I briefly met John back in the 80's when he was in the UK speaking at a Spike & Mike animation festival, and I think Tin Toy had just come out (also, Pixar had just gotten out of the hardware business at that point, and the company I worked for was talking to them). In contrast to every other computer animator I knew back then, he was 100% focused on story. You only have to look at any of those early shorts like Luxo Jr and Andre & Wally B, to see how that's true. Luxo Jr is downright whimsical, which is hard enough for live actors to pull off. When you watch one of their movies, you'll see that on-screen, Pixar is almost always modest wrt their technological capabilities, to the point where you have to know a thing or two to appreciate the difficulty of what they're doing (the opening shot of Bug's Life was technologically amazing for the time). It's that Italian word again, Sprezzatura. The guys at Lucasfilm, otoh, are not shy about showing off (the spaceship flying through clouds at the start of Clones, for example). In a nutshell, that's the difference between Lucas' good computer animation, and Pixar's great animation.

And just because I like looking up facts about Pixar, here's the proof that whatever they're doing with their story-telling process is working *decently* well. Pixar has made 12 feature films. All 12 of them have opened at #1 at the Box Office. The average opening weekend gross is 61 million dollars. The average worldwide gross for a Pixar movie? 556 million dollars. Pixar has won 6 out of the 8 Best Animated Feature Oscars, and every single Pixar film released in that time-frame was nominated. They have three movies on the 50 Highest Grossing Movies of All Time List, and every single Pixar movie is on the Highest Grossing Animated Films of All Time List. Doing alright for themselves, those guys.

Nate, all of those facts and my decade long fascination with the company has led me to put together a 1-week screenwriting class called Pixar and the Craft of Storytelling to run November 14-20. I'll be posting about it next week because I think what I've come up with -- six narrative dynamics common to all Pixar movies -- is an incredibly valuable asset to screenwriters. For the SMC class listing, go here.

Can't wait.

At the time, there were two animators who were head & shoulders above the others: John Lasseter and Nick Park, both of whom told adult stories with what is essentially a child's medium. It's kind of interesting to follow their companies' respective fortunes as Aardman followed a purely commercial path, where Pixar took a much longer term view.