Pixar and Disney make strange bedfellows

What happens when a fresh, perky upstart animation company - a company with spunk and wit to boot, a company that has scored some huge box office hits over the last decade - gets hitched to the very behemoth that gave life to the animation industry almost 100 years ago? That's right I'm talking about this year's prodigious Disney-Pixar merger, which made former Pixar owner Steve Jobs, also co-founder of Apple Computers, the single largest Disney shareholder in the world, with $4 billion dollars worth of Disney shares. Well we're now in July, and the honeymoon is over: Steve Jobs is back doing what he does best, which is slaving away at Apple, working hard to keep driving the cult of cool his company has created, while at the same time dealing with Microsoft's ceaseless efforts to encroach on his company's digital music dominance. Jobs still has a seat on the Disney board to keep him busy, but his main focus is Apple, and his role their is only going to get more and more time consuming as Microsoft start to make up ground in the digital music war.

When Disney bought out Pixar animation studios in March this year for an estimated $7.4 billion, some in the industry saw it as a match made in heaven. Others viewed the takeover - or "assimilation", which is Disney PR's preferred term for the takeover - as a standard competition buyout, which would kill Pixar's quirky brand of humour; while others held their breath, choosing to see what the giant ears would do to the unique creative culture at Pixar, who has been responsible for films like Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo, before passing judgement. Well, judgement day is nigh, and it's not looking good for the merger. As you probably know, Cars - a Disney production of a Pixar film - was released a few weeks ago and has been met with some luke-warm reviews, both In Australia and around the world. The release of Cars has been viewed as a litmus test for the new partnership, and the word on the street is that there seems to be some cracks opening up between Pixars 700 animators, artists, mathematicians and all sorts of other technical gurus, and the new rule at Planet Disney.

So to coincide with the worldwide release of Cars, Tia Kratter, who worked as an Art Director on Cars, was in Melbourne on Saturday to give us Southerners a look at what it's like to work at Pixar. First it was a walkthough of Pixar's global headquarters in San Francisco, California. Now, you can probably imagine the end result when someone as enchanting and childlike as Jobs is let loose to design Pixar HQ: three themed bars; yoga, pilates, painting workshops scheduled for lunchtime and after work; scooters as the main source of intra-office transport - you get the idea. That was six years ago, and, according to Katter, Jobs is rarely seen at his former studios these days.

"Now I'm going to very briefly show you how to make a film. It's very simple really." It wasn't - of course - but the crowd, who I discovered was made up of 80% animators and industry insiders after Tia asked for a 'hands-up who actually works in the industry', were very attentive. So we were told just how painstaking a task crafting a film like Cars actually is - and the audience was just as excited to hear about how the flowers in Cars were chosen to emulate a Cadillac's tail-lights as they were when they discovered Pixar were looking for animators, and quickly. This was a crowd of true believers in the Cult of Pixar. Katter was ebullient and spoke with real passion about the culture at Pixar, and went about making the adoring audience incredibly jealous, in an incredibly short amount of time. Then the floor was thrown open for questions. There were a mixture of technical and procedural queries ("Who decides which Pixar scripts go into production and which don't"), as well as a few questions about the Pixar culture.

The Disney takeover eventually came up, and the mood in the room shifted to that of uncomfortable curiosity. While the rest of Kratter's talk sounded like she'd been reading a script written by the happy people at Pixar PR, and sincerely believing every word of it, when talk turned to Disney, Kratter was slightly more reticent. "The big goal right now is to retain that culture at Pixar; and that's going to be hard work," Kratter told the group. Although this may not quite be "fear and loathing at Pixar" material, it was definitely a hint about the prevailing mood in the San Fran Pixar camp. In another, probably more telling hint, Kratter went on record, and unprompted, about how she was a surprised to come to Australia only to find Disney Australia had given up on promoting Cars in the mainstream press. A possible reason, she said, could be that Disney now had decided to turn its focus to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest , which the company is pinning its 2006 boxoffice hopes on. If Saturday's talk was any sign, then Kratter and Pixar may have hit an unforeseen snag. And for all the autonomy no doubt promised to Pixar and its staff by Disney during the courtship prior to the sale, Disney will probably now treat Pixar as one of its revenue streams, rather than giving it the respect it rightfully deserves. And while the writers, artists and animators on the ground at Pixar may be disappointed, it probably comes as no surprise to Steve Jobs.