Pixar has always been at the leading edge of animated children’s entertainment. Here are somethings that they have really done right to stay above all of the rest.

As you all know when the film Wall E came out all of the leading employees of Pixar all met up for a lunch where they wrote all of the most well known Pixar movies in one afternoon.  This is simply amazing to see that much material last so long.  Over all Pixar spends a lot of time working on their projects that can take years to make.  What makes this process so long is that spend a lot of time just on concept art.  If you were to look at the original concept art for Toy Story all of the characters look so much more different than the end result. 

Image via Wikipedia

Motion Capture

Most companies use motion capture to bring a sense of realism when animating characters but Pixar prides themselves on not using this type of technology.  There are days of video that animators made of themselves acting out scenes so that they can make it seem as realistic as possible which is a great thing.  Even if something may be realistic sometimes with different dimensions it won’t look quite right and as an animator they must be ready to fix that.  In toys are going to move and act different than human beings and they capture that very well.

Great Software and Hardware

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Pixar uses a program specially made by called Renderman, it is academy award winning software that allows  workers even further in satisfy the needs of the animators rather than being stuck with typical programs such as: zbrush, maya and motionbuilder.  This program creates a successful rendering pipeline, and also allows artists to control reflections from water and light sources much more efficiently.  The rendering process when working on a project can be a very painstaking process infact animators spend the majority of their time waiting for projects to render and that is why Pixar also keeps the most up to date computers.  On Newegg.com for a week long deal you could buy the exact same video cards that Pixar uses (yes they were custom made for Pixar!) which were on sale for $3,000 dollars and in each computer you would find TWO of these video cards.  Half of the time an animator is working it is generally spent either problem solving or rendering work and this can drastically cut time down.

The most important thing they do right!

Pixar is best at targeting a dual audience in their movies.  There has never been a group more successful than Pixar at doing exactly that.  When parents go see a movie with their children and normally they are not entertained but when they see a Pixar movie there is a child like character that kids can enjoy as well as a great storyline that deals with a subject close to the parents viewing the movie.  Finding Nemo which is obviously about fish to children has a plot that parents can relate too about being too controlling to a parent and people really emotionally relate to that.  Without this necessary component Pixar would not exist as well as they do.  They are good at making good stories, they use great technology, and have a great staff that care very much about what they do.  Walt Disney always wanted to follow an idea when he made Disneyland to have something that children and parents could both enjoy together and Pixar definitely managed to run with this idea very well.