25 years of Pixar studios

Cre­ated from scratch

The ex­hi­bi­tion pro­vides an overview of the 25-year tra­jec­tory of the Pixar stu­dios, the well-known US stu­dio re­spon­si­ble for many mod­ern an­i­mated clas­sics, such as Toy Story, Find­ing Nemo, Cars, Rata­touille, Mon­sters, INC, Wall-E, Up, Brave, In­sid­e­Out and The In­cred­i­bles.

Maren A. Jones, di­rec­tor of Pixar's ex­hi­bi­tions pro­gramme, who was in Barcelona for the open­ing of the ex­hi­bi­tion in Feb­ru­ary, ex­plains: “Peo­ple often think that in dig­i­tal an­i­ma­tion you press a but­ton and that's it. But in fact every­thing you see is cre­ated out of noth­ing, from scratch, start­ing from the creases on clothes to the last leaf of a tree. Many artists con­tribute to mak­ing this pos­si­ble, and the mar­vel­lous works of art be­hind it re­main un­known.“

In order to pay homage to this cre­ative achieve­ment, Caix­aFo­rum' ex­hi­bi­tion Pixar: 25 years of an­i­ma­tion in­cludes a large num­ber of sketches and draw­ings made with var­i­ous tech­niques, as well as sto­ry­boards, scripts, mod­els, tem­plates, videos and in­stal­la­tions. A total of 402 works are on dis­play. The works allow the vis­i­tor to see the de­vel­op­ment of var­i­ous char­ac­ters be­fore reach­ing their final form, from their ini­tial 3-D rep­re­sen­ta­tions to the colour­ful mov­ing de­pic­tions we are so fa­mil­iar with.

“In these films,” says Jones, “there are no ac­tors, so artists can be to­tally cre­ative and free. In Pixar we pre­serve all the artis­tic works that are cre­ated in the process; the show is a cel­e­bra­tion of the fact that, de­spite their tech­no­log­i­cal com­plex­ity, all films start with the tra­di­tion of paper and pen­cil, says Jones.”

The show also in­cludes two par­tic­u­larly sug­ges­tive and evoca­tive in­stal­la­tions : Artscape, con­ceived as an au­dio­vi­sual ex­pe­ri­ence which lit­er­ally emerges the vis­i­tor in Pixar's cre­ative process, and Zoòtrop, which evokes the ma­chine patented in the US in 1867, which laid down the basic prin­ci­ples of an­i­ma­tion be­fore cin­ema was even in­vented, and which was used for the char­ac­ters from the Toy Story saga.

“The show was first com­mis­sioned by the MoMA in New York in 2005. Now it in­cludes an overview of the 12 films made dur­ing the stu­dio's first 25 years,” says Jones.

His­toric mo­ments

Elisa Duran, deputy gen­eral man­ager of the Obra So­cial La Caixa says: “In the ex­hi­bi­tions we ded­i­cate to the world of cin­ema, we like to re­flect the chal­lenges that we find im­por­tant in the cre­ative process. It's what we've done with the shows ded­i­cated to Charles Chap­lin, Fed­erico Fellini and Georges Méliès. In the case of the Pixar ex­hi­bi­tion, we are pre­sented with a “his­toric mo­ment“ in an­i­ma­tion which is al­ready widely-known by au­di­ences, par­tic­u­larly chil­dren.

Duran also high­lights the fact that Pixar: 25 years of an­i­ma­tion is above all an art ex­hi­bi­tion that deals, first of all, with how tech­nol­ogy has en­tered the artis­tic world. It also traces the three main pil­lars that are vital for the peo­ple work­ing under John Las­seter – cre­ative di­rec­tor of Pixar: great char­ac­ters, the world in which they de­velop and the sto­ries they live through.