Pixar News Articles for May, 2017

It's been a long time since I've written a "Pixar News Article" post, but with the Cars 3 marketing machine fully ramped up, there have been a number of excellent behind-the-scenes articles and interviews.

Jay Ward, the Cars creative director and franchise guardian, shared this article regarding how Pixar brings Cars to life, with a focus on authenticity. And this Sahm Reviews article discusses story aspects and some of the challenges that Cars 3 presented with Bob Peterson, Scott Morse, Kiel Murray and Mike Rich.

The Pixar Post released a new podcast episode with the first in their series of interviews they had during the Cars 3 blogger press day a few weeks ago. This interview was with Production Designer Jay Shuster, Character Supervisor Michael Comet and Directing Animator Jude Brownbill, and covered the design, rigging and animation of the multitude of characters in the film.

There was some non-Cars 3 news too. In this Digital Arts article, Pixar's Matthew Luhn talks about the impact storytelling can have on people. Luhn also shares his opinions on how virtual reality is changing and how storytelling can work within that medium.

The next few months should be exciting, with more articles and interviews on Cars 3, and then we should immediately start seeing a lot more Coco news!

Pixar News Articles for January 13, 2015

I'm thinking of starting a new series of posts to highlight cool and interesting Pixar-related news articles, interviews and other events. There's so much going on with Pixar, I'm hoping these posts will capture a good portion of the interviews and technology events that are occurring. If this works out I hope to have a post every week or two.

To start with, Fortune has had a couple of excellent posts recently. As part of their recent cover story on The Walt Disney Company, they interviewed Disney and Pixar president Ed Catmull, which covered Pixar's spin-out from Lucasfilm, their merger with Disney and the use of technology in animated films. They also did an in-depth piece on Disney CEO Bob Iger and his role as CTO, which not only covered Pixar but Marvel, Star Wars and technological changes in their theme parks.

Pixarian Colin Levy tweeted a link to an article on short films that launched the careers of famous directors. The article included John Lasseter for the short film Luxo, Jr., which was released in 1986, the year Pixar spun out of Lucasfilm and became a standalone company. The article itself linked to an interview Entertainment Weekly did with Lasseter which went into more detail of the making of Luxo, Jr. and other early short films like Red's Dream and The Adventures of André and Wally B.


Did you see the pre-production artwork for the Toy Story 3 film that never got made? Former Disney artist Jim Martin has released a number of pieces of concept art from when he was at Circle 7 working on the sequel. This was back before Disney bought Pixar and there was a lot of animosity between the 2 CEOs. Fortunately Bob Iger became CEO, purchased Pixar, and put Lasseter and Catmull in charge of animation of both companies. The new leaders immediately put a halt to the sequel and closed down the division.

There have been a couple of recent videos demonstrating the story process at Pixar. First, CGMeetUp posted a video of Monsters University Head of Story Kelsey Mann showing how to pitch a movie scene. The post contains a number of links to other behind-the-scenes clips from Monsters University.

Second, Story Supervisor Matthew Luhn posted an old video of Andrew Stanton and the late Joe Ranft demonstrating the pitch process, with Ranft pitching an entire scene from Toy Story. Note how Joe is pitching the "old fashion" way, standing up at a board with story cards pinned to it, while Mann does his pitch digitally using a computer.

Although Luhn has only been on Twitter for a short time, he has quickly become one of my favorite people to follow. Many of his tweets contain great behind-the-scenes videos and helpful tips. I highly recommend following him!

There are a couple of cool auctions going on at the moment. The first, which I wrote about this weekend, is the Art to Heart fundraiser to raise money for helping those impacted in the Philippines by Typhoon Haiyan. Many of the original art pieces were created by past and current Pixarians such as Ronnie del Carmen, Ricky Nierva, Matt Jones, Dice Tsutsumi, Robert Kondo, Chris Sasaki, John Hoffman and others. This is beautiful artwork and it's going for a great cause.

The second isn't Pixar related but is still wonderful. Cartoon Brew recently posted about an auction that the stop-motion studio Laika is holding on February 12. It doesn't sound like this is an online auction but will include puppets and props from all 3 of their films - Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls. A portion of the proceeds will go to The Art of Elysium organization.

And for something fun to end on, David Lally tweeted some simulation bloopers from the making of Brave!

If you come across any Pixar-related interviews or news articles, please send them my way and I'll include them in a future post.

My Top Pixar-Related Web Events of 2014

It's the start of a new year, and I thought it would be fun to look back at 2014 and highlight some great Pixar content I found from both well-known and some, maybe not so well-known, websites. I should say right up front the title is a bit misleading. I don't want to imply this list is a "Best Of" list. Rather, these were events, sites and podcasts that caught my attention and I hope ones that, if you're looking for some new Pixar content, might pique your interest. Plus, you'll notice many aren't Pixar-specific but are great sources for animation, technology, pop culture and overall geeky goodness.

Artist: Jeffrey Devey

The Pixar Times is one of the oldest Pixar news site and has been covering Pixar news for many years. The site also has a section for Pixar-related artwork called PixArt, which is full of many beautiful pieces of art and is curated by Jerrod Maruyama. It's well worth your time to stroll over there and spend time looking at it. I especially like the November Feature II piece featuring Mr. Incredible and Jack-Jack.


There was no Pixar film in 2014, but there were still a couple of big Pixar events. The first was the release of Ed Catmull's book Creativity, Inc. I love this book and recommend it to anyone interested in Pixar, business management or how to work in and sustain a creative culture. Catmull did a number of interviews promoting the book, and you can find many great reviews of the book. The Pixar Post launched their book club with Creativity, Inc., and The Incomparable podcast, hosted by Jason Snell, did an episode reviewing the book. I enjoyed listening to Jason and his guests, all who are obviously Pixar fans, discuss the book and highlight a number of the same important points I enjoyed from the book - the egoless environment, the fact that Catmull was so open in discussing their failures and how they're constantly working to create an environment to not avoid failures but make it safe to fail and then figure out how to move forward. If you're into pop culture, I highly recommend checking out The Incomparable (I greatly enjoy their Doctor Who flashcasts).

The second big Pixar event to me was Pixar in Concert. Yes, I realize Pixar in Concert didn't start in 2014 but it's when I was finally able to see it! Music is such a critical component of Pixar films and almost all of their scores have left big impressions on me. So to hear this music live was really an emotional and fun event. If you're familiar with Dan the Pixar Fan, you know that he has a passion for Pixar merchandise. He has daily posts on his wide-ranging collection of Pixar memorabilia (how he does a post every single day is a mystery to me!). But earlier this year he wrote about his and his wife Brita's experience at Pixar in Concert in Salt Lake City. Go check out his post on the concert and then check out some of his merchandise posts.

Pixar's next film Inside Out will not be released until June 19, but it's already been generating huge excitement. In early December, director Pete Docter took over the PixarInsideOut Twitter handle to answer fans' questions regarding the upcoming film. I've posted before how much I enjoy hearing artists discuss the making of a film or their other projects, and this is the second time Docter has done this, his first being a Reddit AMA he did a couple years ago.

Did I just mention that I love listening to artists talk about the making of films? Yes? Well then, The Pixar Post gave me close to a year of behind-the-scenes goodies with their Pixar Pipeline Project. Throughout the year, T.J. and Julie interviewed 8 different Pixar artists, one in each of the main departments a film goes through during development and production. Listening to the artists, you really get a sense of the passion and excitement they each share for their work, and after each episode I'm always amazed at the detail each department puts forth. These episodes are a great way to learn about making animated films, the artists themselves and what it takes to get into the industry. The last episode should be coming out early this month.

In addition to the Pipeline Project, there were some other excellent interviews with Pixarians throughout the year. The first was episode 12 of the Toon Talks Podcast, where Sandra interviewed Pixar animator Bret Parker. You may recognize Bret as the amazing voice of Kari McKeen from The Incredibles. I love Bret's enthusiasm, and she gives some great tips for beginning animators - the value of acting in animation, knowing your character, showing your work often and just as important, showing it to the right people.

Christian Roman

The second interview was the Something Something Experience Podcast interviewing storyboard artist Christian Roman.This was an in-depth interview and went into a lot of Christian's pre-Pixar history such as Mission Hill and The Simpsons. They also briefly discussed Inside Out, the importance of improvisation and hand-drawn art. They even took a detour to discuss Burning Man!

I really liked the consistent message from both Bret and Christian on the importance of acting and improvisation, and how they use these techniques to "plus" scenes. Also, a cool coincidence: shortly after Christian's podcast came out, Pixar Story Supervisor Matthew Luhn posted a tweet titled Storyboarding the Simpsons Way - notes from Brad Bird that Christian had documented and illustrated from their time working on The Simpsons. It's full of great tips and examples for creating compelling storyboards!

© Len Peralta

Finally, Len Peralta interviewed Dr. Michael B. Johnson as part of his Geek A Week series. Peralta's project started as an effort to interview 52 geeks in 52 weeks and draw them as trading cards, and fortunately has continued beyond that first year. The interview goes into Johnson's history at Pixar, a fun discussion on Dungeons & Dragons and the secret thing he geeks out about. I sadly was not aware of this project until Johnson's interview, but have listened to a number of other episodes since and have many others queued up!




So that's my list for 2014! I wrote a similar post a couple years ago and it was fun to go back and revisit it as I wrote this one. Anyways, I hope this post gives you some new sources for Pixar and other cool content. What about you? I'd love to get some recommendations for podcasts or sites. If you have any, leave them in the comments below, and have an awesome 2015!!