Books : The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company

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by: David A. Price

: The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 384.806573
EAN: 9780307265753
ISBN: 0307265757
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: May 13, 2008
Sales Rank: 15148
Studio: Knopf



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Product Description:
With a New Afterword by the Author

Pixar—with the help of animating genius John Lasseter and Steve Jobs—has become the gold standard of animated filmmaking from the beginning with a short special-effects shot made at Lucasfilm to its present position as the producer of landmark films Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Wall-E, and others. Price writes about the corporate feuds between Lasseter and his former champion Jeffrey Katzenberg, as well as between Jobs and Michael Eisner. And finally Price goes behind the scenes of Pixar’s complex relationship with the Walt Disney Company as it transforms itself into the $7.4 billion jewel in the Disney crown.

Amazon.com Review:
Product Description

The roller-coaster rags-to-riches story behind the phenomenal success of Pixar Animation Studios: the first in-depth look at the company that forever changed the film industry and the "fraternity of geeks" who shaped it.

The Pixar Touch is a story of technical innovation that revolutionized animation, transforming hand-drawn cel animation to computer-generated 3-D graphics. It’s a triumphant business story of a company that began with a dream, remained true to the ideals of its founders—antibureaucratic and artist driven—and ended up a multibillion-dollar success.

We meet Pixar’s technical genius and founding CEO, Ed Catmull, who dreamed of becoming an animator, inspired by Disney’s Peter Pan and Pinocchio, realized he would never be good enough, and instead enrolled in the then new field of computer science at the University of Utah. It was Catmull who founded the computer graphics lab at the New York Institute of Technology and who wound up at Lucasfilm during the first Star Wars trilogy, running the computer graphics department, and found a patron in Steve Jobs, just ousted from Apple Computer, who bought Pixar for five million dollars. Catmull went on to win four Academy Awards for his technical feats and helped to create some of the key computer-generated imagery software that animators rely on today.

Price also writes about John Lasseter, who catapulted himself from unemployed animator to one of the most powerful figures in American filmmaking; animation was the only thing he ever wanted to do (he was inspired by Disney’s The Sword in the Stone), and Price’s book shows how Lasseter transformed computer animation from a novelty into an art form. The author writes as well about Steve Jobs, as volatile a figure as a Shakespearean monarch . . .

Based on interviews with dozens of insiders, The Pixar Touch examines the early wildcat years when computer animation was thought of as the lunatic fringe of the medium.

We see the studio at work today; how its writers, directors, and animators make their astonishing, and astonishingly popular, films.

The book also delves into Pixar’s corporate feuds: between Lasseter and his former champion, Jeffrey Katzenberg (A Bug’s Life vs. Antz), and between Jobs and Michael Eisner. And finally it explores Pixar’s complex relationship with the Walt Disney Company as it transformed itself from a Disney satellite into the $7.4 billion jewel in the Disney crown.

Little-Known Facts from The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David Price

• Pixar, not Apple, made Steve Jobs a billionaire. Jobs bought Pixar in 1986 from Lucasfilm for $5 million. In 1995, the week after the release of Toy Story, Pixar went public and Jobs’s stock was worth $1.1 billion.

• Ed Catmull, Pixar’s co-founder, dreamed as a youth of becoming an animator, but decided in high school that he couldn’t draw well enough. Instead, he became an early visionary of computer animation as a graduate student in the 1970’s. "Computer animation was sort of on the lunatic fringe at that time," remembered Fred Parke, a fellow Ph.D. student in Catmull’s class at the University of Utah.

• When John Lasseter joined Pixar—which was then the computer graphics department of George Lucas’s Lucasfilm—he had just been fired from his dream job as an animator at Disney. He became the first person to apply classic Disney character animation principles to computer animation.

• Before it became an animation studio, Pixar went through years of struggle and multi-million-dollar losses. It started as a computer company and John Lasseter’s short films, such as Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy, were promotional films to help sell the company’s computers.

• Pixar was almost bought by…Microsoft? Yep: Jobs remained worried about the company’s finances even after Pixar made a deal with the Walt Disney Co. in 1991 to produce Toy Story, Pixar’s first feature film. The Pixar Touch details the effort to sell Pixar to Bill Gates’s company while Toy Story was in production.

• When writing Toy Story, to find inspiration for the relationship between Buzz and Woody, Lasseter and his story department screened classic "buddy" movies, including 48 Hrs., The Defiant Ones, Midnight Run, and Thelma & Louise.

• John Lasseter has instilled an intense commitment to research in the studio’s creative staff. To prepare for the scene in Finding Nemo in which the fish characters Marlin and Dory become trapped in a whale, two members of the art department climbed inside a dead gray whale that had been stranded north of Marin, California.

• To learn how to make a realistic French kitchen, the producer and first director of Ratatouille worked as apprentices at an elite French restaurant in the Napa Valley.

• Pixar deliberately avoided making the humans in The Incredibles look too realistic. They knew that as animated human characters became too close to lifelike, audiences would actually perceive them as repulsive. The phenomenon, known as the "uncanny valley," had been predicted by a Japanese robotics researcher as early as 1970. Thus, the details of human skin, such as pores and hair follicles, were left out of The Incredibles’ characters in favor of a more cartoonlike appearance.

• The signature of most Pixar feature films is characters who appeal to children (toys, fish, monsters…), but who have adult-like personalities and are dealing with adult-like problems.

• Prior to the acquisition of Pixar by Disney in 2006, Lasseter loathed the idea of Disney making sequels to Pixar films without Pixar’s involvement—as Disney’s contract with Pixar allowed it to do. "These were the people that put out Cinderella II," Lasseter remarked.

• Pixar is more than an animation studio. Pixar’s innovations in computer graphics technology pervade movies today. Special-effects houses like Industrial Light & Magic (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix) use Pixar’s software to create out-of-this-world places and characters.

(Photo © Simon Bruty)





Customer Reviews
Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Engaging and Entertaining!
Very descriptive, yet very entertaining, story of Pixar. This book is told from an unbiased point of view and is engaging from beginning to end. Definitely recommend for any fan of Pixar!


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - PIXAR Survived "The Job's Touch"
Author David Price gives us several stories wrapped into one with his "The Pixar Touch: The making of a Company." Students of the movie industry, computer graphics, and those interested in working in a development stage company (any industry) will find this a most satisfying book.

Price pieces together the converging factors that led to the creation and eventual success of Pixar - the University of Utah's growing influence in computer animation; George Lucas' desire to modernize the tools of filmmaking after the success of "Star Wars" and his pulling together many of the Pixar's eventual founders as part of Lucasfilms Computer Division; frustrated Disney animator, John Lasseter's termination from Disney; Steve Jobs belief that Pixar's Image Computer had the same investment potential of his Apple II and his intense unwillingness to suffer another professional defeat; Disney's Jeff Katzenberg's growing interest in computer animation and his ultimate decision to participate in the making of "Toy Story"; and Disney's growing fear that it was losing its premier global franchise to the upstart, Pixar.

Pixar's evolution into one of the world's greatest brands did not come easily. In the early years, Jobs was not the visionary many claim him to be. He had a different vision for the company and was a very reluctant supporter of the animation group. He tried to get Pixar into the medical imaging field, tried to sell the company to Microsoft, and abused all of the founding employees by taking away their stock in exchange for another capital infusion to keep the company afloat.

In addition, the elite of Disney animators, an early partner, argued that computer animation was a dead end - character animation required nuance upon nuance - nuances too fine to capture in a computer. There were few who had the needed tolerance to put up with the awfulness of an early technology.

This is a great story of American business and rugged individualism. This is a story about a core team that stayed the course, worked long hours, and overcame immense obstacles in the service of a vision, to transform an industry through technology - to make great computer animated movies.



Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Case Study on Success
As other reviews have more than aptly addressed the novel content of the book, the merit of the writing and, honestly, the unabashed and probably slightly biased love for Pixar, I think the only thing that I can add is my thoughts on the how the story of Pixar affected my own perspective and motivation as a artist and filmmaker. With each chapter that I read, I find that I am more inspired and motivated to push my own self further. It is the author's ability to communicate, in quite simple and, perhaps, slightly mundane descriptions, the passion and motivation of the likes of Ed Catmull and John Lasseter. The fact that there is no need for dramatization or exaggeration in this story of the evolution of this particular animation studio is merit unto itself. It is truly intriguing to know the steps, the missteps and the sheer luck that combined to make Pixar a possibility...a wondrous possibility to be sure. Though I admire Pixar, know that this book is not a series of simple pictures or short anecdotes to be easily digested like some "art of" books. It is detailed and biographical and likely, sometimes, offers a bit too much info for a casual reader. Overall, I find it a good book for artists in the industry as well as business folk who enjoy reading case studies on the evolution of successful businesses.


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company
Being a stockholder of Pixar and Disney, and a San Francisco Bay Area resident... I have read many stories over the years [regarding Pixar] in our local newspapers, and it was great to be able to acquire more in depth details about the rise of Pixar from this book.

My company is in a related field so we have an inherent interest in Pixar and Disney, and the various bay area power personalities that run these two companies.

Over the years The Disney Company had moved away from the ideals that Uncle Walt set in place... and we feel that the merging of key creative people Like John Lassiter may help bring them back to Walt's original path.

2D animation will never thrive like it did in the past, but with a little care and attention to "how things used to be" I feel that Mr. Lassiter and his team will be able to get Disney back on the right track.

Pixar had a tough past (mostly financial) to deal with, and we understand that because my company is essentially in the same position, as we struggle to leave our mark... This book really helped by showing that tenacity and "stick-to-it" qualities are key factors when you have ideals that you believe it.

If you have innovative ideas that you believe in strongly... this book will help you hang in there. It demonstrates that good things do happen to good people. I highly recommend this one for your collection.


Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Looks like a great book....
Just got this in the mail today - have only just skimmed it and read parts here and there, but it looks like a great book. The chapters "Making it Fly 1 &2" really caught my interest.

I'm giving this review four stars - mainly because of Amazon and the USPS, the book was shipped to me in one of the flimsy mail pouches and it sustained damage during shipping. The top of the book looks like it was jammed in a machine and the cover binding was crushed to the point of breaking. Add to that the dust cover was really wrinkled from being in such a flimsy package. I know some people might complain that this ain't a good reason to deduct a star from the review - but I see this review in part covering the whole experience of getting this book to add to my collection/library - including the purchase and shipping.

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