The Pixar Story - the power of a long term vision

Pixar is the production company behind some of the greatest computer animation films - Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Wall-E. In the last two decade, they seem to go from success to success, as one of the dominant players in the genre. But did you know that they started off as a computer hardware company? And almost disappeared into oblivion several times before they ever made a feature film?

I’ve been reading The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company (Vintage). It takes us back to the 1970s when computers were the size of rooms and used primarily by the military. Some computer geeks started working on animation using the clunky undeveloped tools of the time and in the process created and evolved the software that eventually made the genre accessible to the world. They were joined by a Disney artist whose knack was to make inanimate objects come alive as if with a personality of their own.

What is fascinating about the Pixar Story is that in different forms, the core team of geeks and artists worked for George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars series, and Steve Jobs, the man who is synonymous with Apple, both visionaries in their own fields, but who were unable to see the meteoric potential in animated films. Lucas saw the team as useful for some special effects but not as film creators in their own right. Jobs bought Pixar because he was interested in the hardware and software for creating images and initially, had little interest in the animation side.

To me, looking at this story as a life coach, there are a number of inspiring themes:

# The Pixar guys had a vision to make animated movies with computer graphics back in the 70s, when the technology was at its infancy. They worked and worked at developing the hardware and software, finding funding by any means possible and perfecting their art for over 20 years before they were finally able to produce their first feature film, Toy Story.

# Their investors and patrons such as Lucas and Jobs gave up on them several times but they just kept going at what they loved, even if it meant pretending to be a computer company while they worked away quietly on their animation.

# They didn’t do it for the money - they had a passion and a vision. These are the only motivators that can keep you focused on a seemingly impossible goal for more than 20 years, especially while others around you think you are deluded. The key artist of the Pixar band of brothers, John Lassiter, was invited to become a director at Disney but he turned them down. He turned down Disney! He could be a director at Disney, he said, but he would rather stay where he was at Pixar (at that time with nothing but a few short films of under 5 minutes to their name) and “make history”.

And make history they did.

Their films and also their technological developments have changed not just the genre of animated films but also how films are made. Computer generated graphics are in most films and even TV shows now. The wonder of computer graphics is how it can take us into impossible spaces and amazing worlds and even make the world on screen seem animated with a reality that is more real and alive than our ordinary world. It has changed they way we tell and take in visual stories - and in so doing, it is changing the way we look at the world around us.

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Here is one of their first short films, Luxo Jr, that was inspired by a lamp on John Lassiter’s desk: