Lightning In A Bottle

Imagine a movie studio that produces nothing but blockbuster films, wins lots of Academy Awards, and controls its actors with the push of a button.

If those actors are toys, bugs and monsters, you could only be talking about one place - Pixar Animation Studios, the most progressive and successful computer animation studio of our day.

Their hit films “Toy Story,” “Toy Story 2,” “A Bug's Life” and “Monsters, Inc.” earned well over $1.5 billion in less than 10 years. This is certainly cause for Pixar to have once been labeled “lightning in a bottle.”

They are also the creative minds behind this year's big hit, "Finding Nemo," which has grossed more than $400 million. Correspondent Dan Rather shows us how they did it in a broadcast that first aired last May.

Nemo’s father Marlin and his comic sidekick Dory spend the entire film traveling the seas in search of the young fish.

“It's really funny, but it's also the most emotional movie we've made. And it's the most visually stunning animated film ever made,” says Steve Jobs, head of Pixar. “We’re on pins and needles. A lot of people at our studio think it's the best film we've ever made.”

Jobs, who is CEO of Apple Computers, bought a small moviemaking software company called Pixar in 1986 – for about $10 million. The company, he says, is now worth about $3 billion.

At Pixar’s colossal northern California studio, where the films are made, the motto seems to be “Work hard, play harder.”

About 700 very lucky people actually get paid for working at Pixar. Their average age is 30-something; average IQ is something else. The studio also boasts of having employees with graduate degrees from some of the finest schools.

Making cartoons, or animated features, is what Pixar is all about. But it's also keen on nurturing the creative spirit, even when it comes to office décor.
Executive Vice President John Lasseter’s office looks like a toy store.
“I had so many toys at home my wife kept saying, ‘Just take them to work.’”

If Steve Jobs is Pixar’s financial whiz, Lasseter is its creative guru, its heart and soul. When it comes to making animated films, he’s done it all as a writer, animator and director. Now, he’s the executive producer of “Finding Nemo.”

His room is surrounded with GI Joes, Hot Wheels and an Academy Award for “Tin Toy.”

His early work in 3D computer animation was considered so revolutionary that he was hailed throughout the industry as the next Walt Disney: “I’m working hard to try to be the John Lasseter of the digital age.”

Lasseter, 46, is married and has five kids - which might explain his childlike enthusiasm for everything.

But when it comes to making movies, Pixar puts all of its energy into the production at hand. Work on “Finding Nemo” began back in 1999 with a spark of an idea, some drawings and lots of research.

They started by studying the sea, observing the waves at northern California beaches, watching how light danced on the ocean’s surface.

Then, they hired a professor of ecology and evolution to teach them the unique motions of each fish. And, to get a true sense of the environment, they went scuba diving in the waters off Kona, Hawaii. It was rough work, but somebody had to do it.

“The animators on Nemo had to throw out a lot of their innate sense of physics because gravity is different,” says Lasseter. “It’s fluid, they're floating and they're moving, and it’s more of this fluid animation of the fins and the bodies and propulsion and all. It’s very different than being bound to the ground by gravity.”

Lee Unkrich and Andrew Stanton are the directors of "Finding Nemo."

“The thing that was so important to us is that when people went to see this movie, we wanted them to feel like they were underwater,” says Unkrich.

“I never want the audience for five seconds to think that they're not underwater,” adds Stanton.

It took two years of production to get it done. Characters were developed, and then programmed into the computer, using special Pixar software. Lasseter and supervising animator Dylan Brown picked up the process from there, taking it to the next stage - animation.

Animator Mark Walsh specializes in making faces. “Here we have a lot of shapes that are built off of pictures we’ve seen of Ellen DeGeneres. We’ve got cute, doe eyes.”

But the biggest challenge is animating what is most prevalent in the film - water.

“If we can recreate nature through simulation, and then control and adjust it, you could actually attempt to direct water,” says technical director Oren Jacob.

This is also necessary skill when simulating the inside of a whale, a scene similar to the hand-painted one created in the 1940s film "Pinocchio."

“We certainly watched that scene in 'Pinocchio' many times as reference for how Disney, back in the day, chose to caricature the inside of a whale and water, how it flows and crashes upon itself,” says Jacob.

“It’s not a better or worse thing, just different in the sense that the physical detail and the realism that we can get closer to. We’re actually able to get closer to what real water would actually do. But we can do that with a lot of computing power and a lot of research and get that to look this way.”

But technology aside, Pixar is single-minded about what’s really important in a film.

“The most important thing in the movie is the story and the characters. Everything that we do on a film is driven by that story,” says Lasseter.

“He was a superhero and I kept telling the guys he’s got to always stand like this, arms akimbo with one eyebrow up, cause they always did that,” remembers Lasseter. “And so I kept doing this, 'It’s like this, guys. See, like that.'”

Their next films, “A Bug’s Life,” “Toy Story 2” and “Monsters, Inc.” all became blockbuster hits, one surpassing the other at the box office. The “Toy Story” formula seemed to work - a touch of innocence, a bit of sarcasm, and a lot of heart.

“All of our stories have a lot of heart to them, because I think that one of the most important things in a film is to have a story that not only makes you laugh,” says Lasseter. “But as Walt Disney always says, ‘For every laugh, there should be a tear.’"

And there were plenty of laughs when after four years of production, “Finding Nemo” was finally finished.

The movie will be released on May 30, and has been getting heavy promotion and media attention. But almost overshadowing the publicity has been the widely reported tension between Pixar and long-time partner Disney, which teamed up in the early 1990s.

Together, Pixar and Disney finance the movies, then Disney markets and distributes them. Profits are then split 50/50.

But Jobs now wants a better deal for Pixar. “We've earned that. I hope the ability to negotiate such a deal with our success,” says Jobs. “Pixar will have a lot of options, as long as we keep making good films.”

And that is up to Lasseter, who pours his talents and emotions into every film and every character. To fully understand his passion, listen to what happened right after the premiere of “Toy Story,” as Lasseter was changing planes at an airport.

“There was a little boy standing at the gate with his mother, waiting for his dad to get off the airplane. He was holding a doll of Woody the Cowboy and clutching it. The look on his face was something so special. I realized by the look on his face that that was his doll, that was his character,” says Lasseter.

“Woody didn't belong to me anymore. And I think about that boy almost every day in working with these films, because I realize they're like a child of yours that you raise. And when they graduate high school and they go off to college, you're giving your child to the world. And you hope you did a good job raising them. That's what these films are like to us. You know?”