There was a great article in the Baltimore Sun today that both delights me and has me scratching my head.
The article delights me because it reinforces some ideas I already had, and publicly stated some less-known things I already knew. These truths I hold to be self-evident boil down to this: the secret of Pixar’s success has to do with doing things differently than the rest of Hollywood. Basically, they focus on story, tell the stories they want to tell, even if the characters don’t come from the Big Book of Hollywood Licensable Characters, and most importantly, they ignore the Suits, Beancounters and Crystal Ball Gazers to which the rest of the industry seems to have abdicated their creative power. There are highly paid guys at studios, publishers, distributors and labels, who so far as I can see, don’t do anything productive. I mean, they don’t create anything. Their main function seems to be to get between the creatives and the audience and say no to unconventional but good ideas. But that doesn’t occur at Pixar.
The article has me scratching my head, because as I read the words, I couldn’t help wondering why the rest of the moviemaking industry hasn’t tried to copy Pixar. I mean, they have tried to copy Pixar when it comes to character design, rendering technology, and so forth… the nuts and bolts, the technicalities of making any film. The technical exercise, they’ve got down cold, of course, because that’s the easy part. But they haven’t tried to copy Pixar in the sense of How You Make Good Movies, how you ignore the suits and greedy bastards, ignore the people who say “no one wants to see a film about a rat”, and get on to the business of telling real, honest-to-God stories with characters an audience might remember in 10 years, after the toys and tie-ins and Happy Meals are gone.
Anyway, the article is far more eloquent than I, but I will pull out a couple of my favorite passages for your browsing convenience:
“[Up creates] a narrative that operates less like a roller coaster than an old-fashioned merry-go-round, with panels that light up and illuminate the core. And because Pixar is also a director-driven studio, Docter didn’t have to stand for any second-guessing based on executives’ condescending notions of audience expectations or the slanted reactions of recruited focus groups.”
and
“When will the rest of Hollywood learn Pixar’s lessons? When will people realize that “conventional wisdom” is rarely wise at all? Hollywood may be sure to pull in a certain tidy sum with a Kate Hudson or Matthew McConaughey comedy or Nicolas Cage slumming in another comic book or fantasy film, but these movies are just killing time in every way. They build no legacy for the art or the industry and leave no feelings of love or loyalty in an audience.”
As for listening to Suits and Beancounters, if there’s anything I think America and the world would have learned from the whole Financial Meltdown caused by truth-blind managers and short-term-focused beancounters is that listening to that collective group is the absolutely wrong way to go. Please tell me we’ve at least learned that, whether we’re talking about making entertainment, or just running the world.
