How The Tables Turned

Resident Evil: Afterlife just came out last Friday... whoopdeedo. I'm not a fan of poorly written films based on video games but in name only. Some friends of mine were dragged kicking and screaming to the movie by roommates, much to my wry pleasure. But I'm not talking about video game adaptations today. I spent my Friday night watching something much better.

My college has a wonderful organization called Meteor Theater which plays films often not yet on DVD. For free. This last Friday they played Toy Story 3. FOR FREE! Definitely a step up from Resident Evil for $12 in my opinion. Even in my 3rd time seeing it, I still shed a tear or two. Manly tears of course! Ummmm...

EXPLOSIONS!!!

 Anyway, Toy Story 3 is Pixar's 11th film as well as 11th entry in a list of consecutively spectacular films (well except for Cars which was run of the mill). So far TS3 is the only film beating out Inception in box office totals with $410 million. Even more impressive is its global gross of over $1,000,000,000!

Pixar sure is something, but who is responsible for its greatness? That man is John Lasseter. It might be difficult to imagine but the ideas that brought Pixar to the top were originally looked down upon by Disney. That's right, this is a rags to riches story.

Way back when, in the archaic era of the 80s, there was a young, Hawaiian shirt-wearing artist at Disney: John Lasseter. He dabbled in 3D animation. At the time Tron had just come out. It was one of the first films to use 3D animation at all but it didn't do too well at the box office, so 3D animation was thought to be a joke. Lasseter saw an art form with potential. His idea was to use 3D and 2D animation together. A method used quite often to this day, this idea was revolutionary. Usually when a setting is viewed by a moving camera in animation, the scene would have to be drawn over and over but at a different angle and perspective. If you can imagine it, it is a very difficult task. On the flipside, moving a camera around an area is easy in live action film. Lasseter had created a solution to one of animation's greatest limitations!

But Disney thought it was stupid, so they fired him! Fortunately, Lasseter was hired by a department of Lucasfilms known as The Graphics Group. They were in charge of some special effects until Lucasfilms sold them to some nobody who was just fired by Apple. That nobody was Steve Jobs. He changed the company into Pixar Computers.

At first it did not do so well. However, it earned an Oscar for one of its short films in 1988. From there Disney signed a deal with Pixar to make Toy Story. As Pixar and John Lasseter himself gained notoriety, Lasseter began a movement for improvements to Disney. The Disney corporation is known for being one of the biggest corporations and smartest at making money. One way they have been doing so is making cheap Disney sequels to cash in on the non-critical audiences who will pay to buy them. John Lasseter is someone who believes film should have heart. As such, he threatened to take his things and go, Pixar included, unless Disney agreed to straighten up and fly right. Disney was cornered and had no choice but to concede, buy Pixar, and make Lasseter the new head of animation. There was much rejoicing.

Also of note, John Lasseter is very good friends with the head of Studio Ghibli and alleged greatest animator in the world Hayao Miyazaki. So much so that Studio Ghibli's most popular and well-known character Totoro makes an appearance in Toy Story 3.

Lasseter says that the heart in Pixar films as well as visuals and even cinematography are inspired by Miyazaki's films. This is apparent in Up where there are many panning shots that display and glorify the beauty of the natural world.

Miyazaki himself is not a fan of 3D animation. He claims it is too "eccentric" whatever that is supposed to mean. Regardless, he had a hand in bringing it into prominence. Hayao Miyazaki's very first film, Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, had an intricately designed and animated climax in a clock tower. This scene inspired some writers and animators at Disney to make the climax to The Great Mouse Detective take place inside of and on the face of Big Ben. Rather than multiply the budget of the film for just one scene, they tried a revolutionary idea. They made the clock tower gears with CG and combined them with the 2D animated characters. This idea was so good that to this day it is used and even overused to cut corners and save money. I bet John Lasseter wishes he'd thought of something like that.

Wait what?