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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Disney Animation vs. Pixar -- Sibling Rivalry (Hollywood Reporter)
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 12-09-2013 10:50 PM
This is an interesting story, although it misses one point: Disney Animation has struck gold again by doing what Disney has always done at its best, which is to create animated fairytale-type movies that have a good story, good songs (most of the time) and memorable characters. Pixar has sort of gone off the rails a bit lately, with their movies either being sequels or maybe aimed a little too high in sophistication for the general family crowd. I know I've liked the last 3 Disney Animation movies (not counting Planes) much better than the last 3 Pixar movies. And the Disney Animation ones have grossed better, too.
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Pixar vs. Disney Animation: John Lasseter's Tricky Tug-of-War
The contrast couldn't have been more stark. On Nov. 22, Pixar Animation Studios laid off 67 employees, about 5 percent of its 1,200-person workforce, as the release of its next feature, The Good Dinosaur, was delayed 18 months to November 2015. That left Disney without a new Pixar movie on next year's schedule for the first time since 2005.
Just five days later, Walt Disney Animation Studios opened Frozen, its 53rd feature, in wide release and set a Thanksgiving weekend record with $93.6 million domestic -- topping Pixar's Toy Story 2 benchmark from 1999. The icy sisterhood tale established itself as a frontrunner for the animated feature Oscar, a category Pixar has dominated. Further underscoring the resurgence of WDAS, Frozen was accompanied by a new short, Get a Horse!, that could win the Oscar in that category.
It's a reversal of fortune of sorts, even as Pixar continues to dominate at the box office. (Its June release Monsters University took in $743.5 million worldwide, surpassing 2011's Cars 2, which grabbed nearly $560 million.) Critics have carped that the studio is relying too heavily on sequels and has lost some of its creative mojo. Meanwhile, WDAS, which long lagged behind Pixar in prestige and profit, has been on a hot streak since 2010's Tangled managed to appeal both to boys and princess-loving girls. "I think the studio has gone through something of a renaissance," Rich Moore, who directed WDAS' 2012 hit Wreck-It Ralph, told THR earlier this year.
Disney's $7.4 billion acquisition of Pixar in 2006 put rival siblings under the same man, Pixar co-founder John Lasseter, working alongside Ed Catmull. Splitting time between Pixar in Emeryville, Calif., and Disney's Burbank lot, Lasseter gets credit for breathing life into WDAS, which stumbled through the 2000s with such flops as Home on the Range, Chicken Little and Meet the Robinsons. But some question whether he is stretched too thin as his studios and other parts of the Disney empire, including consumer products and park design, vie for his attention.
Borrowing a page from Pixar, Lasseter is hands-on at WDAS. He gives extensive notes, pores over story reels and even does the first reading with actors and directors. Initially, Pixar animators worried that he was spending too much time at Disney, where he overhauled Bolt and Tangled. Now that the situation has stabilized, he divides his focus. "Both places think he spends too much time at the other place," says a friend. "That's the true telling point."
At Pixar, every project is workshopped through the so-called Brain Trust, the company's top leaders. If a movie encounters problems, the studio doesn't hesitate to boot directors midstream. Brenda Chapman was replaced by Mark Andrews on 2012's Brave, which won the Oscar. Dinosaur hit a wall when director Bob Peterson couldn't crack its third act. He was taken off the film, though he remains at Pixar.
WDAS has instituted a similar system called the Story Trust, but its meetings are considerably more polite, says one insider: "People are more concerned about ruffling feathers and hurting feelings." WDAS also might be more open to fresh talent. Agencies usually don't send writers to pitch Pixar, where most ideas are generated in-house and directors work their way up the ladder. At WDAS, by contrast, Jennifer Lee was an outsider brought in to work on Ralph then shifted to Frozen. Her suggestions reshaped the project, and she was upped to director with Chris Buck, which one insider says never would happen at Pixar.
WDAS has reached a point where it is developing its own star filmmakers, much as Pixar did with Pete Docter (Up) and Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo). Byron Howard, who helmed Tangled with Nathan Greno, is directing Zootopia for a March 2016 release. And the company's November 2014 film Big Hero 6, the first theatrical animated movie drawn from Marvel characters, is being handled by Don Hall, who directed 2011's Winnie the Pooh.
But Pixar hardly is down for the count, though. "Hollywood won't be happy until they have a big honking failure," snarks one observer, noting that Pixar's run of hits has yet to be duplicated.
If Disney weren't exploiting its library for sequels, analysts would squawk that it is squandering resources. And so Finding Dory, a sequel to 2003's Finding Nemo, is coming in 2016. Lasseter, who directed Cars and its poorly reviewed sequel, has defended the sequel strategy, saying good characters and a good story are what make good movies. Disney CEO Bob Iger, to whom Lasseter reports, is a big supporter of Pixar's sequel strategy and the box office it generates.
But three of the studio's next four releases will be originals. Docter is readying Inside Out, set in the mind of a preteen, for June 2015. A retooled Dinosaur will follow that November, then an untitled movie about the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead.
Hollywood Reporter article
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Terry Lynn-Stevens
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1081
From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Dec 2012
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posted 12-09-2013 11:36 PM
What a stupid article, Pixar generally releases tent pole summer time release films. They released three sequels in their last four releases, what is the big deal? Pixar movies usually make some serious coin and before that Pixar released a lot of original content.
Walt Disney Animation Studios generally makes original pieces, they almost never make or release sequels theatrically. WDAS films rarely are released in the summer time like Pixar films are. WDAS releases do not usually have the competition like Pixar does and the author of the article should praise Pixar for releasing Monster University before Despicable Me 2, both grossed almost 1.5 billion combined and they were released just two weeks apart.
The sequels to WDAS movies such as Lion King 2 etc are not WDAS films, they are made by Disney Toon Studios. The chance of a theatrical release of a Frozen 2 is likely never going to happen, but it might come out on video.
And Planes was made by Disney Toon Studios, not WDAS.
quote:
Disney owns Pixar,
It all goes to the same company.
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 12-10-2013 10:04 PM
Terry, you are totally missing the point.
Nobody is dissing Pixar, the article is just expressing some surprise that Disney Animation is coming on so strong, considering the fact that 10 years ago most people would have predicted that Pixar would become "the" animation unit at Disney. It wasn't till "Bolt" came out and was a fair-sized hit that Disney Animation really began its comeback.
The release dates are planned years in advance, and each studio just positions its movies where it needs them. Disney has had a Pixar movie in the summer for several years and there's no reason to change that (although, they are NOT releasing one in 2014..."The Good Dinosaur" has been pushed back to November 2015). Therefore, the other big "kid movie" season is the winter holidays, so lately they've been releasing Disney Animation movies in that time frame, and DisneyToon movies in the late summer when there is almost always a shortage of family films. This strategy has everything to do with when the movies are ready, and maximizing profits. It has very little to do with "who makes" the movies.
As far as the sequels go, to me they are smarter to make most of them video-only releases. That way they can spend less on production, give the parents of the world a new thing to give their kids, and keep the theatrical time slots open for new original movies that will result in more marketable characters and lead to additional sequels.
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Terry Lynn-Stevens
Phenomenal Film Handler
Posts: 1081
From: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Registered: Dec 2012
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posted 12-11-2013 08:59 AM
Here is an interesting conspiracy
A Disney conspiracy? Is 'Wreck-It-Ralph' really a Pixar movie in disguise?
Disney/Pixar tried to pull a fast one on us. They thought we wouldn't notice, but—aha!—we're too smart for them!
This is pure speculation on my part, but after seeing Wreck-It Ralph this past weekend, I am officially convinced that Disney/Pixar swapped studio names between this film and Brave, which was released earlier this summer. (You probably noticed that Brave was released as a "Pixar" movie, and Wreck-It-Ralph as a "Disney" movie. Yeah, right.) Why, do you ask, do I suspect such a conspiracy? I'm glad you asked!
It's simple. Everyone knows that Pixar makes "life-from-the-perspective of a [FILL IN THE BLANK]" animated films. That's been their modus operandi since the beginning. They've done life from the perspective of a toy, a bug, a monster, a superhero, a fish, a car, a robot, and even a rat who wants to be a chef! In each of these, they've used the fantasy world of the characters (usually based on something from our pop culture) as a metaphor for experiences and struggles we can relate to and empathize with in our real world.
Wreck-It-Ralph follows in this Pixar tradition by giving us a story of life from the perspective of a classic arcade-game character. In the story, Ralph (John C. Reilly) is tired of having to live up to the stereotype put on him as a video-game "bad-guy" character. He wants to do something to earn a medal, which he believes will allow him to get the appreciation he craves. When he runs into the feisty misfit Vanellope von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) from the candy-coated cart racing game, Sugar Rush, he has to make a choice between fulfilling his personal dream and helping her realize hers. By learning to accept being the "bad-guy" he was programed to be in his game, he actual becomes the "good-guy" hero of the story.
Computer, arcade, and video games have become a facet of our pop culture today, like it or not. While it can probably easily be argued that children (and many adults!) spend far too much time playing video games rather than developing real-life skills and real-life relationships, Wreck-It-Ralph is not so much a celebration of the advent of the video-game culture as it is a metaphor for real-life values and lessons. Along the way, of course, it features cameos from many of the most popular video game characters over the last thirty years, tending to favor characters from before the mid-1990's.
The dynamics of the Wreck-It-Ralph story, the style of humor, the character tensions and contrasts, the arches, the plot-patterns, all make it feel like a Pixar movie. Having grossed $49.1 million in its domestic debut this weekend, it's on track to make more money than any previously released Disney CG animated movie.
That's because it's not a "Disney" movie, okay? Follow me just a little bit more.
The Disney vs. Pixar Formula Contrast
Disney makes princess movies. What was Brave? Another movie about a princess sulking about her obstructed independence. Usually, the princess in a Disney movie wants independence to find her Prince Charming, but in Brave she wants independence so she doesn't have to marry a Prince Uncharming. Like every Disney princess movie, it has fairy-tale magic in it—something Pixar movies have never had. Disney animated movies have also been trying to be "cross-cultural" by setting their stories in some distinct culture of the real-world. For example, Beauty and the Beast was in the countryside of France, Aladdin in the Arab Middle East, Mulan in the orient, etc. Pixar hasn't done this before. But Brave follows this tradition by being set in the highlands of old Scotland. The only thing it's lacking to make it a typical Disney princess movie is a few scenes where the characters take time out to sing a song.
So I think the powers that be at Disney/Pixar knew the Disney animation brand has been suffering for a long time, while Pixar's reputation has been comparatively pristine, and they took a Pixar story idea and developed it under the Disney studio label, hoping to improve Disney's image. Meanwhile, they thought Pixar fans would accept Brave just because it had Pixar's name attached to it. They thought it was just semantics, that there isn't an actual difference between how a Pixar movie feels and how a Disney movie feels, but there is.
Let's face it. The most a CG animated Disney movie has made is $200,821,936 (Tangled), and even that was about $59 million below its production budget. Disney has developed such a reputation for flops that even when they produced something halfway-to-decent moviegoers were too leery to help them cover their production costs. In contrast, every Pixar movie has performed domestically above its production budget.
Despite all the elegant highland textures and moments of humor, Brave just did not have the luster and charm of a Pixar film. But when I saw Wreck-It-Ralph, I thought for sure I was watching a movie made by the same people who made Toy Story. In fact, many of the founders of Pixar have their names attached to the credits of Wreck-It-Ralph, such as John Lasseter, who started the whole "life-from-the-perspective-of-a [FILL IN THE BLANK]" formula with his story concept for The Brave Little Toaster in the 1980's—which happens to be about the same time that Disney first started considering making this movie about an arcade game character. Lasseter says that he first became fascinated with computer-graphics animation when he first saw the Disney live-action film Tron (1982), which also has to do with video game characters having an adventure in a computer-game fantasy world.
Disney isn't going Turbo on us, is it?
When Disney bought out Pixar around 2006, many were afraid that Disney would ruin Pixar just has they had ruined many of their own classic characters with countless and pointless sequels. But we were assured that it was the Pixar people who were going to be actually taking over Disney. Maybe that's what happened, and maybe there's just not enough of John Lasseter to go around. Maybe the flip-flop between Pixar and Disney, between Wreck-It-Ralph and Brave, comes because Pixar's people have been so busy trying to reconstruct Disney, that Pixar has suffered.
One just hopes this isn't a sign that Disney bought Pixar to steal all their best people and story ideas for themselves and dump the rest on the Pixar brand. Disney is something like the villain Turbo in the Wreck-It-Ralph movie. Disney is the popular game of yesteryear, but like Turbo is Disney trying to play in someone else's game?
Hopefully, the leadership of Disney/Pixar will allow each of the two brands to be true to themselves and their own traditions instead of trying to amalgamate them. Most of all, we hope Disney doesn't ruin Pixar while trying to stay popular.
Like Wreck-It-Ralph in the film's story, Disney needs to learn to appreciate and improve upon its own brand rather than trying to be like someone else.
A Disney Conspiracy
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 12-11-2013 02:01 PM
I think Pixar is suffering from two things.
First: and most obvious, I think the sequels are killing the company's creative mo jo. I get the impression the work is transforming from a challenging pleasure to a difficult chore. The lack of inspiration in favor of chasing profits for shareholders is showing. With Disney now an owner/partner I strongly doubt Pixar's employees have as much creative freedom as they did in the past. Add to that the expectation for Pixar to hit it out of the ballpark with each release. They have to live up to a certain reputation.
Second: Pixar is also a technology company. Most graphics people have heard of their Renderman software. Over the years Pixar has pioneered many advances in computer animation. Many of those improvements can be seen in Pixar's movies. Toy Story looks crude next to a movie like Ratatouille. Firms like Industrial Light & Magic, WETA Digital and many others use Renderman in their production pipelines. Someone using Autodesk Maya can install the Renderman 18 plug-in for $1300. Getting to the point: most of the biggest advances in computer modeling, animation & rendering have already been made. Renderman has some big rivals, with Mental Ray being perhaps the biggest one. Nvidia acquired Mental Ray a few years ago; the rendering package is integrated into several leading 3D modeling/animation applications.
Overall, Pixar is under some considerable pressure. Walt Disney Animation Studios isn't working under that same amount of pressure.
quote: Mike Blakesley
Interesting theory, but I don't think I buy it. Wreck-It Ralph doesn't seem to look or feel like a Pixar movie, and Brave doesn't feel like a Disney Animation Studios movie in the slightest -- to me at least.
Brave may be a "princess" movie, but it doesn't have the look of a Disney movie. The characters don't have that conventional Disney character look.
quote: Mystery Author
It's simple. Everyone knows that Pixar makes "life-from-the-perspective of a [FILL IN THE BLANK]" animated films.
Every movie is life from the perspective of its main character (or main characters if it's an ensemble piece).
quote: Mystery Author
Disney animated movies have also been trying to be "cross-cultural" by setting their stories in some distinct culture of the real-world. For example, Beauty and the Beast was in the countryside of France, Aladdin in the Arab Middle East, Mulan in the orient, etc. Pixar hasn't done this before. But Brave follows this tradition by being set in the highlands of old Scotland.
This is wrong. First all, some previous Pixar movies have been set in places other than the United States. Ratatouille was set in France (the movie was also pretty successful there too). When Finding Nemo went on shore that shoreline was Australia. Up started in the US but wound up in South America.
Although various Disney movies have been set in Europe, Africa and other places, they are very American in terms of cultural references and attitude.
quote: Mystery Author
But when I saw Wreck-It-Ralph, I thought for sure I was watching a movie made by the same people who made Toy Story.
Wreck It Ralph does excel in pumping up lots of easy to miss details, but these are details long time fans of video gaming appreciate. Attention to detail is pretty common in Pixar movies. Not everyone enjoyed Cars, but I thought Pixar did a great job duplicating a lot visuals to make road geeks happy, such as using a reflective button copy in the proper typeface on those big green highway signs.
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Marcel Birgelen
Film God
Posts: 3357
From: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands
Registered: Feb 2012
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posted 12-12-2013 04:26 PM
quote: Bobby Henderson
Second: Pixar is also a technology company. Most graphics people have heard of their Renderman software. Over the years Pixar has pioneered many advances in computer animation. Many of those improvements can be seen in Pixar's movies. Toy Story looks crude next to a movie like Ratatouille. Firms like Industrial Light & Magic, WETA Digital and many others use Renderman in their production pipelines. Someone using Autodesk Maya can install the Renderman 18 plug-in for $1300. Getting to the point: most of the biggest advances in computer modeling, animation & rendering have already been made. Renderman has some big rivals, with Mental Ray being perhaps the biggest one. Nvidia acquired Mental Ray a few years ago; the rendering package is integrated into several leading 3D modeling/animation applications.
I don’t have any numbers to back it up (because Disney isn’t really publishing them or I'm just to stupid/lazy to find them), but I doubt that Pixar is really making a lot of money on their software business, they already left the high-end workstation market around the time they started working on Toy Story. The funny thing is that they once made movies to showcase their hard- and software... Even in that considerable niche of animation, RenderMan isn't exactly a house-hold brand and mainly being used for real high-end productions. It’s also not a stand-alone product, has a steep learning curve and the Pixar rendering tool chain is only really useful for large renderfarms (most professional 3D products already offer decent tools for small to medium sized renderfarms), which also have a very limited market.
Both ILM and WETA Digital use RenderMan, but ILM (where Pixar actually once started) is now technically a Disney company too. I also don’t see any of the other big animation studios actually using the product of their main competitor.
In the past, 3D modeling, animation, rendering software and high-end workstations were prohibitively expensive and margins on those products were still huge, but since the market has been dominated by a few big players that went for higher volumes, like e.g. Autodesk, Avid and Newtek to a much lesser extent and workstation prices have been slashed, there is only real money left in volume.
quote:
This is pure speculation on my part, but after seeing Wreck-It Ralph this past weekend, I am officially convinced that Disney/Pixar swapped studio names between this film and Brave, which was released earlier this summer. (You probably noticed that Brave was released as a "Pixar" movie, and Wreck-It-Ralph as a "Disney" movie. Yeah, right.) Why, do you ask, do I suspect such a conspiracy? I'm glad you asked!
First of all, Brave is a Pixar movie. This September, I’ve been to the "25 Years of Pixar Animation" exhibit in Amsterdam. They had storyboards (that looked a lot like previous storyboards), artwork, 3D character prints, 3D trial renderings and even some concept art with hand-written notes by John Lasseter. Yeah, they could have fabricated all of this, but I’m not buying that, it would be an utter waste of resources.
As for “Wreck it Ralph” being a Pixar movie in disguise... Well, after I watched it together with my girlfriend, I happened to say that it in some way felt more like a Pixar movie in overdrive than a Disney Animation movie. Still I don’t believe this was a genuine Pixar production. But let us not forget that there is no reason why Pixar and the many divisions of Disney couldn’t share story elements and many of their creative talents and tools. They even share the same creative director...
Also, does the general public actually care about the difference between "Genuine Disney" and "Pixar"? Most people I know didn’t know the difference even before the acquisition. Also, Disney always marketed most of the Pixar characters like their own. Disney characters have been present in their theme parks even before the acquisition of 2006. So why would they even bother to stage this "false-flag operation" that could potentially backfire if it leaked out?
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