Documentary brings "Pixar" struggles to life

The Pixar Story

By Kirk Honeycutt

SAN RAFAEL, California (Hollywood Reporter) - The "overnight" success of Pixar Animation Studios seemed like a smooth rocket ride, but Leslie Iwerks' documentary about the cartoon behemoth is a jolting reminder that it was a risky business venture.

An unstable combination of sheer determination, unending struggle, initial failures and gut instinct, it took an almost karmic combination of talent and fortuitous events to get that baby off the ground. Many people participated, but "The Pixar Story" rightly zeroes in on John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and their entrepreneurial godfather and backer, Steve Jobs, who all but willed the Pixar success into reality.

Having the run of the studios' archival footage, going back to before Pixar existed, and unparalleled access to just about everybody she needed to interview, Iwerks -- who previously made "The Hand Behind the Mouse," a documentary about her famous animator grandfather, Ub Iwerks -- delivers an incisive and often inspiring story of a group of super talents for whom failure was not an option.

After its world premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival, Iwerks says she means to qualify the film for Oscar consideration. She then hopes to secure a theatrical release. But its real value will undoubtedly be as a DVD with expanded footage of the interviews and behind-the-scenes peeks that didn't make it into the 86-minute feature. This film will be an invaluable resource for film and animation historians, as well as multitudes of Pixar fans, from here to infinity and beyond.

Iwerks counts herself among those fans. So her portrait, narrated by Stacy Keach, is admiring, not journalistic. Even so, the most hard-bitten investigator would be hard-pressed not experience wonder at such a rousing story.

Computer animation was around long before Pixar. Animators in Europe and North America were experimenting with this combination of art and science in shorts dating back to the '70s. Yet there was often a lack of warmth in the designs, and representing humans, even cartoony ones, was a challenge. Features were out of the question.

Lasseter and Catmull were among the first to see the future so clearly. Lasseter came out of Cal Arts with training in Disney animation. He worked at Disneyland in Anaheim and eventually landed a job in Disney's Burbank studios. When "Tron," one of the first features to mix computer-generated action with live-action, came out of Walt Disney Pictures in 1982, Lasseter pushed for and got a unit that experimented with 3-D animation.

But such was the fear of the computer -- that somehow the computer would replace humans rather than becoming a new tool for animators -- that Lasseter was actually fired by Disney when he completed his project.

He joined the computer division of Lucasfilm, where he met Catmull, a computer scientist trained at the University of Utah, who helped develop digital image compositing technology.

In 1986, Jobs bought Lucasfilms' digital division and founded Pixar with Lasseter and Catmull as his key men.

After losing $1 million a year for five years, Jobs needed to see a return on his investment. So Pixar put "Toy Story," the first feature-length computer-animated film ever, into production.

"Some of us had never even worked on a movie," Lasseter notes.

Initially, Disney, which was to release "Toy Story," imposed its ideas on the production, to disastrous results. The first trial reel was awful, former vice chairman Roy Disney recalls.

Only when Pixar animators tore up those notes and went with gut instincts did the production take off. The worldwide gross of $350 million by "Toy Story" (1995) led Jobs to Wall Street, where he raised $132 million through an IPO. That put Pixar on a firm footing and led to a string of hits.