Those first classes were such a success - of the 120 people who worked at Pixar then, 100 enrolled - that we gradually began expanding P.U.’s curriculum. Sculpting, painting, acting, meditation, belly dancing, live- action filmmaking, computer programming, design and color theory, ballet - over the years, we have offered free classes in all of them. This meant spending not only the time to find the best outside teachers but also the real cost of freeing people up during their workday to take the classes.
Related Quotes
Like me, John remembers discovering that there were people who made animation for a living and thinking he’d found his place in the world. For him, as for me, that realization was Disney-related; it came when he stumbled upon a well-worn copy of The Art of Animation, Bob Thomas’s history of the Disney Studios, in his high school library. By the time I met John, he was as connected to Walt Disney as any twenty-six-year-old on earth. He had graduated from CalArts, the legendary art school founded by Walt, where he’d learned from some of the greatest artists of Disney’s Golden Age; he’d worked as a river guide on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland; and he’d won a Student Academy Award in 1979 for his short film The Lady and the Lamp - an homage to Disney’s Lady and the Tramp - whose main character, a white desk lamp, would later evolve into our Pixar logo.
And yet, for all our faulty assumptions, the shorts accomplished other things for Pixar.
People who work on them, for example, get a broader range of experience than they would on a feature, where the sheer scale and complexity of the project demands more specialization among the crew. Because shorts are staffed with fewer people, each employee has to do more things, developing a variety of skills that come in handy down the line. Moreover, working in small groups forges deeper relationships that can carry forward and, in the long term, benefit the company’s future projects.
- LEARNING TO SEE
In the year after Toy Story’s release, we introduced a ten-week program to teach every new hire how to use our proprietary software. We called this program Pixar University, and I hired a first-rate technical trainer to run it. At that point, the moniker university was a little misleading, though, as this was more of a training seminar than anything resembling an institution of higher learning. It is easy to justify a training program, but I had another agenda, and in trying to accomplish it, we would find surprising bonuses.
And I’ll admit that these social interactions I describe were an unexpected benefit. But the purpose of P.U. was never to turn programmers into artists or artists into belly dancers. Instead, it was to send a signal about how important it is for every one of us to keep learning new things. That, too, is a key part of remaining flexible: keeping our brains nimble by pushing ourselves to try things we haven’t tried before. That’s what P.U. lets our people do, and I believe it makes us stronger.
The specific procedural changes will sound mundane to anyone who doesn’t work in animation - we implemented a faster, more secure way, to cite a tiny example, of delivering the latest cuts of films to directors - but when you add them all up, they mattered. In the weeks after Notes Day, we implemented four good ideas, committed to five more, and earmarked still a dozen more for continued development. All of them stood to improve either our processes, our culture, or the way Pixar is managed.