Jack Covert Selects - The Pixar Touch

The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company by David A. Price, Knopf, 304 pages, $27.95 Hardcover, May 2008, ISBN 9780307265753 Disney's The Sword in the Stone may have inspired some youngsters with dreams of becoming a knight or magician, leading them to a life of role-playing and dice-throwing. But, one little boy, John Lassater, thought instead about becoming an animator right then and there. He's now one of the people at the helm of Pixar, and yes, he did get to animate some pictures. David A. Price's The Pixar Touch walks readers through the genesis of Pixar. Its beginnings reach far back into the 1960s, before computer technology was even a glimmer on the horizon of film making, let alone in our everyday workforce and home life. The book weaves the tales of not just one or two great masterminds behind Pixar, but actually dives into the contributions of the many different people who helped establish what it is today. This is no small feat, as there are literally thousands of such individuals to acknowledge (George Lucas, Tim Burton, Ed Catmull and Steve Jobs, just to name a few). The author also takes on the huge task of talking about the technology, innovation and expertise that fueled Pixar into an Academy Award-winning company. He does so with great care, making the story accessible and easy to comprehend even though readers may not know anything about mainframes, pixels, frame buffers and other such computer hardware. Detailing the histories of the company's huge hits (including Monster's Inc. and Finding Nemo) as well as some of its misses, Price shows how Pixar demonstrates the value in having faith not only in yourself, but also in those around you. The Pixar Touch never loses sight of the company's greatest renewable resource, the human spirit. Just envision that little boy looking up at the big screen, watching another little boy pull a huge sword out of a stone, thinking, "Hey, I could do that!"