Towards Infinity And Beyond Branding, Reputation, and the Critical Reception of Pixar Animation Studios

American author and journalist Jonah Lehrer declared in 2012 that Pixar Animation Studios was ‘the one exception’ to the oft-cited maxim that, in Hollywood, ‘nobody knows anything.’ Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times spoke in similar terms in 2008, writing that, ‘critics and audiences are in agreement on one key thing: Nobody makes better movies than Pixar.’ Thirteen consecutive global box office successes and scores of industry awards would seem to suggest that Lehrer and Goldstein are correct. Yet it is important to recognise that such statements invariably refer to something intangible, something beyond a particular Pixar film or selection of films. There exists, in other words, a widely held set of meanings and associations about what the studio represents, and to whom. This thesis argues that this set of meanings and associations – Pixar’s brand identity – is far from the fixed and unambiguous entity it is often seen to be. If the studio has come to be seen as guarantee of quality family entertainment, when did this notion become widespread? Have the parameters for ‘quality’ and ‘success’ remained constant throughout its history? I demonstrate for instance that Pixar benefited considerably from Disney’s wavering reputation from the late-1990s onwards. I approach branding as a discursive process, and one that brand producers sometimes have little control over, contrary to the implicit claims of most marketing literature. Broadly chronological in structure, the thesis traces the development of the studio’s reputation by drawing on Barbara Klinger’s approach to historical reception studies. Individual chapters focus on how Pixar was discussed by critics and journalists at specific moments or in specific contexts, as it evolved from a computer graphics company to become the most celebrated film studio of all time. Ultimately, this is a case study of the cultural work involved in the making of a brand or an auteur, and how these meanings can shift over time

The Art of Animation: How Animation is Creating a Better Film Industry

With the progression of streaming services in recent years, the art form of animation has gained traction, continuing to develop into exceedingly creative forms through the work of talented artists. Animation has developed alongside the film industry, achieving great success in the process. This thesis will define animation and its place within visual effects, critically analyze categories of character design, theme, and story while demonstrating their relationship with animation, and contrast animation with live action films to understand its strengths and differentiations. The research concludes that animation has great benefits to offer the film industry and should be continued to be explored as a respected and viable form of artistic expression

Remembering Nostalgia : Trends of Nostalgia within contemporary animated films

The use of 2D animations visual designs within contemporary 3D animated films has become a vastly more popular and far-reaching trend, with big animation companies like Pixar and Disney, releasing several films since 1995 that reveal a re-emergence of 2D nostalgia in main-stream animation. I believe this is a result of a desire in audiences for a more nostalgic aesthetics, in the form of 2D aesthetics in the character designs and overall style choices within contemporary 3D animated films. I will endeavour to explore this trend within this research report by discussing two films from director Brad Bird, The Iron Giant (1999) and The Incredibles (2004), that I feel explore this contemporary trend of nostalgia specifically within the animation industry, stressing the importance of the visual signifiers that I believe incorporate this current trend of nostalgia. This paper does not, however, look at nostalgia as a broad based cultural phenomenon, but rather looks at the aesthetics of nostalgia specifically in terms of my two case studies and feature film animation. To do this, this paper will look to define nostalgia in terms of animation, exploring the sentimental nostalgia that I believe is evident in my two case studies, after which it will look at the history of 2D and 3D animation, and how the developments within these two mediums made the aesthetic of my case studies possible. The majority of this paper will be dedicated to discussing my chosen case studies in terms of the visual indicators of nostalgia that can be found within them. Throughout this paper, I will attempt to show that the aesthetic of these two films is a direct result of the nostalgia that contemporary audiences and animation studios have for a specific style of animation and the lifestyle associated with it, from a time that embodies this: 1950s and 60s America.GR201

Spartan Daily, March 21, 2000

Volume 114, Issue 38https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9535/thumbnail.jp

Drawing from motion capture : developing visual languages of animation

The work presented in this thesis aims to explore novel approaches of combining motion capture with drawing and 3D animation. As the art form of animation matures, possibilities of hybrid techniques become more feasible, and crosses between traditional and digital media provide new opportunities for artistic expression. 3D computer animation is used for its keyframing and rendering advancements, that result in complex pipelines where different areas of technical and artistic specialists contribute to the end result. Motion capture is mostly used for realistic animation, more often than not for live-action filmmaking, as a visual effect. Realistic animated films depend on retargeting techniques, designed to preserve actors performances with a high degree of accuracy. In this thesis, we investigate alternative production methods that do not depend on retargeting, and provide animators with greater options for experimentation and expressivity. As motion capture data is a great source for naturalistic movements, we aim to combine it with interactive methods such as digital sculpting and 3D drawing. As drawing is predominately used in preproduction, in both the case of realistic animation and visual effects, we embed it instead to alternative production methods, where artists can benefit from improvisation and expression, while emerging in a three-dimensional environment. Additionally, we apply these alternative methods for the visual development of animation, where they become relevant for the creation of specific visual languages that can be used to articulate concrete ideas for storytelling in animation

The Magic Behind the Magic: Discovering Why The Walt Disney Company is so Successful

One might not realize the empire standing behind the brand name “Disney” and what has gone into the creation of such a multifaceted business model that is leading the industry. While Disney, officially called The Walt Disney Company, has hand-crafted every element of the magical experiences and creations they put forward, there is an underlying business model and leadership skill-set that has brought the company ahead of the rest. It is within the social sciences that we can focus on this model and how it affects the rest of the film and mass media companies who strive to mimic the enterprise that is second to none. I argue that there is a “magic,” a defining factor, behind the constructed ‘magic’ Disney puts forward. Concepts from both disciplines, communications, and leadership studies, can be examined and applied to the enterprise by looking at what sets it apart, defining it as the most powerful entertainment brand in the world. According to Business Insider and extensive research, “Disney is not only powerful because of its recent purchases: It benefits from a long and established history.

The Cowl - v.79 - n.10 - Nov 13, 2014

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 79 - No. 10 - November 13, 2014. 20 pages

Animation or Cartoons: An American Dilemma

This project attempts to elucidate the connection between animation and preconceptions about appropriate age demographics in the United States. It endeavors to demonstrate that animation has primarily remained a children’s medium because of contingent contextual factors, rather than elements inherent to the medium, and that its evolution over time is proof of its merits as a medium. Through an exploration of the Golden Age of animation between the late 1930s and the late 1950s, as well as an exploration of animation between 1988 and the present, it uses various examples within film, television, and theatrical shorts to show limitations placed on the medium. These limitations caused the medium to be marketed towards children and to be perceived as being only for children, creating a paradigm in which more mature explorations were infrequent. Both the preconceptions and the consequences of the contextual factors that caused this remain to this day, but American animation’s history has provided evidence that these strictures are not inescapable

Animating Aesthetics: Pixar and Digital Culture

In the pre-digital age of cinema, animated and live-action film shared a technological basis in photography and they continue to share a basis in digital technology. This fact limits the capacity for technological inquiries to explain the persistent distinction between animated and live-action film, especially when many scholars in film and media studies agree that all moving image media are instances of animation. Understanding the distinction in aesthetic terms, however, illuminates how animation reflexively addresses aesthetic experience and its function within contexts of technological, environmental, and socio-cultural change. “Animating Aesthetics: Pixar and Digital Culture” argues that the aesthetics that perpetuate the idea of animation as a distinct mode in a digital media environment are particularly evident in the films produced by Pixar Animation Studios. As the first studio to produce a fully computer-generated animated film, Pixar has had a large and lasting influence on the standardization of computer animation. Rather than relegate animation to the domain of children’s entertainment or obfuscate its distinction from live action film, this critical study of Pixar demonstrates how its films build on an aesthetic tradition that interrogates nature, challenges epistemological stability, and explores the effects of technological change. This study includes investigations into the uncanny integrity of digital commodities in the Toy Story films, the technological sublime in Monsters, Inc., the exceptionality of the fantastic in The Incredibles, and sensorial disruption in Ratatouille. Each chapter explores aesthetic experience and how it operates as a contested domain in which norms and values are challenged, reconfigured, but also reproduced. Overall, this dissertation demonstrates how popular animated media can engage contemporary philosophical questions about how we know the world, how we understand technology and our environment, and, finally, how aesthetics are fundamental to humanistic inquiry and critical thought

Can Computers Create Art?

This essay discusses whether computers, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), could create art. First, the history of technologies that automated aspects of art is surveyed, including photography and animation. In each case, there were initial fears and denial of the technology, followed by a blossoming of new creative and professional opportunities for artists. The current hype and reality of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools for art making is then discussed, together with predictions about how AI tools will be used. It is then speculated about whether it could ever happen that AI systems could be credited with authorship of artwork. It is theorized that art is something created by social agents, and so computers cannot be credited with authorship of art in our current understanding. A few ways that this could change are also hypothesized.Comment: to appear in Arts, special issue on Machine as Artist (21st Century