The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company | 
 enlarge | Author: David A. Price
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
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Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 18707
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 5.8 x 1.3
ISBN: 0307265757
Dewey Decimal Number: 384.806573
EAN: 9780307265753
Publication Date: May 13, 2008
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Condition: ***NEW*** Minor shelf wear
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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 A Simon Bruty)
Product Description
The roller-coaster rags-to-riches story behind the phenomenal success of Pixar Animation Studios, and the first in-depth look at the company that forever changed the film industry and the "fraternity of geeks" who shaped it.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 The magic touch June 14, 2008
Julie Neal (Sanibel Island, Fla.)
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
I was glued to this book about Pixar's humble beginnings and inspiring ascension into the firmament. In true Cinderella fashion, the company starts with nothing, gets no respect, but eventually its dreams come true. It's a thought-provoking journey.
Pixar's story interweaves with that of the Walt Disney Company throughout its history. Founding CEO Ed Catmull's college dissertation involved creating a texture map projecting Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh onto undulating surfaces. When Disney decided to replace its ink-and-paint process with computers, it had Pixar test the system with a scene from The Little Mermaid. In 1991, Disney agreed to finance Pixar's first full-length feature film, Toy Story, but production was shut down in late 1993 because the plot dictated that Woody be mean and petty. Disney rewrote the script to make the toy cowboy more sympathetic. And in January 2006, Disney agreed to acquire Pixar for 287.5 million shares of Disney stock.
The story works in the biographies of some fascinating men. Catmull turned down Disney when it approached him to help design the Walt Disney World attraction Space Mountain. Steve Jobs, newly thrown out of Apple Computer, bought Pixar for just $5 million, only to discover he had to spend twice that to keep it afloat. You read how John Lasseter advances from a skipper on Disneyland's Jungle Cruise to the principal creative advisor of Disney and Pixar animation.
The book includes a handful of black and white photos, and eight glossy, full-color pages with images from Pixar movies Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars and Ratatouille.
Here's the chapter list:
1. Anaheim
2. In the Garage
3. Lucasfilm
4. Steve Jobs
5. Pixar, Inc.
6. Making it Fly 1
7. Making it Fly 2
8. "It Seemed Like an All-Out War"
9. Crisis in Monstropolis
10. Emeryville
11. Homecoming
Appendix 1: Pixar Academy Awards and nominations
Appendix 2: Pixar Filmography
Excellent creative and business history June 17, 2008
Michael Hopp (San Francisco)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Price does a nice job tracing Pixar from the initial birth of computer graphics at the University of Utah through Pixar's acquisition by Disney. He does well with both the business history (including interesting detail on Steve Jobs and the hard bargains he drives) and the creative history, as the Pixar team builds up to feature films and then delivers again and again.
Fascinating History of a Fascinating Company June 11, 2008
RRapier (Arizona)
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
This book proves that the story behind the amazingly successful animation studio is as interesting as anything they have created for the big screen. Definitely a must read for anyone who considers themselves a Disney or Pixar fanatic.
This book went to Infinity and Beyond!! July 2, 2008
Joel Siegel (Chicago, IL)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I am an animator and have always had an affinity for PIXAR. When I heard about this book I knew I needed to read it immeadiately. It goes through the entire history of PIXAR with some detailed background on computer animation itself. Also it gives brief back stories of each of the major players that started PIXAR and/or have been major players since then. I have never found a non-fiction book more interesting in my life. Once you pick up this book you actually will no be able to put it down. There is however a lot of tech talk so if you do not know much about computers or animation you may not like it as much, but it really is a good and fast read. I recommend it to all who are truly interested in PIXAR, computer animation, and even the growth of a small business.
It's about the Story July 4, 2008
Hillevi Peterson (Roseville, MN)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am a teacher who uses stories to draw students into an academic concept. I love a good story that teaches. This one exceeds any expectations. It's about the growth of software that I use daily from concept to reality; from the unaffordable to the common man. It's about dreams that percolate FOR YEARS and not just achieve instant stardom. It's about patience and conflict and overcoming some obstacles and being taken down by others. It is about character building while building characters that have become a mainstay of our culture. In short, it's inspirational for those of us who continue to work on our ideas and dreams while others scoff at our million to one odds at success. The Pixar Touch motivates us to reply: "so you mean I still have a chance."
This is a must read for all of those who lead creative teams or who dream to create!
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