The Pixar Touch

As a fan of pretty much every movie that Pixar has ever made and as someone who remembers being impressed by their early animated shorts when I saw them years ago, I was obviously eager to read all about the founding of the company.

So the early chapters of this book are great since the cover the pre-Pixar years as the company founders move from company to company building their knowledge and skills. It's really just as much a history of computer modeling as it is of Pixar.

The middle chapters that focus on Pixar's early years are fascinating too, painting Steve Jobs in a somewhat different light to that in his own biography as well as going into detail about the struggles to create the first few films and the Disney buyout.

It's the last few chapters that let things down. The book only takes us up to Ratatouille but coverage of those last films seems almost perfunctory. Certainly they weren't the critical or commercial hits of the earlier movies, but that doesn't make them less technically interesting to me.

So while I liked what was there, I did come away feeling like their might be more to the story than was in the book.