Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Pixar Equals Motown Records?

Gamasutra draws a comparison I'd never considered before:

The challenge facing all creative media businesses today is to establish a system that balances their creativity alongside productivity ...

What I went looking for were companies that sustained commercial success over a long period using different teams and entirely new concepts – not just more of the same – and yet still managed to create works of long-term artistic merit. There are two absolute crackers: Motown Records and Pixar Animation Studios.

[Motown] delivered over 110 top tens in a ten year period - that's almost one a month: for an entire decade!

Berry Gordy, Motown's founder, applied the same principle of quality to every aspect of the production process. He used dedicated songwriters. He brought in the best local musicians for recordings rather than the artists themselves. He created ‘artist development’ to coach his young stars on how to act, behave and present themselves.

Better yet, he held regular weekly meetings to review all of the tracks being worked on and to assess them against the current top five. Any song which he felt wasn’t up to scratch, or wouldn’t be received well in the charts, was sent back for more work ...

And how does Pixar compare to this? I think we can see the similarities, can't we?

Ten movies in just over a decade, grossing more than $2.5 billion, giving them the industry’s highest average.

Pixar’s approach highlights another key aspect of a successful ‘creative assembly line’: it’s not about the original idea - it’s all about the people and the process. Ed Catmull, who’s now the president of Disney-Pixar, encapsulates it very neatly: "If you give a good idea to a mediocre team they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works." ...

The thing of it is, there are no original ideas, only old stories told in new and audience-grabbing ways. Is Wall-E something nobody has never seen before? Uh, no. Not if you've watched various space operas that have been produced for the silver screen over the last .... oh ... seventy years. The Wallster draws bits and pieces from a lot of them. But the little robot's creators hammer together something fresh and zestful in the process.

Shakespeare didn't concoct his plays out of whole cloth, he rewrote old plots that had been lying around in other people's manuscripts and made them his own. It was the music he put into his new works that made them endure. The storylines had mold on them when he used them back in the sixteenth century, he just spiffed them up.

In the 20th Century, the iconic Casablanca was constructed from a rickety, unproduced play entitled Everybody Comes to Rick's. Some Warner Broos. writers, in fact, thought it was downright sucky, and said so:

Dear Hal:

I do not like the play at all, Hal. I don't believe the story or the characters. Its main situation and the basic relations of the principals are completely censorable, and messy, its big moment is sheer hokum melodrama of the J. Phillips Oppenheim variety, and this guy Rick is two-parts Hemingway, one-par Scott Fitzgerald, and a dash of cafe Christ ...

Bob [Buckner]

Despite this internal studio derision, Hal Wallis, Michael Curtiz, Howard Koch and the Epstein brothers used movie alchemy to turn copper into gold, and the rest is Turner Classic Movies.

But I think the examples and lessons above are reasonably clear: It isn't the subject matter; it isn't even the "originality." It's the talent of the crew to turn steel wool into spun silver, of making the dialogue crackle and the plot twist and turn in compelling,unexpected directions on its way to the Third Act. It's the ability to make characters -- even slighty cliched one -- connect with five and fifteen and fifty-year-olds.

Pixar, and once upon a time Motown, had the game plan and game players to accomplish these things. No doubt there will be others that will, sooner or later, come trundling down the pike.

But originality has little to do with it. Execution, as Gamasutra points out, is far more important.

18 comments:

Tim said...

So... rather than a shotgun approach like most major studios pumping out 20 films a year and hoping one or two turn a profit, Pixar works like a marksman, taking careful aim with each shot.

It's a great way to work, though a very high risk process, in that each film is so high budget they must be blockbusters to break even, much less turn a profit. They are definitely a boutique shop. We won't be seeing any low-budget sleeper hits from them. (Though I would love to see what a smaller Pixar team could do with 1/4 their usual mondo budget.)

Anonymous said...

"So... rather than a shotgun approach like most major studios pumping out 20 films a year and hoping one or two turn a profit..."

Are you comparing Pixar to live action studios?
Or do you think Dreaworks makes "20 films a year"?

Trust me, however you may love them, they aren't "pumped out".
It's NOT the people, it's not the procedure, it's the people+procedure. Plus a different carte blanche positioning in the marketplace that allows them to do it that way(and good for them-I mean that).

Other studios aren't going to make "an Andrew Stanton film" because they don't have Andrew Stanton working there more than for any other reason. But that's okay, you know. Really.

Tim said...

Yes, I was referring to live action studios. But I see where my reference breaks down. Pixar isn't a studio like Fox or Universal, or even Disney for that matter. It is a boutique subsidiary of a larger conglomerate.

It would be better to compare Pixar to another Independent who releases through a major studio... Maybe like Walden Media, or Porchlight, or the first couple of years of Mirimax's slate.

I guess my point was that the people+procedure aspect has given them an incredible record that no other shop has had. And perhaps I should have spelled out more that I think the "shotgun approach" is generally used by lesser talents who don't quite grasp the procedure. They do their best and hope they break even before the film hits Netflix.

My opening comment was supposed to be a little tongue-in-cheek, as if to say "So... that's their magic formula! The secret is out at last!!"

I'll work on my delivery.

Anonymous said...

Pixar started off as a small tech company. Now they're big evil Disney co. themselves.

DreamWorks started off as this huge child of SKG to rival Disney. Now they're more like an independent studio on their own, ironically just like Pixar of old, and still rival Disney.

Pixar is losing some steam don't you think? It's not the most prolific animation studio and while the awards count is great, the money is not that much.

Anonymous said...

Pixar makes far more money than any other animation studio (probably all of them) in the last 10 years. The Toy Story characters are "evergreen," and Cars has made 5 billion when all is added up. Incredibles and Monsters Inc. sold a lot of toys, and did well at the box office. So did Nemo.

Cable and TV sales for Pixar are a premium, and command double the price of any other animation studio.

You really don't see many Dreamworks character toys out there. I saw a few for Kung Fu Panda, but not many. I don't recall many Madagascar toys (although I wish there had been!).

With every dollar accounted far, Pixar is far more profitable than either Disney feature animation or Dreamworks.

Not being a fan-boy here...just the facts.

Anonymous said...

If you want to make a case for what a great studio Pixar is then stop trotting out the fact that they make oodles of money for Disney in merchandise. That only explains why they're so valuable to Disney not why they're the best animation studion in the universe.

And BTW many of their film charcaters are not 'evergreen' as you suggest. In fact very few of them have merchandise that lasts any longer than many of the Disney latter films....Bug's Life, ratatouille, Monsters Inc, and even Nemo to name a few.

Anonymous said...

I'm very disappointed that not a single retard has used the word "pixie" yet in this thread.

Anonymous said...

actually pixie is so pre-merger. Please refer to Disney/Pixar as Dixar.

Anonymous said...

"And BTW many of their film charcaters are not 'evergreen' as you suggest"

Toy Story and Cars are most definetly "evergreen." Monsters and Nemo both still sell toys. You'd THINK The Incredibles should be evergreen, but as of yet, they aren't.

But they are "evergreen," and drive a LOT of revenue every year. Know your facts.

Anonymous said...

I wish more people would be like the ones here and see Pixar for the evil empire they really are. The bane of animation. Unreal how much love they get when in reality they deserve no credit whatsoever.

Anonymous said...

Please don't feed the troll.

The writers of this blog, and most of the commenters, give Pixar all due credit, as they do DreamWorks and other successful studios. And there's also some frank critique. If that equates to portraying Pixar as an 'evil empire' then I think your skin is a tad too thin.

Anonymous said...

I will agree that the writers of this blog give Pixar all due credit - but sorry, "most of the commenters" do not.

At times it seems there is always a race to debunk any positive entry written about Pixar on this site with comments like snide remarks about how Pixar doesn't pay their people or whatnot (on entries about quality). I'm not saying it happened here, I'm saying it's happened before. And it's not rare.

Even on this entry. Tim starts off by mentioning "other studios" and immediately someone takes it as a slight against Dreamworks. Gracious. Talk about thin skin.

Anonymous said...

True, there's thin skin all around. Too much partisanship, not enough respect.

I think there's so much fanboy worship of Pixar, the people at other studios get pretty fed up and defensive.

Here's to artist-to-artist respect. Cheers to my peers, wherever you may work.

Anonymous said...

Pixar started off as a small tech company. Now they're big evil Disney co. themselves.

WRONG. They still operate independently without interference. Only the money has a new parent company.

DreamWorks started off as this huge child of SKG to rival Disney. Now they're more like an independent studio on their own, ironically just like Pixar of old, and still rival Disney.

WRONG. Dreamworks does not follow an independent vision and operates much like a large conglomerate in that the company is guided by a large board of directors. Many of whom have allegiances in other places.

Pixar is losing some steam don't you think?


WRONG. The facts refuting this are readily available. Nice try though.


Another day, another bitter Dreamworks employee post.

Anonymous said...

So if Pixar = Motown... we have to consider that eventually Motown lost its Mo. Is Pixar in danger of the same thing? What can we learn from Motown's fall?

Anonymous said...

That John should avoid sleeping with his top performer...?

Anonymous said...

Dreamworks operates much like a large conglomerate in that the company is guided by a large board of directors. Many of whom have allegiances in other places.

Anyone who knows anything about DreamWorks knows this is absolute rubbish. How did so many fanboys become so bitter and resentful (and misinformed)?

Floyd Norman said...

I did two films at Pixar back in the nineties, and it was one of my most memorable animation experiences in my career.

If Pixar Animation Studios is evil, then I wish all studios would be so evil.

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