The Pixar Animation Studios
Is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California that is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. Pixar began in 1979 as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm computer division, before its spin-out as a corporation in 1986, with funding by Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, who became the majority shareholder.
Disney purchased Pixar in 2006 at a valuation of $7.4 billion, a transaction that resulted in Jobs becoming Disney's largest single shareholder at the time. Pixar is best known for CGI-animated feature films created with RenderMan, Pixar's own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan image-rendering application programming interface, used to generate high-quality images.
Pixar has produced eighteen feature films, beginning with Toy Story (1995), which was the first-ever computer-animated feature film, and its most recent being Cars 3. The studio has also produced several short films. As of July 2017, its feature films have earned approximately $11 billion at the worldwide box office, with an average worldwide gross of $634 million per film. Finding Nemo (2003), along with its sequel Finding Dory (2016), as well as Toy Story 3 (2010) are among the 50 highest-grossing films of all time, with the lattermost film being the third all-time highest-grossing animated film with a gross of $1.063 billion. Thirteen of Pixar's films are also among the 50 highest-grossing animated films of all time.
The studio has earned sixteen Academy Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards, and eleven Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments. Many of Pixar's films have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature since its inauguration in 2001, with eight winning; this includes Finding Nemo and Toy Story 3, along with The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007), WALL-E (2008), Up (2009), Brave (2012), and Inside Out (2015). Monsters, Inc. (2001) and Cars (2006) are the only two films that were nominated for the award without winning it, while Cars 2 (2011), Monsters University (2013), The Good Dinosaur (2015), and Finding Dory have not been nominated. Up and Toy Story 3 were also the respective second and third animated films to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first being Walt Disney Animation Studios' Beauty and the Beast (1991).
The studio's headquarters are located in 1200 Park Ave, Emeryville, California, USA.
Headquarters
When Steve Jobs, chief executive officer of Apple Inc. and Pixar, and John Lasseter, then the executive vice president of Pixar, decided to move their studios from a leased space in Point Richmond, California, to larger quarters of their own, they chose a 20-acre site in Emeryville, California, formerly occupied by Del Monte Foods, Inc.
The first of several buildings, a high-tech structure designed by Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, has special foundations and generators to ensure continued film production, even through major earthquakes.
The character of the building is intended to abstractly recall Emeryville's industrial past. The two-story steel-and-masonry building is a collaborative space with many pathways.
Traditions
While some of Pixar's first animators were former cel animators, including John Lasseter, they also came from computer animation or were fresh college graduates. A large number of animators that make up the animation department at Pixar were hired around the time Pixar released A Bug's Life (1998) and Toy Story 2 (1999). Although Toy Story was a successful film, it was Pixar's first feature film at the time, becoming the first major computer-animation studio to successfully produce theatrical feature films.
The majority of the animation industry is located in Los Angeles while Pixar is located 350 miles (560 km) north in the San Francisco Bay Area. Also, traditional hand-drawn animation was still the dominant medium for feature animated films.
With the scarcity of Los Angeles-based animators willing to move their families so far north, give up traditional animation, and try computer animation, Pixar's new hires at this time either came directly from college or had worked outside feature animation. For those who had traditional animation skills, the Pixar animation software Marionette was designed so that traditional animators would require a minimum amount of training before becoming productive.
Pixar's films follow the same theme of self-improvement as the company itself has: with the help of friends or family, a character ventures out into the real world and learns to appreciate his friends and family.
As of 2016, every Pixar feature film produced for Disney has included a character voiced by John Ratzenberger, who had famously starred in the TV show Cheers. Pixar paid tribute to their "good luck charm" in the end credits of Cars (2006) by parodying scenes from three of their earlier films, replacing all of the characters with motor vehicles. After the third scene, Mack (his character in Cars) realizes that the same actor has been voicing characters in every film.
Another longstanding Pixar tradition is their movie trailers that do not contain actual footage from the released film, instead the film's characters and setting are used in a short story to promote the film.
Due to the traditions that have occurred within the film, such as anthropomorphic animals and easter egg crossovers between movies that have been spotted by fans, a blog post entitled The Pixar Theory was published in 2013 by Jon Negroni to make the belief that all of the characters within the Pixar universe were related.