The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company Rough Cut - Hardcover

Price, David A.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307265757 ISBN 13: 9780307265753

Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

The author of Love and Hate in Jamestown charts the turbulent, rags-to-riches history of Pixar Animation Studios in context to the changing fortunes of computer animation, bringing together interviews with dozens of insiders to discuss the rocky early years, the volatile personal relationships involved, and the making of the studio's blockbuster, innovative films. 60,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David A. Price was raised in Richmond, Virginia, and was educated at the College of William and Mary, where he received his degree in computer science. He graduated from Harvard Law School and Cambridge University. Price has written for The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, Business 2.0, The Washington Post, Forbes, and Inc. and is the author of Love and Hate in Jamestown. He lives with his wife and sons in Washington, D.C.

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Still another film was in Pixar’s pipeline during the making of A Bug’s Life. Talk of a sequel to Toy Story began around a month after Toy Story opened, when Catmull, Lasseter, and Guggenheim visited Joe Roth, Katzenberg’s successor as chairman of Walt Disney Studios. Roth was pleased and embraced the idea.

Disney had recently begun making direct-to-video sequels to its successful feature films, and Roth wanted to handle the Toy Story sequel this way, as well. A direct-to-video sequel could be made for less money, with lesser talent. It could be priced cheaply enough to be an impulse purchase. Disney’s first such production, an Aladdin spin-off in 1994 called The Return of Jafar, had been a bonanza, returning an estimated hundred million dollars in profits. With those results, all self-restraint was off; Disney would soon grace drugstore shelves with Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas; Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World; The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride; and still another Aladdin film.

Everything else about the Toy Story sequel was uncertain at first: whether Tom Hanks and Tim Allen would be available and affordable, what the story’s premise would be, even whether the film would be computer-animated at Pixar or cel-animated at Disney.

As with A Bug’s Life, Lasseter regarded the project as a chance to groom new directing talent. In early 1996, once Roth decided that Pixar would handle production of the sequel, Lasseter assigned directing duties. Stanton was immersed in A Bug’s Life; Pete Docter, whom Lasseter regarded as the next in line, was already beginning development work on his own feature about monsters. For Toy Story 2, Lasseter turned to Ash Brannon, a young directing animator on Toy Story whose work he admired. Brannon, a CalArts graduate, had joined Pixar to work on Toy Story in 1993.

The story originated with Lasseter pondering what a toy would find upsetting. In the world of Toy Story, a toy’s greatest desire is to be played with by a child. What, Lasseter wondered, would be the opposite of that–worse, even, than being displaced by another toy?

An obsessive toy-collector character had appeared in a draft of Toy Story and was later expunged. Lasseter felt that it was now an idea whose time had come. Thinking of his own tendency to shoo his sons away from the toys on his office shelves, especially a Woody doll that he prized for its Tom Hanks signature, Lasseter began talking about the notion of a toy collector who hermetically seals toys in a case where they will never be played with again. For a toy, it would be a miserable fate. Brannon then suggested the idea of a yard sale where the collector recognizes Woody as a rare artifact and distracts Andy’s mom to grab him. Out of those ideas, Toy Story 2 was born.

The concept of Woody as part of a collectible set came from the draft story of A Tin Toy Christmas, in which Tinny was part of a set in a toy store and became separated. The other characters in Woody’s set emerged from viewings of 1950s cowboy shows for children, such as Howdy Doody and Hopalong Cassidy. “We started looking at these canonical characters that you find in westerns,” said Guggenheim, who was producer of Toy Story 2 during the first year of development work. “You would find a gruff old prospector. You would find other characters, like an Annie Oakley—Calamity Jane sort of character, a tough frontier girl.”


The development of the cowgirl character, Jessie, was also kindled by Lasseter’s life; Nancy had pressed him to include a character in Toy Story 2 for girls, one with more substance than Bo Peep. Jessie had started in a different form, as Señorita Cactus, a Mexican side- kick to the Prospector; she was to sway Woody with her feminine wiles. When the character of Jessie replaced her, the personality of the female lead became tougher and more direct.

As the story approached the production stage in early 1997, there remained the question of where Pixar would find the people to make it, given the demands of A Bug’s Life on the company’s employees. Part of the answer would come from a production organization within Pixar devoted to computer games. The Interactive Products Group, with a staff of around ninety-five (out of Pixar’s total staff of three hundred), had its own animators, its own art department, and its own engineers. Under intense time pressure, they had put out two successful CD-ROM titles: The Toy Story Animated StoryBook, released in April 1996, and The Toy Story Activity Center, released in October of the same year to coincide with the videotape release of Toy Story. The games featured much of the voice cast of the film, except that the voice actor Pat Fraley took Tim Allen’s place as Buzz, while Woody was played by Tom Hanks’s younger brother, Jim. The company touted StoryBook as the first CD-ROM to deliver full screen, motion-picture-quality animation on home computers. Between the two products, the interactive group had created as much original animation as there was in Toy Story itself.

Jobs had convinced himself that the games would sell ten million copies, like best-selling direct-to-video films. Kerwin, as head of the group, insisted that the market wasn’t there on such a scale. We can make a good, profitable business out of them, she said. (The products had sold almost a million copies combined.) But they won’t be a home run like Toy Story.

If that’s the case, Jobs said finally, then why don’t we just turn all these people over to making another movie? Thus, in March1997, while Kerwin took the assignment of building a short-films group, Jobs shut down the computer games operation and the games staff became the initial Core of the Toy Story 2 production team.



Press Release
TIM ALLEN AND TOM HANKS RETURN
AS “BUZZ LIGHTYEAR” AND “WOODY”
March 12, 1997
The Walt Disney Studios and Pixar Animation Studios announce today that a sequel to the groundbreaking Academy Award—nominated feature film TOY STORY is underway and being created exclusively for home video. The all-new, fully computer-animated sequel will feature the voices of Tim Allen and Tom Hanks, who reprise their enormously popular roles as “Buzz Lightyear,” the space ranger, and “Woody,” the pull-string Cowboy, respectively. Production on TOY STORY II reteams Disney’s Feature Animation team and Pixar’s Northern California studios. . . .
“‘Toy Story II’ is the latest production to be announced in our growing made-for-video film category,” Ann Daly, President, Buena Vista Home Video, said. “With ‘Aladdin and the King of Thieves’ and the debut of ‘Honey We Shrunk Ourselves’ next week, we are now bringing both animated and live-action films into this pipeline with great success. . . .”


Disney soon became unhappy with the pace of the work on the film and demanded in June that Guggenheim be replaced as producer. Pixar complied.

He looked back on his seventeen years with Pixar and Lucasfilm and concluded that he had most enjoyed working with groups that were venturing into new directions, like the EditDroid digital editing project and the original Toy Story effort; with Pixar’s shedding of everything but feature films, he believed the company’s strategy left few entrepreneurial opportunities. Guggenheim, now financially secure thanks to the stock offering, left the company.*...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0307265757
• ISBN 13: 9780307265753
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 308
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Knopf; https://knopfdoubleday.com; ; 3 Queen Caroline Street Hammersmith; London; W6 9PE; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar