keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

John Lasseter's appearance at the TIFF Bell Lightbox on Tuesday, June 7 at 7:30 p.m has been cancelled. Details are here .

(There are mild spoilers below.) Watching Toy Story 3 , I think I'm getting a clearer understanding of Andrew Stanton's contribution to Pixar. While most people are comparing the latest Toy Story to the two previous films, it seems to me that the new Toy Story relates most closely to Finding Nemo and Wall-E , two films directed by Stanton. Stanton is listed as one of the writers on the latest Toy Story . Toy Story 3 resembles Nemo in that it is about moving to a new stage of life, where old relationships cannot stay the same. Marlin has to loosen his grip on Nemo in order for Nemo to grow. Andy has to let go of his childhood in order to become an adult; the toys have to accept that their time with Andy is over. Both films (and many of the Pixar features Stanton has contributed to) deal with separation. Stanton was adamant about Wall-E not being an ecological fable, yet Toy Story 3 takes the characters to a dump, an endless stretch of society's garbage. It's...

We've all had bad photographs taken. I'm sure that everyone reading this has cringed at a driver's license, passport or yearbook photo of themselves. It's unusual, however, for a publisher to use such a bad photograph on the cover of a book that they want people to purchase. This book, out in October, is aimed at the 9-12 age range. No doubt many children would love to know more about Pixar and animation, but I can't imagine that the above photo will encourage them to reach for this book. I'm sure that Disney and Pixar have excellent portrait photos available for publicity purposes. Why did an art director choose one where Lasseter is clearly not at ease? Cover up the smile and look at his eyes. This is a classic case of a face sending mixed signals. We've all done it, but most of us are lucky enough not to have it splashed on a book cover.

Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Darryl F. Zanuck and John Lasseter. All of them worked as studio heads and film makers, but one of them was significantly different than the others. I'll bet you're guessing Zanuck, who was head of 20th Century Fox, but is that the case? I've just finished re-reading Michael Barrier's The Animated Man , his biography of Walt Disney (now in paperback ). His portrait of Disney strikes me as being accurate based on my own knowledge and experience of Disney history. Starting in the 1920's, Walt Disney was an entrepreneur trying to build a business. It wasn't until the early 1930s, that he really began to see the artistic possibilities in animation, that his focus shifted. The culmination of Disney-as-artist was Snow White , a film that Disney was intimately involved with every detail of. The problem in a collaborative commercial art form like film is that the delicate balance that has to be maintained between business and art. I...

David A. Price's book, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company , is a readable history of today's leading animation studio. It's also clearly shows that the company, especially in its early days, was far more than John Lasseter. Within animation circles, discussions of Pixar naturally revolve around Lasseter, but Price establishes the importance of Ed Catmull to the existence of the company. It was Catmull's vision to create movies with computers and it was Catmull who assembled the team of software engineers at the New York Institute of Technology that started to make them a reality. Once Catmull understood the limitations of Alexander Schure, the head of NYIT, he migrated his team to George Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic. Catmull's contributions came in several areas. As a software engineer himself, he not only wrote code but had an intimate understanding of the problems that needed to be solved. In addition, he was a natural at management. He not o...

I'm a little pressed for time over the next few days, but wanted to point out this excellent article in the N.Y. Times about how the two companies are adjusting to each other after Disney's purchase of Pixar. I'm going to come back to various things in this article, tied together with Michael Barrier' s Disney bio, The Animated Man . This quote, in particular, caught my eye. One Pixar insider, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized by the company to speak, joked that scheduling a meeting with Mr. Lasseter has become harder than “lining up a chat with the pope.”