By Andrew Eastep

I think it’s weird to be a moviegoer in this era of film.

I don’t think I could possibly have a more vague opening statement than that. Stay with me, though.

It’s an era where titles are remade, rereleased, and repackaged constantly. Star Wars, Blade Runner, Toy Story, Scooby-Doo, The Jungle Book, Jumanji, Terminator, and Vacation have all found their way back onto the silver screen in some way or another after a twenty-year hiatus, as if Hollywood collectively pulled a Rip Van Winkle and continued where they left off.

It’s kind of absurd that there has not been one, not two, not three, but four entirely different Spider-Man film franchises made in the last twenty years. The only thing more constant than the eventual release of death is that there will always be a new Marvel movie coming out.

But as much as we might criticize Hollywood for being out of ideas, and as much as they might actually be out of ideas, I don’t think we can ignore that there’s a larger force behind the City of Stars’™ recent obsession with beating dead horses: nostalgia.

It’s a strategy that makes sense. If you’re going to spend a tens of millions dollars on a movie, why would you risk turning a profit on something original, when you’ve got a property that a) already has a story written, b) already has established characters, c) is within the public consciousness, and d) has an audience guaranteed to buy tickets. You’d be losing money not to remake Batman… again.

I now find myself in this strange time where my generation is the one being marketed to. With our newfound adulthood and the freedom—and disposable income—that comes with it, we’re the next generation to have our rose-tinted goggles squeezed like an orange for studios to feast on. Movies that I watched over and over again on DVD in childhood are finding new life in movie theaters. (And they often come across considerably worse than I remember.)

What will our generation be nostalgic for? What movies made us who we are today? And which ones will we look fondly back on as we grow older?

In an informal survey of my peers, I found that out of all of the movie studios represented in the results, there seemed to be one clear winner: Pixar Animation Studios.

Pixar Animation Studios. Image credit: User Clint Via Flickr.

Well, technically the real winner was Disney, because they’ve gone on to buy everything, including Pixar, so let’s just pretend that The Mouse isn’t one step away from owning our souls.

But like everything in this mortal coil, Pixar didn’t start off as the titans of animation that they are; they too have an origin story. So, in order to understand why Pixar is the nostalgic capital of animation, we need to look back to how they became the cultural phenomenon they are.

The year is 1979. “I Will Survive” is topping the pop charts, Sony has introduced the Walkman, and V-necks are all the rage.

Ed Catmull. Photo credit: User Web Summit Via Flickr.

George Lucas, riding high off the release of 1977’s Star Wars, wants to add a computer division to his company Lucasfilm. To head this new division, Lucas hired 34-year-old Ed Catmull from the New York Institute of Technology. Catmull had already proven himself to be one of the pioneers of the new medium of computer graphics, having created the first computer animation in 1972.

Under Catmull’s direction, the Computer Division of Lucasfilm would produce the first computer-animated sequence in a feature film in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, the first computer-generated character animation in “The Adventures of Andre & Wally B.,” and a prototype Pixar Imaging Computer, which promised to revolutionize computer graphics with its capability to render three-dimensional color images. (This was the 1980’s. Back then Galaga was considered cutting-edge.)

In 1986, seven years after the creation of the Computer Division, Steve Jobs, recently shunned from Apple Computers, bought the forty-person team from Lucas and incorporated it under the name Pixar. And although they may have been small, they were about to make history.

“We humans like to know where we are headed, but creativity demands that we travel paths that lead to who-knows-where.” That’s a quote from Catmull in his book Creativity, Inc., and it’s one that embodies the spirit of Pixar. Despite their small team, Pixar was pioneering animation technology that had never been successful until then. They had been working on a project with Disney that would revolutionize the world of traditional animation, what was then called CAPS (The Computer Animation Production System… catchy).

Luxo, Jr. Image credit: User Rosenfeld Media via Flickr.

In August 1986, at SIGGRAPH, an annual conference that shows off new technology in the world of “computer graphics and interactive techniques,” Pixar debuted “Luxo, Jr.,” a short film directed by John Lassester, which would go on to net the company’s first Oscar nomination. This was followed by 1987’s “Red’s Dream,” and 1988’s “Tin Toy,” which became the first computer-animated film to win an Academy Award. Despite their critical success, Pixar became known for producing animated commercials for brands like Tropicana, Trident, and Listerine. While the lessons were invaluable, the group was itching for a new challenge. And in 1991, a deal was struck.

The climate of animation Pixar was trying to enter was one ruled by traditional, hand-drawn animation. The animation box office was dominated by smash hits like 1989’s The Little Mermaid, 1992’s Aladdin, and 1994’s The Lion King. Computer graphics were really only used for special effects in major motion pictures; nobody knew what a fully computer animated movie could look like. Pixar’s success would be dependent on whether or not the world was ready for a fully computer-generated feature film.

Upper School English teacher and all-around film buff Rachel Greene believes that, “it’s not just about the story. It’s about the fact that the technology and the economics in terms of investment in ideas but also in money, and the storytelling, and the audience came together at just the right time for Pixar.”

Upper School librarian, Collegiate archivist, and film historian Benjamin Lamb said, “I think initially Pixar arrived at a moment when animation was in-between analog, hand-drawn past and a computer-driven future, and it was really kind of magical to see what computer animation could do.”

On November 22, 1995, Pixar’s Toy Story hit theaters nationwide.

Four years earlier, Disney and Pixar had inked a contract where they would work together to create three films. The first of these would be Toy Story. And boy, did it leave a mark.

Toy Story became number one at the box office on its first weekend. It then went on to be the highest grossing film of 1995, grossing $362 million worldwide. 

The tale of Andy and his talking toys, with a cast of voice acting stars that included Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Annie Potts and Don Rickles, was nominated for four Academy Awards the next year, with John Lasseter winning a Special Achievement Oscar.

Roger Ebert gave Toy Story a score of four stars and said about the film, “Its best pleasures are for the eyes. But what pleasures they are! Watching the film, I felt I was in at the dawn of a new era of movie animation, which draws on the best of cartoons and reality, creating a world somewhere in between, where space not only bends but snaps, crackles and pops.”

Due to the success of Toy Story, Disney and Pixar changed the deal of their contract to produce five animated films over the next ten years.

But following Toy Story, Pixar encountered a stark challenge in the economy of the box office. As cinema ticket prices began skyrocketing in the second half of the 1990s, it became more and more difficult to convince someone to spend their dollar on your movie, which meant Pixar couldn’t waste any time focusing on their recent success. They needed to keep innovating.

In a 2015 interview with Fortune magazine, Catmull said about their success, “There were successful companies in Silicon Valley, and there were companies the equivalent of your Google and your Apple today, but that time it was Sun and Silicon Graphics and so forth. And what would happen is the companies would be very successful, they’d go public and get their pictures on magazines and so forth, and then they’d fall apart; they’d do something really stupid… it leads to a delusion, and the delusion is that our successes draw conclusions… we draw the simple conclusion that what we’re doing is right, so I’ll keep doing that… and when Toy Story came out, then I could begin to see the process apply to us.”

What followed was a string of financially successful movies that continued to change what computer animation could be: movies like 1998’s A Bug’s Life ($162 million domestic), 1999’s Toy Story 2 ($245 million domestic), 2001’s Monsters, Inc. ($255 million domestic), 2003’s Finding Nemo ($339 million domestic), 2004’s The Incredibles ($261 million domestic), and 2006’s Cars ($244 million domestic). 

But Pixar’s success isn’t just built around their capacity to innovate. Sure, a great deal of their success comes from the technology they develop, but families aren’t going to watch a movie just because an animated movie has never been able to render that many hairs on a person before. 

According to Lamb, “Pixar is, for the most part, good at producing high-quality films that combine resonant, human stories with jaw-dropping technological innovation in ways that have mass appeal for parents and kids.”

Pixar has a characteristic knack for telling human stories hidden under a cheerful façade of some fantastic world. Toy Story is a story about jealousy and favoritism disguised as a movie about a toy astronaut and cowboy. The Incredibles is a movie about marital infidelity and middle age hidden under the guise of superheroes and comic books. Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc. are both about fatherhood.

According to Greene, “the biggest pattern is making the ordinary extraordinary, right? Like in Finding Nemo, the role of a father becomes a heroic quest. It elevates being a parent to the role of Odysseus winning a war.”

This is a practice Pixar continues to this day, with Soul being about the trials that come with pursuing your dreams, Inside Out being a discussion on the psychological effects of change, and Cars 2… is… well, it probably sold plenty of Cars lunchboxes.

But there’s a reason Pixar can tell the stories that they can: process. Pixar is a company founded on the process of making movies, believing that there are no shortcuts to making a work of art.

They have failed. They constantly fail. Pixar is a movie studio plagued with production restarts, scrapped concepts, and slow, arduous work. And it’s what makes them good.

Catmull commented on their process: “Sure enough, we fail all along the way. That is our process… We’ve had films before that have had restarts. We’ve had three complete restarts before…”

Pixar believes in creating one cohesive vision, and letting that vision be the driving force of the production. The director starts with their idea, they build a team around them, and together they create the first draft. All that matters is how well the team works together. The quality of their work doesn’t matter, because at this point the work becomes iterative. The team constantly reshapes and reforms the story over and over again until it resembles the final cut.

The company has rules and principles that they follow in the creative process. They break down power structures in the company to make sure that everyone’s voice is heard, and that the only authority is the director. There are no bosses or CEOs in the creative process; there are only peers helping each other. 

Greene said, “they’re a part of the film from start to finish. They do the storyboarding and the screenplay and the direction and the animation—the whole studio does that together, and it’s the same team responsible for it—that can really fall apart in film making. I think having a vision is helpful; and also really following through on a story.”

I started talking to students about why they remembered Pixar movies and why they had been ingrained in the cultural consciousness of our generation. What I found was that most of the time, the reason everyone remembers Pixar movies is because they can always come back to them and get something new.

When discussing her nostalgia for Toy Story and Finding Nemo, Rory Jones (‘24) said that “I remember it fondly because of the classic themes of growing up, which I wanted to get a move on. Now, looking back, I understand the life lessons in these movies a lot more, because I have pretty much lived those experiences.”

Ethan Clark (‘21), on his love of The Incredibles: “rewatching The Incredibles now as an adult is drastically different then what it was like as a kid… As a kid, you tend to glance over some of the more ‘adult’ scenes in the movie… The movie panders not just to younger audiences for the cool superheroes but also to the adults about how a superhero would survive in a more modern setting.”

The movies Pixar makes aren’t ones that you vaguely remember from an infantile youth; they become this perennial experience that asks that you return to it again and again seeking new details, new meaning, and a new appreciation.

Making a movie is hard. We give Hollywood flak for capitalizing on nostalgia, but it’s a tried and true method that works.

There’s a concept in psychology known as the ‘mere-exposure effect.’ It suggests that “individuals show an increased preference (or liking) for a stimulus as a consequence of repeated exposure to that stimulus.” In other words, it means that we like what we’ve already seen.

For Hollywood, it means it’s less risky to repackage what we’ve already seen and call it something new. I think that’s why we’ve seen so many remakes and rereleases in the past few years.

Pixar breaks that theory. From their inception, they’ve been innovators, whether it be the creation of the Pixar Imaging Computer, computer generated short films, or the first computer animated movie.

Are there elements of nostalgia in their movies? Yes.

Have they fallen prey to the sequelitis of Hollywood? Also yes.

Pixar Animation Studios at 2019 D23 Expo. Photo credit: Anthony Quintano via Flickr.

But for every Cars 3, there’s a Coco. For every Monsters University, there’s an Inside Out. For every Toy Story 4, there’s a Soul.

Maybe I’m just a miserly guy who’s too occupied analyzing movies. Maybe I need to get a life instead of sitting in a movie theater (hopefully again soon) watching a kid’s movie.

But I think that there’s something valuable about Pixar. They don’t make something with the goal of succeeding. They make something with the goal of making something, and it’s because of that they succeed.  

In a world where everyone seems hyper-focused on efficiency and productivity, Pixar stands out as an example of the good that can come from focusing on risk, originality, quality, and effort.

Featured image credit: Jason Pratt Via Motiongrapher.com.