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Book Club: The Pixar Touch

For July book club we read The Pixar Touch by David Price. This book is a fun piece delving into three major phases of Pixar: the formaltion of the company (including a brief history of computer graphics as a field), Pixar under Steve Jobs, and the era of Disney’s acquisition.

My favorite section by far was the first, providing fantastic insights into the early phases of the computer graphics and computer animation industry. There were references to companies where I worked including Silicon Graphics, and SIGGRAPH demos that are absolutely legendary throughout the industry. Sharing this at Book Club where friends were at Apple while Jobs was CEO of both Pixar and Apple, and others were involved in the development of early graphics chips led to great personal stories and reflections. In this section you really hear about the evolution of compute graphics as an industry, the titans of that era, like Evanston Sutherland, the creation of the company, originally as a division of Lucas Films, and the early interactions of Lassater and Catmull.

The second section on the Pixar purchase by Steve Jobs, detailed much of the struggle between being a hardware company offering software and services for computer animation and graphics, and being an animation shop. What ostensibly started as a way to demonstrate the Pixar Image Computer capabilities quickly became the primary passion of the Pixar cofounders (to the point that they rarely and soon didn’t USE the Pixar Image Computer for the animation they shared at SIGGRAPH). There are clear power struggles, and some shady activities around stock for employees that happened during this time, but it also becomes an important era, since it details the initial distribution deal with Disney, which entirely changed the trajectory of the company. In some ways this begins my least favorite part of the book since the behavior of a lot of business leaders I have long admired that is described in the book was shoddy at best. My favorite part here was the creative vision of Catmull and how he evolved that style within Pixar. That was a true highlight and made me want to rewatch all the older films to see the evolution in technique.

The last section is really about the Disney acquisition and how it set up the long term success of the company. While other books detail the history of Disney’s journey far better (Storming the Magic Kingdom and Ride of a Lifetime to name a few) it does share the impact of the personal relationships and power struggles on the fate of Pixar, and how the company ended up being such a wildly expensive acquisition, but also wildly successful in reinvigorating the brand. In this section the best part was reading about a successful acquisition. So rarely do large scale acquisitions yield continued (and in fact enhanced) success of both brands, and this is one of those rare cases worth delving into.

I am a complete sucker for these kinds of books: history of computing stitched in with suprising heroes and ultimately success, so I definitely recommend it, but I would say that the author glosses over much of the impact of the wars between Eisner and Jobs, and how it negatively effected the employees of Pixar. Ultimately, it is more a love affair with the creative vision and journey than a true exposé on how Pixar evolved, but it was still a very fun read.

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