To Infinity and Beyond
How Steve Jobs Saved Pixar

The story of how Steve Jobs, having recently been ousted from Apple Inc, bought the graphics group, renamed it Pixar and, with a little help from his friends, changed the future of animated films

The story of Pixar, the digital animation company that with films such as Toy Story, Cars and WALL-E revolutionised animation, saved a Hollywood studio and invented a brand medium, not to mention delighting billions across the globe, begins not with the razzle dazzle of a Hollywood premiere, or the vicious infighting of a studio boardroom, though as we shall see its story takes in these locales and more, but with a lamp. It is an ordinary Luxo angle-poise lamp of the kind under which writers, students and indeed animators have toiled in the wee small hours for over 70 years.

This particular lamp sits on a desk in a nondescript building in San Anselmo, Marin County California, a desk belonging to John Lasseter, an early thirty-something animator who has soft, slightly owlish features and the slightly doughy complexion of a man who spends too much time indoors in front of computer screens. Lasseter has been obsessed with cartoons from when he was a boy, and has never shed his love of the form. “I even watched them when it wasn’t cool in high-school,” he said years later. “I ran home to watch Bugs and his Buddies on Channel 11.”
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