Heather L Holian

At Pixar, where the employees number over 1000, hundreds of these individuals are artists, many with fine art degrees and active personal studio practices outside Pixar. By day, however, they work collectively to inspire directors and production teams, solve visual problems, and create a believable digital world through paint, pencil and pixels.

This paper goes behind the final mass media film and reveals that while Pixar artists work in concert with a director, they have a surprising amount of creative agency. Indeed, Pixar seeks out individuals with strong artistic personalities and vision, despite the stylistically homogenizing production process. Further, my study demonstrates that Pixar’s creative culture offers a notably different model of collaborative art making, distinct from traditional fine arts, but rooted in individual contribution. Ultimately, my paper contributes to the larger topic of collaboration dynamics and the individual artist by complicating the notion and traditional understanding of “commercial collaboration.”

The clever end titles of Pixar’s WALL-E appear to subtly imply the justifiable position of this Studio’s animation among the masterworks of Western art. At the very least WALL-E’s appearance before ancient frescoes and the landscapes of Van Gogh bring attention once again to a debate, which found frequent voice in the late 1930s and 1940s, following the successes of Walt Disney, but which has remained virtually dormant ever since: Does animation deserve a place among the history of Western fine art? This paper will explore this still relevant issue, while also addressing the opinions of Pixar artists on the subject.

This essay explores the dynamics of large-scale collaboration and collective imagination at Pixar Animation Studios, by focusing specifically upon the Academy-Award winning Brave (2012) and its art department team. As such, this study will investigate the important, seemingly contradictory, but in fact, complementary nexus of individual inspiration and artistic agency on the one hand, with group-oriented experiences, collaboration, and director-driven aesthetics on the other. Through author interviews with Pixar artists, producers and art directors, as well as an analysis of standard production components such as research trips, art reviews and concept art, this essay will ultimately reveal the great dependence of Pixar productions, such as Brave, upon strong, individual artistic personalities dynamically blended through the experience of camaraderie, shared experience and a carefully cultivated collaborative studio environment. More broadly, this paper will challenge traditionally held notions of “commercial collaboration” and situate animation within the larger discussion of collaborative art making.

As early as the 1930s animators were viewed as “actors with pencils,” and “cast” for particular shots or characters accordingly. The same attitude is widely held in the field today and dictates everything from the assignments given to animators at Pixar, to the curriculum of American animation schools, to the advice supplied online to budding practitioners. If this logic is followed to its seemingly rational conclusion, then animators are in fact, arguably the most sophisticated, versatile, and total—that is entirely masked and anonymous—professional masqueraders working in the entertainment business today. In many respects the characters they bring to life are complex, highly pliable digital “masks” briefly inhabited by the animator.

In this case the complete cloaking of an animator’s identity, endemic to the medium, brings both the required consistency of style necessary in large projects, but also artistic anonymity outside the walls of a given studio. Indeed, according to Pixar animator and director Angus McLane the best animation does not attract attention to itself since “…the nature of animation is to cover up what the animator actually does...” Given the huge collaboration necessary to make an animated film, whereby as many as 45 animators may be involved, with several animating the same character, being an “ideal animator” is in large part about being able to deftly put on and take off a persona or “mask” at will, and at times, wear more than one.

Using Pixar as a case study, this essay will seek to identify and analyze the nature and various contemporary effects and implications of the “masked” animator. Consideration will focus on how this role impacts practitioners themselves, the individual animated film, as well as the place of animation in the larger world of cinematic entertainment.

In January of 1993 Ralph Eggleston started his new job at Pixar Animation Studios as art director of the project that would become Toy Story. Over the next two and a half years, Eggleston collaborated with his team of artists to develop a visual style that enhanced and realized the vision of director, John Lasseter, while also exploiting the available technology of this first CG animated film. A saturated palette, slightly caricatured forms, realistic textures and tangible details brought the world of Andy’s room to life. In the process, Eggleston and his crew unknowingly established a touchstone aesthetic that would directly impact two more Toy Story films over the next fifteen years.
As this chapter will demonstrate, Pixar artists cast to design the sequels necessarily worked within the iconic visual world of the first Toy Story, and sought to make their own contributions in step with trilogy story developments, technological advances and changes of director. In so doing this talk will explore the influences, design challenges and collaborative processes of Eggleston and his artistic team, before considering how the art departments of Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 inherited, reinterpreted and extended the trilogy’s aesthetic, most notably in the third installment. Here the particular cinematic tastes of director Lee Unkrich and the design sensibilities of Dice Tsutsumi combined to create a visually rich world that believably ranged from the warm, saturated palette of sunlit suburbia to the stark, harsh hues of a working dump. Technological advances, which enabled the realization of evolving visual and stylistic goals will also be considered.