News Release

Published by The Guardian Jun 2010 

"In the notoriously precarious film industry, where nothing is certain and no one knows anything, there is one word that functions simultaneously as talisman, balm and kitemark. That word is Pixar, and you don't have to be a shareholder in Disney, which bought the computer animation studio in 2006, to feel reassured when you hear it.

With the imminent UK release of Toy Story 3, the apparently final instalment of the groundbreaking series that began Pixar's reign in 1995, the question of how one studio has maintained such incomparably high quality control remains intriguing. Among Pixar's contemporaries, only Japan's Studio Ghibli (much beloved of the Pixar crowd, who even pay tribute to the Ghibli classic My Neighbour Totoro in Toy Story 3) has been more consistently groundbreaking in animation, and even it has floundered somewhat with its last two films.

From the first frame of the original Toy Story, 15 years ago, the marriage of eerily realistic computer animation and old-fashioned, emotionally plausible storytelling was a bountiful one. Add to that the studio's sparkling wit, manifested in gags or allusions often accessible only to older viewers, as well as a wealth of incidental detail that positively demands repeated study, and it's no wonder that Pixar's movies can withstand tens, even hundreds, of viewings by any age group. Take it from me: my family's copies of titles by rival outfits such as DreamWorks Animation (Shrek, Madagascar) or Blue Sky Studios (the Ice Age trilogy) have mysteriously vanished to the back of the DVD collection, while The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Up remain on constant rotation.

Toy Story 3 is the 11th feature from the studio, which began life in 1984 as the computer graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm Ltd, before Steve Jobs bought it for $10m two years later. It only opened in US cinemas a fortnight ago, but already space ranger Buzz Lightyear and his ragtag assortment of toy pals have already trashed box-office records in that seemingly effortless Pixar way. The film's initial $109m haul was the biggest ever opening weekend for the company; two weeks on, its North American takings stand at nearly $236m, and over $340m worldwide, with the film yet to open across most of Europe. Toy Story 3's UK release later this month will have the cinema chains prostrating themselves in gratitude.

That's before you take into account the colossal merchandising opportunities: the Buzz Lightyear toy is tipped to be this year's "must-have" children's Christmas present – as long as shops don't repeat the understocking error that followed the release of the first film, which was cheekily referred to in Toy Story 2 when Barbie knowingly mentions "short-sighted retailers who didn't stock enough toys to meet demand".

For Pixar, financial success must feel almost routine; how can it not when the worldwide takings of its features to date, including Toy Story 3, amounts to more than $5.5bn? Still, what really distinguishes it from other studios is the robustness and longevity of its output. Breaking box-office records is, ultimately, for the birds; Pixar is all about the long game.

Not that this should be confused with playing it safe. On the contrary, Pixar appears to pride itself on spinning conceptual straw into cinematic gold. While Toy Story 3 is, by the studio's own standards, a safe bet at the box office, the more commercially secure Pixar has become, the more it has used its bankability as a springboard for innovation and experimentation. Aside from Toy Story 3 and the forthcoming Cars 2 (a sequel to the only film on its CV that dipped noticeably below the normally stratospheric standards), nothing else in its recent output adheres to received wisdom about what makes a hit.

Take the sumptuous 2007 comedy Ratatouille, in which a rodent chef prepares nouvelle cuisine dishes in a Parisian restaurant. The picture's theme was the provenance of great art – hardly box-office bait – while the title was feared so offputting that a phonetic spelling was added to the poster. Or WALL-E, an attack on consumerism; not only was this remarkable work soul-achingly bleak for its first, dialogue-free 40 minutes, but it featured, as the critic Jonathan Romney observed, a metal box for a hero and a steering-wheel for a villain.

Financial commentators in the US rashly predicted that the studio's fortunes would decline with the release of Up, because of the uncommercial decision to have a 78-year-old widower as its hero. But the film made nearly $300m (on a $175m budget) during its US theatrical release alone. Future projects – including Newt, about an attempt to mate the last remaining newts on earth, who unfortunately despise one another – indicate a continuing aversion to formula.

That audiences have come to cherish Pixar, eccentricities and all, is testament to the level of trust and goodwill the studio has generated. "That's part of what Steve Jobs said early on," recalled Dylan Brown, a supervising animator at Pixar, when I spoke to him in 2007. "He said he wanted to build Pixar into a brand so that when people go see a Pixar film, there's a certain level of integrity they can trust, even without seeing anything in advance about the film. As artists working on a film, it's a big part of how we can go home and feel good about what we've done. I don't want to put four years of my life into something that doesn't have integrity, or a personal message."

A measure of the affection with which Pixar is regarded can be found in the online outrage which greeted a venomous review of Toy Story 3 by the New York Press critic, Armond White. "The Toy Story franchise isn't for children and adults," wrote White, "it's for non-thinking children and adults. When a movie is this formulaic, it's no longer a toy because it does all the work for you. It's a sap's story."

Even in an age when internet opprobrium can be generated simply by asking whether Robert Pattinson is having a bad hair day, there was a fearsome response from Pixar fans outraged that White's broadside was preventing the film from achieving a 100% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website, which assesses critical reaction. "You have no soul, nor a heart," wrote one reader, while another declared: "I hate you. Toy Story 3 is one of the most creative movies ever made."

Around the release of Ratatouille, though, Brown did sense the rumblings of a mini-backlash. "It's a strange time at Pixar," he said. "People may not be rooting for us as they once did. We've been very lucky: every film has made a profit, and after a while some people seem to get angry about that. They seem annoyed, as if we had some secret formula for our films that we're refusing to share with everyone."

Pixar's seeming ability to please all the people all of the time continues to raise some critics' hackles. A recent story in Ms magazine went fishing for controversy by griping about the seven-to-one ratio of male and female characters in Toy Story 3 – while ignoring the importance that a young girl plays in the moving conclusion, or the unexpected gumption shown by the film's Barbie doll, who gets the picture's funniest scene when she tortures a narcissistic Ken doll by ripping her way gleefully through his snazziest retro outfits.

Pixar has built its vast following through the simple but surprisingly rare tactic of pursuing excellence. The studio spends many months mapping out its story structures before characterisation or dialogue make an appearance. Making no distinction between the demands of animation and live action, it draws its talent from across cinema. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, worked on the screenplay for the original Toy Story. Tom McCarthy, writer-director of The Station Agent and best known for playing a corrupt reporter in The Wire, worked on the script of Up. Michael Arndt, Oscar-winning writer of Little Miss Sunshine, co-wrote Toy Story 3.

The studio also learned from Disney's occasional example of using A-list actors in its voice casts: by recruiting stars such as Tom Hanks (Toy Story 1–3), Holly Hunter (The Incredibles), and Willem Dafoe (Finding Nemo), it effectively made voice-acting the profitable Hollywood sideline it is today. The secret of Pixar, if there is one, seems increasingly to be that they aren't interested in making great films for children – just great films.

Brad Bird epitomises the studio's knack for attracting and then protecting talent; he gravitated toward Pixar, where he directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille, following an unhappy experience making The Iron Giant for Warner Bros. According to Bird, who was recently announced as the director of Mission: Impossible 4: "The mistake everyone makes is to assume animation is a children's medium. It's not. It's a medium, a method of storytelling. We don't make these films for children, we make them for us – and hope kids, teenagers, other adults, all have similar tastes to us. There's no strategy to it."

Strikingly, at Pixar there is also no room for the glut of modern references, the riffs on celebrity and brands, that have dominated its competitors' animated films. The prime offender in this respect has been DreamWorks, whose zany output often seems soulless by comparison. Where Pixar uses pop-culture buffoonery as the icing on the cake, for DreamWorks it is the cake: remove the in-jokes in Shark Tale or Bee Movie and there's not much left, least of all the sense of enchantment that is the lifeblood of fantasy storytelling. Specific references instantly carbon-date those films, rendering them ever more unintelligible to future viewers.

"Pop-culture references are easy," Bird told me. "And they give the audience a cheap thrill. But they don't last. Take Disney's 1992 version of Aladdin, which I like – when that came out, and I saw the genie doing an impression of [US chatshow host] Arsenio Hall, I thought: 'This is going to mean nothing in 10 years' time.' We try to avoid that."