That famous Pixar lunch of 1994 (2014)
gointothestory.blcklst.com
gointothestory.blcklst.com
Fun fact - the film took so long to produce because Andrew Stanton knew Pixar couldn't realistically animate space when he conceived of the idea. Good thing they waited too, as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPW3mvAN0Rc was the final result.
I will say though that after decades of Pixar basically defining the standards of what computer generated animation should be, studios are starting to catch up to and even leapfrog their style. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Arcane are two notable examples of this.
Particularly awesome bits:
- the use of off-registered halftone dots instead of camera focus
- hand-drawn comic frames interspersed into the film
- Kirby dots as a story element
- the frame rate as a story element
- the colors! look at what happens when Miles’ spider sense goes off for the first time
- motion lines and animation smears instead of motion blur
I could go on about this movie for hours. One of my all time favorite animated films.
"a lost people find a savior who leads them home" is not a random premise. religions are based on this story.
"Toy Story 3" is imho a lessor version of "The Brave Little Toaster".
But in this case it was at least Lassiter copying his own idea, that he had lost rights/control of.
And the story has almost no changes beyond adapting it into the TS universe. It's truer to the original story than Disney's remakes are.
This article leaves the impression these were brilliant ideas that came out well-formed over the lunch table. The book led me to the opposite conclusion: Pixar has such a high hit rate because they have a well-crafted process that can turn almost any idea - no matter how rough - into great film.
Luck: Lucas let them leave as a division rather than just shut them down or have them each choose other divisions.
Luck: They didn't get sold to HP but instead to Jobs
Luck: Jobs was willing to blow 70 million over 4 years on them failing to be a computer company before letting them pivot to movies. Lots of people could probably pull some level of success from being given $70 million+ (though probably not Pixar level success)
Luck: Lassiter didn't get fired earlier for sexual harassment (not in the book)
Luck: Catmull didn't get sued for illegal anti-competitive practices. (not in the book)
Of course I love many Pixar movies and respect the amount of effort and talent that goes into them.
Genuinely don't know what this refers to -- when was Pixar large enough to do that?
Very similar to what Jobs did with other tech companies to drive down wages for engineers.
If you have a bunch of kids with completely unconventional career ideas that no one would try... and then they all manage to strike it big doing these strange things... then you've got something special. Sure, part of it is in the capabilities and post-meeting culture of those kids... and part of it is to have strange but actually achievable ideas from the beginning.
I note that they're not completely crazy ideas. They know the limitations of their (new) medium, and are trying to find the ideas that are barely viable, and thus groundbreaking, at the edges.
The audiobook is good, too.
I don't doubt there's lots of feedback on details, but I have doubts about how much story arcs might change, or how "rough" the originating ideas are, especially after realizing that "Toy Story 3" is just (imho a lessor version of) "The Brave Little Toaster" as fed through the "Pixar Process".
It's toys instead of appliances, an attic instead of a cabin, being repurposed at a daycare instead of a repair shop, and an incinerator instead of a compactor, but the pixar process didn't change the overall story at all.
(The idea was originally Lasseter's, but to oversimplify, he basically lost the rights and others ended up making TBLT, while he eventually got to do TS3.)
Maybe other movies saw more changes going through the process, but the only example we have to actually compare didn't.
"Monster's Inc" - Box office: $577.4 million
"Finding Nemo" - Box office: $940.3 million
"WALL-E" - Box office: $521.3 million
$2.4B worth of ideas, not counting two sequels and eight theme park rides/attractions.
Imagine if they'd taken the whole afternoon instead of just lunch!
(1) Heimlich's Chew Chew Train, (2) Flik's Flyers, (3) It's Tough to Be a Bug, (4) Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor, (5) Mike & Sulley to the Rescue!, (6) Living Seas w/ Nemo & Friends, (7) Crush's Coaster...
What am I forgetting?
Also, It’s Tough To Be A Bug was cloned, so I guess you can count it twice. It’s still playing at Animal Kingdom (1998), and opened with Disney California Adventure in 2001 (closed 2019).
But Inside Out might be the only Pixar movie that I actively dislike. Any other is at worst an indifferent "meh".
https://www.metacritic.com/movie/inside-out-2015/critic-revi...
And quite apart from that, I was intrigued that when my 10yo daughter went to see a therapist, she was asked if she'd seen Inside Out. Not necessarily because it's an in any way accurate depiction of the mind, but as a jumping off point for a discussion about the experiences that form our identity ("core memories") and how those can evolve over time as we get older.
It makes the opposite point to me: if a lot of smart people pour a lot of their energy into making an animated movie, it doesn't matter what the initial idea was.
Note: This does not apply to features or startups. Features are time limited because the cast has to move on so you have to capture what you capture, and can't just fix it in post. And startups you can't just rely on your intuition that you're making what the audience wants.
Studios do not rely on intuition when making animated movies. Work-in-progress screenings for staff and the public are held during production. Even Pixar.
Look at Illumination - another super high quality production with random/funny ideas.
> In one of his trips to Marine World (Six Flags Discovery Kingdom), he saw a shark which he thought could be done so well in animation (like Bugs Life and Toy Story, at that time animation was restricted and advance materials could not be made)
What is interesting is that these directors knew the limitations of the technology well and let that inform their decision making as to what stories they would undertake.
Because of that, these stories never entered the uncanny valley.
Over the years I've taken this to mean that everyone has ideas, but it's doing something with those ideas is the valuable bit. Yes you might fail but you'll learn something, but you can lower the risk of failure if you surround yourself with the talented people.
For example, "internet on a phone" is an idea. Getting it to work is another matter entirely.
However, all of that still begs the question of whether those incentives are actually necessary to achieve similar outcomes in social welfare. AFAIU, empirical evidence for patent regimes in particular seem to be equivocal at best.[1] Nonetheless, the justifications do indeed recognize that what actually matters is whether or not people do something constructive with their ideas.
[1] Case in point: not only did I read the book, Against Intellectual Monopolies, I paid for a Kindle copy even though it was published gratis ;)
Kramer: I conceived of this whole project two years ago.
Jerry: Which part? The renovating the restaurant you don’t own part or spending the two hundred million you don’t have part?
http://maddogmovies.com/almost/scripts/raidersstoryconferenc...
The author won't know why or what's going on, just that there's a lot of news.ycombinator.com referrer traffic for an old article from nearly a decade ago that hardly anyone read. Then he'll maybe drop by and say hello on the thread.
However as I think about it some more, it seem like there is no reason we can't hangout and have free form discussions over a video call except that I rarely it happen.
Are there folks who have experienced these kinds of discussions over remote hangouts
(It was "Barbaronite" in bulgarian - not barbano-nait - but Bar-Ba-Roh-Ni-Te)
Rose-colored glasses. Production of Toy Story shut down production for three months, at Disney's insistence, because of major story and character problems. That means over budget. Even legends have problems and need help.