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Fun factory
12 January 2002

A serious business: Mike, the one-eyed green
blob, and Sullivan, in Monsters Inc

In a huge converted cannery in California, a group of grown-ups are behaving like children. But this is the home of Pixar, makers of 'Toy Story', 'A Bug's Life' and now 'Monsters Inc', and here playing is a very serious business. Chloe Veltman reports

The workers in a former Del Monte fruit cocktail canning factory in Emeryville, California, have been asking themselves some searching questions lately. While some have been wondering how to make fish talk, others have been pondering what kinds of flowers monsters grow in their windowboxes. It takes several years and hundreds of millions of dollars for them to come up with the answers. But unlikely though it sounds, the return on the investment has been remarkable.

Pixar, the computer animation company behind the films Toy Story, Toy Story II and A Bug's Life, has won 13 Oscars as a result of its activities. When its latest film, Monsters Inc, opened in America last month, it broke box office records. The movie, about an unlikely friendship between Sullivan, a big, hairy violet-and-blue-spotted monster, and Boo, a three-year-old girl who causes chaos in the monster world, pulled in $63.5 million on the opening weekend, a box office record for an animated film.

The canning-factory-turned-$88-million- animation-studio in a nondescript northern Californian suburb is the key to Pixar's success.

It's just another day in Emeryville and the 600 Pixar employees are having a paper aeroplane competition. Perched on a balcony, they take turns to launch homemade darts. In a pronounced fit of 'dart envy' two people drag a 6ft plane to the top of the stairs and, accompanied by enthusiastic whoops from the crowd, send it on its way. It swoops clumsily for a couple of seconds before pitching inelegantly into the ground. With the competition over, employees climb on their micro-scooters to go back to work, saluting each other as they cross the lofty atrium.

In one corner of the 215,000 sq ft 'campus', employees sit chatting under the plastic headsets of old-fashioned hairdryers. Elsewhere, school children play on video-arcade games; it's a public holiday, so their parents have brought them to work. There is a brick pizza oven, a health club, a lap pool, a crazy-golf course and an outdoor amphitheatre. The company even has its own boot camp, Pixar University, where employees take courses in everything from painting to yoga.

Down the hallway, behind a disused air-conditioning vent, is the Love Lounge, a Hobbit-sized drinking-hole stuffed with kitsch furnishings and a cocktail cabinet. Shortly after moving into his office, animator Andrew Gordon, who keeps a vintage smoking jacket on hand for Love Lounge moments, discovered the empty vent when he turned the key in a small door hidden near the floorboards. Now, when dignitaries such as Roy Disney, Michael Eisner and Randy Newman drop by, they crawl into the lounge on hands and knees for a cocktail and sign their names on the wall in indelible marker.

Even the uninspiring 10 sq ft cubicles in which the animators work have been given a Pixar makeover: from a desert island with hothouse plants, tiki torches and pineapples, to a suburban bungalow with a mailbox and a rolled-up hose outside the door.

Everywhere you look, artwork by Pixar staff adorns the walls of the studios, including paintings and drawings of Pixar characters and intricate scale models of the film sets. In a glass case, a model of Sullivan shows how the character evolved over time. At first he was given octopus-style tentacles for legs, until the art department realised that this would make it difficult for him to walk. 'Everybody imparts their own personality on the building,' says Monsters Inc director Pete Docter.

If Pixar is reminiscent of Roald Dahl's Chocolate Factory, then John Lasseter is its Willy Wonka. Obsessed with toys and insatiably inquisitive, the 45-year-old father of five is so in touch with his inner child, he wears a Monsters Inc watch to work, and once turned up to a movie premiere driving a motorised hotdog. As executive vice president of creative, Lasseter oversees every aspect of Pixar's artistic output, from directing films and developing stories to choosing which creatures will adorn the Monsters Inc cereal boxes. 'John knows the medium like the back of his hand,' says Docter. 'I rely heavily on him.'

Lasseter has won two Oscars, directed three of Pixar's four feature films, and shown that the computer can be just as powerful a tool as reams of hand-drawn pictures. 'He demonstrates that computer-based animation can effectively deal with literally any thematic material, even the most deeply human,' says Steven Lavine, president of Cal Arts, the Disney-sponsored animation college in southern California. 'He is well on the way to making animation a viable alternative, perhaps even a replacement, for live-action cinema.'

At first it's hard to imagine how this laidback, avuncular Californian with thinning hair and a paunch is being hailed as the new Walt Disney. Dressed in shapeless jeans and one of his trademark Hawaiian shirts, dotted with red, white and blue bumper cars, he is talking me through his vast toy collection; more than 200 playthings are scattered around his office. Star Wars figures and scuttling automata jostle for space with air-powered robots and toy cars.

'Here's my favourite,' he says, scooping up a waxy lump of a doll from the floor. 'My name is Casper,' wheezes its ancient voice-box tinnily when he pulls a string in its neck. He acquired Casper the Friendly Ghost as a boy, growing up near LA. Many years later, the toy's pull-string mechanism would inspire Woody, the central character in Toy Story. Lasseter's own children - five boys aged four to 21 - used to come to work with him and rattle his nerves by playing with his priceless collection of antique toys. 'I found myself freaking and laughing at myself,' he says. But it made him consider what happens to toys that aren't played with, the ones left on the shelf. And thus the premise for Toy Story II was born.

'My favourite toys are the ones that move, and through their movement they have personality,' he says, winding up an insect-like gizmo so it scuttles erratically across the floor. The same could be said of his approach to animation. 'In creating a character, the most important thing is to create movement that looks like it has been generated by the character's thought processes. It's not just about putting eyes on a Coke can.'

Lasseter's first love was cartoons, but from an early age he knew his 'burning desire was not just animation, but telling stories'. At 13 he read a book about the making of Disney films, and decided he was going to become an animator. Five years later he enrolled as an animation student at Cal Arts, before going on to join Disney.

'When I first saw computer animation, I thought, this is what Walt Disney and his staff have been striving for,' he recalls. 'With computer animation, you get the same high level of control you have with hand-drawn animation, but it's really dimensional. You can move in and around objects.' However, the Mouse House was going through a stagnant period, and Lasseter began to feel frustrated. So in 1984 he moved to Lucasfilm where he made his name animating the stained-glass knight sequence in Steven Spielberg's Young Sherlock Holmes. But in 1986, to Lasseter's relief, George Lucas sold off the computer division of his company to Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple Computer, who rebranded it as Pixar. 'I wasn't that interested in special effects because you were never in control of the story,' he says.

At Cal Arts, Lasseter and his contemporaries (including Planet of the Apes director Tim Burton) were encouraged to place as much emphasis on characters and plot as on technological wizardry. 'One of the things this classic training did for me was recognising that the computer is just a tool.'

Yet technology enables Pixar to accomplish special effects that would be impossible for traditional animators to create by hand. Renderfarm is the humming centre of Pixar's technical activities. In a 50ft by 70ft room, 250 computers produce each movie frame, with air-conditioners working overtime to keep the machines at a constant temperature. But last year, during the worst months of the California energy crisis, the building experienced rolling blackouts and the cooling system shut down.

'It got very hot,' recalls systems manager Peter Kaldis. 'The temperature rose to over 100F in under 10 minutes.'

It was computer power which helped create the thousands of individual blades of grass and leaves which make up the ant's-eye view of the world in A Bug's Life. For Monsters Inc (which used more than twice as much computer power as Toy Story II), lifelike fur - three million strands of it - was created to cover Sullivan's body.

This was one of the biggest challenges the technologists working on Monsters Inc faced. Since lifelike hair moves independently of its owner, they had to animate each strand. 'You can't just throw hair on to a surface,' says Bill Reeves, Pixar's supervising technical director. Clearly a solution was needed - 'intelligent fur', Steve Jobs calls it. 'If our animators had to animate every hair on that fur and move it, they would never finish the film. So we had to figure out a way to make the fur move automatically.' Pixar scientists created a new dynamics system that would understand the physics of every environment, such as snow, wind, darkness and light, and simulated the movement of the hairs accordingly.

The animators are already hard at work perfecting myriad effects - including the creation of fish scales, bubbles and plant life - for Finding Nemo, an underwater adventure starring a clownfish, which Pixar plans to release in 2003.

It is these 50 or so animators who are the core of Pixar. They are artists, computer wizards, and storytellers all rolled into one. Andrew Gordon, one of 35 animators who worked on Monsters Inc, was given the unenviable task of bringing Mike, the green one-eyed blob-monster voiced by Billy Crystal, to life. With no hips, neck or shoulders to play with, Gordon spent hours studying Crystal's mannerisms so he could imbue what was basically just 'a giant eyeball' with human emotion. 'I would videotape close-ups of my eyeball to see what the eye was doing,' says Gordon. Then, using 'avars' (articulated variables) developed by Pixar's technology team, Gordon created subtle movements such as pupil dilation to make the character look real.

Once the story and script have been developed, actors - who in Monsters Inc include John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, James Coburn, Jennifer Tilly as well as Crystal - are brought in to provide the voices. Supervising animator Glenn McQueen explains that each character has 'an actor who does the words, and an animator who figures out the character's motion'.

Although special effects are used to give the fictional stories and characters a layer of verisimilitude, 'reality' is a bit of a dirty word around Pixar. Last year's much-hyped animation film Final Fantasy, which used computers to create ultra-lifelike human characters, did not impress the Emeryville digerati one bit. 'Final Fantasy is interesting intellectually, but it's like a car without an engine under the hood,' says Lee Unkrich, who co-directed Monsters Inc. Although the film was technologically groundbreaking, it lacked the most essential quality: a story.

The story is the engine in Pixar's filmmaking process. It can take several years to perfect the storyline for a single film, and where most Disney animation movies are based on old books and fairy tales, every Pixar plot is developed from scratch. It took Pete Docter, a smiley 33-year-old Pixar animation veteran, almost five years to pin down Monsters Inc.

He conceives of a world where monsters are more frightened of children than the other way around. 'As kids we have these unnamed, unconscious fears, and we create monsters as a way to make them tangible,' says Docter.

'We began thinking, if monsters represent fears, what then are the monsters themselves afraid of? The obvious answer: children. Our own fears are afraid of us!'

Not only are children the company's primary audience but they also inspire many of their films. For Monsters Inc, Pixar employees were persuaded to bring their children into work where Docter made them stand in front of a microphone to record their screams. 'We tickled them to try to get them to scream into the mike.'

The main power source in the monster world are the screams of human children. Monsters Inc is the scream-harvesting plant in the industrial town of Monstropolis, where an elite squad of scarers is responsible for siphoning the screams of children each night. It's a perilous business, as monsters believe kids to be highly toxic. So when top scarer James P Sullivan accidentally lets three-year-old Boo into the monster world, chaos ensues. Docter's initial concept went through many changes; Boo started life as a 32-year-old man, and Sullivan went from being an uncoordinated loser to the prodigious child scarer you now see on screen.

Devotion to the story is rigidly observed. In the early Nineties, when Lasseter and his team were having problems with the Toy Story plot, Disney, which has collaborated with Pixar since its first movie and on every one since, put the film on hold. Production only resumed months later when Lasseter had tidied up the denouement.

When Steve Jobs established Pixar, it was a very different company. It focused on creating high-end computer graphics hardware and software. As the sole animator, Lasseter's job was to make a short film every year to showcase Pixar's fancy technology. 'Pixar didn't make any money back then,' says Lasseter. 'I think there must have been many times when Steve would say to himself, "I don't know why I'm doing this." The company was haemorrhaging cash and Jobs threatened to shut it down, even though Lasseter's fame as an animator was spreading.

In 1988 his short film, Tin Toy, about a tin drummer boy marching through a child's bedroom, became the first computer-animated film to win an Oscar. 'In those first nine or 10 years Steve Jobs probably sank $50 million of his own money into this company,' recalls Lasseter. 'He stuck with us. No one in the world would have stuck with us like he did.'

It wasn't until 1991, when Jobs negotiated a deal with Disney to develop, produce and distribute up to three Pixar films, that the company's fortunes began to turn around. But Lasseter's biggest break came in 1995 with the release of Toy Story, the first feature film ever made using computer graphics. It generated more than $191 million at the US box office and earned Lasseter a special achievement Academy Award.

The success of the film stunned Hollywood. Hardly anyone had heard of Pixar, let alone imagined that this boho group of computer nerds would be responsible for such a triumph. 'When Toy Story came out, people were like, "Who are those guys? Where did they come from?" ' recalls Lasseter. 'It was as if we were an overnight success. But we had been around almost 10 years.'

In 1997, Jobs renegotiated his deal with Disney. The two companies agreed to make five feature films and split the profits. These days, Jobs, who owns 63 per cent of the company, usually spends one day a week at Pixar, overseeing strategy and managing the Disney relationship.

It's around 65 years since Uncle Walt's Seven Dwarfs hi-ho'd across our screens, but animation is only now beginning to be taken as seriously as live-action films. In March, for the first time in the history of the Oscars, a best animated feature award will be presented.

Perhaps to compensate for the historical insignificance of animated films, and in typical Pixar spirit, its movies are packed with in-jokes and allusions to animation lore. None more so than Monsters Inc. From the sushi restaurant named Harryhausen's after Ray Harryhausen, one of animation's iconic figures, to the Toy Story characters who pop up in cameo roles, Pixar delights in self-reference. Members of the production team voice characters, and directors Docter and Unkrich play double bass and ukulele on Randy Newman's soundtrack.

Interestingly, the subtlest in-joke in the movie ends up being the most profound. On the walls of the vast Monsters Inc factory in the heart of Monstropolis, tiny words are scrawled. With a pair of opera glasses and a bit of insider knowledge, you'll see that the inscriptions are the names of Pixar employees. 'It's not about the beautiful building or the computers,' says Lasseter. 'It's about the people.'