Pixar, Digital Animation and the Contemporary era

Since the advent of cinema few Animation studios in history can boast the reputable filmography of Pixar Animation Studios. Founded in 1979, originally as an arm of Lucasfilm collaborating on special effects with special effects company Industrial Light and Magic, the company didn't really gain it's now international notoriety until it's acquisition by Disney and the success of Toy Story. Pixar pioneered digital technologies in the mid 90s, while other major studios such as Dreamworks were riding the wave of 2D animation, which had seen a resurgence thanks to the popularity of contemporary Disney films such as The Lion King, Aladdin and Beauty and The Beast, Pixar broke new ground in 1995 with the first fully digitally animated feature film, Toy Story. John Lasseter, the director of Toy Story, who originally worked as a 2D animator for Walt Disney Feature Animation, famously criticized 101 Dalmatians as the film 'where Disney had reached its highest plateau' stating the films often repeated themselves without adding any new ideas or innovations. Part of Toy Story's success can be attributed to the way animators took what were simple and established animation and storytelling techniques from Classic Disney animation and presenting them through this new and exciting technology.

Hand Painted Background from The Jungle Book (1967)

Imaginative staging, detailed backgrounds and accessible characters, all hallmarks of Classic Disney are prominent in much of Pixar's work. The hand painted mattes of Golden Age Disney era animation have been swapped out for meticulously rendered 3D backgrounds. Both serve the same purpose of drawing us into these fictional worlds, and both have their own benefits, but where 3D really triumphs over traditional 2D in this regard is in the depth of the image. With 2D animation, drawings and backgrounds are layered on top of one another, and while it is not impossible to achieve depth in an image, depth is much easier to achieve in a 3D workspace. Assets are not simply overlaid on a background, they are a part of the background and can more easily interact with it and there are less restrictions as to where the perspective can change to in the staging of a scene, granting more access to the repertoire of film language and allowing storytellers to be more flexibility in telling their stories.

3D Rendered Background form Wall E (2008)

Pixar's character designs more often than not also subscribe to the Disney school of Anthropomorphic creatures and everyday objects, such as toys and cars. What digital animation allows for though is a level of detail in these sorts of characters never before seen. Pixar's 2001 film Monsters Inc was heralded at the time as the absolute cutting edge in fur technology with the character of Sulley. During the production of Monsters Inc, Pixar's engineers had to figure out how to animate over 2 million hairs on Sulley efficiently and realistically with shadow and texture, for which they set up their own Simulation department to create a new program exclusively for rendering fur.  Such a level of detail would be near impossible to do in 2D without thousands of man hours to achieve the same effect and its not like the character's design is particularly complicated, but the character is meticulously detailed in it's rendering.

To compare, if you look at a similar character form classic Disney, for example Baloo from The Jungle Book is the same stock archetype as Sulley in essence, with the same posture, similar features and role in the story, but the level of detail is significantly skewed in Sulley's favour. That's not to say Baloo's design isn't a timeless classic, but it shows the benefits of what 3D has to offer and what John Lasseter mean't when he said he thought Disney had reached it's 'highest plateau.'

Over the past 20 years, Pixar has consistently delivered on a technical and storytelling level with their films, but every aesthetic runs its course and Pixar's more recent outing have not had the same impact or critical acclaim that the first few films (Toy Story through to Up) had upon their release and this is partially because other major animation studios, such as Dreamworks have finally caught up. Nowadays, while no longer the tech pioneers they were back in the mid-90s, the name Pixar is still synonymous with quality visual storytelling.