Can you organise a group of people working together to make them more creative? Ed Catmull, president of Pixar thinks so. He shares those principles and practices with us. And he should know, he has managed Pixar to produce some truly creative films, and then in 2006 he became president of Disney Animation (when Disney Animation was about to be shut down) applying the same principles which led to Disney releasing the most successful animated film ever, Frozen. He’s collected these principles together in a really helpful book Creativity Inc: Overcoming the Unseen forces that Stand in the Way of True Inspiration.
Here’s Ed Catmull:
I don’t think our success is largely luck. Rather, I believe our adherence to a set of principles and practices for managing creative talent and risk is responsible. Pixar is a community in the true sense of the word. We’ve had a chance to test whether our principles and practices are transferable. After Pixar’s 2006 merger with Disney, I Pixar’s chief creative officer John Lasseter, and other senior managers were asked to help him revive Disney Animation Studios. The success of our efforts prompted me to share my
thinking on how to build a sustainable creative organization.
In this post I’ll share one of the principles that was most helpful for me and explain a little of why we should learn from Catmull, and then some of the best free resources to explore further.
Getting started: Best place to start is an article Catmull wrote for The Harvard Business Review (HBR) in 2008 How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity which basically outlines the principles in the book and some of the Pixar story and it’s absolute gold. Go read it right now. A lot of the best books on business and organisation start as HBR articles and I’ll post links to a lot of them here. You get free access to 8 articles if you register and it’s well worth it.
Most Helpful Principle: The Ugly Baby and Exploring the Neighborhood.
It’s a great phrase, and it talks about the fact that all of pixar’s films are bad at the beginning. In Catmull’s words, they Suck! Really. not an exaggeration, they suck. And that’s the first principle, is that an idea is bad at the beginning and only gets better as you make decisions and explore it. He calls these ideas at the beginning The Ugly Baby.
He says that we shouldn’t think that the ideas for the films are just little cute undeveloped versions of the fully grown films we see at the cinema, they are in fact Ugly Babies. Telling some stories from Pixar’s films he then shows how through a process of exploration, they become good ideas. And this is so helpful if you’re trying to do something, or create something that’s new. The raw idea that I have now is an ugly baby but with work and development it won’t stay that way.
A little later in this post I’ll show you a specific example from one of Pixar’s films UP, and you can decide for yourself whether it was in fact an Ugly Baby. Personally i think it was a monster! Then I’ll explain the principle for developing this idea into something great which Catmull calls Exploring the Neighborhood.
Why should we learn from Catmull and his book?
A bit of background first, if you don’t know Pixar. They are a fantastically creative filmmaking company creating some of my favorite films, they just happen to be animated films. Their president, Ed Catmull dreamed for 20 years of making the first animated film, Toy Story, which revolutionized the animated film genre. The studio has since released one creative gem after another. Catmull believes this is because of the unique company culture that they’ve built at Pixar where management has created an environment through the application of a set of principles which has made creativity possible. He shares these principles and practices in his book Creativity Inc.
The book is part Pixar’s story and part principles, but they’re woven together in a pretty engaging way.
I could explain why i love Pixar, their creative story, believable characters, authentic emotional core, or you could just see for yourself: here’s the opening sequence to UP. Best 7 minutes you’ll spend today (probably).
Everytime i watch that sequence there’s seems to be a little, eh hem, dust in my eye. And the film itself goes on to be even better.
But here’s what’s fascinating. The original version of the story from the director who’d just made the equally brilliant Monsters Inc. Was, well, dreadful. Judge for yourself:
Our tenth movie, Up, would be one of our most emotionally rich and original films, but it was also a case study in change and randomness. Conceived and directed by Pete Docter, it would be heralded by critics as a heartfelt adventure impeccably crafted with wit and depth. But boy, did it ever change during its development.
In the first version, there was a castle floating in the sky, completely unconnected to the world below. In this castle lived a king and his two sons, who were each vying to inherit the kingdom. The sons were opposites—they couldn’t stand each other. One day, they both fell to earth. As they wandered around, trying to get back to their castle in the sky, they came across a tall bird who helped them understand each other.
This version was intriguing, but ultimately it could not be made to work. Those who saw it had trouble empathizing with spoiled princes or understanding the rules of this strange, floating world. Pete recalls that he had to think hard, then, about what he was trying to express. “I was after a feeling—an experience of life,” he says. “For me, there are days when the world is overwhelming—especially when I’m directing a crew of three hundred people. As a result, I often daydream of running away. I have lots of daydreams about getting marooned on a tropical island or walking alone across America. I think we can all relate to the idea of wanting to get away from everything. Once I was able to understand what I was after, we were able to retool the story to better communicate that feeling.”
Only two things survived from that original version, the tall bird and the title: Up.
For the next pass, Pete and his team introduced an old man, Carl Fredrickson, whose lifelong love affair with his childhood sweetheart Ellie was summarized in a brilliant prologue that set the emotional tone for the rest of the film. After Ellie dies, a grief-stricken Carl attaches his house to a huge bouquet of balloons that makes the structure slowly lift into the sky. He soon discovers that he has an eight-year-old stowaway (and eager cub scout) with him named Russell. Eventually, the house lands on an abandoned Soviet-era spy dirigible that’s camouflaged to look like a giant cloud. Much of this version of the story unfolded on this airship until someone noted that—while it worked okay story-wise—it bore a slight resemblance to an idea Pixar had optioned that had to do with clouds. Though Pete had not been inspired at all by that idea, the echo felt too strong. So it was back to the drawing board.
In the third version, Pete and his team dumped the cloud, but kept the seventy-eight-year-old Carl, his sidekick Russell, the tall bird, and the idea of the house being lifted into the sky by balloons. Together, Carl and Russell floated in the house to a flat-topped Venezuelan mountain, called a tepui, where they encountered a famous explorer named Charles Muntz, whom Frederickson had read about and been inspired by when he was a boy. The reason Muntz hadn’t died of old age by this point was that the aforementioned bird laid eggs that had a magical, fountain-of-youth effect if you ate them. However, the egg mythology was complicated and got in the way of the core story—it felt like too much of an aside. So Pete revised again.
In the fourth iteration, there were no youth-prolonging eggs—Pete had taken them out. Which left us with a chronological problem: While the emotional throughline of the film was working, the age difference between Muntz and Carl (who’d admired him since childhood) should have meant that Muntz was pushing a hundred. But we were late in the game—too late to fix it—and in the end, we simply decided not to address it. We’ve found over the years that if people are enjoying the world you’ve created, they will forgive little inconsistencies, if they notice them at all. In this case, nobody noticed—or if they did, they didn’t care.
Ugly Baby!
Principle: Exploring the Neighborhood: Pick a path and go down it.
So here’s the principle that Catmull proposes. He calls it Exploring the Neighborhood which means that the iterative nature of this process is necessary for the creative process.
While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.
If you create a fearless culture (or as fearless as human nature will allow), people will be much less hesitant to explore new areas, identifying uncharted pathways and then charging down them. They will also begin to see the upside of decisiveness: The time they’ve saved by not gnashing their teeth about whether they’re on the right course comes in handy when they hit a dead end and need to reboot.
It isn’t enough to pick a path—you must go down it. By doing so, you see things you couldn’t possibly see when you started out; you may not like what you see, some of it may be confusing, but at least you will have, as we like to say, “explored the neighborhood.” The key point here is that even if you decide you’re in the wrong place, there is still time to head toward the right place. And all the thinking you’ve done that led you down that alley was not wasted. Even if most of what you’ve seen doesn’t fit your needs, you inevitably take away ideas that will prove useful. Relatedly, if there are parts of the neighborhood you like but that don’t seem helpful in the quest you’re on, you will remember those parts and possibly use them later.
He then gives another example from Monsters Inc to illustrate: Ugly Baby score cards at the ready, go!
Let me explain what I mean by exploring the neighborhood. Years before it evolved into the funny, affecting tale of a fierce, shaggy behemoth (Sulley) and his unlikely friendship with the little girl it’s his job to scare (Boo), Monsters, Inc. was an altogether different story. As first imagined by Pete Docter, it revolved around a thirty-year-old man who was coping with a cast of frightening characters that only he could see. As Pete describes it, the man “is an accountant or something, and he hates his job, and one day his mom gives him a book with some drawings in it that he did when he was a kid. He doesn’t think anything of it, and he puts it on the shelf, and that night, monsters show up. And nobody else can see them. He thinks he’s starting to go crazy. They follow him to his job, and on his dates, and it turns out these monsters are all the fears that he never dealt with as a kid. He becomes friends with them eventually, and as he conquers the fears, they slowly begin to disappear.”
Anyone who’s seen the movie knows that the final product bears no resemblance to that description. But what nobody knows is how many wrong turns the story took, over a period of years, before it found its true north. The pressure on Pete, all along, was enormous—Monsters, Inc. was the first Pixar film not directed by John Lasseter, so in some very real ways Pete and his crew were under the microscope. Every unsuccessful attempt to crack the story only heightened the pressure.Fortunately, Pete had a basic concept that he held to throughout: “Monsters are real, and they scare kids for a living.” But what was the strongest manifestation of that idea? He couldn’t know until he’d tried a few options. At first, the human protagonist was a six-year-old named Mary. Then she was changed to a little boy. Then back to a six-year-old girl. Then she was seven, named Boo, and bossy—even domineering. Finally, Boo was turned into a fearless, preverbal toddler. The idea of Sulley’s buddy character—the round, one-eyed Mike, voiced by Billy Crystal—wasn’t added until more than a year after the first treatment was written. The process of determining the rules of the incredibly intricate world Pete created also took him down countless blind alleys—until, eventually, those blind alleys converged on a path that led the story where it needed to go.
“The process of developing a story is one of discovery,” Pete says. “However, there’s always a guiding principle that leads you as you go down the various roads. In Monsters, Inc., all of our very different plots shared a common feeling—the bittersweet goodbye you feel once a problem”—in this case, Sulley’s quest to return Boo to her own world—“has been solved. You suffer through it as you struggle to solve it, but by the end you’ve developed a sort of fondness for it, and you miss it when it is gone. I knew I wanted to express that, and I was eventually able to get it in the film.”
Resources to Explore
I’ve collected some of the free resources to explore here:
This is the best interview with Catmull that I could find. He sums up the main idea of the book as well as some of the principles and goes through some of the story of pixar too.
Here’s the History of Pixar, Disney & Steve Jobs
Growing up, Ed Catmull had two heroes: Albert Einstein and Walt Disney. He wanted to be a Disney animator but instead went into computer graphics where it became his dream to make the first computer animated film. He thought it would take 10 years. It took 20. He worked for George Lucas in his computer graphics division and brought on John Lasseter but in 1986 Steve Jobs bought the company and then lost money on it for 10 years while Pixar struggled to make a feature length animated film until the runaway success in 1995 of Toy Story. With the acquisition of Pixar by Walt Disney in 2006, Catmull became president of Disney Animation Studios and Pixar in a strange reversal became the head of Disney. Here’s Ed in his excellent HBR article in 2008 on How Pixar fosters Collective Creativity:
Pixar’s track record is unique. In the early 1990s, we were known as the leading technological pioneer in the field of computer animation. Our years of R&D culminated in the release of Toy Story in 1995, the world’s first computer-animated feature film. In the following 13 years, we have released eight other films (A Bug’s Life; Toy Story 2; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; Ratatouille; and WALL·E), which also have been blockbusters. Unlike most other studios, we have never bought scripts or movie ideas from the outside. All of our stories, worlds, and characters were created internally by our community of artists. And in making these films, we have continued to push the technological boundaries of computer animation, securing dozens of patents in the process.
For 20 years, I pursued a dream of making the first computer-animated film. To be honest, after that goal was realized—when we finished Toy Story—I was a bit lost. But then I realized the most exciting thing I had ever done was to help create the unique environment that allowed that film to be made. My new goal became, with John, to build a studio that had the depth, robustness, and will to keep searching for the hard truths that preserve the confluence of forces necessary to create magic. In the years since Pixar’s merger with Disney, we’ve had the good fortune to expand that goal to include the revival of Disney Animation Studios.To go back a bit, Disney’s story began when it was innovatively producing excellent films under the genius founder Walt Disney. Who brilliantly married technology and art, first linking animated film and sound, creating what, until Toy Story, we thought of as animated films – then numerous other innovations including animation over live action. This period saw the classics Snow White (1937), Fantasia (1941), Pinocchio (1940) and Bambi (1942), Cinderella (1950) and Peter Pan (1953), Lady & the Tramp (1955), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and 101 Dalmatians (1961), , Mary Poppins (1964) Jungle Book (1967). After his death though in 1966 the company went through a long period of lack of creativity until the late 80s when the company again began producing pioneering animations: The Little Mermaid, Beauty & the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, and Pocahontas were made at this time. Then again the studio entered a long period of lack of creativity until Catmull and Lasseter took over in 2006. It was expected that Disney Animation would be shut down.
So Catmull & Lasseter have fantastically achieved their goal of reviving Disney and proving that their management for creativity principles that brought the success of Pixar could be applied to a different context with the same results with first Tangled then Frozen and recently Zootropolis which is funny and emotional and creative.
World.Hatch Learning 