Pixar and the Internet: Do they get it?

Few people would argue that Pixar has put together the most high-powered animation team since the heyday of Disney.

But are they focusing on the right challenges?

Harvard Business Review has an article and podcast featuring Pixar and its co-founder, Ed Catmull.

Every since the company made 'Toy Story' in 1995, Pixar has produced three products: short films that let it test out new technologies and techniques (these are shown at SIGGRAPH, sold on iTunes, and played before Pixar's features in theaters), full-length features, and animation software called Renderman.

Around 2003, the company shifted from making one feature every 24 months to one every 12 months - which was a big deal.

In 2006, after Disney acquired Pixar, Catmull and John Lasseter essentially took over Walt Disney Feature Animation.

That's a lot of work.

And yet I'd still argue that the big challenge for Disney and Pixar to be thinking about is animated content for the Web... stuff that can be produced less-expensively, that connects with audiences in different ways, that takes big risks Pixar wouldn't take on the big screen.

Imagine an embeddable animated character for your MySpace or Facebook page that would greet visitors with a different quip every time they came. Or content delivered to cell phones that might introduce you (and your kids) to the characters in the next Disney or Pixar feature -- and reminding you to see it in theaters or buy the DVD. Or a Pixar serial, updated every week online, that might eventually add up to a feature?

(Of course, when DreamWorks Animation tried to do a TV show, things didn't work out so well... but I think that was a risk worth taking.)

One of Walt Disney's genius moves was to look at television and realize that it was not just a medium for promoting his movies... but also a medium that presented new creative opportunities. Ask anyone who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s whether watching Disney shows on TV, like the 'Davey Crockett' series, had an impact on their childhood. It certainly had a major positive impact on the Walt Disney Company.

I'd suggest that the Internet today is what TV was in the 1950s - a medium that offers the chance to take big creative and business risks, and potentially earn big rewards.

Will Pixar?

New Pixar Documentary: 'The Pixar Story'

I'm eager to see the new doc 'The Pixar Story' when it's broadcast on TV, released on DVD, or released theatrically. (It played last month at Comic-Con.)

It was directed by Leslie Iwerks, the granddaughter of Ub Iwerks, who was Walt Disney's original partner. (An earlier film and book she produced focused on Ub's career.) Her production company has a Web site, but it's woefully short on clips from her work -- including the new Pixar project.

From Peter DeBruge's Variety review:

The movie is, above all else, a celebration of animation in all its forms. Iwerks naturally has a firm grasp of the medium's history and rightly sees Pixar as the catalyst for the recent resurgence of audience interest in animation.

Early in the movie, Lasseter credits the book "Walt Disney's Art of Animation" with inspiring him to enter the field, and Iwerks' film will no doubt have a similar effect on future generations. She focuses less on Pixar's behind-the-scenes methodology (with good reason, considering how exhaustively those details are chronicled on the Pixar DVDs themselves), but presents a treasure trove of rare footage, including clips of Lasseter's first two Student Academy Award-winning film-school projects, "Lady and the Lamp" and "NiteMare," which presage "Luxo Jr." and "Monsters Inc."

Iwerks also includes the computer-animated "Where the Wild Things Are" demo Lasseter and Glen Keane developed for Disney, as well as Catmull's U. of Ohio experiment in rendering his own hand (the first 3-D computer effect featured in a movie) and Loren Carpenter's 1980 fractal landscape experiment "Vol Libre" (which enabled Pixar's work on "Star Trek II").

Here's the IMDB info.

Variety: What's Changing at Walt Disney Feature Animation with Pixar in Command

Ben Fritz of Variety writes that Disney animators were optimistic when Pixar co-founders Ed Catmull and John Lasseter arrived to take the reins last year:

Disney animators use words like "euphoria" to describe what they felt at the time. Today, those feelings are more tempered, thanks to an unexpected round of cutbacks in December that saw Disney Animation lay off 160 employees, or about 20% of its staff.

"Everybody recognizes the fact that they're trying to change the culture down here for the better, but it's safe to say that the pixie dust that surrounded their arrival has pretty much disappeared," says one source close to Disney Animation.

Also interesting in the piece is Fritz's observation that, despite talk about making WDFA more "director-driven," the post-Pixar period hasn't been without directorial conflicts (and even some departures).