Last Week, This Week: CES & Sundance

1. A few last things worth reading about CES...

- Netflix CEO Reed Hastings talks about how his company's future hinges on integrating Netflix's streaming movie service into lots of new TVs, Blu-ray players, and set-top boxes.

- This NY Times piece summarizes some of the big trends from CES last week, including 3-D at home, Palm's new social networking phone, and Net-connected TVs.

- Variety colleague Ben Fritz and I were blogging last week from CES. I just posted some audio clips of a conversation I had with four studio home entertainment execs and some remarks that Jeffrey Katzenberg and John Lasseter made during the Sony keynote last Thursday.

2. Sundance starts this Thursday. The Journal offers a look at some of the films getting early buzz, and predicts a lukewarm year for acquisition action. The Salt Lake Tribune also has a look at what's different about this year's fest. Robert Redford seems perfectly happy to have a low-key year: "What might be a positive is that if there is less hoo-ha, less of a circus atmosphere," he tells the paper, "there will be more tendency to focus on what it is that we're really about, which is the independent filmmakers and the quality of the work."

3. And one more link... this NY Times piece is interesting because it is yet another article that suggests that the global credit crunch is slowing down the deployment of digital cinema and 3-D projection technologies to theaters.

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?

John Lasseter Red Carpet Interview: Disney/Pixar Animation Update

IESB has a video interview with John Lasseter, the head creative honcho at Pixar and Walt Disney Feature Animation. He talks about 'Enchanted' and 'The Frog Princess' ("It's so exciting to have hand-drawn animation coming back")...says Disney will soon return to releasing new cartoon shorts (the first will feature Goofy explaining how to hook up a home theater system)...and plugs 'Wall*E,' the next Pixar release, describing it as Pixar's first science fiction film.

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.

John Lasseter Takes the Reins

Laura M. Holson's story in Sunday's NY Times paints the clearest picture I've seen so far of John Lasseter as a strong, opinionated, and very hands-on leader at Walt Disney Feature Animation. It's a great read. Holson writes:

...The first filmmaker to run Disney’s animation operations since Walt Disney died in 1966, [Lasseter] said he wants to reclaim the studio’s golden era.

Since those early days, though, almost everything has changed. On the Disney campus, the creative culture is tattered still from years of cost-cutting and political infighting. And in the world at large audiences have moved on. The sweet wholesome tales of Mickey Mouse and friends don’t have the same relevance for a generation raised on violent video games, distracted by 500 cable channels and preoccupied with Web diversions like MySpace.

“I’m not sure it’s a trivial challenge,” said Jim Morris, a Pixar producer who is working on the forthcoming “Wall-E.” “As charismatic as John is, he can’t do everything.”

Disney's forthcoming 'Meet the Robinsons' was extensively retooled under Lasseter's guidance, and the director of 'American Dog' was edged out. Lasseter also isn't stingy with his feedback on new Disney rides for the theme parks.

Of course, Walt Disney was known for having strong opinions -- and he prodded his employees into producing great work. Could Lasseter do the same? I think the only thing that could prove problematic for Lasseter, over the long term, is that his name isn't on the door.

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).