PIXAR
14 THE LIST 1~ .
Moving pictures
n Toy Story. which reached our screens an astonishing 12 years ago. the only things on the screen which look animated are the humans. Woody the toy cowboy. despite his name. is human. endearing. attractive. Buzz has the chin and charm of a Hollywood heart-
throb and Mr Potato Head. voiced by Cliff
from Cheers. is expressive. funny and dignified. despite his stick-on plastic nose and Groucho Marx spectacles.
It‘s the humans. with their weird long-limbed movement and disjointed actions. that look as though they came off a designer‘s pad. As visual jokes go. it's very Pixar — all the visual and dramatic interest is focussed on the toys. and we the audience are placed in the position of children. down on the rug. lost in our imagination. We’ve been there ever since.
Very Pixar too is Sully. the loveable monster from Monsters Inc. whose rippling. multi-hued blue fur demanded the invention of a whole new computer process. ‘texture mapping‘. A
life size model Sully greets visitors to Pixar‘s headquarters in California. but the three- dimensional version of the blue monster looks somehow less realistic than the one on the screen. It took Pixar‘s massive mainframe 11 hours to create each frame that Sully appeared in. Real life could never compete.
This month. some of Pixar‘s most iconic images take over Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland as part of an exhibition celebrating 20 years of the groundbreaking animation company. which has scooped 2() Academy Awards. The exhibition includes over 250 drawings. collages. sculptures. paintings. pastels and animated sequences. An accompanying series of events includes talks by Pixar‘s dean of art lilyse Klaidman and Oscar— winning animator Michael Dudok de Wit.
Here. from sketch to intricately realised final scene. we can trace the development of Buzz. Lightyear. Woody. Nemo. The lncredibles. the Cars. and Pixar‘s latest creation. a French rat