Animated Storytellers: A Pixar Animation Studios Profile

Trevor Hogg has begun a 3-part series on the rise to prominence of Pixar Animation Studios, and in the first part gets into amazing background on the creation of the company and their near collapse in 1991.

After five consecutive years of financial loses, Pixar laid off 30 of its 72 employees in 1991. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a major problem for the company was “that its software technology exceeds the capabilities of the available hardware.” Pixar was too advanced for its time. Attempting to stop the monetary bleeding, Steve Jobs shutdown all of the company’s projects outside of commercials and the development of RenderMan.

On the verge of an economic collapse, Pixar was thrown a fiscal lifeline when it was approached by Disney about transforming Tin Toy into a big screen production.

via Animated Storytellers: A Pixar Animation Studios Profile (Part 1) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .