Pixar’s Origin Story and How it’s the Perfect Example of Art Meets Tech ???
It was the beginning of the pandemic lockdown. I was 22 and unemployed. I was living in central California at the time. And I was the definition of the clueless consumer. I watched or listened or observed things without really taking anything in. That is, without giving a meaning or a spark to it. Nothing felt alive to me. I had become a mindless machine trying to plow through the new normal.
?It was March 31st, 2020, and I just needed something new to watch to take my mind off of the toilet paper shortages and the frantic “Covid-lives-on-kleenex-boxes” Facebook videos that always seemed to find their way to my feed, uninvited.
I was ready for a break. I stumbled upon an interesting-looking documentary while I was surfing Netflix looking for the next great thing to watch. It was nothing, just about this little film company called Pixar. Well, Pixar seems pretty cool and their movies are good. But will it be boring..? I asked myself. Would I inadvertently be returning to my phone ten minutes into the documentary? Would I end up reading five more conspiracy theory articles promptly after eating the last of the popcorn? Who knows.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I have always enjoyed Pixar’s films. But I didn’t really know what it was all about or why it started, other than to entertain people, which it continues to do extremely well to this day.?
Well, long story short, it was anything but boring.?
In fact, it woke me up. I’m gonna tell you why, and how, this documentary did just that for me, and why it’s living proof that technology and art do–and always will–coexist.?
“While…[anyone] identifies Steve Jobs with his amazing work at Apple, that’s not the only company he’s responsible for turning into a major success,” journalist Steve Kovach asserts in his article for Business Insider. No, indeed. In fact, Jobs had just recently been ousted from Apple and begun his secondary tech company Next.?
Not long after, Jobs bought Pixar from LucasFilm for $5 million. He was intrigued with the company since over at Apple, art and graphics had become a core part of the design of the revolutionary computer. He then invested another $5 million into Pixar out of his own pocket.
One thing especially interesting to note that perhaps not many people know: Pixar, in its earliest days, was also a computer hardware company. The Pixar Image Computer was its signature product, going for $135,000 a pop. It was targeted to the graphics and the medical industries, and didn’t do all that well in sales, apart from Disney, which purchased a lot of the image computers from Pixar. It wasn’t limited to mere hardware, either. In the late 1980s, Disney and Pixar had developed a Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) that revolutionized the computer animation system as people knew it from that point on. This system was used in many of the Disney renaissance films, including Beauty and the Beast and Fox and the Hound.
Eventually Jobs decided to sell the hardware division of Pixar to Viacom, a media company which owns radio and television services, and of which Nickelodeon and MTV are subsidiaries. It might have seemed that the Pixar cash flow was finally back to a good place.
But the problems didn’t end there. Computer hardware was still expensive to purchase, and Pixar was burning cash right and left in its efforts to “fulfill its vision as a graphics production company”, says Kovach.?
Pixar was also struggling in its attempts to maintain a stable partnership with Disney to collaborate and get Pixar’s first feature film completed. Meanwhile Jobs continued investing countless dollars into the company, again from his own pocket.
领英推荐
Things were looking pretty bleak. Just as Jobs was considering selling Pixar to Microsoft, Pixar’s Toy Story (1995) became a hit as the first feature-length animated film that was completely computer-generated. It went on to make $360 million globally.? Let that sink in.
Oddly enough, in the past before Pixar came to be, Pixar’s co-founder John Lasseter was let go from Disney from proposing a shift from hand-drawn methods to computer graphics to produce films. The staff back then didn’t know what to do with such an outlandish idea. Today, though, even Disney has jumped onto the computer animation bandwagon. Others who followed include companies like DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox, and more. Wow.
Why the “wow”? Because Pixar paved the way for the computer animation industry as we know it. The company significantly reduced the amount of manual labor using computer graphics to create films, and they did so with only a fraction of the people that would have been needed at Disney to do so. “What’s the big deal?” you ask. Because Pixar streamlined the modern animation process and was the first to do so, and it certainly couldn’t have been done without Jobs, a legendary giant in the world of technology and now in the world of media arts as well.
Before seeing the documentary, if a person was looking at it from the outside in, one could say that there is not a whole lot of overlap between tech and art. One requires logic and critical thinking, the other requires freedom of expression. Jobs proved this misconception wrong in his pursuit of revolutionizing computer graphics, another reason why he and Pixar were perfect partners because their missions resonate with each other. At one point in time Apple’s slogan was “Think Different”. Pixar came to be on the basis of “combin[ing] proprietary technology and world-class creative talent to develop computer-animated feature films.” Not sure about you, but that sure sounds to me like thinking differently. Considering also that art and technology are two uniquely challenging startup fields to succeed in, particularly as an entrepreneur, Jobs is truly a champion figure in this respect as are the founders of Pixar.
This origin is the prime example of two worlds converging into one not because one is inferior to superior to the other, but because there can’t be one without the other anymore. There can be no separation. Because they belong together.
Sources:?
Isaacson, Walter. 2011. Steve Jobs. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.