Movie Review: The Pixar Story

Here are four lessons we can learn from seeing Leslie Iwerks' new documentary, The Pixar Story, which had its North American debut at the Waterloo Festival of Animated Cinema last Thursday night.

1. Becoming the premiere CGI animated studio in the world is a lot harder than it looks.
2. Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs and John Lasseter are (a) geniuses, (b) totally insane, or (c) all of the above.
3. Pixar looks like it's an absolutely amazing place to work.
4. Considering that the then-Disney CEO insisted that all scripts be "edgy" (and all animated films be musicals) it's an absolute miracle that the Walt Disney Company, and its subsidiaries, produced any quality films during the Eisner era.

Leslie Iwerks, the grand-daughter of legendary Disney animator and Mickey Mouse creator Ub Iwerks, has crafted what is possibly the definitive biography of the Emeryville studio, tracing its origins through the lives of its three founders: computer genius Ed Catmull, moneyman Steve Jobs and former Disney animator John Lasseter.

John Lasseter Most Important Person in Iwerks' Doc

The Pixar Story traces the drama, heartbreak and eventual triumph that characterizes the history of the Emeryville Studio. Beginning with Lasseter's student days at Cal Arts, through Pixar's gestation and eventual divorce from George Lucas' Industrial Light & Magic, the first shorts, and into the messy birth of classic films like Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and The Incredibles.

Iwerks aims for the human angle, putting her story fully on people like Lasseter, Jobs, Catmull, Bird and Lasseter' directorial protegés: Pete Docter (Monsters Inc.) and Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo).

Not surprisingly, Iwerks' lens tends to focus on Lasseter most of all, tracing his history from his student days, learning animation from Disney's Nine Old Men, and working alongside future directors Brad Bird (Ratatouille), Tim Burton (Sweeney Todd) and John Musker (The Little Mermaid). The film follows Lasseter through his apprenticeship at Disney under Glen Keane, and getting unceremoniously dumped after senior executives hated his short, The Brave Little Toaster.

"Disney let Lasseter go because they didn't know what to do with him," says producer Don Hahn (The Lion King). It would eventually cost the Mouse House $7.4 billion to get him back.

Pixar Art Surprisingly Crude

The Pixar Story features lavish footage from various films – such as a scene from 1976 schlock-fest Futureworld, which featured Ed Catmull's hand rendered in CGI, the first computer generated image ever put on film – to show the mindset of the company, and its players, through every stage of its evolution.

Animation fans will enjoy seeing the vintage images from such early shorts as The Adventures of Wally B. and André and Tin Toy, but one of the most interesting aspects of the film is showing how crude so many of those early images were.

Divorced from the action and story, Pixar's art is grotesque and unrefined; it's not surprising that cel animators sniffed at any statements that CGI could ever replace hand-drawn work. However, it's the sparkling tales that redeem the unrefined art in these shorts. It was storytelling, not the gee-whiz factor of animated FX, that propelled Pixar to the top of the CGI heap.

Authorized Biography Still Shows Insight

Considering this is an authorized biography, The Pixar Story is long on feel-good details and short on investigative journalism. It glosses over the year-long battle between Eisner and Jobs that would eventually result in Eisner losing his job at the Mouse House. It also calls the Lasseter-directed Cars "every bit a triumph as previous Pixar movies," even though it's generally considered the weakest film in the studio's canon.

The "happy ever after" ending is a bit clumsy, considering that Lasseter and Catmull are still engaged in a raging turf war to instill Pixar's "story first" philosophy (ironically, an imitation of Walt Disney's credo) into the Mouse House. But for an in-depth look at the studio and its major players, this film is worth watching.

If you are at all a fan of Pixar's movies, you owe it to yourself to check out The Pixar Story. 9/10

scene from Finding Nemo

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