CMU School of Drama


Monday, January 20, 2014

From Dream to 3D Reality: The Fascinating Origins of Pixar

gizmodo.com: Before a story about toys, before monsters went corporate, before anyone went searching for Nemo, and before twenty seven Academy Awards, Pixar was a high-end computer hardware company whose clients included the government and the medical community. The story of Pixar isn't exactly full of superheroes, adorable robots, or talking bugs. The tale of the most profitable and critically adored animation studio in the history of the world (yes, by sheer gross numbers, more so than Disney) is one filled with financial difficulties, fired Apple employees, digital printers, and an animated left hand. And it all started with a Mormon graduate student at the University of Utah.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

It's stories like this that truly amaze me. How a world-renown and loved company such as Pixar started from something nothing like Pixar! It honestly just goes to show that not everything is as it seems nor will something always turn out the way you think. Companies such as Apple are prime examples of this. Starting out from basically nothing, a workshop in the garage, to being one of the leading technology companies in the world. I think that, although this story may not have been intended as a lesson, it is something that we can definitely take a truth away from.

Adelaide Zhang said...

It's really interesting to see the long process that Pixar had to go through before becoming what it is today. I would never have thought that its origins were so different -- it just goes to show that you can't always predict what will work and what won't, and that often the best way to be successful is to go with what the current trends. Granted, this is not a foolproof method, but Steve Jobs poured millions of dollars into Pixar so that it could sell its computers, even when it wasn't very successful, though it worked out alright for him, of course.