UP, Up and Away!

13/10/2009

How Pixar’s genius new movie has dragged Disney into the 21st century

Movie history was made at Venice Film Festival last month when the venerable annual celebration of cinema presented its prestigious Golden Lion Honourary Award for Lifetime Achievement to Pixar Animation Studios. The occasion marked the first time in the festival’s 66-year history such an award has been made not to an individual but to a company. It’s a gesture that confirms the widely-held view that Pixar is the pre-eminent producer of CG or computer-animated feature films.

The award was presented to the studio’s chief creative officer (CCO) John Lasseter (also director of the Toy Story franchise and Cars) and his fellow film-makers Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille), Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc), Andrew Stanton (WALL-E) and Lee Unkrinch (Finding Nemo) by Star Wars creator George Lucas. Pixar first came into being as a subsidiary of his Lucasfilms in 1979.

Stepping up to the podium to accept the Lion from Lucas on behalf of all the technical boffins and artistic wizards at Pixar’s home in northern California’s Silicon Valley, Lasseter told the crowd of movie stars, celebrities, industry professionals and world’s press gathered in Venice: “Film-making and animation is one of the most collaborative art forms there is in the world, and it is never more collaborative than at Pixar.

“We really set out to deeply entertain an audience, not just children but adults as well.”

Lasseter’s short but sweet and spot-on speech was accompanied by a screening of footage from the highly-anticipated Toy Story 3 (directed by Unkrinch and set to be released next year) in which Woody, Buzz and their plastic pals are once again separated from their beloved owner when the now young adult Andy leaves home for college.

The buzz about the third instalment of the original Pixar film was, please forgive the pun, light years ahead of anything enjoyed by Pixar’s contemporaries. But then the animation studio does have an unbroken record for producing commercial and critically  popular entertainment.

Twelve years, nine features and a handful of shorts on from the 1995 release of the first Toy Story, a new Pixar film has become a movie calendar event. Which was why Pixar’s 10th feature, Up (opening in the UK on October 16 and, under the direction of Docter, the first to be made in 3D), received its world premiere earlier this year in May at the biggest event in movie showbusiness: Cannes Film Festival. No doubt, it’ll pop up at March’s Oscars, too, and after then land at the BAFTAs.

Of the numerous ways to measure the resounding success of Pixar’s films, the 22 Oscars they’ve earned is a good place to start (all six films released since the inauguration of the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2001 have been nominated in the new category, with four of them winning).

Beyond that industry endorsement, all nine films have hit the number one spot at the box office, generating enough ticket sales to give Pixar nine of the 25 highest grossing animated films of all time. That translates as a lot of cinema bums on seats. If you want some closer-to-home anecdotal evidence to back up all those stats, try asking a kid what their favourite animated film is. The answer will almost certainly be the title of a Pixar film. My nephew’s is Cars or maybe The Incredibles.

“Some art pitched at children talks down to them, as adults manqués,” says Hannah McGill, artistic director of Edinburgh International Film Festival, which hosted the UK premieres of Ratatouille and WALL-E. “The best of it, however, works the other way, by permitting adults to access their curious and responsive child-brains.

“Pixar belongs firmly in the latter category; in fact it probably defines it for our times. I don’t think of Pixar films as ‘children’s films’, in the sense of being limited or naiv. On the contrary, they’re extraordinarily advanced and sophisticated, in that they speak meaningfully to human beings of all ages.”

 “What you get from Pixar,” adds Mark Grindle, the animation screenwriter and producer, and co-founder of Dundee-based Animation Finishing School, “is not a cynical manipulation of emotions but genuine passion for intelligent storytelling, rich characterisation and the readiness to embrace new technologies that you saw in early Disney.”

The house of the mouse’s acquisition of Pixar Animation Studios in 2006, at a staggering cost of $7.4bn, saw Disney owning Pixar lock, stock and barrel, but with the proviso Pixar remained an autonomous creative entity. The first film released by the new Disney subsidiary, Ratatouille, seemed to confirm the corporate takeover hadn’t, as some feared, ruined the beauty of Pixar.

“The whole deal has been structured so that Pixar will always stay independent, will always stay what it is,” Lasseter reassured cinema-goers and stock holders at the time. “We will always continue making Pixar films up at Pixar Studios.”

The deal not only ensured Pixar’s autonomy, it also charged Lasseter, now CCO of both companies, with the task of rejuvenating Disney’s ailing output (which, since the turn of the new millennium, has been comprised largely of low-quality straight-to-DVD sequels spin-offs). There’s a delicious ironic twist here that can’t be lost on Lasseter, who used to work at Disney but was unceremoniously given the boot in 1983 after unsuccessfully pitching a computer-animated short to a short-sighted executive.

“When I arrived [back] at Disney,” Lasseter said after the deal was sealed, “I found the animators demoralised. They were at the bottom rung. But they loved what they did and wanted to produce great animation. My job was to make Disney the film-maker-led studio it once was. I’m going back to sprinkle fairy dust.” 

The result of Lasseter’s efforts was Bolt, the cute CG animation about a canine TV star that felt like both a Disney classic and a cutting-edge Pixar movie. Meanwhile, the boffins and wizards at Pixar cooked up their second post-Disney deal film, WALL-E – an environment-themed homage to ‘70s science fiction movies that proved to be as good, and off the wall, as anything they’d produced yet. Which brings us back to UP.

Pixar’s 10th film is the uplifting tale of a grouchy septuagenarian balloon salesman named Carl Fredricksen who fulfills his lifelong dream to embark on a great adventure by tying thousands of balloons to his house and flying to South America.

Fredricksen, a cross between Spencer Tracy and Walter Matthau (voiced by US TV veteran Ed Asner aka Lou Grant), is the most unlikely and arguably the most distinctive Pixar hero yet – that’s saying something bearing in mind previous protagonists have included everything from a talking eyeball to a squeaking robot. Fredricksen was created, probably not entirely coincidentally, with Disney’s old-timer animators in mind.

“Carl is largely inspired by our own grandparents,” says Docter, “and a few other folks as well, but in particular by Joe Grant who was part of the 1937 team who created Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and to whom the film is dedicated. I got to know Joe when he was in his 90s, when he was this great old wise guy. Every time I would show him something we were working on he’d say, ‘What are you giving the audience to take home?’

“That was his way of telling me it’s the emotion, the character-based emotions, that people are going to remember.” Docter, Lasseter and their colleagues have done well to heed that advice. It’s the dedication to creating great characters that has, more so than the drive to push the envelope with new technological advances, ensured Pixar has maintained an unblemished track record. It’ll be interesting to see if they can keep it up. Pixar’s creative team aren’t resting on their laurels: Toy Story 3 and Cars 2 may be on their way, but the next two scheduled projects take the studio into uncharted territory.

The first – an adaptation of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter of Mars, a science fiction fantasy involving an American Civil War veteran who is transported to the red planet – will, under the direction of Stanton, mix animation with live action. The second, an epic reconstruction of the San Francisco earthquake to be directed by Bird and titled 1906, is planned to be completely live action. Those guys at Pixar certainly refuse to make life easier for themselves.

“It never gets easier,” Docter agrees. “We still don’t know everything but we allow ourselves to make mistakes.

“If you don’t make mistakes, you’re not taking enough risks. That’s how you get to the good stuff. That’s how we do it at Pixar.”