I am studying Pixar as a project in my film studies lessons at school and have come across the question, is it possible to define a "Pixar style"? :confused: I would be very grateful of any replies on this question as it would help me alot! thanks :) :)
from a non-tech perspective id call it vivid, crisp, border realisitic
pixars style is to make very good quality cgi that could be used in films like star wars except use this cgi quality to make cartoons.I think they are trying to not be that realistic and still have that cartoony element.
if you look at the design through out the history of the different pixar movies, they are actually very different. The style is really more linked to the individual people who made the movie. Incredibles for examble screams Brad Bird rather then the previous pixar films.
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except that star wars sucked. also i think with every film there is probably an evolutionary jump in the tech they use.
Very true, on both points. The under lining character of the Pixar films is the quality of the work, even through the advancement in the techknowledge they use. Any person would be hard pressed to name a Pixar title that could be thought of as a stinker.
Lucasfilm and Pixar both strive to create believable environments, although Pixar's environments are a little less detailed (The Incredible's jungle fight scenes notwithstanding).
Even as far as story goes, Pixar and Lucasfilm both do a great job.
The difference is in dialog: the spoken word. Pixar just destroys Lucasfilm on this point. Pixar characters don't step all over their tongues delivering unbelievable dialog.
Are you comparing visual quality or script quality? In that case, it isn't really worth comparing companies at all, but rather the directors/writers involved in the projects.
Personally, I thought Nemo was about as big a stinker as it gets, going along the lines of why Disney's studios ultimately closed (going with the argument that poor scripts and not 2D is what ultimately closed down their 2D facilities). If it wasn't so pretty it'd barely be watchable at all.
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Lucasfilm has created in my opinion some of the worse CGI since the prequels began. The first one they made was still allright but it has been downhill from there. in almost every aspect. CGI, Character design, script, narrative. name it.
Pixar on the other hand goes from one strength to another. not only is the technology getting better and better but so is their story telling. im just dissapointed they havent gotten involved in special fx for film as of yet.
another big difference is Lucasfilm is dining out on what it did decades ago and got fat on merchandise money (like no one else before or probably since) instead of going forward they went sideways.
I agree. At some point, the merchandising stopped feeding the movies and the movies just fed the merchandiging. Let's add another bar scene, because it's a way to get a whole bunch of aliens in one place so we can make figures of them. Don't wanna run out of figure opportunities. Hey, everybody wants Wookiee stuff, let's go to Planet Wookiee. Aw, we'll write it into the plot somehow. Yoda never goes anywhere, let's send him to Planet Wookiee. Yeah, yeah, and he knows Chewbacca from way back. They went to Yale. Then we can have Wookiee ships and guns and masks and action figures.
Lucas was brilliant when he worked out the deal for licensing that he did for Star Wars. If it wasn't for that stroke of genius (he admitted himself he never saw this coming - he thought he's sell some posters at cons, and that was about it), we wouldn't have LucasArts or Industrial Light and Magic or Skywalker Sound or THX. But then they started "adjusting" the movie content to create more marketing opportunities. In the end, SW:EpIII was nothing more than a 2 hour CGI toy commercial.
precisely. he just lucked into the merchandising. the studio didnt see the potential so they let him have it. go figure
i think you guys are being geeks about this.Star wars's cgi was fine and had nothing wrong with it.If you dont like the film's thats fine but this is about there cgi quality not about story or merchandising.
I think pixar and lucasfilm have very comperable cgi except pixar is much lesser detailed to give there characters that cartoon effect.Its like brad bird said he didnt want stubble or anything on mr.incredible because if he did it would be too realisic.
That was my point as well Thunderbot. I think if you look at the progression from Episode I to Episode III the quality in the CGI was a dramatic improvement. It wasn't perfect, but quite a bit of it did look very good. My biggest complaint with them is that there was too much visual work on it. It becomes a kind of white noise of explosions and flying debris, but SW isn't alone in that. Virtually every visual FX film out there has this problem (Lord of the Rings definitely had it's moments of "What the hell am I looking at?"). It's a term I've heard called visual diarhea. It leaves the audience wondering what they should be looking at. Terminator 3, Matrix: Revolutions, Lord of the Rings (at least the last 2), Van Helsing, Kingdom of Heaven, and Episode 3, amongst others, all suffered from it at some part of the film or another.
Comparing ILM to Pixar is a bit unfair in that Pixar's level of detail is significantly lower than ILM's (Lucasfilm had nothing to do with the CG by the way). It's kind of like comparing the visual quality of Pixar to Looney Toons. That's a bit of an extreme example, but I imagine you get what I'm saying. There's a huge difference in portraying what's supposed to be real and what's a charicature of real life. Actually, comparing Peanuts to Prince Valiant is a better example.
The difference between a visual style approaching realism and that of one iconizing it is a pretty important distinction. An audience will naturally find the flaws in a film that approaches realism, their minds grappling with what doesn't look right. It's one of the reasons that digital doubles and motion capture are difficult to get to work on anything but long shots and crowds. The missing details, no matter how minute, are amplified because everything else is there. One of the reasons that "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" and "Polar Express" failed to connect with audiences, leaving them feeling like the characters were just stiff maniquinns.
An iconic film making style, like Pixar's or most 2D for that matter, leaves quite a bit up to the audience's imagination. The audience is able to project themselves on to the characters. There wasn't a single realistic looking character in The Incredibles, but at the same time they had some of the most convincing and believable performances of any digital double. Why? Because the audience filled in the gaps. They were over exagerrated, glossing over the fact that it's virtually humanly (and computationally) impossible to animate a character exactly as a real person would move, with all of the facial ticks, subtle mucle movement, cloth, skin, etc.. It has to be good enough that you don't question it, but leave enough to the imagination. It's kind of like a magician getting you to look at one hand waving wildly so you don't notice what the other hand is up to. This is also one of the reasons that Jar Jar stood out so much (again aside from writing). He was an "animated" icon of a character and as a result to fit in with the 'hyper' realism that the rest of the film was going for.
I don't know. I think that you may be letting your anger at George for writing garbage (and using it to sell toys, yet something else that has nothing to do with the FX) get in the way of acknowledging that there was some pretty amazing FX in the newer Star Wars films (especially the last 2). The matte paintings alone are virtually worth paying to go see.
Here's some theoretical questions on Star Wars: Had they not been associated with Star Wars, would you have held them to such close scrutiny? Do you hold to the belief that the first Star Wars movies were awesome, once you take them out of the context for when they were made? Do you think it's a coincidence the most critically acclaimed one (Empire) was the one that George had the least control over? How do you think Return of the Jedi fits into the grand scheme of selling toys, or is it only in the last 3 that it's become a problem? How does nostalgia play into the process of evaluating the quality of a film?
Personally, I doubt the audiences would have gotten much past Episode I if it hadn't been associated with Star Wars. On the other hand, if he hadn't been restricted by the plot line of the originals, it might have had a better chance. But the last two were at least worth watching once, on par with the rest of the poor excuses for SciFi that's been in the theaters the past several years.
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If eps 1-3 hadn't been "Star Wars" movies, they would have been savaged by critics and moviegoers worse than they already were. The uber-fans would have had a field day with the trite story and horrible acting had it not been for their pedigree. If they weren't "Star Wars", they would have been considered the same as "Battlefield Earth". Yep, I said it! :D
I don't buy the "restricted by the plot of the originals" argument. Lucas has been telling us for years that he had all six (plus three more) plotted out waaaay back when. Well, if that's the case, then the "restrictions" of the original three movies would have had no effect on the three trilogies, right? Ya can't have it both ways, George - either they were all plotted out and the plotting was weak, or they were cobbled together on the fly and the treatment story was a cover story. Either way, they are what they are and people can take them or leave them.
If I hadn't lost a bet, I still wouldn't know for a fact how atrocious ep 3 was... Ironically, I sounded like Darth when I lost the bet and had to go to the movie - NOOOOOOOOOO!!!! :D
As you can see from all the post so for, the answer to your question is no...or maybe yes. There is an expectation formed in a person mind when you say the word Pixar. Your are going to have to break down the word style into smaller chunks. The word style is, as you can see by the posts so far, too broad of a word. To pin down the "Pixar style" is going to require that you use a lot of pins.
actually if we were being geeks about this we would be arguing a pro Lucas pov but we arent. there might have been a progression from Epi 1 to Epi 2 but there wasnt much. it seemed campy and overdone with reference to creatures. the fx were just too painted on. to me it always seems that they went backwards instead of going forwards. with Star Wars the originals the fx always seemed to be part of the story while here the story seemed part of the Fx. its like John Woo, he went hollywood, started making movies round the stunts he planned.
I define style as "the result of producing a body of work," simply because you're not always consciously going "OK well I have to fit into this look." That gets tricky here because there are principles of character design, and animation, etc. and they filter down to the better versions of things.
The characters all seem to have the same style eyes...er...they tend to stay in one pose for as long as possible, with minor changes to limb accents.....anticipations are tiny and the move to the next pose is usually PDQ. The movies showcase a lot of experimentation with cloth/fur and helped the practically application of that science grow...(or more on topic with what you want, those design elements were more readily shown off in their characters before others?)...
Try to watch some of them again and look for the consistency you seek.
I think PIXAR definatly has a story telling stlye. Their movies tend to have the theme of letting your children grow up and spread their wings. If it's not a strong theme of the film, "Toy Story 2," "Finding Nemo," "Monster's Inc," "The Incredibles," it's usually there in a subtle sub plot.
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the Ape
...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."
I was just thinking about something similar the other night, weirdly enough.... Didn't Andy have a little sister in the Toy Story movies? Boo's a small child, Nemo's a small child, Jack-Jack, Dot from a Bug's Life...if that counts towards the question....I'm sure there'll be a Mini Cooper, a Mark II Midget, a hatchback, something in Cars =)
Maybe a moped.
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You'll also note that Pixar lets kids be kids. In most Disney films, kids are 1/2 kid, 1/2 adult: Ariel, Simba, Aladdin, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Belle, Jasmine, the Beast. The only kids I can even name are Pinocchio and Chip.
Compare that to Andy, Sid, Boo, Nemo, Violet, Dash and Jack-Jack.
What I mean about kids growing up is kind of a general over-view, and doesn't really apply just to kids. I should've said letting characters stand and spread their wings. Although sometimes you're hit over the head with it like Mike in "Monsters' Inc" saying to Boo, 'Go on... go grow up.'
I guess it's more of a trust thing, which usually goes back to parents trusting their kids to be able to do something. Some examples:
Nemo swims into the net of fish and tells them all to swim down so the fishing boat doesn't haul them in.
Mr. Incredible, trusting his wife and kids in the final battle that they can hold their own, and that he can't always protect them and that they can protect themselves.
The ant colony trusting in Flick's plan, even though they think it's the 'Warrior Bugs' plan.
Boo no longer being scared of Randal in "Monsters' Inc."
Those are just a few examples.
For a visual style, the characters always tend to have very large eyes. PIXAR does this because they take great pride in having their facial acting come across. They do tend to have a very bright color pallet as well, but what they do very well is bring in atmosphere. They link their colors to the mood of the shot. A great example of this is the begining of "The Incredibles." The whole action sequence of Mr. I stopping different bad guys starts off in bright daylight with him stopping the bank robbers with the tree signaling the peek of the super heros. As that sequence progresses and he causes more and more damage, hurting the suicide jumpper, hurting the people on the train, the day progresses into sun set, visually matching the twilight of the super heros. No other studio does this, or does this quite as well as PIXAR does.
Oh, and George can't write or direct a movie to save his life. He really needs to learn that, just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Visual diarhea indeed! Just look how he ruined the first three Star Wars movies.
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the Ape
...we must all face a choice, between what is right... and what is easy."
Agreed. I'll repeat this, but I don't think it's a coincidence that the best Star Wars movie was the one that George had the least control over. But I don't think that necessarily implies that the art or VFX were poor, just that they had a poor story holding them together.
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You're still confusing the story with the FX, and I'd agree the movies as a whole weren't very good, but the FX were on par and better than alot out there. Have you seen Ep 1 or 2 recently to comapare to the 3rd recently? The diffence in visual quality between the 1st and the 3rd is a dramatic improvement (as is the difference between the 1st and 2nd).
The visual style also to some degree, was calculated to match the matte painting look of the originals. The cloud city in Empire, Courusant in the new films, both have a very similar look, amongst others. Jabba's Palace, the Ewoks, the Jawa's, and the cantina weren't campy? There's just more of it in the recent ones (going back to my visual diahrea theory), and the story tends to get in it's own way. Sure Jar Jar sucked goat balls, but there was alot more going on in the films beyond Jar Jar (especially after EP1) As Yoda might say, "Clouded by nostalgia this one has become."
I can respect that you don't like the visual style, each to their own, but I still think that you are being overly critical because you didn't like the films as a whole. Being able to separate whether you like something from appreciating the quality and work that went into it can be difficult.
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actually im not being overtly critical. one of the things that turned me off was the special fx. i was never too into the script and i wasnt expecting much from Lucas so there wasnt any issues there.
on re-thinking i think it IS unfair to compare Pixar and LucasArts but the special FX were still quite shoddy. especially the red tinged background scenes of the city backdrop. that was horribly executed. they might have been going for a look but they were in no way faithful to the look of the original (and im not an insane purist fan)
its basically like Joel Schumacher raping Batman.
What city was this? Do you mean the lava planet?
And yeah, George said he had all three plotted out, but he didn't actually write them until the previous one was finished. I won't argue that they were good movies, they definitely weren't. But I will stick with my argument that there were some very good FX in there. I firmly believe that most people were looking for holes in the films (in all FX films) and have become Uber-nerds, unable to let anything slide. 20 years ago this stuff would have been fantastic (again, not talking about script here), but now with DVD's everyone can become a VFX expert by going through a movie frame by frame and tear it apart and become super critics of the genre: "Arm Chair VFX Supes" if you will. Only letting movies that were actually good slide past on a wave of euphoria from an actually decent script in the theaters. The rest have to stand up to an analysis of the tiniest of details that no movie would be capable of standing up to. I doubt we'd be having this discussion if people thought Ep 1-3 were good movies.
Why not bring up LOTR, Spider Man, or Pirates of the Caribean, there were plenty of horrible FX in there, many of them weren't even fixed when the fixed it for the DVD? Most likely because they were good movies we overlook the other problems. Why not bring up Alexander? Similar in scale in some respects (at least some of the battles), not a particularly good movie, and the FX weren't great, but it didn't leave people with the visceral anger that they feel after their rosy, child hood memories of Star Wars were besmirched by George's feeble attempts at a revisiting the story line. Ep3 left people bored or angry, so they start to look for the holes that are in all of these movies and then blow them out of proportion. There are plenty of movies and musicians that I don't particularly like (some even hate) but can respect them for the talent that went into making their art. I'm not sure anyone here has been able to separate their tastes from an assesment of quality.
When the preview for King Kong came online the message boards were filled with people complaining that a couple of frames of the dinosaur didn't quite match the quality of Jurassic Park! A COUPLE OF FRAMES!
I think if anything the SFX these days suffer most from over critical fans (of FX) with nothing more to do than debate subtle hues rather than take in the big picture. I don't think there was a single non-FX shot in Ep 3. Virtually every set was extended virtually, and no one notices, because it was good. Virtually every camera was manipulated in post to do a camera move virtually, no one knows. They point out the mistakes on the really hard stuff or didn't like a particular ship's design and say the ALL of the movie's SFX were bad. Master and Commander didn't win an Oscar for VFX because it was so good no one could tell what had been done on the FX (aside from the storm sequence).
EP3 wasn't a great, or good for that matter, movie (and only good in parts where no one was actually saying anything), and the SFX weren't perfect (I haven't seen a movie with perfect FX yet), but there were quite a few good things about what the movie did accomplish, it's just the errors that stand out. The opening space battle looked particularly good (if a little too chaotic), any of the close ups of the robots looked very good, tactile, the matte painting look of Corusant looked very close to the originals (it only looks out of place in the context of modern movies that don't use matte paintings like that).
Don't let your hatred of George and what he's done to your child hood nostalgia get in way of enjoying that there is some very good work in the recent films. You unfortunately have to sit through attrocious dialogue and stiff acting to get to it.
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Kdid. i was talking bout the normal planet where they have the assembly and stuff and chancellor dude lives.
im going to completely separate writing from the FX.
Alexander i havent seen, the thing with it was that it was rushed through to release i think in a few weeks after it was shot. why they gambled with a $100million flick like this i will never know.
i have only watched the Star Wars flicks in the theatre and havent repeatedly watched them to criticse them as a VFx expert.
the entire film like a wet dream for an Fx guy excpet it seems they had kids doing most of the stuff. there have been quite a few films that had vfx and it was well executed Gladiator comes to mind.
my point is you take some films like 2001 Space Od and u see the level of work that was putout in times when these digital art luxuries werent around and the work stands up while you take your most modern stuff and a lot of it just falls flat.
The Acad Awards jury know a little more than most people about special fx but regardless the Fx isnt the film the film is the film (if that makes any sense) which is why i would consider the subtle stuff you cant catch like what they have done for Oliver Twist to be great work.
Im sure there is a lot of stuff LucasArts did well but its just that as a whole it was weak and wasnt a great visual experience.
i think they overdid it and none of their present films are as fun to watch as the old star wars. plain truth. that.
the only one thing i liked in the entire series was the ending of the Epi 1 with the parade (a lot like the one in which Cleopatra comes to Rome) and in context of writing they had a great character like Darth Maul and they did absolutely nothing with it.
Thank you to everyone for your replies to my question :) if you have any more ideas then keep posting, thanks :)
Lizzard. I have to agree with you on the point that switching to digital from a miniature stand point hasn't been good for the FX industry.
With a few exceptions, like my personal fav The Matrix (the original), digital FX have added little to the landscape of film. I'm becomming more and more disenchanted with the whole industry (and I work in it!). There was and still is, something magical about watching the original King Kong, Sinbad, or even the orignal Star Wars (pre-re-release). The unworldly look of it allowed you to disassociate yourself from the 'reality'. Now everything is so close to reality (or hyper reality) that your mind can only begin to find flaws in it, going back to the theory I mentioned earlier on iconic imagery vs. realistic imagery*
One of the real problems in the FX industry (and this is a personal theory) is the availability of the digital viewing station. A shot can be looped up and watched over and over instantly. Previously, there was some built in 'wait' period as the film or tape had to be rewound. Now a shot, sometimes shorter than a second even with head and tail, can be watched repeatedly.
What ends up happening is the VFX Supe and all of his/her minions watch it once, most of the time without comment. Watch it a second time, sometimes they'll catch a problem, that's fine, that's what their supposed to do. But when it takes 8-10 viewings pausing periodically, playing it back slow, to notice that a shadow isn't quite the right shade of blue for 5 or six frames, then there's a problem. They end up noodling away on a shot that should have been finaled weeks ago, focusing on minute details that the audience will never notice.
The FX industry has become miopic to an extreme, loosing track of the big picture. It's one of the ways you end up with a movie like Terminator 3, where a good portion of the action sequences are a non-sensical mess of flying debris or Matrix Revolutions where the siege just looked like a mass of shiny black liquid, and the new Star Wars films definitely had this problem. Each frame is a beautiful masterpiece, worthy of a still in the making of book, but when you play them all together, there's just too much detail and information for the viewer to take in. The equivalent of visual white noise.
The orignal Star Wars (and all SFX films around that time frame) couldn't put that level of detail in, but it worked out for them, because it let the audience take it in and fill in the 'gaps'. A much more fulfilling experience for the audience members.
*If you're interested in reading more about iconic vs. realistic theory, I HIGHLY recommend Scott McLeod's Understanding Comics. This is one of those books that should be mandatory reading for any filmmaker/animator/graphic artist or anyone planning on making a living using images.
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i think the audience has the lost "how the f*** did they do that" factor. now its like oh they just blue screened it or they just painted it, oh thats just CGI. hell if someone actually did something now they would go the other way and say its CGI as well.
i think movies are fast losing the wow factor now because all of the imagery is becoming easy to portray(and i say that with great respect for the vfx industry).
i think once this reaches a point where the audience gets sick of vfx it will spark a move towards the older movies of people like Scorcese and DePalma and the French exisential cinema where it will be more character and story driven rather than set driven.
but the thing is there are quite a few people who are making cracking use of vfx (Sin City) although Rodriguez made some really horrible stuff in his spy kids flicks.
you also have vfx being used like they are in Batman Begins, Oliver Twist, Gladiator, subtle stuff.
or maybe movies will lose their prominence all together to video games and we will see a shift all together (runs and ducks)
There is a Pixar style in the same sense that there was a Schlesinger style (Looney Tunes et al) and a Disney Studios style and a Hanna-Barbera style. That is, all cartoons done in one studio are going to have a similar appearance because they usually use many of the same people from project to project.
What really determines the "style" - more importantly than the company that produces the movie - are the directors, animators, and designers working on that movie; and when Dindal or Bird and their crews move from studio to studio, they're going to take some of their "style" with them.
If you didn't know who produced Shark Tale or Bug's Life or Ice Age or Over The Hedge or Monsters Inc. or Madagascar, I doubt you could identify which studios they all came from.
That said, Pixar's stuff usually has a more cutesy, toddler-friendly look and movement to it.