8 ms·

That famous Pixar lunch of 1994 (2014)

148 points by BerislavLopac 5y ago

mikepurvis 5y ago
Pete Docter has always been my favourite Pixar director. I feel like he doesn't get the limelight as often as the others, but his movies (Monsters Inc, Up, Inside Out, and Soul) I think go considerably deeper than the rest of the Pixar catalogue as far as offering tender and humanizing insights about people and relationships.
- beerandt 5y ago
  The first minutes of Up stands up on its own as a masterpiece. But Inside Out might be the only Pixar movie that I actively dislike. Any other is at worst an indifferent "meh".
  - mikepurvis 5y ago
    Interesting, well... you're certainly entitled to your opinion, but the overwhelming critical and general consensus is that Inside Out is wonderful: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/inside-out-2015/critic-reviews https://www.metacritic.com/movie/inside-out-2015/critic-revi... And quite apart from that, I was intrigued that when my 10yo daughter went to see a therapist, she was asked if she'd seen Inside Out. Not necessarily because it's an in any way accurate depiction of the mind, but as a jumping off point for a discussion about the experiences that form our identity ("core memories") and how those can evolve over time as we get older.
mabbo 5y ago
"A Bugs Life" - Box office: $363.3 million "Monster's Inc" - Box office: $577.4 million "Finding Nemo" - Box office: $940.3 million "WALL-E" - Box office: $521.3 million $2.4B worth of ideas, not counting two sequels and eight theme park rides/attractions. Imagine if they'd taken the whole afternoon instead of just lunch!
- dave5104 5y ago
  > and eight theme park rides/attractions (1) Heimlich's Chew Chew Train, (2) Flik's Flyers, (3) It's Tough to Be a Bug, (4) Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor, (5) Mike & Sulley to the Rescue!, (6) Living Seas w/ Nemo & Friends, (7) Crush's Coaster... What am I forgetting?
  - proggy 5y ago
    I think the missing one is Tuck and Roll’s Drive Em Buggies (Disney California Adventure) Also, It’s Tough To Be A Bug was cloned, so I guess you can count it twice. It’s still playing at Animal Kingdom (1998), and opened with Disney California Adventure in 2001 (closed 2019).
  - mabbo 5y ago
    You know even more than me. I was just going off the wiki pages for Monsters Inc franchise and Finding Nemo franchis, which list 3 and 5 attractions each.
  - jefflinwood 5y ago
    Nemo stage show at Animal Kingdom, maybe?
headmelted 5y ago
I love that this was written like 8 years ago, and that if it gets further up the page it will get the HN lovehug. The author won't know why or what's going on, just that there's a lot of news.ycombinator.com referrer traffic for an old article from nearly a decade ago that hardly anyone read. Then he'll maybe drop by and say hello on the thread.
- labster 5y ago
  Website won’t load for me, and it’s only rank 23.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> Bugs, like toys, would be easier to animate and thus an easier option. > In one of his trips to Marine World (Six Flags Discovery Kingdom), he saw a shark which he thought could be done so well in animation (like Bugs Life and Toy Story, at that time animation was restricted and advance materials could not be made) What is interesting is that these directors knew the limitations of the technology well and let that inform their decision making as to what stories they would undertake. Because of that, these stories never entered the uncanny valley.
- 2bitencryption 5y ago
  And the first Pixar film that focused on human characters was The Incredibles, which is very smart since the characters are highly stylized and angular, like something from an Ayn Rand book cover.
omarhaneef 5y ago
Does this anecdote make the point the author makes? It makes the opposite point to me: if a lot of smart people pour a lot of their energy into making an animated movie, it doesn't matter what the initial idea was. Note: This does not apply to features or startups. Features are time limited because the cast has to move on so you have to capture what you capture, and can't just fix it in post. And startups you can't just rely on your intuition that you're making what the audience wants.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  I’d argue this is the same case with tech startups - you decide on some rough idea and riff on that topic there’s probably money to be made. I like to contrast it with biotech, where you’re limited by the laws of nature.
- david422 5y ago
  I would agree - it seems like if you do a well done animated movie you could have any type of plot and still succeed. Pixar to me is super high quality. Look at Illumination - another super high quality production with random/funny ideas.
- hondo77 5y ago
  > And startups you can't just rely on your intuition that you're making what the audience wants. Studios do not rely on intuition when making animated movies. Work-in-progress screenings for staff and the public are held during production. Even Pixar.
- furyofantares 5y ago
  I agree. Not much work went into the initial concepts of these extremely successful movies, because that's not what made the movies successful. Not to say the concepts weren't good, or these folks aren't experts, but it is to say that what set them apart was the massive amount of highly skilled work on executing the idea.
- subsubzero 5y ago
  The ideas themselves were not earth shattering, its the technology behind the ideas and the drive of the teams behind that to make the 'dreams' a reality. Also not having some soul sucking hollywood producer trying to make every character and scene 'edgy'.
tobyjsullivan 5y ago
I'd recommend the book Creativity, Inc. as supplementary reading for anyone who hasn't enjoyed it yet. Covers a lot including an insightful (albeit very high-level) discussion of how Pixar's stories are transformed from these simple ideas into great films (lots of iteration, lots of early prototyping and feedback, etc.). This article leaves the impression these were brilliant ideas that came out well-formed over the lunch table. The book led me to the opposite conclusion: Pixar has such a high hit rate because they have a well-crafted process that can turn almost any idea - no matter how rough - into great film.
- ramraj07 5y ago
  Yeah this lunch discussion is akin to a bunch of kids deciding during recess what they want to become - one a doctor and another an astronaut. If a bunch of kids do actually succeed in all their careers then what went right is the schools methods not the creative process in that lunch break.
  - mlyle 5y ago
    But it's not really just that, is it? If you have a bunch of kids with completely unconventional career ideas that no one would try... and then they all manage to strike it big doing these strange things... then you've got something special. Sure, part of it is in the capabilities and post-meeting culture of those kids... and part of it is to have strange but actually achievable ideas from the beginning. I note that they're not completely crazy ideas. They know the limitations of their (new) medium, and are trying to find the ideas that are barely viable, and thus groundbreaking, at the edges.
- pimlottc 5y ago
  I haven’t read the book but if you ever get a chance to see one of the traveling Pixar museum exhibitions, do it! The amount of work that goes into making one of those films is staggering, as is the volume of non-digital art that is created as part of the creative process. Highly recommended!
  - 5y ago
paxys 5y ago
Wall-E is by far my favorite Pixar movie, and IMO one of the best in any genre made in the last couple of decades. Really speaks to Pixar's creative genius that they can strike gold from even the most random premise. It is literally about a romantic trash compactor living in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Fun fact - the film took so long to produce because Andrew Stanton knew Pixar couldn't realistically animate space when he conceived of the idea. Good thing they waited too, as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPW3mvAN0Rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPW3mvAN0Rc was the final result. I will say though that after decades of Pixar basically defining the standards of what computer generated animation should be, studios are starting to catch up to and even leapfrog their style. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Arcane are two notable examples of this.
- bane 5y ago
  The scene you linked to always reminded me so much of the ending with the Crows of the "Secret of NIMH" https://youtu.be/DWvliFXzALg https://youtu.be/DWvliFXzALg
- naikrovek 5y ago
  > the most random premise "a lost people find a savior who leads them home" is not a random premise. religions are based on this story.
  - civilized 5y ago
    This is like saying the movie You've Got Mail is about AOL.
    - naikrovek 5y ago
      I do not know how one could see it that way; AOL has no plot, and "You've Got Mail" does.
- nautilius 5y ago
  Also, it works (for the most part) entirely without dialogue.
jb1991 5y ago
I'd be curious if they also had a lunch when they decided that all software engineering interviews should require the candidate to implement a binary search tree from scratch.
spoonjim 5y ago
I don't know how great this lunch was. It doesn't take a Pixar legend to say "let's make a movie about toys coming to life." Even I could do that. What it takes a Pixar legend to do is to take that idea and create Toy Story on time and on budget.
- hondo77 5y ago
  > What it takes a Pixar legend to do is to take that idea and create Toy Story on time and on budget. Rose-colored glasses. Production of Toy Story shut down production for three months, at Disney's insistence, because of major story and character problems. That means over budget. Even legends have problems and need help.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    Yes it's more, getting such a magical piece of artwork created, with everything that goes into it. To me, the "story" of the Pixar movie is perhaps the least interesting part (except for something like Wall-E which is pretty novel)... stories like "what if an animal got separated from his dad and got lost?" is not a very novel idea but Pixar made it to 100% perfection.
planetsprite 5y ago
At a lunch meeting after seeing Cars I came up with the idea that there should be two more Cars movies. Still Pixar hasn't sent me any royalties for my idea.
ripvanwinkle 5y ago
I read this and was left wondering if this might be making the case for working on site as compared to remote work. However as I think about it some more, it seem like there is no reason we can't hangout and have free form discussions over a video call except that I rarely it happen. Are there folks who have experienced these kinds of discussions over remote hangouts
- quartesixte 5y ago
  It happens all the time on discord servers everywhere. It’s just that the random freeform discussions that happen on discord over voice chat happen to not be something companies want to implement yet.
thedougd 5y ago
For another incredible look into the creative process, check out this transcript of tapes from the brainstorming sessions for "Raiders of the Lost Ark." George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Larry Kasdan sat down for four or five days to develop George's idea: http://maddogmovies.com/almost/scripts/raidersstoryconference1978.pdf http://maddogmovies.com/almost/scripts/raidersstoryconferenc...
subsubzero 5y ago
Finding Nemo was so far ahead of its time in terms of beauty of the animated undersea world and just the incredibly vivid colors that pervade that whole movie. Its extremely surprising that it was filmed in 2003(almost 20 years ago) and comparing it to finding dory it still looks better than its sequel.
illwrks 5y ago
I remember one of my lecturers in University, who at the time was probably 50, state that he 'had the idea for Toy Story in the 80's but the difference is that he did nothing with the idea, while the Pixar guys did.' Over the years I've taken this to mean that everyone has ideas, but it's doing something with those ideas is the valuable bit. Yes you might fail but you'll learn something, but you can lower the risk of failure if you surround yourself with the talented people.
- busyant 5y ago
  Had a prof in grad school who won a Nobel. He was giving a summary of his lab's research to us first year students and he said the same thing. "Ideas are cheap. Even the one that made me famous. Execution counts"
  - maroonblazer 5y ago
    Same. My prof laughed at NDAs for the same reason. Ideas aren't what's valuable. It's having the drive, dedication, inspiration and level of excellence to bring it to life.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      Yup. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Which is why I oppose a lot of IP law. For example, "internet on a phone" is an idea. Getting it to work is another matter entirely.
      - wahern 5y ago
        Incentive to create or invent isn't the actual justification for copyright and patents, neither from the perspective of the law nor economics. Copyrights are justified as an incentive to publish and distribute, while patents are justified as an incentive to reduce to practice (i.e. actually build the thing) and disclose. However, all of that still begs the question of whether those incentives are actually necessary to achieve similar outcomes in social welfare. AFAIU, empirical evidence for patent regimes in particular seem to be equivocal at best.[1] Nonetheless, the justifications do indeed recognize that what actually matters is whether or not people do something constructive with their ideas. [1] Case in point: not only did I read the book, Against Intellectual Monopolies, I paid for a Kindle copy even though it was published gratis ;)
beamatronic 5y ago
Barbapapa’s Ark is remarkably similar to Wall-E
- malkia 5y ago
  Holy!!!! Where this came up from - This was my other fav show as a kid (real huge back in the days in Bulgaria). wow! (It was "Barbaronite" in bulgarian - not barbano-nait - but Bar-Ba-Roh-Ni-Te)

148 points by BerislavLopac 5y ago

Pete Docter has always been my favourite Pixar director. I feel like he doesn't get the limelight as often as the others, but his movies (Monsters Inc, Up, Inside Out, and Soul) I think go considerably deeper than the rest of the Pixar catalogue as far as offering tender and humanizing insights about people and relationships.

beerandt 5y ago
The first minutes of Up stands up on its own as a masterpiece. But Inside Out might be the only Pixar movie that I actively dislike. Any other is at worst an indifferent "meh".
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  Interesting, well... you're certainly entitled to your opinion, but the overwhelming critical and general consensus is that Inside Out is wonderful: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/inside-out-2015/critic-reviews https://www.metacritic.com/movie/inside-out-2015/critic-revi... And quite apart from that, I was intrigued that when my 10yo daughter went to see a therapist, she was asked if she'd seen Inside Out. Not necessarily because it's an in any way accurate depiction of the mind, but as a jumping off point for a discussion about the experiences that form our identity ("core memories") and how those can evolve over time as we get older.

mabbo 5y ago

"A Bugs Life" - Box office: $363.3 million "Monster's Inc" - Box office: $577.4 million "Finding Nemo" - Box office: $940.3 million "WALL-E" - Box office: $521.3 million $2.4B worth of ideas, not counting two sequels and eight theme park rides/attractions. Imagine if they'd taken the whole afternoon instead of just lunch!

dave5104 5y ago
> and eight theme park rides/attractions (1) Heimlich's Chew Chew Train, (2) Flik's Flyers, (3) It's Tough to Be a Bug, (4) Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor, (5) Mike & Sulley to the Rescue!, (6) Living Seas w/ Nemo & Friends, (7) Crush's Coaster... What am I forgetting?
- proggy 5y ago
  I think the missing one is Tuck and Roll’s Drive Em Buggies (Disney California Adventure) Also, It’s Tough To Be A Bug was cloned, so I guess you can count it twice. It’s still playing at Animal Kingdom (1998), and opened with Disney California Adventure in 2001 (closed 2019).
- mabbo 5y ago
  You know even more than me. I was just going off the wiki pages for Monsters Inc franchise and Finding Nemo franchis, which list 3 and 5 attractions each.
- jefflinwood 5y ago
  Nemo stage show at Animal Kingdom, maybe?

headmelted 5y ago

I love that this was written like 8 years ago, and that if it gets further up the page it will get the HN lovehug. The author won't know why or what's going on, just that there's a lot of news.ycombinator.com referrer traffic for an old article from nearly a decade ago that hardly anyone read. Then he'll maybe drop by and say hello on the thread.

labster 5y ago
Website won’t load for me, and it’s only rank 23.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> Bugs, like toys, would be easier to animate and thus an easier option. > In one of his trips to Marine World (Six Flags Discovery Kingdom), he saw a shark which he thought could be done so well in animation (like Bugs Life and Toy Story, at that time animation was restricted and advance materials could not be made) What is interesting is that these directors knew the limitations of the technology well and let that inform their decision making as to what stories they would undertake. Because of that, these stories never entered the uncanny valley.

2bitencryption 5y ago
And the first Pixar film that focused on human characters was The Incredibles, which is very smart since the characters are highly stylized and angular, like something from an Ayn Rand book cover.

omarhaneef 5y ago

Does this anecdote make the point the author makes? It makes the opposite point to me: if a lot of smart people pour a lot of their energy into making an animated movie, it doesn't matter what the initial idea was. Note: This does not apply to features or startups. Features are time limited because the cast has to move on so you have to capture what you capture, and can't just fix it in post. And startups you can't just rely on your intuition that you're making what the audience wants.

ramraj07 5y ago
I’d argue this is the same case with tech startups - you decide on some rough idea and riff on that topic there’s probably money to be made. I like to contrast it with biotech, where you’re limited by the laws of nature.
david422 5y ago
I would agree - it seems like if you do a well done animated movie you could have any type of plot and still succeed. Pixar to me is super high quality. Look at Illumination - another super high quality production with random/funny ideas.
hondo77 5y ago
> And startups you can't just rely on your intuition that you're making what the audience wants. Studios do not rely on intuition when making animated movies. Work-in-progress screenings for staff and the public are held during production. Even Pixar.
furyofantares 5y ago
I agree. Not much work went into the initial concepts of these extremely successful movies, because that's not what made the movies successful. Not to say the concepts weren't good, or these folks aren't experts, but it is to say that what set them apart was the massive amount of highly skilled work on executing the idea.
subsubzero 5y ago
The ideas themselves were not earth shattering, its the technology behind the ideas and the drive of the teams behind that to make the 'dreams' a reality. Also not having some soul sucking hollywood producer trying to make every character and scene 'edgy'.

tobyjsullivan 5y ago

I'd recommend the book Creativity, Inc. as supplementary reading for anyone who hasn't enjoyed it yet. Covers a lot including an insightful (albeit very high-level) discussion of how Pixar's stories are transformed from these simple ideas into great films (lots of iteration, lots of early prototyping and feedback, etc.). This article leaves the impression these were brilliant ideas that came out well-formed over the lunch table. The book led me to the opposite conclusion: Pixar has such a high hit rate because they have a well-crafted process that can turn almost any idea - no matter how rough - into great film.

ramraj07 5y ago
Yeah this lunch discussion is akin to a bunch of kids deciding during recess what they want to become - one a doctor and another an astronaut. If a bunch of kids do actually succeed in all their careers then what went right is the schools methods not the creative process in that lunch break.
- mlyle 5y ago
  But it's not really just that, is it? If you have a bunch of kids with completely unconventional career ideas that no one would try... and then they all manage to strike it big doing these strange things... then you've got something special. Sure, part of it is in the capabilities and post-meeting culture of those kids... and part of it is to have strange but actually achievable ideas from the beginning. I note that they're not completely crazy ideas. They know the limitations of their (new) medium, and are trying to find the ideas that are barely viable, and thus groundbreaking, at the edges.
pimlottc 5y ago
I haven’t read the book but if you ever get a chance to see one of the traveling Pixar museum exhibitions, do it! The amount of work that goes into making one of those films is staggering, as is the volume of non-digital art that is created as part of the creative process. Highly recommended!
- 5y ago

paxys 5y ago

Wall-E is by far my favorite Pixar movie, and IMO one of the best in any genre made in the last couple of decades. Really speaks to Pixar's creative genius that they can strike gold from even the most random premise. It is literally about a romantic trash compactor living in a post-apocalyptic Earth. Fun fact - the film took so long to produce because Andrew Stanton knew Pixar couldn't realistically animate space when he conceived of the idea. Good thing they waited too, as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPW3mvAN0Rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPW3mvAN0Rc was the final result. I will say though that after decades of Pixar basically defining the standards of what computer generated animation should be, studios are starting to catch up to and even leapfrog their style. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Arcane are two notable examples of this.

bane 5y ago
The scene you linked to always reminded me so much of the ending with the Crows of the "Secret of NIMH" https://youtu.be/DWvliFXzALg https://youtu.be/DWvliFXzALg
naikrovek 5y ago
> the most random premise "a lost people find a savior who leads them home" is not a random premise. religions are based on this story.
- civilized 5y ago
  This is like saying the movie You've Got Mail is about AOL.
  - naikrovek 5y ago
    I do not know how one could see it that way; AOL has no plot, and "You've Got Mail" does.
nautilius 5y ago
Also, it works (for the most part) entirely without dialogue.

jb1991 5y ago

I'd be curious if they also had a lunch when they decided that all software engineering interviews should require the candidate to implement a binary search tree from scratch.

spoonjim 5y ago

I don't know how great this lunch was. It doesn't take a Pixar legend to say "let's make a movie about toys coming to life." Even I could do that. What it takes a Pixar legend to do is to take that idea and create Toy Story on time and on budget.

hondo77 5y ago
> What it takes a Pixar legend to do is to take that idea and create Toy Story on time and on budget. Rose-colored glasses. Production of Toy Story shut down production for three months, at Disney's insistence, because of major story and character problems. That means over budget. Even legends have problems and need help.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Yes it's more, getting such a magical piece of artwork created, with everything that goes into it. To me, the "story" of the Pixar movie is perhaps the least interesting part (except for something like Wall-E which is pretty novel)... stories like "what if an animal got separated from his dad and got lost?" is not a very novel idea but Pixar made it to 100% perfection.

planetsprite 5y ago

At a lunch meeting after seeing Cars I came up with the idea that there should be two more Cars movies. Still Pixar hasn't sent me any royalties for my idea.

ripvanwinkle 5y ago

I read this and was left wondering if this might be making the case for working on site as compared to remote work. However as I think about it some more, it seem like there is no reason we can't hangout and have free form discussions over a video call except that I rarely it happen. Are there folks who have experienced these kinds of discussions over remote hangouts

quartesixte 5y ago
It happens all the time on discord servers everywhere. It’s just that the random freeform discussions that happen on discord over voice chat happen to not be something companies want to implement yet.

thedougd 5y ago

For another incredible look into the creative process, check out this transcript of tapes from the brainstorming sessions for "Raiders of the Lost Ark." George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Larry Kasdan sat down for four or five days to develop George's idea: http://maddogmovies.com/almost/scripts/raidersstoryconference1978.pdf http://maddogmovies.com/almost/scripts/raidersstoryconferenc...

subsubzero 5y ago

Finding Nemo was so far ahead of its time in terms of beauty of the animated undersea world and just the incredibly vivid colors that pervade that whole movie. Its extremely surprising that it was filmed in 2003(almost 20 years ago) and comparing it to finding dory it still looks better than its sequel.

illwrks 5y ago

I remember one of my lecturers in University, who at the time was probably 50, state that he 'had the idea for Toy Story in the 80's but the difference is that he did nothing with the idea, while the Pixar guys did.' Over the years I've taken this to mean that everyone has ideas, but it's doing something with those ideas is the valuable bit. Yes you might fail but you'll learn something, but you can lower the risk of failure if you surround yourself with the talented people.

busyant 5y ago
Had a prof in grad school who won a Nobel. He was giving a summary of his lab's research to us first year students and he said the same thing. "Ideas are cheap. Even the one that made me famous. Execution counts"
- maroonblazer 5y ago
  Same. My prof laughed at NDAs for the same reason. Ideas aren't what's valuable. It's having the drive, dedication, inspiration and level of excellence to bring it to life.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    Yup. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Which is why I oppose a lot of IP law. For example, "internet on a phone" is an idea. Getting it to work is another matter entirely.
    - wahern 5y ago
      Incentive to create or invent isn't the actual justification for copyright and patents, neither from the perspective of the law nor economics. Copyrights are justified as an incentive to publish and distribute, while patents are justified as an incentive to reduce to practice (i.e. actually build the thing) and disclose. However, all of that still begs the question of whether those incentives are actually necessary to achieve similar outcomes in social welfare. AFAIU, empirical evidence for patent regimes in particular seem to be equivocal at best.[1] Nonetheless, the justifications do indeed recognize that what actually matters is whether or not people do something constructive with their ideas. [1] Case in point: not only did I read the book, Against Intellectual Monopolies, I paid for a Kindle copy even though it was published gratis ;)

beamatronic 5y ago

Barbapapa’s Ark is remarkably similar to Wall-E

malkia 5y ago
Holy!!!! Where this came up from - This was my other fav show as a kid (real huge back in the days in Bulgaria). wow! (It was "Barbaronite" in bulgarian - not barbano-nait - but Bar-Ba-Roh-Ni-Te)