
Re:Hardly the new Disney. (Score:2, Interesting)
Um...Yes. You can. These are freaking little kids. When they see a huge version of their Disney DVD characters (that they incessantly watch over and over again btw), that is a pretty big impact. The parent poster is right, there is no PixarLand to continue the revenue st
It's the story stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)
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" [imdb.com] isn't too different than what we saw in "Snow White" [imdb.com] 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.
Finding Nemo tops Lion King in box office (Score:2, Interesting)
The Lion King was lauded for it's return to traditional hand-drawn animation techniques. In the past Disney had 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 deg
sorry (Score:2)
Argh! Go ahead and mod this post down as redundant, as I have posted this already. This really bothers me as out of ~60 comments I have been modded down only twice. Oh well it's just a SNAFU
Trying to Decide to RTFA? (Score:4, Interesting)
My favorite bits (in no particular order):
- Mention of the Genesis Effect from Star Trek II
- The stories of Disney's rejections and failures trying to assembly-line movie production
- A feeling of satisfaction reading about how rejects from Warner and Disney found their utopia
- A left-brained acknowledgement of the tools and their makers.
- A right-brained acknowledgement of the creative stories and their creators.
Having lost interest in superhero power fantasies for a number of years, I had zero interest in seeing The Incredibles. From what little bits anyone knew about this movie it sounded like the first Pixar loser story. "Rev up the digital effects Joe! Another superhero movie broke box office records. Get the writer to draft something where the good guy uses the new fire effect!" I'm now quite intrigued to see just what sort of spin Pixar plans to put on superheroes.Call me a sucker, but Pixar really does seem to know what can make or break a good movie. Now let's just hope they aren't beaten by the quantity over quality rules that other animation houses may adopt.
Re:Trying to Decide to RTFA? (Score:2)
I'll believe it when I see theme parks (Score:2)
I'll believe it when they survive long enough to produce their own theme parks, not just license characters to Six Flags or equivalent, and especially not to Disneyland.
its the Art of Telling a Story that does it! (Score:2)
Pixar have tapped into something thats been missing from stories for a long time: originality. They feature insects or the undersea world, or retired superheros, and put them in engaging circumstances... a journey to rescue a fish captured by divers, or a band of aging heros coming back together to save the world.
Then Pixar wraps it all up in a team rescue at the end.. as wired puts it:
It's that rousing moment of collective action close to the movie's end: The Frankentoys rally to save Buzz Lightyear i
Pixars real deal... (Score:2, Insightful)
Secrets to Pixar's Success IMHO (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Team-building (Score:4, Insightful)
That is one shrewd, long-term thinker.
<grrr>
It did it... (Score:2)
Steve Jobs is still a schmuck though.
Pixar... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 Hollywo
He directed The Iron Giant!? (Score:4, Interesting)
I _so_ have to see The Incredibles when it comes out instead of waiting for the DVD.
Re:He directed The Iron Giant!? (Score:2)
Suuuperrrrmaaaannnn.....
I was a little disappointed with the ending, though. The robot shouldn't have survived. The way it just reassembles itself trivialises its sacrifice, as I see it. I think it would have been a better film if the we'd closed on the statue they put up. That's a minor quibble, though: The Iron Giant is great.
Incidentally, I wonder
Its not just story or rendering... (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:Its not just story or rendering... (Score:3, Insightful)
He said to get the right facial expressions, he mounted a mirror on his monitor, and thought of his grandmother, whom he was very close to, when she was dying.
I mean, c'mon! Who the hell did that kind of sh*t for "Treasure Planet" or "Home on the Range"?
In related news... (Score:2)
"The Incredibles" is not a sure thing (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Comparing apples to oranges... (Score:2)
That fallacy could be ascribed to chronological snobbery, but it is in fact simple lack of historical perspective.
Re:And now Pixar... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And now Pixar... (Score:2)
Re:And now Pixar... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And now Pixar... (Score:2)
The point is, he is not likely a computer bigot, though he's a great salesman and a design freak. And, he's a simplicity-efficiency oriented boss. Under his watch, you'd better be using the right t
Re:And now Pixar... (Score:2)
PRMan itself has no GUI, it's CLI. The various dispatching tools have minimal GUIs that could probably be ported in a day or two.
X11 has been available on Mac OS X for almost as long as the OS