Blog Entry#8 From Disney to Pixar, The innovative story behind Cartoon Animation

 (Pixar and Walt Disney logos from Google Images)

Article based on The Pixar Story

With the market becoming filled with similar products, businesses have to have their own competitive edge in order to stand out and attract its own market, and one way of doing this is through innovation.

For our story today, which aims to show eagerness to innovate help a business to prosper, we will highlight two of the world’s most famous animation studios – Walt Disney and Pixars, through the story of John Lasseter (director of Toy Story, Bug’s Life.) who worked for both
companies.

John Lasseter, after winning an animation competition, was hired as an employee for Walt Disney who was getting popular by producing different hand-drawn 2-D animation. He worked as an animator studios but after quite sometime, he felt that Disney films has already reached its peak and criticized that the studio already lost its magic and therefore needs to innovate.
During this time, Disney is producing a Tron, which at that time uses a state-of-the-are computer imaging system, a more complex camera in filming the said film. It is during this time that he realized that computers can be used to make movies with three dimensional backgrounds where traditionally animated characters could interact to add a new, visually stunning depth that had not been conceived before.

Soon enough, he was granted permission by Disney to experiement with computer animation. This, however led to his career’s demise because Disney executives didn't perceived any benefits from this huge cost. Furthermore, they fear that animators may be replaced and become obsolete once they started to use computer for animation.

While that was happening at Disney, Star Wars director, George Lucas, together with a group of people who were enthusiastic about computer animation, started to study and make a thorough research about computer animation. Soon enough they were able to built a computer capable enough to produce picture like graphics, which they called the Pixar Image Computer.
This is where actually Pixar came from, because these project is requiring Lucas Films huge amount of money, George Lucas and his team decided that they should make it a separate business entity to prevent from George Lucas’ studio from shutting down.

Lucky for them, Steve Jobs, after the success of his Apple computers invested $10 million to Pixar. This investment, however wasn’t enough to allow Pixar produce high quality films so they collaborated with Disney to helped Pixar in producing Toy Story, A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2, The success of this feature films soon become a threat to Disney, who faces the death of 2-D animation. Soon enough, Disney, in order to save the company merges with Pixar giving birth to the brand name “Disney-Pixar” which we saw starting from the Incredibles.