Pixar Co-Founder Mulls Meaning of Success

By Mel Cowan on December 10, 2009 1:10 PM

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and current president of both Pixar Animation and Walt Disney Animation Studios, spoke to a packed house in the Ray Stark Theatre on Dec. 7.

During the talk, which focused on the creative process at Pixar, Catmull pointed out that the studio’s remarkable track record was difficult to explain.

“Our success is ultimately mystifying,” he said.

He went on to detail how, having set himself a longtime goal of completing the first full-length computer animated feature film, he found himself at a loss following the creation of Toy Story.

“I had achieved my goal - now what?” Catmull said. “I decided that my next goal was to build a studio and a sustainable culture that would outlast me and [director] John [Lasseter].”

Having no business experience prior to the creation of Pixar, Catmull enlisted the services of a company that distilled the content of business books down to abstracts. “The problem was that the abstracts revealed that there was nothing there,” Catmull said. “They wanted to create a simple answer, but the problem with a simple answer is that it allows you to stop thinking.”

Elaborating on the problem of the “simple answer,” Catmull talked about a phrase he constantly heard in the film world. “Everyone always said how ‘story was the most important thing in movies. Story was king’,” he explained. “But it’s a tautology. Movies are stories, therefore how can story be the most important thing? It’s meaningless.”

During his initial business study period, Catmull also analyzed the life cycles of comparable Silicon Valley companies which, after promising beginnings, ultimately failed. “What happened to the magic?” Catmull asked. “If we were successful, would we make the same mistakes?”

While acknowledging that Pixar did make mistakes, Catmull offered his thoughts on factors that have contributed to the company’s success, including the embracement of those mistakes. “Fail early, fail often and learn fast,” Catmull said.

He went onto detail how a Pixar short film, which cost $2 million, was an abject failure, but Catmull saw this as a learning opportunity, noting that the company had the chance to realize that the director of the short was not ready to direct a feature film, an endeavor that would have cost considerably more.

“An animated film can cost $140 million to $180 million,” he said. “Our take on it was that it was better to have a train wreck with model trains than with real ones.”

In contrast to the standard studio model, in which multiple levels of oversight exist above a director, Catmull described Pixar’s “brain trust,” a group of trusted directors who meet to exchange ideas on projects, which exists only to provide suggestions for how a project can be improved. The director of the project ultimately has final say.

Catmull also contrasted the typical development process with what “development” means at Pixar. “Our development team doesn’t look for stories,” Catmull said. “Their job is to create teams of people that work well together.”

In a candid anecdote, Catmull related how Toy Story 2 ran into difficulties from the very beginning. “It went off the rails. We had planned to send it straight to video, but we quickly changed our minds. The idea of making a ‘B product,’ while other people in the building were working on an ‘A product’ just didn’t work,” Catmull said.

While throughout his talk, Catmull decried generalities and truisms, like the pointless quest for the “simple answer” that plague the worlds of both business and art, he may have come closest to describing the secret to Pixar’s remarkable success with this statement about turning Toy Story 2 from a second-class product into a people-pleasing hit.

“We realized that having lower standards for something is bad for your soul.”

TAGS: cinema

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