Forget technology, it’s traditional media that count at Pixar

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After visiting Pixar: 20 Years of Animation, it’s easy to imagine a whole generation of Taiwanese youngsters eager to enter the animated film industry when they grow up.

With 650 works on display that cover much of Pixar’s output, the exhibit — currently running at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum — goes behind the scenes at the studio, and is organized in three sections: Character, Story and Worlds.

With 22 Academy Awards, four Golden Globes and three Grammys to its name, Pixar is unquestionably an animation powerhouse. Led by creative guru John Lasseter, the film studio’s critical acclaim is matched by its commercial success, with each of its 10 feature films grossing an average of US$200 million. Formed 23 years ago by Apple cofounder Steve Jobs and bought in 2006 by Disney, Pixar continues to earn plaudits from critics and children alike.

The exhibition charts the evolution of Pixar’s films and the links between traditional media — sketches, painting and sculpture — and the latest computer technology, while emphasizing the central role that storytelling occupies.

In one section, the meticulous work that goes into developing Pixar’s characters is shown, including Jerome Ranft’s eight sculpture prototypes of Sullivan from Monsters, Inc and Tia Kratter’s mixed media color sketches of the monster’s fur.

Storyboards predominate in the Story section including Jan Pinkava’s for Geri’s Game, which explores camera angles.

According to the exhibition catalogue, the worlds created by Pixar are either derived from real locations or are new interpretations of genre films. The color scripts from Ratatouille brilliantly recreate the architecture of Paris and Monstropolis from Monsters, Inc was inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Pixar curator Elyse Klaidman started the exhibition more than a decade ago.

Taipei Times: How did Pixar: 20 Years of Animation begin life?

Elyse Klaidman: When we moved into a new building in 2000, I asked Ed Catmull [president of Pixar] if I could have a little space that could be a gallery. They gave me a huge space ... to use as a gallery for internal artist exhibitions and I did the show internally with Monsters, Inc and it was showing the development of the concept and artwork. And as Pixar grew, I realized there were lots of people in the building who weren’t necessarily seeing this artwork.

TT: So the exhibit was almost fully formed before New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) approached you to first mount the show externally?

EK: Not really. We had done a number of exhibits before that point — Monsters, Nemo, The Incredibles — so there had definitely been some selection process internally. But we started fresh. When the creators at MOMA came — they came to Pixar maybe four times for two or three days — we just went into a very intensive process explaining to them how the process worked because people have all kinds of preconceived notions of what it is. And then we started showing them ... hundreds of thousands of pieces of art. And then eventually, through this process of explaining our process and looking at the work, we divided it up into Story, Character and World, which are these three main components.

TT: Is it fair to say that the exhibit focuses more on traditional artistic mediums such as painting, pastel and gouache?