Discovering the Pixar Brand Through Short Form Storytelling
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Wesleyan University The Honors College Finding Luxo: Discovering the Pixar Brand through Short Form Storytelling by Lillian Page Holman Class of 2015 A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors from the College of Film and the Moving Image Middletown, Connecticut April, 2015 i TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................................... ii INTRODUCTION: PIXAR PHILOSOPHY ............................................................................................... 1 1. “PORTFOLIO FILMS”: INVENTING A MEDIUM ............................................................................ 8 LUXO JR. ........................................................................................................................................................ 9 RED’S DREAM .............................................................................................................................................. 20 TIN TOY ....................................................................................................................................................... 29 2. PIXAR DOES CARTOONS: THE COMEDIC SHORTS ................................................................... 42 KNICK KNACK .............................................................................................................................................. 43 LIFTED ......................................................................................................................................................... 55 PRESTO ........................................................................................................................................................ 64 3. “WHEN SOMEBODY LOVED ME”: PIXAR SHORTS WITH HEART ........................................ 77 BOUNDIN’ .................................................................................................................................................... 78 PARTLY CLOUDY .......................................................................................................................................... 83 LA LUNA ...................................................................................................................................................... 96 4. A MYSTERIOUS NEW REALITY: DAY AND NIGHT AND THE BLUE UMBRELLA .............. 107 DAY AND NIGHT ......................................................................................................................................... 107 THE BLUE UMBRELLA ................................................................................................................................ 118 CONCLUSION: A FOUR-MINUTE LOVE STORY BETTER THAN TWILIGHT .......................... 140 SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................... 153 APPENDIX ................................................................................................................................................. 162 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Much like the blue umbrella has a city full of friends to help get him where he needs to go, I have a community of friends to thank for helping me to complete this project: First and foremost, I want to thank my tutor, teacher, and mentor Scott Higgins. Thank you for taking an enthusiastic sophomore seriously when she said she wanted to write about Pixar and for listening to every word she has said since. It is an understatement to say that your patience and guidance during this process has been invaluable and your belief in this work inspiring. I have learned so much from you and am forever grateful. Thank you to the most important people in my life, my parents, John and Sarah Holman. Your faith in me always somehow manages to exceed my faith in myself and it keeps me going when I need it most. Thank you for approaching this project with so much joy on my behalf and for providing me with everything I needed to make it the best that it could be. I love you so much. Thank you to the entire Wesleyan Film Department specifically Jeanine Basinger, Steve Collins, Lisa Dombrowski, and Marc Longenecker. You built an academic home for me where I could pursue my passion and learn from the best. A special thank you to Lea Carlson. You have been one of my greatest allies during my time as a major and your ever-present warmth, expertise, and enthusiasm has meant so much to me. I truly could not have completed my thesis without you. Thank you to Bill Reeves and Teddy Newton for gifting me with your time and incredible insight on Pixar. It was an honor to meet and speak with both of you. I would also like to thank Heather Feng at Pixar for welcoming me so warmly and for showing me around when I visited. You truly are one of the people who makes Pixar so special. A huge thank you to Sarah Shachat. You are not only being one of my dearest friends, but you provided your expert feedback on so much of my thesis. You did so much, so enthusiastically and it made all the difference. I would like to especially thank you for teaching me that Tinny’s hat has a “plume” and not a “poof.” There are many more people who have shepherded me through this process and while I wish I could say more, I would like to thank: my housemates: Avery, Dan, and Ian; my beautiful siblings at Alpha Delta Phi; my amazing brothers Jay and Neil; the Peytons and the Storfers; and my loving friends from afar: Emily, Becky, Gabriel, Ariella, Ben, Vivianne, Tamar, Jillian, Natalia, Chris, Jordan, Andrea, Corey, Samara, Maika, and Kathryn. 1 Introduction: Pixar Philosophy In one of the iconic scenes from Pixar Animation Studio’s 2005 film The Incredibles, Helen Parr AKA Mrs. Incredible and her children Violet and Dash are trapped in a cave hiding from the villain’s evil henchmen. Helen turns to her children and asks, “Remember the bad guys on those shows you used to watch on Saturday mornings? Well these guys are not like those guys.”1 While Parr is only referring rather disturbingly to the fact that these bad guys will not hesitate to harm children, her warning manages to say a lot more about the film she is and more importantly, the studio that created it. These guys are not like those guys because they are Pixar creations and therefore not your typical cartoons. The Incredibles and the rest of the Pixar canon take place in worlds where things matter because things can be lost. Fictional realties with realistic emotional stakes are what Pixar has become known for and this distinguishes their work in the field of contemporary animation. It is easy to prove Pixar’s success with numbers. Their highest grossing film, Toy Story 3, made more than a billion dollars at the box office, and out of their thirteen features, only two have not been nominated for a single Oscar.2 What is harder to quantify is the respected reputation the studio has generated with their films and the changes that has had on the animation medium. Film Critic Wesley Morris might have put it best, when in his obituary for Steve Jobs he wrote with regard to computer animation “This frontier made us nervous. No more hand-drawn animation? 1 The Incredibles. Dir. Brad Bird. Perf. Craig T. Nelson, Samuel L. Jackson, Holly Hunter. Pixar Animation Studios, 2004. DVD. 2 See Appendix 2 But most Pixar films are better than most live action films.”3 The answers to why this is, lay far deeper than statistics. They lie in the stories these films tell and the way those stories are told. They lie in the studio’s structure and it fosters creativity. Most importantly, they lie in the minds of the artists who work on these films. While Pixar is best known for its features, there is a subset of Pixar’s films that make the studio no money4 yet define the studio just as much as the features do: these are the short films. Every Pixar feature except their first, Toy Story (1995), has been released theatrically with a short film preceding it. Even before Toy Story, the studio produced three short films under the Pixar label and one for Lucasfilms Computer Graphics Division. The films are made by different directors, span different genres, and have different looks. The only things they have in common are their brevity and the Pixar label. What the following chapters hope to do is reveal what that label means using close analysis. It examines the essential skills the Pixar team learned in their early years, how they learned to develop comedy and sentiment separately and fused together, and how they continue to experiment to this day with the medium. Ed Catmull, Pixar’s president and co-founder, claims “because everyone knows that the shorts have no commercial value, the fact that we continue to make them sends a message that we care about artistry at Pixar; it reinforces and affirms our values.”5 While Catmull is speaking more to the business strategy, I argue that the content and the structure of these films individually also point Pixar’s definition of 3 Morris, Wesley. “For better or worse, he tamed technology.” boston.com. The Boston Globe, 7 October. 2011. Web. 1 Apr. 2015. 4 Catmull, Ed. Creativity Inc. New York: Random House, 2014. Print. Pg. 107. 5 Catmull, Pg. 210. 3 artistry. Each film is a clear, concise example of narrative choices that exemplify the Pixar style and the Pixar ethos. What these films achieve on a smaller scale has been incorporated