When a Pixar movie is around, almost no

other animated film stands a chance of taking the top spot during the award season. Competitors do not find a sliver of hope when Pixar, the leading bellweth-er of that genre of choice, way in advance, smells the award it is about to receive. It almost seems like the other ones that get nomi-nated is just for the sake of having a category dedicated to the animated films.

It is as if you are culling the hunky guy from the others, who just so happen to sit at the children’s table playing with their food.

Yummy!Whether for children,

adults, or vampire-swoon-ing adolescents, there is something for just about everyone to sink their teeth in and go gaga over. Also, blend grandma and grand-pa into the mix and you have a complete flurry of the populace, only topped with an extra dollop of cream to make up for that appeal.

It is also artistry at its finest as they, almost, every year seem to be leaps and bounds above their con-tenders, at least in the case of the clanky Wall-E, or the decedent Ratatouille. (And yes, they know a thing or two about how to write numbers and animate virtual, identifiable charac-ters in front of a monitor and they have always had a knack for storytelling.)

And now though, that the golden age in animation

is moving at a brisk pace, more and more companies are joining the fray, pump-ing millions of dollars into upcoming projects. Money-milking giants such as the likes of Warner Brothers, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures all want their share too.

“They take risks. They innovate and push the barriers, and other studios just try and copy,” Andy Wyatt, the former Director of Honeycomb Animation now course leader of Digi-tal Animation at University Collage Falmouth, said. “Sometimes other studios produce gems that get over-shadowed by Pixar.”

Far from being an indie-gem, James Cameron’s lat-est eyeball-orgasm, Avatar, backed by 20th Century Fox with an estimated budget of $300m, uses “some cut-ting edge animation and effects,” he added.

Still at the top of their game, back when Pixar advanced the art of anima-tion, almost every film they would put out came across as something no other com-pany had been able to repli-cate. Others may have come around the technology, but that “secret sauce” still re-mains in both the way Pixar serve their stories, and how they pen memorable char-acters.

StorytellingPixar remains the first

ones to have found an avenue through to channel their strengths, so much so that every entry they dole out finds a special place

in some kid’s, or adult’s, heart.

A Pixar movie takes twice as long to make as it does for other studios, and that is its first phase: the screenplay. Wyatt, whose résumé includes, among others, Duck Tales: The Movie and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series, said that “Pixar movies are at least 3 years in the script stage before they start pro-duction.”

That is the equivalent of how much time it takes for other studios to make mul-tiple animated films part of a franchise.

The last decade can be seen, by audiences and alike, as a gradual shift in how Pixar has used anima-tion beyond the limitations present in earlier works. Moreover, the technological advancements of anima-tion – motion-dynamics, expressions, and emotive character-behavior – are not as much of an evolution from the past so much as a jumping off point from which to expand.

The stories, still, remain “strong and the technology is always stunning,” said Wyatt, who believes there hasn’t been a major shift between Toy Story and the likes of Pixar’s latest works.

He explained how well Toy Story has aged over the years, putting it in contrast to Wall-E, Pixar’s uto-pian apocalypse, which he thought “had an enormous amount of detail, but not stronger as a movie than Toy Story.”

Even so, swift on the

Wooed by the wonders of animation By Fiman Jafari

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uptake, that is a process that has taken them ten years from the day Toy Story (1995) was made, the very first feature-length to utilize computer-generated-imagery (CGI) as part of cinema. Yet, which is also one that Wyatt said “looks as fresh today as it did 15 years ago.”

Spick-n-span Only now, with the right

necessities, is animation extending out of the norma-tive standards of storytell-ing, lending way to territory that is not as reliant on explosive spectacles as it is on invocations of drama that adds resonance. The preamble of Pete Docter’s balloon-soaring idyll, Up, pays homage to Citizen Kane. Go figure!

For years, people have been fretting and draw-ing lines between the cor-ralled, semi-dollhouse look of stop-motion and the spick-and-span look of CGI, insisting that the effects of CGI will phase out the other medium. But for Andy Wy-att, “It never will.”

While that seems like a long shot, the oohs-and-aahs of CGI, melded with stop-motion, may be part of the potential evolutionary

leap within animation.In doing so, Wyatt ex-

plained that CGI would have to get “used with stop-motion on mouths and hands to make corrections and tweaks easier.” Unlike Fantastic Mr. Fox, he said that “Coraline used 3-D printouts of CGI-animated scenes which were then replaced physically in front of the camera.”

Despite those minute details, Mr. Wyatt boiled such movie making down to its core: story-telling. He added, “As long as the story is good, audiences love the film, irrespective of its technique.”

An industry driven by a great deal of riding on one another’s coattails and icky one-trick-ponies, Pixar’s way of striving for origi-nality has remained intact over the years. Financially and viably, it has also been a factoring part of their sustenance as a thriving company, as shown on the screen, or rather, multi-plexes. By making sure as many butts as possible get put into seats, “they spend time and money getting it right,” Wyatt, the Anima-tion Course Leader, said.

And that money is literal-ly projected onto the screen

when you get transported into a world that is nothing but zeros, and other scroll-ing variables, that operate on the back-end. Weird!

2009From last year’s Cora-

line, a vaudevillian art-house adaptation from Neil Gaiman novel, to Hayao Miyazaki’s water brushed seascape-fan-tasia, Ponyo, and Wes Anderson’s bubbly Roald Dahl adaptation, Fantas-tic Mr. Fox, there has been an even keel insofar as the paradigm-shift in anima-tion. A technique like stop-motion animation, a handcrafted way of physi-cally making objects part of the scenery, is making inroads into more mate-rial. Both Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox used stop-motion animation differently, none of which were made by Pixar.“Fantastic Mr. Fox was

great because it was very rough at the edges com-pared to the over-slick look of CGI,” said Wyatt. “It looks physical, and that has an appeal you could never get with CGI.”

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