Image via CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

I admit I was excited to see the Toy Story Teaser from Pixar. I'm just a huge animation fan, and Pixar is one of the most amazing stories in animation. It started out as a research group with George Lucasinside ILM. Because Lucas was getting divorced he had to sell some stuff from his empire, and the research group (which was looking into computer generated animation techniques) was one to go. Steve Jobs stepped up then and bought the company. Actually Ross Perot almost bought it first. When Pixar was finishing on Toy Story, Jobs, who had a lot of free time on his hands and was going through a bit of a crisis after Apple and Next, became slightly obsessed with the project. To his name, he struck a 3 picture deal with Disney, but more importantly made sure that the Pixar Leader came in the opening credits . This created Pixar as the name in 3D animation when Toy Story was released in the early 90's. So much so that other movies following that used 3D animation, such as Dream Works, were in the public's eye attributed to Pixar. Good branding. If you would like to read more about that part of Pixar's history, you should check out the book The Second Coming of Steve Jobs. But he was a real tyrant as well. He almost moved the Pixar animation Studio acros the state so that his commute for the meetings would be shorter. This in the final months of production with a huge deadline, and the first time a 3D Full Length Feature was ever created by Pixar. Luckily this didn't happen.

Seeing as today John Lasseter is now running Disney Animation (Principal Creative Advisor), it will be very interesting to see how this movie comes out.

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