The Pixar Touch

Pixar’s Journey

In 2006, the Walt Disney Company bought Pixar Animation Studio for $7.4 billion, an unlikely homecoming for Pixar, once a tiny, money-losing computer hardware company. Now, after a parade of award-winning animated movies, Pixar’s success seems like it ought to have been inevitable, but it was not. Pixar struggled with artistic, technological and business challenges. Its three leaders – owner and CEO Steve Jobs, animation guru John Lasseter and president Edwin Catmull – were considered failures when they joined Pixar, but their previous business experiences opened the door to greater ambitions and more success. They shared dogged perseverance and an innovative vision of a new way of making movies and telling stories.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, the University of Utah was the place to be in the new field of computer graphics. Student Ed Catmull grew up dreaming of making animated movies, but he had no talent for drawing. He thought computers might let him fulfill his dreams. The culture of Utah’s computer science department encouraged individual initiative, so he created a short film where he digitized and animated his left hand. It was so groundbreaking...