How will the laid-back Pixar cope with corporate giant and new owner Disney looking over its shoulder, asks Hugh Linehan
Just over the Bay Bridge from San Francisco lies the impressive headquarters of Pixar Animation Studios. Swanky, but in an understated way - recycled red bricks, brushed steel - its post-industrial, millionaire hippy chic is pure northern California. Inside, the studios, offices and heavy-duty computer equipment are wrapped around a vast atrium space, the size of a small football pitch, equipped with big, comfy couches, pool tables, a juice bar, a chill-out area... It's not brash or overbearing, but you can definitely smell the money.
When I was there in 2003, on the eve of the release of Finding Nemo, Pixar had just moved in, and one of the company's employees remarked with a chuckle that "they do say that you should hold stock in a company until it gets an atrium. Then you should sell".
Since then, both Finding Nemo and The Incredibles have set new box-office records. Pixar is rich. Very rich. And now it has been sold, to its long-term partner Disney, for a whopping $7.4 billion (€6 billion). The deal, which calls for 2.3 Disney shares to be issued for each Pixar share, makes Pixar chief executive Steve Jobs the largest single shareholder in Disney, with a 6 per cent stake. It also hands over control of Disney's legendary but ailing animation division to John Lasseter, the creative powerhouse behind such hits as Toy Story, Monsters Inc and A Bug's Life.
Jobs, of course, is also boss of Apple, the computer company riding high on the success of the iPod music player and iTunes online music store. With iTunes currently forging into the new business of downloading TV shows and other forms of entertainment, the business is abuzz with talk of new synergies and possibilities.
This week's rapidly concluded deal brings to an end four years of sparring between the two companies. Disney has distributed all the Pixar films made to date, splitting box-office receipts and licensing revenues, with Disney holding the rights to any sequels. But that contract was due to come to an end with the release of the next Pixar movie, Cars, this summer, and Jobs had been looking to strike a much harder bargain, which was rejected by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner. The clash of personalities between these two alpha males of the entertainment industry was one of the great Hollywood sideshows of this decade.
In a sense, what's happening now is that Pixar is coming home. After all, John Lasseter served his apprenticeship at Disney and has always cited it as his formative influence, a view shared by Roy E Disney, Walt's nephew, who was highly critical of Eisner's handling of the Pixar deal, and who was forced off the Disney board for his pains. Since then, Eisner himself has left, replaced by new CEO Robert Iger, and Roy has made his peace with the company.
HOWEVER, THERE IS some sense of foreboding about what the takeover might mean for Pixar, a company that in less than 10 years has revolutionised the animated feature film, a form invented in the 1930s by Walt Disney himself.
Much attention has focused on the fact that, in the process, Pixar has supplanted hand-drawn, "classical" animation with digital technology. But that rather misses the point. It's not the technology that draws the audiences, it's the fact that Pixar movies are fresher, funnier and better made than their competitors. As Pixar people never tire of reminding you, it's not computers that do this, it's human beings. The big question is whether their Bay Area culture and attitudes will sit comfortably with the much more corporate world of Disney.
As Marla Backer, an analyst at Research Associates, told New York's Daily News this week: "Disney is bureaucratic. People roller-blade down the halls of Pixar . . . I don't think Pixar needs Disney looking over its shoulders."