Document details

To Infinity and Beyond
How Steve Jobs Saved Pixar
Adam Smith
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.” […]

Keywords

Source

Title
Source type Magazine
Published
Language en
Document type Feature
Media type text
Page count 8
Pages pp. 126-127,129,131-132,134-136

Metadata

Id 2579
Availability Free
Inserted 2016-07-07