Animation pioneer Pixar marks 25 years
EMERYVILLE, California — Pixar, a pioneer of computer animation that has made a dozen profitable feature films and become one of the most successful studios on the planet, is celebrating its…
EMERYVILLE, California — Pixar, a pioneer of computer animation that has made a dozen profitable feature films and become one of the most successful studios on the planet, is celebrating its 25th birthday.Born in the early 1980s as George Lucas's computer graphics division, the company took off after it was purchased by Apple founder Steve Jobs in 1986 and christened "Pixar."That year, the hopping desk lamp and ball, heroes of Pixar's first film -- the short "Luxo Jr" -- lit the way toward a new generation of features entirely composed of computer graphics."The combination of changing technology and artistic creation gave something that had never been done before," said Ed Catmull, one of the company's founders and now president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios."The movie-telling was an extension of creative technology."He compares the company's emergence to the advent of Disney, which showed a previous generation the potential of cartoons and purchased Pixar in 2006."It's like the early days of Disney, when filmmaking was brand new and animation was brand new, it was a technical revolution," Catmull told AFP."People don't think about that today because it happened so long ago. But Walt was always bringing the newest technology."In 1995, Pixar scored big with "Toy Story," the first feature-length film composed entirely of computer-generated graphics.The animated feature tracing the adventures of a toy cowboy and spaceman dazzled viewers and critics alike, bringing in more than $350 million worldwide."'Toy Story' was the first CG film where the audience was no longer aware that they were watching computer-generated images, they just wanted to know what happens to Woody and Buzz Lightyear," said Tom Sito, a former Disney and Dreamworks animator who now teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles."Other pioneering computer animation studios were made up of engineers and research scientists trying to be amateur artists, along with a few professional artists struggling to learn computer prog
last modification 2011-07-02 09:00:16
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