A gallery of visual development art, 1994–2010
With more than a decade’s worth of service to the company, Christine Freeman is the longest-employed member of the five-person team of archivists who care for the Pixar Living Archives, Pixar’s collection of production artwork, documents, and historical artifacts. The exact number of items held in the archives is not known but is estimated to be over one million pieces and growing.
Most of those million pieces originate from the art and story departments at Pixar, which create tens of thousands of pieces of artwork for every feature film. Just because a film is created with computer graphics doesn’t mean that a computer produces the entire film. Artists conceive of every stage of the film long before the first mouse button is ever clicked, and they use every imaginable art material to develop their ideas: pencil, marker, acrylic, pastel, gouache, and even clay.
In the early days of animation, the artwork used to create animated films was considered an unremarkable by-product of the filmmaking process. In those days, long before Pixar, the physical art-making materials were considered to be more valuable than anything that could be drawn onto them. Cel washers cleaned the sheets of celluloid onto which characters were inked and painted so that the cels could be reused in the following film. Unwilling to store them, studios routinely burned animation drawings and backgrounds in dumpsters. Disney, which proved savvier than other studios, sold its production cels at Disneyland in the 1950s alongside more conventional offerings of hot dogs and mouse-ear hats. Disney was also the first studio to create an archive of its work, and today, their Animation Research Library (ARL) holds more than 65 million pieces.
The Pixar Living Archive began with a suggestion from Jonas Rivera, who proposed the idea while working as the art department coordinator on A Bug’s Life. One of his earlier tasks had been packing up Toy Story artwork and shipping it to Disney’s ARL. He felt the studio should keep its artwork in-house as a reference and inspirational resource and, beginning with A Bug’s Life, Pixar’s art has never left the company. (The Toy Story artwork returned, too, after Disney purchased Pixar in 2006.)
When John Lasseter worked at Disney in the early 1980s, Disney’s animation art archive was called “The Morgue.” Pixar’s “Living Archive” moniker intentionally sends a different message. “It’s a place where artists can go to see the art, touch it, and in certain instances, even borrow the work,” said Christine Freeman. Within Pixar’s Emeryville campus, a small room serves as an office and processing center for the archives. The majority of the artwork, however, is housed in a four-story office building in a nondescript industrial neighborhood around the Port of Oakland. Buildings and areas within buildings at Pixar are named after New York neighborhoods, and the archives are called “Ellis Island” after the famous island in New York Harbor that housed the records of millions of immigrants entering the United States.
The archivists at Pixar who have been charged with protecting this irreplaceable trove of artwork take their work seriously. They spend hours working on disaster recovery plans and collaborate with third-party experts to prepare for catastrophes, a necessary precaution in the infamously earthquake-prone San Francisco Bay Area. “I like to think we’re pretty prepared,” Freeman said. For starters, water is routed to the perimeter of the building so that pipes that could leak or cause floods don’t hang overhead. The more insidious threat to archives is fire—a warehouse fire started by an electrical fault destroyed much of Aardman Animations’ archives in 2005—which is why Pixar chooses to keep its materials in a building that has a waterless fire suppression system. Should a fire erupt, bursts of a colorless, odorless halocarbon called heptafluoropropane will flood the archives, snuffing out the fire while keeping the artwork safe and secure. The facility is climate controlled with humidity maintained at an average of 50 percent (plus or minus 5 percent) and temperature at 70 degrees (plus or minus 2 percent), a stable environment that slows the natural deterioration of art materials.
To the viewer seeing a film for the first time, Buzz has always been Buzz, and Woody has always been Woody. We cannot imagine these characters looking and behaving any other way. But the archives at Pixar reveal a circuitous development period composed of an infinite number of Buzzes and Woodys. It is an exhaustive process whittling myriad possibilities into the endearing and distinctive personalities that eventually appear on screen.
The same holds true for a film’s setting, which is the focus of this section of the book. The inspirational artwork created by artists allows them to explore ideas for locations unfettered by the restrictions of the computer animation production process. As its title suggests, the art is meant to inspire new ways of thinking about a film. Teddy Newton’s collage studies for The Incredibles were created not to suggest the film’s final look, but to spur thinking about how to incorporate a bold and stylized mid-century design aesthetic. Geefwee Boedoe’s concept studies for A Bug’s Life depict a decorative natural world filled with electric hues of blue and magenta, ants in pure black silhouette, and rhythmic swirls of shapes that neatly tie the frame together. The effect is striking, less concerned with capturing reality than exciting a viewer’s senses. As a film is developed, many such avenues are explored before settling on an approach.
For some films, locations are more easily defined than others. Monsters, Inc. had a long-gestating development because it involved designing an entire world from scratch. Where do monsters live, work, and play are questions that can be answered only by an artist’s imagination. But with the idea of a Southwestern desert landscape firmly implanted for Cars, production designer Bill Cone dedicated most of his concept drawings to figuring out how to visually represent the majestic scale and distinctive light of that setting.
In recent times, the archivists’ job has shifted from storing physical artwork to preserving artwork that has been created digitally. Artists at Pixar are encouraged to work in the medium they feel best suited to the demands of a film, and nowadays many choose to draw and paint directly on the computer. Working digitally can be especially useful as a film advances deeper into production, since it allows the artists’ work to accurately reflect the finished look of the film. Paul Topolos’s digital illustration for WALL•E, created at an advanced stage of the film’s production, would have been difficult to recreate with traditional media.
The artwork created over the last twenty-five years at Pixar is proudly displayed inside of the studio and is made available to the public in books such as this one. In 2005, the exhibition Pixar: 20 Years of Animation debuted at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the show has since continued on a global tour across London, Tokyo, Melbourne, Helsinki, Seoul, Taipei, Singapore, and Oakland. A newly curated Pixar: 25 Years of Animation exhibition began its world tour in Hong Kong in 2011. The principals at Pixar recognize the value of preserving this artwork, which tells the story not only of how the studio’s films were created, but of Pixar itself. Each piece acknowledges an unwavering commitment on the part of the studio’s artists to discover the strongest way of expressing a story’s visual possibilities.
