A juggernaut named Pixar
History traces path of pop-culture colossus
The
By David A. Price
Knopf, 308 pp., illustrated, $27.95
We'll set out the disclaimer straight away: In the computer-animated Pixar film "Monsters, Inc.," the character of James P. "Sulley" Sullivan is in no way based on this reviewer. My middle initial is not P., I've never used an "e" in the nickname, and I'm not 8 feet tall and covered in blue fur. But Sulley's sidekick, a one-eyed, lime-green bowling ball with pipe-cleaner limbs named Mike Wazowski, may well have taken some cues from a preexisting character. In 2002 a San Francisco-area poster artist sued Pixar for copyright infringement, claiming that the concept for Mike had been cribbed from one of his stock characters.
Art, as journalist David A. Price points out in his well-crafted book on Pixar, the brain trust that revolutionized animated film, is "never created in a vacuum chamber." Pixar films have paid homage to "The Magnificent Seven," Hitchcock's "Rear Window," Marcel Proust's famous madeleine, and, in "WALL-E," a cultural heap that ranges from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "Hello, Dolly!"
But if the stubby eyeball voiced by Billy Crystal owed an unpaid debt to a cartoon artist best known for his Grateful Dead album covers, the company that launched the character was indisputably the first of its kind. It may seem a bit premature to write a history of a business barely more than 20 years old, until we consider that in the span of a single decade Pixar has utterly overtaken the list of top-grossing animated films. "Toy Story," "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles," "Ratatouille": Anyone who has been around kids in the past decade is well aware of the company's runaway, inimitable success.
By bringing animation into the 21st century with state-of-the-art computer programming, Pixar effectively controls the cartoon colossus of the last century, Disney, which absorbed the younger company in a 2006 megadeal. As part of the agreement, Pixar investor Steve Jobs is now Disney's largest shareholder; director John Lasseter has taken over as chief creative officer; and Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull is president of the combined companies.
Books about the high-tech business have become a genre unto themselves in recent years, with multiple titles devoted to
Catmull, the unheralded visionary whose lifelong commitment to computer animation made Pixar the hub of the form, came to computer programming in the late 1960s in the University of Utah's legendary computer science department. It was, as the author explains, a charmed environment comparable to those in Elizabethan London, where drama took a quantum leap.
Having hoped to become a Disney animator as a boy, Catmull was driven by his teenage realization that his drawing skills weren't good enough. After designing computer imaging programs for a millionaire investor on Long Island, he and another graphics wizard, Alvy Ray Smith, co-founded a computer division for George Lucas's film company. After several years of being underutilized, they were bought out by Jobs, who was searching for a new project following his 1985 ouster from Apple.
For several years, the newly renamed company's biggest talent lay in its ability to spend Jobs's money. There was little market for Pixar's esoteric graphics hardware. But one employee in particular, Lasseter, a former Disney animator who had once worked as an attendant on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland, was determined to use the company's ingenious programs in the service of storytelling, and he was given free rein.
Lasseter's 2 1/2-minute short film "Luxo Jr.," about an anthropomorphized desk lamp and its "son," received an Academy Award nomination in 1987. More important, it captured the imagination of the computer graphics community. When Lasseter was approached by a colleague after a screening, he braced for an arcane technical question. "John," the programmer asked, "was the big lamp the mother or the father?"
For Pixar, it was a eureka moment. Perhaps for the first time in computer animation, the company had succeeded in rendering characters that made the audience forget they were watching technology in action. It would take Pixar almost another decade to convert its graphics expertise into the seamless creativity of its first feature film, "Toy Story," one of only two animated movies on the American Film Institute's recent list of the 100 greatest American films. (The other is "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.") Since then, however, Pixar has charged forward like Buzz Lightyear, releasing a rapid-fire succession of blockbusters that have sparked a true renaissance in Hollywood animation.
When Rockport native Andrew Stanton made a long pitch to Lasseter about his idea for a film called "Finding Nemo," about a clownfish and his journey to find his missing son, Lasseter listened politely to the hourlong monologue, then joked, "You had me at 'fish.' " By this point in the book, the tales of the making of each new Pixar feature (stopping short of "WALL-E," the company's latest instant classic) begin to feel similarly overwrought.
But the intrigue of the merger with Disney, featuring a blood feud between Jobs and Disney chairman Michael Eisner, resolves that problem handily. Upon finalization of the long-gestating agreement, Lasseter addressed an audience of several thousand Disney shareholders. His speech, reports the author, unfolded in much the same way as a classic Pixar script: "stretches of adventure narrative and comedy punctuated by moments of disarming earnestness - all capped by the inevitable happy ending."
To generations of Disney fans now enchanted by the films of Pixar, it's a familiar story.
Globe contributor James Sullivan is the author of "Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon." 