Why Pixar Is the Apple of Hollywood
Steve Jobs let the animators at his other little company do what they do best with WALL*E: use breakthrough technology to bring a great idea to life, but don’t let it out of the lab until it’s perfect. Sound familiar? Inside the world’s top animation studio, Pixar’s chief says his CGI wizards work the Apple way.
WALL*E's robotic crush, EVE (left), reflects a touch of Apple design from the computer giant's celluloid siblings at Pixar. “They are incredible at producing software and hardware,” says the breakthrough studio's president. (Image Courtesy of Pixar)
LOS ANGELES — To see the influence of Apple on Pixar, you don't have to look much further than WALL*E—not the cute trash-compacting robot from the studio's eponymous new film (though he does boot up to the Mac chime and own an iPod), but his polished white paramour, EVE. Part iPhone 3G, part Asimo, she's the animated equivalent of the next product that might be unveiled by Steve Jobs, who effectively runs both companies. Except for the laser blaster, perhaps.
In many ways, Jobs's two brainchildren share the same strategies and values: strong brand identity, meticulous attention to detail and design, and perfectionism toward the end product, even if it means pushing back release dates and going a year without a major release. The result is a cult-like emotional attachment to the impersonal—engineering turned into art. But with studio brass insisting that the turtlenecked titan has a hands-off approach to toon details, instead allowing the veteran CGI gurus to develop their own industry standards, Pixar remains the orange to Apple's, well, apple.
"What is in common there is a fundamental belief about uniqueness and making sure that something is really good," explains Pixar co-founder Edwin Catmull, who now serves as president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. "Apple computers and iPhone, they are what they are because Steve has put together this phenomenal team of people, and they are incredible at producing software and hardware—that's the driving philosophy."
Pixar's fate could have been different. In fact, were it not for Jobs, it might currently be an automotive design firm. Casual fans forget that the company originated under George Lucas as the CG effects department of Lucasfilm—a cash-sucking venture that was all but stalled in the R&D phase during the mid-1980s. When Ewok action figures failed to cover the Computer Division's costly overhead, the Star Wars director put that section of the company up for sale.
Named after that division's proprietary computer, Pixar might have gone to Philips or General Motors, with its technology being used for medical imaging or the next generation of Detroit's CAD software. But in January 1986, after being squeezed out of his position at Apple, Jobs bought it out for $10 million—a steal compared to the $7.4 billion that Disney ponied up to acquire the company 20 years later.
These were the days before the iPhone and Leopard, when Macintosh was still the scrappy personal computing choice of hipsters and higher education—back when the boxes were beige, the screens black-and-white and the disks floppy.
Just as Apple borrowed from Xerox's Smalltalk interface, which in turn shaped the industry-standard Windows operating system, Pixar wasn't the only destination for filmmakers who wanted to produce computer-animated films. But like Jobs, the now legendary animator John Lasseter had been let go from his day job (at Disney, in the animator's case), so he went off to refine his craft and later came back to run the company that had previously dismissed him.
Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't Toy Story that re-launched Pixar, but a program called RenderMan. Today, everyone from Weta to Industrial Light and Magic uses Pixar's breakthrough software to generate realistic-looking, computer-generated animation and effects shots. "Our view was that we had to solve a few problems before computer graphics could be used in making feature films," Catmull says. "One was motion blur, the other was complexity."
To create a convincing digital image, artists and engineers break down the animated world into tiny shaded polygons. When Catmull and his team got started, computers were capable of crunching anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 polygons per shot. To get the level of detail they wanted for a project like Toy Story, the Pixar crew estimated they would need a program capable of managing 80 million polygons. "Part of our logic was that we wanted to have something so extreme that it forced us to think about the technical challenges," Catmull says.
Nearly everyone in the CGI industry has relied on Mac's OS for years, and these days they're mostly all using RenderMan, which has evolved at the source with each Pixar project's new functionality—fur in Monsters, Inc., water for Finding Nemo and ray tracing of reflective surfaces on Cars. There is even an 800-mile gap between Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., and the RenderMan group separate in Seattle, so the company's software team can address the visual challenges posed by outside projects as diverse as Spider-Man, 300 and Happy Feet. That third-party F/X work for other studios benefits Pixar films in turn, especially since the primary challenges of Ratatouille and WALL*E involved the overall visual complexity of those two films more than specific technological hurdles.
Even though the revolutionary software allows potential competitors to generate a Pixar-quality final image, but that doesn't mean they can turn around and make Pixar-level films. That's partly because the company closely guards a second, equally important program called Marionette, which assists the artists with modeling and animation. But most importantly, Pixar honors a good story as the soul of its projects. Where his computer company balances breakthrough hardware (a touchscreen cellphone) with practical interfaces (multitouch OS X), Jobs's Hollywood stake never lets the technology or the animation artistry to dominate. "A lot of people get into this because they want to make animated films," Catmull says. "And our view was always [that] the art and the technology are just handmaidens to telling good stories."
Apple and Pixar do overlap in their willingness to risk ridicule for the sake of originality. When every other PC manufacturer was producing square boxes in grey and black, who put out iMacs in five colors? And which studio was fearless about building a movie around a rat in a kitchen? Who took away the disc drive, trusting users to embrace online cloud computing? And when rats didn't turn audiences away, who moved on to animating a cockroach best friend?
Like Apple, Pixar is the kind of company where people have been known to trade in whatever career they've been chasing to be part of a creative environment, starting over from scratch if necessary. Take seven-time Oscar winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom (Jurassic Park, Titanic), who bided his time doing sound on Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo until Pixar gave him the chance to direct his own short, Lifted. Or Little Miss Sunshine scribe Michael Arndt, now writing Toy Story 3.
"We have a style for the way the creative works which is unique within the industry. The Pixar films aren't like the films from the other studios, and it's a consequence of the way we approach it," Catmull says. "The underlying philosophy always was, you hire people who are smarter than you are, you do things that are challenging and risky, and you don't try to over-manage things."
That may sound more like Pajama Friday at Google headquarters, but then again, Google lives for beta. But if things go wrong, Pixar—like Apple—has been known to push back delivery dates and overhaul a project completely. By contrast, Microsoft or Google (not to mention a number of Hollywood studios, both live-action and animated) will pick a date and stick with it, sometimes rushing an unfinished product out the door to let the general public troubleshoot it for them. When Cars veered off track, Lasseter pushed the film from a Thanksgiving release to the following summer.
The trick, Catmull says, is to make sure everything is perfect before it goes out the door, because animation studios can't patch things later the way computer companies do. "Software goes through versions, so the first version goes out and you iterate on it in a public way," he says. "With films, you can't do that, so we also iterate on them, but we do the iteration internally." Everything starts our rough, getting more presentable with each successive polish.
"Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille were our most extreme cases of having to do a major rethink midstream," Catmull remembers. Though most animated features take between three and five years to make, new directors swooped in on both films to rescue the projects at the eleventh hour. Lasseter was busy directing A Bug's Life while Toy Story 2 was spinning off-course, which gave him less than a year to rescue the sequel to Pixar's breakout hit. "The film was remade in nine months, which is almost impossible, but we did it," Catmull says. And no sooner had Brad Bird wrapped The Incredibles than he was pulled in to rewrite and direct a troubled Ratatouille. In the end, just one line from the original script remains.
So what about that white dominatrix bot in WALL*E? Sure, it's a nod to the Apple design aesthetic, but it also carries a distinctive personality of its own—as consumers have come to expect from both of Steve Jobs's iconic companies. And even though Jobs owns a majority stake in Pixar, he doesn't meddle in such details as story and character design. "The truth is, Steve has stayed out of our internal technical and production pipeline," Catmull says. "As we dealt with the issues, he was there to support us. But in the area of graphics, we are the experts."
In many ways, Jobs's two brainchildren share the same strategies and values: strong brand identity, meticulous attention to detail and design, and perfectionism toward the end product, even if it means pushing back release dates and going a year without a major release. The result is a cult-like emotional attachment to the impersonal—engineering turned into art. But with studio brass insisting that the turtlenecked titan has a hands-off approach to toon details, instead allowing the veteran CGI gurus to develop their own industry standards, Pixar remains the orange to Apple's, well, apple.
"What is in common there is a fundamental belief about uniqueness and making sure that something is really good," explains Pixar co-founder Edwin Catmull, who now serves as president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. "Apple computers and iPhone, they are what they are because Steve has put together this phenomenal team of people, and they are incredible at producing software and hardware—that's the driving philosophy."
Pixar's fate could have been different. In fact, were it not for Jobs, it might currently be an automotive design firm. Casual fans forget that the company originated under George Lucas as the CG effects department of Lucasfilm—a cash-sucking venture that was all but stalled in the R&D phase during the mid-1980s. When Ewok action figures failed to cover the Computer Division's costly overhead, the Star Wars director put that section of the company up for sale.
Named after that division's proprietary computer, Pixar might have gone to Philips or General Motors, with its technology being used for medical imaging or the next generation of Detroit's CAD software. But in January 1986, after being squeezed out of his position at Apple, Jobs bought it out for $10 million—a steal compared to the $7.4 billion that Disney ponied up to acquire the company 20 years later.
These were the days before the iPhone and Leopard, when Macintosh was still the scrappy personal computing choice of hipsters and higher education—back when the boxes were beige, the screens black-and-white and the disks floppy.
Just as Apple borrowed from Xerox's Smalltalk interface, which in turn shaped the industry-standard Windows operating system, Pixar wasn't the only destination for filmmakers who wanted to produce computer-animated films. But like Jobs, the now legendary animator John Lasseter had been let go from his day job (at Disney, in the animator's case), so he went off to refine his craft and later came back to run the company that had previously dismissed him.
Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't Toy Story that re-launched Pixar, but a program called RenderMan. Today, everyone from Weta to Industrial Light and Magic uses Pixar's breakthrough software to generate realistic-looking, computer-generated animation and effects shots. "Our view was that we had to solve a few problems before computer graphics could be used in making feature films," Catmull says. "One was motion blur, the other was complexity."
To create a convincing digital image, artists and engineers break down the animated world into tiny shaded polygons. When Catmull and his team got started, computers were capable of crunching anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 polygons per shot. To get the level of detail they wanted for a project like Toy Story, the Pixar crew estimated they would need a program capable of managing 80 million polygons. "Part of our logic was that we wanted to have something so extreme that it forced us to think about the technical challenges," Catmull says.
Nearly everyone in the CGI industry has relied on Mac's OS for years, and these days they're mostly all using RenderMan, which has evolved at the source with each Pixar project's new functionality—fur in Monsters, Inc., water for Finding Nemo and ray tracing of reflective surfaces on Cars. There is even an 800-mile gap between Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, Calif., and the RenderMan group separate in Seattle, so the company's software team can address the visual challenges posed by outside projects as diverse as Spider-Man, 300 and Happy Feet. That third-party F/X work for other studios benefits Pixar films in turn, especially since the primary challenges of Ratatouille and WALL*E involved the overall visual complexity of those two films more than specific technological hurdles.
Steve Jobs, shown here demonstrating OS X at MacWorld 2000, made billions on Pixar and still owns a majority stake, but he stays out of detailed work on film development. (Photograph by John G. Mabanglo/AFP/Getty Images)
Even though the revolutionary software allows potential competitors to generate a Pixar-quality final image, but that doesn't mean they can turn around and make Pixar-level films. That's partly because the company closely guards a second, equally important program called Marionette, which assists the artists with modeling and animation. But most importantly, Pixar honors a good story as the soul of its projects. Where his computer company balances breakthrough hardware (a touchscreen cellphone) with practical interfaces (multitouch OS X), Jobs's Hollywood stake never lets the technology or the animation artistry to dominate. "A lot of people get into this because they want to make animated films," Catmull says. "And our view was always [that] the art and the technology are just handmaidens to telling good stories."
Apple and Pixar do overlap in their willingness to risk ridicule for the sake of originality. When every other PC manufacturer was producing square boxes in grey and black, who put out iMacs in five colors? And which studio was fearless about building a movie around a rat in a kitchen? Who took away the disc drive, trusting users to embrace online cloud computing? And when rats didn't turn audiences away, who moved on to animating a cockroach best friend?
Like Apple, Pixar is the kind of company where people have been known to trade in whatever career they've been chasing to be part of a creative environment, starting over from scratch if necessary. Take seven-time Oscar winning sound designer Gary Rydstrom (Jurassic Park, Titanic), who bided his time doing sound on Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo until Pixar gave him the chance to direct his own short, Lifted. Or Little Miss Sunshine scribe Michael Arndt, now writing Toy Story 3.
"We have a style for the way the creative works which is unique within the industry. The Pixar films aren't like the films from the other studios, and it's a consequence of the way we approach it," Catmull says. "The underlying philosophy always was, you hire people who are smarter than you are, you do things that are challenging and risky, and you don't try to over-manage things."
That may sound more like Pajama Friday at Google headquarters, but then again, Google lives for beta. But if things go wrong, Pixar—like Apple—has been known to push back delivery dates and overhaul a project completely. By contrast, Microsoft or Google (not to mention a number of Hollywood studios, both live-action and animated) will pick a date and stick with it, sometimes rushing an unfinished product out the door to let the general public troubleshoot it for them. When Cars veered off track, Lasseter pushed the film from a Thanksgiving release to the following summer.
The trick, Catmull says, is to make sure everything is perfect before it goes out the door, because animation studios can't patch things later the way computer companies do. "Software goes through versions, so the first version goes out and you iterate on it in a public way," he says. "With films, you can't do that, so we also iterate on them, but we do the iteration internally." Everything starts our rough, getting more presentable with each successive polish.
"Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille were our most extreme cases of having to do a major rethink midstream," Catmull remembers. Though most animated features take between three and five years to make, new directors swooped in on both films to rescue the projects at the eleventh hour. Lasseter was busy directing A Bug's Life while Toy Story 2 was spinning off-course, which gave him less than a year to rescue the sequel to Pixar's breakout hit. "The film was remade in nine months, which is almost impossible, but we did it," Catmull says. And no sooner had Brad Bird wrapped The Incredibles than he was pulled in to rewrite and direct a troubled Ratatouille. In the end, just one line from the original script remains.
So what about that white dominatrix bot in WALL*E? Sure, it's a nod to the Apple design aesthetic, but it also carries a distinctive personality of its own—as consumers have come to expect from both of Steve Jobs's iconic companies. And even though Jobs owns a majority stake in Pixar, he doesn't meddle in such details as story and character design. "The truth is, Steve has stayed out of our internal technical and production pipeline," Catmull says. "As we dealt with the issues, he was there to support us. But in the area of graphics, we are the experts."
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