Pixar

Pixar, American film production company specializing in computer animation, located in Emeryville, California. The studio was founded in 1986 by the executive Steven Jobs and the computer scientist Edwin E. Catmull. Jobs is the company’s chief executive officer and its creative head is John Lasseter.

The company began life as the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm, the production company of George Lucas. In the early 1980s, Catmull and his team produced the first entirely computer-generated sequence in a film when they created a one-minute scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), in which a missile equipped with a life-producing warhead strikes a dead planet causing it to burst into life. Catmull’s brainchild was a studio that would produce films that were exclusively computer generated. He pitched the idea to the co-founder of Apple Computer Inc., Steven Jobs, and Jobs bought Lucasfilm’s CG division for US$10 million in 1986.

Established as an independent production company, Pixar’s first film was Luxo Jr (1986), a two-minute short featuring two Anglepoise lamps, in which the bigger lamp acts like a parent to the small lamp as it plays with a ball. The film proved that computer-generated animation could impart charm and character to non-living objects.

In 1995, Pixar completed work on Toy Story, the first fully computer animated feature film. The cartoon, about the adventures of the rival toys, Woody the cowboy doll and the spaceman Buzz Lightyear, was highly acclaimed and became the most successful film of that year, grossing over US$360 million worldwide. Its director, Lasseter, also received a Special Achievement Academy Award for his leadership on the pioneering production. Pixar subsequently signed a ten-year agreement with the distributor of Toy Story, Walt Disney Pictures, in 1997. Under the deal, Pixar agreed to make a further five films co-financed by Disney, which undertook to distribute them, with the companies sharing the profits. In a field where consistency is notoriously difficult to maintain, with A Bug’s Life (1998), Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), and The Incredibles (2004), Pixar bucked the trend in creating a succession of critical and popular hits that made it, film for film, the most successful production studio of all time. Pixar’s third film under the deal with Disney, Finding Nemo, won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film; the fifth was Cars (2006). In addition, the sequel Toy Story 2 (1999) outgrossed its predecessor and won the Golden Globe for Best Picture.

Although Pixar has been at the forefront of new computer technology, developing the Oscar-winning rendering software RenderMan, the key to its success lies equally in the company’s strong storytelling philosophy, which emphasizes the importance of plot and character as much as technical innovation.

Disney and Pixar initially struggled to reach agreement on a renewed deal, however in 2006 new Disney chief executive Robert Iger and Steve Jobs agreed the US$7.4 billion (£4.1 billion) acquisition by Disney of Pixar from 2007. Under the agreement, John Lasseter will be the creative chief of the joint Disney/Pixar animation studios.