George Lucas and LucasFilm have announced the creation of an animation unit within ILM to be called Lucasfilm Animation to focus on digital animated features in competition with Pixar and PDI/Dreamworks.
The irony? Pixar started as a division of Lucasfilm 17 years ago and was sold to Steve Jobs for $10 million. Pixar has a net worth now of over $3 billion.
While that may seem to paint Lucas as the fool, it doesn't take into account the huge amounts of development dollars spent over all those years to build Pixar into what it is today. I believe that a lot of that cost can be deferred as the costs of hardware and software have dropped dramatically. Also, the learning curve has already been conquered somewhat by the R&D and software engineers currently at ILM.
But more to the point... the amazing success of Pixar is only partially attributable to their mastery of the technology and the development of new animation and rendering tools. It's primarily because of their mastery of one simple, often over-looked element in film today: THE STORY!
Shrek may have looked like a million bucks and maybe it had a few good jokes, but I firmly believe that Monster's Inc. will be the film that people will still be watching in 20 years when they want to see a touching, funny and heart warming story about two best friends and a little girl.
As much as I'm a geek and a technology nut, I only hope that Mr. Lucas can put in place at Lucasfilm Animation, producers and directors that care not only about the image but about the story and characters that come to life at 24 digital, highly processed, expensively rendered, frames-per-second.
Update: More info from the L.A. Times.
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