Pixar Animation Studios: Home of the Toys

Over in "Frogtown," the chief technology officer is munching on a veggie burrito, musing on the emotional motivation of Jessie the Cowgirl, Woody's new sidekick in Toy Story 2. Across the street in "Bugville," the corporate headquarters, the Oscar-winning director of TS2 is trying to keep his four sons from tearing up a rare Woody marionette, one of at least 200 toys, dolls and action figures stuffed into his tiny office. Down the hall past the "Batcave," their boss was recently spotted interviewing CFO candidates while dressed in shorts, his shoeless feet propped up on the desk. Soon a former circus juggler will be leading visitors through a sculpting class in the Annex, where they will come across the newly hired CFO on her lunch hour. She is slapping clay on a wire figure while studying a live, totally nude model.

Is this any way to run a $2 billion business?

It is if you're Pixar Animation Studios, the hottest place on the planet these days for computer animators. For 60 years, Disney owned animation, from Snow White to The Lion King. But when Toy Story 2 opens this Thanksgiving, upstart Pixar will seal its place as the new standard bearer of heart-warming stories for kids and parents. What's more, it's being done on computer and outside Hollywood.

The studio's first two computer-generated hits, 1995's Toy Story and last year's A Bug's Life, are already among the Top 5-grossing animated films of all time. Monsters, Inc., its fourth feature-length film, is set for 2001. "Pixar is about movies with heart, humor, action--and visuals like you've never seen before," says director John Lasseter, the company's resident creative genius.

Walking into the 13-year-old movie studio--crammed into a nondescript office complex outside San Francisco--is like entering a Fellini film, with wacky characters and even wackier settings: circus-striped umbrellas, fake mustache collections, kitschy dolls, TV memorabilia.

The 430 denizens who work here include a European rock star and a co-founder of the Flying Karamazov Brothers, as well as a dozen or more Ph.D.s. Job descriptions are fluid: chief technical officer Ed Catmull, one of the true pioneers of computer graphics, now heads up the story-development department. "There aren't a lot of closed doors," says TS2 co-director Ash Brannon, 29. "I can't think of another place where people feel so free." Or so involved. Everybody at Pixar is a "filmmaker," including Greg Brandeau, who runs the 1,700 computer processors known collectively as the RenderFarm.

The one guy who's oddly hesitant to call himself a filmmaker is Pixar's chairman and CEO, Steve Jobs. With Apple consuming so much time these days, he is rarely at the studio--which is just fine by employees, who both fear and respect him. The truth is that without Jobs, who bought the company from director George Lucas in 1986 and now owns nearly 65%, Pixar would simply not exist. He is credited with wangling an extraordinary fifty-fifty profit-sharing deal with Disney in 1997 for five pictures. "It's his vision. He's the real deal," says Thomas Schumacher, president of Walt Disney Feature Animation. While Lasseter and Catmull handle the moviemaking, Jobs strategizes--creating, for instance, the new 15-acre "campus" in nearby Emeryville, scheduled to open in 2000.