You could be in an anonymous unit on an industrial estate anywhere in the world, if it weren't for the huge computers and the toys. But this is Oakland in northern California, half an hour's drive across the bay from San Francisco and home to some of the highest-of-high-tech companies in the world, and this unprepossessing, single-storey building is home to the outfit that many believe is leading the film industry into the 21st century. It is November and Pixar, the world's first company dedicated to making digitally-animated feature films, and the maker of one of the most delightful and popular movies of the 1990s, Toy Story, has just wrapped up production on its latest film, A Bug's Life.
Inside the building is a maze of computer workstations and cubicles, customised to resemble everything from a child's playpen to a Hawaiian beach hut: most are empty. Everywhere you look, there are toys, cluttering every spare inch of shelving, dangling from every exposed beam. The latter-day Peter Pan who runs this huge romper-room is John Lasseter, an amiable, moon-faced visionary with a taste for loud shirts who began his career as a classical animator with Disney, Pixar's associate company, before becoming fascinated with the possibilities of digital technology in the early 1980s.
"From the first moment I saw computer animation," he says, "I fell in love with the notion that you could create these three-dimensional images that people would believe in. We don't try to make the audience think this is a live-action film. They'll always know it's a fantasy film, but they also know it still looks real. But it's the story and the characters that are most important. When I first started working in this medium, it was a huge novelty, just because it was made with a computer, but to me it was always going to be the story and characters that made it memorable."
Lasseter and his team came up with the idea for A Bug's Life a year-and-a-half before the release of Toy Story, so they've been working on the new film for more than four years. "The nice thing about working on Toy Story was that we were unknowns and nobody was paying any attention to us until the movie came out," he recalls.
Although Pixar is part-owned by Disney, which also markets and distributes its films, the company's style is very different, Lasseter acknowledges. "We can't do anything that's too sappy or schmaltzy. We like funny, intelligent, smart movies, but we like making films for everybody - adults and kids. I like the recent Disney movies, but I like telling funny tales, too."
In some ways, actually, A Bug's Life is closer than the wonderfully sly and irreverent Toy Story to the Disney style, but there's still a gleeful sense of fun about this tale of a young ant who rescues his colony from a bunch of predatory grasshoppers, as well as a sophisticated use of film references and allusions (the plot carries echoes of several classic westerns and gangster movies).
"We're all film geeks here, constantly watching all kinds of movies," says Lasseter. "There's a feeling you can get from a scene, like that wonderful sequence in Witness where they're all working together to raise the barn, and we wanted the same kind of feeling when the ants are all working together."
Visually, also, the new film isn't just a technical advance, but a richly visual treat that shows the artistic potential of the digital medium. "I love rich colour," Lasseter says. "I want to give the audience a real treat, with wonderful visuals, and this medium is great because of what you can do with lighting, which you can't do with traditional animation. With A Bug's Life, it was more difficult to achieve than in Toy Story, because it's a more natural world. You caricature the world to the point where people know it doesn't exist, and then you can add further elements of reality. So you can create these blades of grass, and then add a light breeze to give them life and movement."
Although Pixar began life as a software company, it is now effectively a fully-fledged film producer - but the ethos and work practices of the company remain more Silicon Valley than Hollywood. The majority shareholder is one of the most famous names in the computer business, Steve Jobs, cofounder of Apple. "With Steve's help, Pixar went public, and everyone now owns shares in the companies," Lasseter explains. "It's very satisfying, in this business where everyone's always worrying where their next job is coming from, I can look around here and see people buying houses, getting married, having kids - not necessarily in that order. The last thing is that we set out to have fun, both because that's the way I am, and it because it ends up on the screen."
Steve Jobs famously returned to Apple two years ago to head up the ailing corporation, and since then has overseen a dramatic upswing in the company's fortunes, most obviously with the successful release of the iMac computer last year. Yet he doesn't take a salary or hold shares in Apple - he hardly needs to, since the value of his stake in Pixar is estimated at around $1 billion. The ascetic, 43-year-old vegan is one of the most famous names in the history of the computer revolution, yet he believes that future generations are more likely to remember him as a movie mogul than as the founder of Apple. "There's no computer around today that people will be familiar with in 60 years' time," he says. "But I think they'll still be watching these movies."
Like Jobs, Lasseter is also thinking in the long term. "In 50 years' time, people will be looking back at Toy Story as the most antiquated, simplistic-looking movie around, but I hope that they will still be entertained by the story, in the same way you can enjoy the films of Keaton and Chaplin."
"The medium is still in its infancy," says Jobs. "We have awesome technology at Pixar - we're five years ahead of anyone else. But story and script is what drives this studio. In this case, our story team came to us and said they wanted to do a story outdoors, which is much, much harder. In Toy Story we had all these smooth surfaces, geometric shapes and flat lighting. In A Bug's Life there isn't one straight line. Everything is lit in a much more sophisticated way. On Toy Story we were using some of the most powerful computers in the world, and each frame was taking three hours to render. On this movie the computers were many times more powerful, but the frames are still taking three hours, because the picture is so much more complex. Our ambitions are growing with the technology."
Both men have ambitious plans for the future, steering Pixar away from ancillary activities such as making adverts and CDROMS, towards the prime objective of movie-making. "We set a goal of equalling Disney's output of one feature film a year," says Jobs. "We have a lot less people working for us than they do, but we can achieve that because of the technology."
The company is currently working on Toy Story 2, scheduled for release at the end of the year. It's big, potentially hazardous business. "These movies are very expensive to make," says Jobs. "We're the lowest-cost producers in the industry, making them for between $50 million and $100 million. Traditional classical animations cost $125 to $150 million a film. The only people who can do it are Disney and Pixar. Maybe DreamWorks can do it some day, but outside that there's nobody else."
Mention of DreamWorks raises the one dark shadow over the sunny world of Pixar. The Battle of the Insect Movies was in full swing when I visited California in November, with competing billboards for A Bug's Life and Antz jostling for space on every hard shoulder. It's well known by now that Disney and Pixar are more than a little sore at Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney executive who left to help form the new DreamWorks studio, promptly putting a rival, digitally animated movie on a similar subject into production. Jobs is blunt on the subject of Antz. "Jeffrey knew all about A Bug's Life when he was at Disney, and then he went off and made a movie on the same theme."
Despite the obvious similarities, A Bug's Life is very different from Antz, not just in its storyline, which is more child-friendly than the DreamWorks film, but in the quality of the animation, which is several miles ahead of its competitor. Antz did very well at the American box office, but A Bug's Life has done even better. "Antz's success doesn't help us or hurt us," says Jobs. "The movie business isn't like the computer business. If you walk into the store and buy a certain brand of computer, then the other companies lose that business. In the movie business, if there are three really good movies playing, then audiences will go see all three. If there are three mediocre movies, they won't go to any of them. So it's not a zero sum game."
A Bug's Life is released on February 5th