Perfecting Pixar's Movies Takes a Crazy Amount of Research

Don’t be fooled: Pixar is as much a research firm as it is an animation studio.
Image may contain Plant Fruit Food and Produce
Designers working on Ratatouille even studied real-life cherries to make sure the fruit looked believable. Digital painting by Robert Kondo.Disney/Pixar

It would be so easy to think of Pixar as all play and no work. After all, the Disney-owned studio churns out happy-ending tales with lovable bugs, toys, and race cars for protagonists. Even its monsters are good guys.

Don’t be fooled: Pixar is as much a research firm as it is an animation studio, and a new exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City does an expert job at showing us how. For Pixar: The Design of Story, the movie studio supplied Cooper Hewitt with 650 renderings, mockups, illustrations, and storyboards of its characters and landscapes, along with background. Taken together, these artifacts illuminate the painstaking level of research that goes into the creation of every character, right down to the folds in an old man’s jacket sleeve, or the texture of the curls in a heroine’s hair.

Take Carl Fredricksen’s house in Up. The residence is as central to the movie’s plot as Russell, the dog Dug, or Carl himself, and Pixar’s designers treated it as such. It’s based on a Victorian-style home in Berkeley, California, and an annotated diagram on display at Cooper Hewitt shows where the designers specified nearly microscopic details like patina’d copper at the base of the chimney and the scale and frequency at which cracks in the paint would appear.

“When the house floats up and you’re looking at the infrastructure, it was really important that pipes connect in the right way, so if a plumber was watching the film they wouldn’t go, ‘oh, they took a lot of license,’ ” says Cara McCarty, curatorial director at Cooper Hewitt. Same goes for designing something as everyday as water: “In Finding Nemo the water is so incredible, but it’s hyper-realistic,” McCarty says. “If it’s too realistic, like a realistic painting, it almost becomes dead. They find ways to tweak it so that if someone who knows a lot about water is looking at it, and they’re already seduced by the movie and along for the ride, they don’t think, ‘it’s so phony.’ ”

No detail goes unturned in a Pixar film, and Cooper Hewitt’s new interactive display tables are a trove of them. To create Toy Story’s Woody, designers sculpted a series of busts, to make sure he looked likable from all angles. Filk, the underdog hero of A Bug’s Life, even fits Leonardo Da Vinci’s ideal proportions for man. The color of the western American landscape in Cars was taken directly from a dirt sample the movie’s creators collected, while on a Route 66 research-road trip. It might seem counter-intuitive, but the best way to get audience to believe in an imaginary world is by faithfully studying our real one.