Why Pixar kicks digital ass

Anthony Tardiff (just a total stranger whose blog I stumbled across today) asks the question, "Why is Pixar so good and nobody else?"

This is not just an academic question. Pixar's success not only brought in a swarm of wanna-bes like Dreamworks/PDI (Shrek, Shark Tale), Blue Sky Studios (Ice Age, Robots), and Vanguard Studios (Valiant), it also hastened Disney's abandonment of traditional cel animation, and has -- in just over ten years -- turned Pixar from a company that was known only to computer imagery geeks into a household brand with worldwide acclaim.

It's a really bad cliche, but I think the reason Pixar succeeds where everyone else fails is because they truly care about their stories. I don't mean just that they polish and re-polish a story to death; I mean they refuse to compromise the integrity of each movie to make a fast buck. They don't see their movies as "franchises" to be milked to death (I'm looking at you, Shrek), they don't approach their works as novety gimmicks to be exploited, they don't develop characters or choose actors based on what popular screen star du jour can voice the part, and they never go for the quick-and-dirty humor tools -- pop-culture references, celebrity parodies, and fart jokes -- that other studios reach for automatically.

(Yeah, I know about the bubble joke in Finding Nemo, but I'd argue that it was an anti-fart joke, because it played against expectations. It's a joke where the comedy comes because one character mistakenly assumes that bodily functions are involved, but the viewer knows otherwise, and laughs as a result.)

In my opinion (and since this is my blog, my opinion is what you're gonna get ), the fundamental key to Pixar's success is that they never lose sight of the fact that people will be watching their movies five, ten, even fifty years from now. For a movie to endure that long, it must have qualities beyond the superficial; it has to be timeless, and it has to appeal to all ages. A pop-culture reference that's funny today will only merit a chuckle in three years, and be completely incomprehensible by twenty. Nobody is going to want to watch Shark Tales in 2030, because nobody will "get" the references in four-fifths of the film -- and the one-fifth that they do get is filled with shallow characters and weak narrative, so there's no incentive to watch it. And a movie that appeals only to young viewers today with slapstick and goofball antics won't hold them ten years later, when those grown-up fans will be rolling their eyes in embarassment.

If you want to find the secret of Pixar's quality, just study this description of the development of Toy Story 2:

If Toy Story 2 was a Disney production, they'd rush it out the door as a direct-to-video cheapquel like Pocahontas 2 or Tarzan 2, then ignore the rotting to their culture as they rake in the easy money from gullible (or desperate) parents looking for something to placate the tots. If it was a Dreamworks production, they'd lather on the fart jokes and pop-culture references to cover up the inadequate story, roll out a hundred-million-dollar ad campaign showcasing the celebrity voices (you can always identify an ad for a Dreamworks animated movie because the celebrity names take up more space than the title), and dispense the cinematic equivalent of cotton candy -- visually nifty and briefly sweet, but with the staying value of air.

At Comic-Con 2004, Brad Bird had a panel discussing his experience on the just-completed The Incredibles, and the following exchange occurred (emphasis mine):