Pixar's Believable People

A still from Geri’s Game (1997)

Welcome! We’re back with another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This is the plan:

• 1. The early development of Pixar’s human characters.
• 2. Animation newsbits.
• 3. The last word.

A note before we start. Last week, we premiered the Congolese short Machini (2019) online, and the response was wonderful. Unfortunately, some readers ran into technical problems with the embedded video, so we’re sharing a fresh link (watch here) that should work for everyone. Machini is available for one more week, and we highly recommend giving it a look while you can.

Now, let’s go!

1. Computer puppets

It was a question that haunted early 3D computer graphics. What makes a credible animated human?

Building realistic people was a fixation of the CG world in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Just take Rendez-vous in Montreal (1987), which tried to resurrect Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe as polygonal models. “You can put actors out of jobs,” boasted its creators.1 But the results were unsettling. And, while cartoonier humans like the one in Tony de Peltrie (1985) were better, they still didn’t totally land.

These problems were known. Pixar’s crew, for one, was well aware of them.

The studio’s first wave of films from 1986, Luxo Jr. and Beach Chair and Flags and Waves, have no humans. They’re about inanimate objects (lamps, folding chairs) and natural phenomena (shadows, water) that were easier to capture. The team didn’t try to do what it couldn’t do, and so those films continue to hold up.

“Modeling and animating a human character on a computer is a difficult proposition,” wrote Pixar’s post-production guy Craig Good in 1988. “Three-dimensional modeling is really a form of sculpture. There is nothing easy about making a statue of a person which is both realistic and pleasing, and making the sculpture move only complicates things. The eye is very unforgiving when it comes to human faces.”2

Pixar did attempt a cartoony clown in Red’s Dream (1987) — a “project…