The Pixar Story is an inhouse documentary presenting, in 88 minutes, the Pixar story. It's slick, it's historical, and if you're interested, it's worth a watch. Not so easy to find, though, unless you're willing to download it from not-your-public-library, where it is available in abundance.
I could see Pixar from my office window. A Sarah Palin thing. I don't mean that I could see it now if I wanted to but don't want to, I mean that I used to could see it, but that was a couple of offices ago, back in the 80s. Sitting at my desk I could make it out. At the time, my office window looked out over a parking lot where a hawk swooped down and grabbed a pigeon, and even if you think that pigeons are flying rats, I'm sorry, but I've had rats for pets. Except for that naked tail, they're pretty cool. This was back when I worked above the Sand Dabs Restaurant and the aroma of deep-fried dabs would rise up right around naptime - back when I could see Pixar, I mean, not back when I had the rats; in fact, back when I could see Pixar, I had a parakeet, and in addition to Pixar, I could see the office of the parakeet's doctor, off to the left. Pixar was across the street behind the multistoried, zigguratlike Ask building, next to the Target loading dock. I could have worked at Pixar; I mean, I could have walked in and applied for a job, instead of jogging past the building every day. I guess that I could say the same about Yahoo when it was still stuck in a little building on the Central Expressway, next to the Decathalon Club - where, having laid off 15,000 last week, it may end up again - or when I worked three buildings down from Google on Garcia, when Google was just being born and was peddling their search engine incestuously to Yahoo. That's why I think of Pixar as sort of related to Target, because they were side by side, and because of the Target-like product packed into Toy Story as a consequence of the animators going over to Target for their pre-Starbucks coffee during their early brainstorming. But the point is, Pixar from the start was connected in its spiritual innards to Hollywood, whereas my company abandoned Jesus in those tough times and signed a deal with the Defense Department, so that while Pixar was working on 3D-landscapes to entertain, and while the DOD was abandoning their attempts to teach homing pigeons in the warheads of Cruise missles to peck at touchscreen pictures of the terrain around Verbiblobstakaya and instead was rolling into Silicon Valley like a Stephen-King black fog to shop for databasemaker systems that could map a route from a silo north of Seattle to the center of Moscow, to be used by a missle travelling the whole shot at a height of 3 feet above the steppe, my company was vectoring down 101 past Moffett Field to the Blue Cube and Lazy L. Leaving me in the end with this question: if one guy wins an Oscar for animation and the other guy contributes to the destruction of the human race via massive nuclear strikes, which one wins? Mothers, don't raise your children to build bombs tra la. Pixar moved across the bay to Richmond Point, anyway; impossible commute. For another time: how game designers and animators fit in, the sales and use of whose work dwarfs the efforts of Pixar and its kin; but does not dwarf, in spite of all those dollars and all that game violence, the real bomb makers.
Pixar started out as a group of bright young people in Lucasfilm, got bought by Steve Jobs from Lucas, made some hits, went public, made some more hits, sold out to Disney, made Ratatouille and Wall-E while managing, despite being acquired and despite the aging of its bright young people, to avoid absorption by Disney, and subsequent decline. So far. The Pixar Story - the movie - was completed in the Ratatouille timeframe. On a parallel timeline, Pacific Data Images started out with some bright young people, contributed to some movies, sold out to Dreamworks, made some hits, spun off as PDI/Dreamworks, made some more hits. Whereas I could see Pixar from my office window, I can see PDI from the roof of my house, down in a complex that does its little bit to wreck the baylands. A friend who works there tells me that the old timers - PDI was founded in 1979 - say that the atmosphere in the company hasn't changed so much over the years. Dreamworks, at the other end of the state, hasn't done to PDI yet what Disney will probably end up doing to Pixar.
The Pixar Story comprises animated snippets alternating with talking heads. I've had it up to here with talking heads. Especially serious heads, telling me how hard they worked, lord how hard, and are all now without exception crudzillionaires. But wait a minute. I go out in my shorts every day and while jogging listen to the Washington Post political podcast, Slate, Washington Week, MacLaughlin, To the Point, Day By Day (RIP), News and Notes (RIP), Left Right and Center, The New Yorker Out Loud, Planet Money, so forth. Or did until I downloaded The Fountainhead the other day and got sidetracked by 30 hours of Ayn Rand. Is it that I need the talking heads? I talk back? Hold the IPOD like a phone to my ear and talk into it? One talking head in The Pixar Story that caught my attention was the former CEO of Robertson Stephens Investment Bank, which went down hard when the dot.com bubble burst. Watching him was like watching Hamlet talking to the skull in the graveyard. And George Lucas, get off the screen! You have lost your right to pontificate about anything ever again. Thank God your divorce and Howard the Duck made you dump Pixar before you started writing stories for it.
Man, did Steve Jobs make a bundle off Pixar. The magic touch. Apple, NeXT, Pixar. My daughter-in-law's sister is his favorite serving person in Woodside. Another Palin thing. He's a good tipper, or maybe that's just money falling accidentally from his pocket when he pulls out his handkerchief. I also won a free lunch at a lunchwagon that parked outside NeXT every workday noon, two blocks dowon from the Glomar Explorer. I got pinworms along with the lunch, which only in recent years can you treat with an over-the-counter remedy; before that, you had to get a prescription and the only place you could get one, if you were the typical carrier of pinworms, was in the emergency room, so that when I fell off a ladder and separated both shoulders and was transported in exquisite pain to the hospital, transported, I had to wait to be seen in line behind three individuals with pinworms, such being the vagaries of triage. For this I do not blame Steve Jobs. In the movie, which took seven years to make, Jobs retains the fat of midlife and good living, which has since melted away with his cancer. :(
What's the difference between "It's hard to remember" and "It's easy to forget"? Young kids just out of school, wearing those cotton pants that I always thought would be a reasonable alternative to jeans but could never find, and short-sleeved patterned shirts still favored by the Indian employees hereabouts. Animation scientists. Lasseter gets canned from Disney in the first 15 minutes of The Pixar Story. I googled "roy disney weird looking." 154 hits but not the kind that I was expecting.
Sign of the times: notice how nobody asks for "a reasonable facsimile thereof" anymore? The copy now equals the original. Back in the day, you had to sit down and draw a bunch of boxtops that looked like the single one that you had, in order to buy the poster without having to ten boxes of Wheaties. How long before live actors will no longer be needed, or wanted, in films, squeezed out by their virtual brothers and sisters? How long before actors join gas-station attendants in their netherworld? Or will actors hang on like supermarket checkout clerks, battling automation? Note that PIXAR spelled backwards is RAXIP (Replace Actors with Xygotefree Illusionary Personas). Didn't Steve Jobs as a young man look like the devil? Now what? Live actors to take refuge in/on the internet? How will that work? Porn is practically there already, but I mean otherwise?
When computer animation cranked up, old-fashioned pen-and-ink cartoonists were in fear for their jobs; The Pixar Story shows them still busy with those pencils, but my friend at PDI never sees anyone with pencil in hand, away from the keyboard. In the future, I'm sitting on my couch in front of my Sony holographic box and my neighbor, who already, here in the present, bemoans the paucity of gigs in the acting profession, says to me, "Hey, I could do that!" as we watch a movie in which Buzz Lightyear appears to actually be the authentic Clark Gable. No, my neighbor couldn't do that, because Gable pulls off his leg and beats a chicken with it. Pathetic.
Sure, live actors will keep acting. I just wrote a review about two guys who spent 29K doing a 9-day shoot for their movie. But you know what? They spent another 500+ days at the computer using Adobe Creative Suite 3. But yes, live actors will persist. There are still clipper-ship captains, aren't there? About four of them, versus thousands in the 1800s. There are still muleskinners. Or are there? There aren't that many damn mules anymore. Mine is gone, laid low by loneliness. There isn't a single mule in the family anymore. You ever eat mule? There's good eatin on a mule. And you know how they say that if gays can marry, next thing some guy will marry his goat? What about cartoons? One fellow applied to marry Jessica Rabbit. He was turned down not because she was a cartoon, but because she was a rabbit. If I marry the cartoon Maggie Gyllenhaal, does that mean that nobody else can too? Does it mean that I can get that scene in Sherry, Baby removed so that nobody can watch it but me? From here on out, PDI is going strictly 3D-with-the-glasses for theatrical releases - the next step toward these unholy unions? And what about those scriptures that say the sheeps will be separated from the goats? Why the goat-hate?
With regard to blockbusters: when an animated blockbuster becomes absolutely indistinguishable from a real one, will anyone ever hire 10,000 extras again, or travel to strange and photogenic sites, a la The Fall? Will DIY filmamakers at their computers bifurcate into the ones who make extravagant swashbucklers and the ones in the mumblecore community who mumble to themselves alone in the dark of night bathed in the glow of their flatpanels? There are a few folks out there who prefer vinyl records to digital CDs because the imperfections and underproduced music on the wax disks imbue the music, or so they say, with a richness missing in the sterile digital world. Will it be like that with the movies? Or will the enterprising animator let a boom mike hang down into the frame and add projector film scratches to create such effects for the old-fashioned movie afficinado?
Tom Hanks and Tim Allen have a word to say in The Pixar Story. Is it weird that the actors' bodies go first, so that only their voices remain in the movie? "Oh, Tom Hanks is in Toy Story. Isn't that wonderful." When animation makes the computerized actor identical to the real one, but voice technology continues to lag behind the visual, Tom Hanks will be dubbing himself. He'll get paid for the use of his image, of course, but he won't be acting anymore. Or worse, he'll take the money for his image but refuse to do his voice, and then he'll find himself watching himself onscreen sounding like Michael Madsen, who will do literally anything for a buck. And then virtual actors onscreen who become favorites won't be copies of current living favorites anymore - well, they might be, replicas of John Wayne, Jean Harlow, favorites old and new - but more often they'll be new nonexistent actors. And then Tom Hanks' voice will be animated too and used for an imaginary character instead of himself, maybe another Woody (who actually looks and acts more like Dick Van Dyke), and Hanks will be paid for that too and can go spend his money at the Old Actors' Home. But I'm no Luddite. Who will now take the plunge and animate Hilary Swank? Meanwhile, the virtual stars will marry - strange ceremonies on tropical islands where only the animators are present. The virtual stars will have children, who will also become stars. Since they'll be rich, the virtual stars will adopt real babies from Africa. They'll cheat on each other. Thank God there will be virtual Jimmy Stewarts around to maintain some reasonable standards. But then, some sorehead will bring back Anita Bryant.
In The Pixar Story, the heads talk and then we see the cartoons they created. Irony?