Pixar owns the animation category at the Oscars. They should really just have the Pixar team present the “Pixar Runner-Up Award” to whoever was second best that year. I read The Pixar Touch earlier this year and found it weirdly inspirational. As it turns out, the Pixar crew got together long before there was a market for computer animation films. They basically had to invent the majority of the software they used to make their films and then lie to everyone to either a) trick them into letting them make films b) make them think they were doing the job they’d been asked to do while actually working on getting all the pieces in place to make films. And after many, many years it worked, it totally worked. These guys knew what they wanted to do before there was a market for computer animation, before the technology existed and when everyone (George Lucas, Steve Jobs etc) was telling them it was a stupid idea. And they went ahead and did it anyway. Fight the power!
The other fascinating bit was Pixar’s devotion to the storyline. It’s as important if not more so than all the technology they created. Turns out they were schooled in the Disney way of storytelling thanks to some animators they stole. Fascinating stuff. It put me in mind of this article I read back in the day…essentially a paraphrasing of a speech Pixar gave at some conference. It’s an inside look at the storytelling/story-crafting process. Branding and copywriting is all about storytelling, so like a dork I bookmarked because if you’re gonna steal ideas from someone it might as well be somebody with an Oscar.
