JKR

Pixar

This week's Champion of Design is Pixar, the brand known for it's outstanding creativity in the world of animation. Silas Amos outlines the brand lessons that we observed...

Great brands, they say, become verbs. While we might not be ‘Pixaring’ just yet, the name defines its category. Recently I overheard a cinema usher confidently describing Rio as ‘the latest Pixar’, although it’s not (not close). Does this indicate that a brand is losing its lead, its distinctiveness?

Unlikely, because while being a technical pioneer arguably made Pixar, it’s not, in my opinion, what sustains it. Pixar’s astonishing rendering of chromes, water, fur and suchlike can be copied. But if inanimate objects, from angle-poise lamps to toys and cars offer the best subjects for Pixar’s technology, their limitations have presumably inspired the leaps of imaginative storytelling which stick in the mind. For Pixar, content is king.

Ironic that it’s the emotional heart at the centre of the films that defines Pixar, not their dexterity with a pixel. Both Up and Toy Story 3 were mostly reviewed from the perspective of how embarrassing it was to start weeping in front of one’s children.

Certainly chief creative John Lasseter believes that technology is not the be all and end all. When he became creative head at Disney the old drawing tables were taken out of mothballs for The Princess and the Frog – a return to the traditional hand-drawn musical animation that made Disney famous, and which they had killed off in a desire to emulate Pixar’s technical lead.

So what makes Pixar distinctive? Innovation? A visionary creative head? Or the most traditional thing in the book - a superior, crafted product. As Lasseter himself puts it, “quality is a great business plan”.

For the full article, pick up this week's copy of Marketing.