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The Making of a Company
Knopf
May 2008
On Sale: May 13, 2008
304 pages
ISBN: 0307265757
EAN: 9780307265753
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
The roller-coaster rags-to-riches story behind the
phenomenal success of Pixar Animation Studios: the first
in-depth look at the company that forever changed the film
industry and the “fraternity of geeks†who shaped it. The Pixar Touch is a story of technical innovation that
revolutionized animation, transforming hand-drawn cel
animation to computer-generated 3-D graphics. It’s a
triumphant business story of a company that began with a
dream, remained true to the ideals of its
founders—antibureaucratic and artist driven—and ended up a
multibillion-dollar success. We meet Pixar’s technical genius and founding CEO, Ed
Catmull, who dreamed of becoming an animator, inspired by
Disney’s Peter Pan and Pinocchio, realized he would never be
good enough, and instead enrolled in the then new field of
computer science at the University of Utah. It was Catmull
who founded the computer graphics lab at the New York
Institute of Technology and who wound up at Lucasfilm during
the first Star Wars trilogy, running the computer graphics
department, and found a patron in Steve Jobs, just ousted
from Apple Computer, who bought Pixar for five million
dollars. Catmull went on to win four Academy Awards for his
technical feats and helped to create some of the key
computer-generated imagery software that animators rely on
today. Price also writes about John Lasseter, who catapulted
himself from unemployed animator to one of the most powerful
figures in American filmmaking; animation was the only thing
he ever wanted to do (he was inspired by Disney’s The Sword
in the Stone), and Price’s book shows how Lasseter
transformed computer animation from a novelty into an art
form. The author writes as well about Steve Jobs, as
volatile a figure as a Shakespearean monarch . . . Based on interviews with dozens of insiders, The Pixar Touch
examines the early wildcat years when computer animation was
thought of as the lunatic fringe of the medium. We see the studio at work today; how its writers, directors,
and animators make their astonishing, and astonishingly
popular, films. The book also delves into Pixar’s corporate feuds: between
Lasseter and his former champion, Jeffrey Katzenberg (A
Bug’s Life vs. Antz), and between Jobs and Michael Eisner.
And finally it explores Pixar’s complex relationship with
the Walt Disney Company as it transformed itself from a
Disney satellite into the $7.4 billion jewel in the Disney
crown.
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