After I wrote my last post about the dearth of innovation in film, I happened to read Anthony Lane’s New Yorker piece on Pixar, “The Fun Factory”. It made me slap my forehead in an “of course!” way. Lane starts out as a skeptic, ready to debunk the myth of Pixar as the den of awesomeness that everyone says it is. After a tour of the mind-blowingly fun facilities that comprise the Pixar campus (including a pool and beach volleyball courts), Lane asks: “Is there not, in short, a dark underbelly to the Pixar state of bliss?” By the end, he has totally drunk the kool aid.  He quotes Pixar head John Lasseter: “The people at Pixar are my best friends. Not only do I want to see them every day–I can’t wait to see them everyday…when my wife, Nancy and I make a list of whom we are going to take on vacation, the top group is Pixar.”

I’m a pretty cynical bastard myself. I don’t believe in workplaces where people hold hands and sing kumbaya because well, mainly I’ve never had one. But as I re-watched Finding Nemo this past weekend, I couldn’t help but think that this utopian multiple hit-making machine is the real deal. The secret sauce? The founders and original artists fought for innovation in the early days of the company. Now they are the standard in animation that thrills children and thoroughly engages adults. Before Pixar, mainstream animation (mostly proffered by pre-Pixar Disney) was the stuff of facile kid fantasies, and not anything I could stand to look at for more than a minute. While the perfection of 3D animation lies at the core of Pixar’s creative approach, there is also an approach to story that soars sometimes sadly, sometimes sweetly but always smartly.

Put simply, these guys are masters of story.

Lane takes a stab at what makes Pixar stories great:

The key to Pixar, I came to realize, is that what it seeks to enact, as corporate policy, and what it strives to dramatize, in its art, spring from a common purpose and a single clarion call: You’ve got a friend in me.

In cinema, as in fiction, friendship is a more durable substance that we give credit for, and often more resilient than love. Indeed, it may be the hardiest strain of love that we possess, untroubled by erotic fragrance; once Huck Finn and Jim–to take the most obvious ancestors of Woody and Buzz–meet on Jackson’s Island, they don’t declare their friendship to one another, or let it disturb their sleep. They just get on with it. That practical momentum, conservative in its emotions but radical in its taste for adventure, runs through Westerns, Andy Hardy movies, “The Flinstones,” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” before landing in the land of Pixar.

I would add that because we live in an era of extreme disintermediation as a result technology and other social forces, the narrative of friendship becomes an even more vital mythological pull, one which will be studied for some time to come. And I am sure that when history judges this era in American film,  Pixar films will emerge as the thematic and aesthetic masters of our day.

In the mean time, why aren’t we tinkering away at more models like Pixar?

StoryCorp’s mission is “to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives.” Simple perhaps, but in the execution, often profound.

Many thousands of interviews later, StoryCorps has become perhaps the most comprehensive document of what America really feels and sounds like, outside of the din of propaganda and for that reason, I am a devoted follower.

Then I saw the creatively wonderful move into animation, and the artful renderings of these brief moments. Not only was this a re-imagining of stories through an artist’s point of view, but it also extended the world of the stories in a meaningful way. Below, is a wonderful piece that renders a brilliantly willful, brash and cheeky Chinese-American grandmother with great visual wit.

No More Questions! from StoryCorps on Vimeo.

Credit for originally posting this goes to Maria Popova of Brain Pickings, who curates the best stuff online and shares it with the world. The work is by Egor Zhgun, a popular Russian illustrator/animator and satirist. I wish I knew more about this guy because I love his sense of humor. Here is his blog, in case you read Russian and, a few of his illustrations at Artlebedev

Stainboy is an anti-superhero superhero, whose only talent is his uncontrollable production and smearing of greasy stains everywhere he goes. In the series, he works for the Burbank police, and at the start of each episode he is ordered to investigate and bring in social outcasts. Many of the outcasts are characters from Burton’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy where the Stainboy character made its first appearance in two short poems.

Beginning today, November 22nd until December 6th, anyone can submit lines on Twitter for the next episode of the Stainboy story, hashtagged #BurtonStory. In what Burton himself describes as an “Exquisite Corpse” experiment, the story will be created 140 characters or less at a time, to yield an episode likely less than five minutes, which is how long the previous animated episodes ran.

Here you can see the 6th installment of the popular flash animation series launched in 2000. In this final episode, we flashback to Stainboy’s beginnings in the weird kids orphanage in Burbank.

STAIN BOY

Of all the super heroes,
the strangest one by far,
doesn’t have a special power,
or drive a fancy car.

next to Superman and batman, I guess he must seem tame.
But to me he is quite special,
and Stain Boy is his name.

He can’t fly around tall buildings,
or outrun a speeding train,
the only talent he seems to have
is to leave a nasty stain.

Sometimes I know it bothers him,
that he can’t run or swim or fly,
and because of this one ability,
his dry cleaning bill is sky-high.

Sometimes, marketing and advertising can be brilliant. This is one such occasion.