Pixar Animation Studios is a computer animation film company situated near Berkeley, California. They started life making short movies and adverts, before reinventing the wheel with the world's first feature-length computer animated film, Toy Story. They have gone on to rake in twenty-six Academy Awards, seven Golden Globes, and 3 Grammys - and have made over $6.3 billion worldwide. Ultimately, though, it's not the statues or the money it's made which finally distinguishes it from other movie studios: it's the superb and consistent quality of their movies.
It's worth emphasizing that their success hasn't led to safe, conservative choices - far from it, Pixar have instead enacted a policy of taking big chances, telling stories no one else would dare invest in - and then crafting them into cinematic gold. Take the brilliant 'Ratatouille', in which a rodent chef creates dishes in a Paris restaurant. The picture's theme was the virtue of great art – hardly box-office bait – while the title was imagined so odd that a phonetic spelling was added to the poster. Or take 'WALL-E', an attack on capitalism; not only was this stunning movie desperately poignant for its 1st, dialogue-free 40 minutes, but it had a metal box for a hero and a steering wheel for a baddie.
Their multitude of devotees - both young and old - have grown to adore and place total trust in Pixar - to a level that no other film studio can equal. You can't throw a stone without hitting a Pixar fan... but have you ever met a Univeral fan, or a Paramount fan? Pixar has built this fan base via the self-evident but surprisingly infrequent tactic of working on the movies until they're at the standard they expect. Pixar take months constructing its story structures before characterisation or dialogue are thought about. In pursuit for the highest quality it works with the most talented writers and directors. Joss Whedon, mastermind behind Buffy and Firefly, worked on the screenplay for the original Toy Story. Tom McCarthy, writer-director of The Station Agent, worked on the script of Up. Michael Arndt, Oscar-winning writer of Little Miss Sunshine, co-wrote Toy Story 3.
Pixar have also learned from Disney's model of getting A-list actors for its voice casts: through employing Hollywood stars like Tom Hanks, Holly Hunter and Willem Dafoe, it made voice-acting the profitable industry it is today. The secret of Pixar, if you can isolate one, appears to be that they aren't about creating great movies for kids – just great movies.
Strikingly, at Pixar there is no room for the excess of pop culture references that have overtaken its competitors' animations. The leading culprit in this respect has been DreamWorks, whose wacky output too often comes across like soulless fluff. While Pixar adds jokes as the icing on the cake, for DreamWorks it is the cake: take out the in-jokes that litter Shark Tale or Bee Movie and there's not much left. These contemporary references immediately carbon-date those movies, leaving them even more unfathomable to future viewers.
An additional critical component is the design of their movies. They look like no others, have a grace and artistry which the likes of DreamWorks appear unable to match. A cause of this is that, unlike DreamWorks, Pixar bring out a film every year or two. That’s it. If you study a Pixar film, you’ll discover scarcely a glitch. Of course, each film is not completely perfect, but generally, the animation, sound, script, characters, pacing, comedy, emotion – it’s all unimpeachable.
As well as those technical components, Pixar movies have that intangible yet vital element: soul. Everything - from the story, to the characters, and the voice cast oozes with a human touch. This, beyond any other single component, accounts for why Pixar films are beloved by viewers of all ages, why the next Pixar feature is always expectantly awaited, and why Pixar are currently the best film studio in the world.
This is the UK's only Pixar DVD Price Comparison Site.
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