Pixar Canada Officially Open!
Although they’re still in temporary offices in downtown Vancouver as they finalize a permanent, 20,000 sq ft. home, Pixar has released a video today announcing their official arrival in Canada! 18 year old me is pretty excited right now, while 8 year old me fainted before he had a chance to check the video out on CTV’s website, which for some reason is against embedding videos (we all know that embedding is why NO ONE has ever heard of YouTube…), which not only features John Lasseter, Ed Catmull, and the executive team at Pixar Canada discussing the new studio, but shows various classic characters discovering the city.
Like I said, I’m obviously pretty excited. Not just that Pixar’s in the country, but that they’re in the same city, when they could have hit up Montréal— the main reasons for Vancouver seem to be taxes, the matching timezone for working with the mothership, and the fact that there’s a huge talent pool here looking for work.
Here’s hoping it all works out in the long run, this is going to be a huge deal for the vfx/animation community at large here.
Thanks to /Film for the find!
So in addition to our show now being on iTunes (subscribe here!), episode two is now up for your listening + viewing enjoyment. This week, as made apparent by the album art, we did a commentary for Pixar’s “Up”.
So if you have any small children who insist on watching this on a constant loop, you’re in luck. Enjoy.
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Pete Docter’s 1 min. pitch for the original Monsters, Inc.
I’m a sucker for a great story. Enough that I want to build my whole career on storytelling, in fact. So when someone inherently great at it, like speakers on The Moth, This American Life, or say, Oscar-winning screenwriter and Pixar feature director Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc., Up) throws one our way, I get pretty engrossed and excited about it.
On a new episode of Jeff Goldsmith’s Creative Screenwriting Magazine Podcast (a show great for so many reasons that I won’t get into here), Pete Docter and the eternally entertaining Bob Peterson sat down to talk about Up and their own histories for an altogether too-short 1 hour, 12 minute podcast.
About 22 minutes in, while talking about how much films change over the course of their development, Jeff pressed Pete for what the story of Monsters, Inc. originally was. While I love Monsters, Inc. in a big way, the film he described sounded pretty amazing, and one I’d still love to see in the future. I highly recommend listening to the minute-long audio file in this post, but, if you can’t access it for whatever reason, I’ve transcribed it here below. And make sure to check out and subscribe to the free Creative Screenwriting Magazine Podcast so you don’t miss an episode of insights, stories, and fantastic interviews with screenwriters from every genre. Also in this episode is Pete + Bob confirming that they’re currently developing their next film together.
“Well, my idea was that what it was about was about a 30 year old man who is like an accountant or something, he hates his job, and one day he gets a book with some drawings in it that he did when he was a kid from his mom, and he doesn’t think anything of it and he puts it on the shelf and that night, monsters show up. And nobody else can see them. He thinks he’s starting to go crazy, they follow him to his job, and on his dates, and all this— and it turns out these monsters are fears that he never dealt with as a kid. And each one of them represents a different kind of fear. As he conquers those fears, the guys who he slowly becomes kind of friends with— they disappear as he conquers those fears. It’s this bittersweet kinda ending where they go away, and so not much of that stayed
[…]
it sounds better as a pitch than it did at the time— anyway. “
I’m down.
Other recent Pixar-related stuff on my blog: Pixar University and Wall-E/Buy’n’Large easter eggs in the Toy Story 3 trailer!
How we look at it is we want to reverse the pressure. I want to make these films to never be driven by what a consumer products [department] thinks they should be, but rather what the story should be. If you make a good film it’s like going on a nice holiday. You will want a souvenir.
Up producer Jonas Rivera on the challenge of merchandising the film.
Ok so this is kinda old news by now, but I’m writing this on the 8th, to be published later as I’m pretty busy with exams and all.
That said, from SlashFilm.com:
At the licensing fair in Las Vegas, Disney/Pixar revealed to buyers behind closed doors that they have yet another sequel in the works. Despite what Brad Bird said on stage at WonderCon two years ago, Pixar is now in the sequel business. Cars 2, Toy Story 3, and now Monsters Inc 2. According to Jim Hill, buyers who attended these limited preview sessions were sworn to secrecy by Disney officials, but several have confirmed that Pete Docter will be following up Up with a sequel to Monsters, Inc.
YESS. Monster’s Inc. 2. While I can’t imagine what this would be about and think that the first film was pretty much self-contained, I do love the film so very much, and feel like the post-UP Pete Docter is an even more mature filmmaker than he was 12 years before the sequel is expected to hit (and, on the standard Pixar 5-year dev. cycle, ~17 years after he started work on the first film. For reference, Pixar was still in a fire-hazardous spread of small building over an area of nothern California, nowhere near the beautiful campus they have now)
The first still to come out of Pixar’s new short film, “Partly Cloudy”. Notice the fact that the cloud is also a full character w/ a nose, eyes, etc. Go on. Notice it.
Ben Burtt's Awesome 30 min. Presentation on the Sound of Wall•E
Video of Ben Burtt - sound designer of the lightsaber, Darth Vader, and Indiana Jones giving a 30 minute presentation at Pixar on how he crafted the sounds of Wall•E. Includes a great Q&A session as well.
