Pixar's Believable People
Plus: news.
Welcome! We’re back with another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This is the plan:
1. The early development of Pixar’s human characters.
2. Animation newsbits.
3. The last word.
A note before we start. Last week, we premiered the Congolese short Machini (2019) online, and the response was wonderful. Unfortunately, some readers ran into technical problems with the embedded video, so we’re sharing a fresh link (watch here) that should work for everyone. Machini is available for one more week, and we highly recommend giving it a look while you can.
Now, let’s go!
1. Computer puppets
It was a question that haunted early 3D computer graphics. What makes a credible animated human?
Building realistic people was a fixation of the CG world in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Just take Rendez-vous in Montreal (1987), which tried to resurrect Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe as polygonal models. “You can put actors out of jobs,” boasted its creators.1 But the results were unsettling. And, while cartoonier humans like the one in Tony de Peltrie (1985) were better, they still didn’t totally land.
These problems were known. Pixar’s crew, for one, was well aware of them.
The studio’s first wave of films from 1986, Luxo Jr. and Beach Chair and Flags and Waves, have no humans. They’re about inanimate objects (lamps, folding chairs) and natural phenomena (shadows, water) that were easier to capture. The team didn’t try to do what it couldn’t do, and so those films continue to hold up.
“Modeling and animating a human character on a computer is a difficult proposition,” wrote Pixar’s post-production guy Craig Good in 1988. “Three-dimensional modeling is really a form of sculpture. There is nothing easy about making a statue of a person which is both realistic and pleasing, and making the sculpture move only complicates things. The eye is very unforgiving when it comes to human faces.”2
Pixar did attempt a cartoony clown in Red’s Dream (1987) — a “project which nearly killed us,” Good noted. But the film’s city sets and living unicycle are its real stars. The unicycle emotes and looks believable and commands the screen in ways that the clown, as impressive as he was then, never quite manages.
When Pixar started Tin Toy (1988), it aimed to tackle the human problem. Craig Good called it “our first serious effort at animating a human character.”
In its early years, Pixar wasn’t an animation studio, and its animation division was very small. “We’re a computer company, and we started to create [films] in an effort to advance our technology and research new topics,” said programmer and artist Eben Ostby, one of the core members.3
Ostby had a major hand in Tin Toy. Pixar spent half a year on the film, and “[m]ost people would be aghast at how many all-nighters we put in while making this five-minute clip,” he said. It pairs Pixar’s living objects with a detailed human performance: Billy, a baby feared by all his toys. The team described humans as “absolutely the most difficult thing to try,” but they were tried nevertheless.4
Billy took his name from Bill Reeves, another key figure in the Pixar animation department. One magazine called him the character’s “father, of sorts.”5 Reeves was a technical director on Tin Toy, and an animator, and he was involved in the creation of Tinny, the story’s hero. Craig Good wrote that Reeves had an “amazing ability to sit down and work for hours at a stretch.”
He used that ability on Billy. Reeves began by cutting grid lines into a large clay sculpture by another artist, then tracing those lines with a digitizer pen to bring the shapes into Pixar’s computers. As Reeves said in the ‘80s:
I thought the baby would be an interesting problem. This was my first attempt at doing human forms, but several people in SIGGRAPH … had done work with humans. We based some of our conclusions on what they had done. And we did a lot of experimenting. …
[W]hen we put the head and the body together, they didn’t fit. The neck is proportioned differently in the two pieces. … But it was okay; I managed to bang in the back of his neck with some tools in the computer. In fact the head just sits down on the neck. … If you look closely, there are some shots when Billy is crawling where you can actually see a gap — like he’s coming apart. Thank goodness it’s only five or six frames.
His neck was just one of Reeves’s and the team’s worries. This character was a huge, painstaking achievement, backed up by many hours of research into babies’ movements — Billy’s model had some 40 “attach and pull points” on each side of its face. But Pixar was going beyond its means. “When he opens his mouth really wide, there’s a funny creasing that goes on in the jaw area,” Reeves said. He also mentioned that “the skin wasn’t flabby like a real baby’s would be.”6
“We achieved probably 90% of what we’d hoped with the gross motions,” Reeves admitted at the time.
It was enough to win Tin Toy an Oscar — the first for computer animation. Frank Thomas of the Nine Old Men called Billy “just fantastic.” But other people soon attached other words to the character: “demonic,” “from hell.”
A lot about the baby works, and the film holds together, but not everything is right. Billy’s design is a bit uncanny, his movement a bit stiff. He’s caught at a weird middle point between realism and exaggeration, and the tech didn’t go as far as Pixar needed. While the tin-toy protagonist looks great today, Reeves has described Billy as “weird-looking.”7
After the Oscar victory in 1989, the editor of Computer Graphics World spoke about the reactions to Billy. “It’s really difficult to get things lifelike. The baby — some people find it grotesque,” he said. “That’s the best there is, and it’s not there yet.”8
Following Tin Toy, Pixar went back to objects. They led a lot of the studio’s ads during the first part of the ‘90s, for products like Listerine. As with Luxo Jr.’s lamps, many of these characters are compelling even now.
Along the way, the team developed a Tin Toy Christmas special that ultimately evolved into Toy Story.9 Objects were the stars again, and not by coincidence. Like Ed Catmull said in 1995:
We wanted to play to our strengths for our first film. We didn’t want to start with something where the humans were the major characters. In Tin Toy, we had a problem with the baby, because it looked cute on paper, but in 3D it looked a little grotesque, because the head was so large. It has to do with human perception. We want to make humans that are stylized, not real. The problem is, the closer you get to reality, that’s when the brain starts to kick in with its auto-recognizers, and thinks something is a little weird. If you back off, and make the humans more abstract, audiences will accept it more readily.10
Toy Story couldn’t do without humans altogether — it needed a few in side roles. Pixar made them far cartoonier than Billy, but they remained the most challenging characters, and were animated last.11
One trouble was skin. Toy Story’s skin shader was “phenomenally complicated,” said the studio’s Brad West, and yet “when we put it into a lit scene, it essentially looked like plastic. It was the world’s most complicated plastic shader.” Plus, the humans still couldn’t act quite as effectively as the toys.12
And so Pixar relied on workarounds. To combat the skin, the artists went for “as much clothing as possible” on the characters. There were also attempts to keep Andy, Sid and the others only partly in frame. “[S]ome humans feel stiff at times. So we’ve tried to stage shots where we only see feet, hands,” said Pete Docter, a directing animator on the film.
Yet Ralph Eggleston, Toy Story’s art director, wasn’t satisfied. Like he said in ‘95:
... for all the work we put into them, the humans fall flat. Everything else is so believable, and when you see the people, it’s jarring. In 75 percent of the cases, the people look really great, and the other 25 percent I’m not that comfortable with. Next time we’ll do better.13
It was a little harsh. Toy Story is an excellent film, and the human characters are way more persuasive than the Tin Toy experiment. But it was also true that Pixar hadn’t fully cracked what it was trying to crack.
The ideas were in place: humans who were stylized but convincing, who didn’t feel artificial and who moved with the liveliness of Pixar’s object characters. Toy Story got part of the way there. Geri’s Game (1997) did the rest.
Jan Pinkava had joined Pixar in 1993, drawn by the appeal of Luxo. “It was because of that film that I pursued computer animation,” he said.14 Pinkava became an asset to the ad group: the Listerine Robin Hood spot was his, among others.
Geri’s Game, a short film, was a large step up for him. Catmull was looking for someone to work on human characters, and Pinkava got the job. “Ed knew that in the long term the studio needed to be free to include humans,” Pinkava said, because there are “only so many toy, bug and fish stories you can tell.”15
Here’s Catmull:
Our only directive to Jan before he made it was that it had to include a human character. Why? Because we needed to get better at them. We needed to work on rendering not only the smoothly irregular surfaces of faces and hands but also the clothes that people wear. At this point, remember, because of our inability to render skin and hair and certain curved surfaces to our satisfaction, humans had only been ancillary characters in our movies.16
Serious tech solutions powered Geri’s Game. For example, Tony DeRose used “subdivision surfaces” to create a seamless character who doesn’t split or crease in the odd ways that Billy does, even with Geri’s broader range of motion. Cloth simulation got realistic enough that Geri’s jacket had to be cut properly to hang properly. And his model had a nearly unwieldy number of controls.17
But the tech side wasn’t the only thing: there was an artistic question, too. Pixar’s humans had left Billy behind, but they still occupied an ever-so-slightly-awkward middle ground between anatomical realism and cartooniness. Pinkava and his team completely escaped it.
Geri, the old man who plays chess against himself, became the furthest thing from a realistic human. “I imagine Geri as a super stop-motion puppet ... I really like the fact that he’s not real. ... People have been creating stylized characters in sculptures for thousands of years,” Pinkava said. “We don’t think about it in terms of computer graphics very much, but it’s an incredibly rich tradition.”18
Pinkava credited this realization to his upbringing. He was born in Czechoslovakia, and raised on the work of Jiří Trnka, the master illustrator, puppetmaker and stop-motion director. With Geri, Pinkava told Cartoon Brew that he “completely ripped off” Trnka’s designs, down to the “way he’s proportioned, his nose, his chin, the way his head works, the way the eyes sit in the face.”
Pinkava again:
… I came from an area of Europe where people have been dealing with puppet theater for centuries … I wasn’t inventing anything. I was just copying what I was exposed to as a child. It felt obvious that you don’t get into the debate of making human characters realistic, never mind that, that’s a worthy goal but not for the animation studio. You’ve got to figure out a stylization for the character as if it’s a digital puppet.
The CG world was still preoccupied with photorealistic human replicas who moved like people. Despite the creepy results in Rendez-vous in Montreal, there was a sense that CG imposters could replace actors. Words like “synthespian” were thrown around; Geri got described as one in the press.
Pinkava pushed back a bit. “It’s not, as some people might think, the creation of fake people to compete with living actors,” he said in 1998. “Why waste living talents, anyway?”19
As it happened, Jiří Trnka had reached that same conclusion in his mid-century stop motion. In 1955, he argued, “A perfect imitation of a human — for example a mannequin in a clothing store window display — gives the impression of life neither as a statue nor as a puppet, and the same is true of wax figures from a [wax museum], which always look terrifying; if they moved, we would have no choice but to run.” Naturalistic puppets were likewise “unnatural and morbid” to him.20
For Trnka, puppets were “not replacements for humans.” Instead, they “should be more archetypical than a human actor can be, and portray and serve the idea of a person, not their surface.”21
The hard problem that Trnka addressed came back in early computer graphics. Many projects ended up in wax-figure territory; tech shortcomings usually got the blame. Geri, though, remains a credible character after almost 30 years. As graphically lo-fi as he looks today, the artistic solutions behind him have lasted. He’s carried by his pushed, puppet-like, archetypical design and movement.
One of Geri’s animators, Karen Prell, was herself a live puppeteer with Muppet experience. “It was so much fun getting into Geri,” she said at the time. “If you think of him as a 3D puppet, he’s so amazingly expressive.”
Pixar’s lamps, unicycles and toy figures had always, in a sense, been puppets — it was partly why they succeeded. Geri brought the idea very concretely to humans. Geri’s Game won an Oscar, and its techniques got into Toy Story 2 and many films ahead.
In fact, the short attracted Brad Bird to Pixar. “Geri’s Game made me feel confident that my problems with CG films could be addressed, because here was a human that was stylized, yet had credibility,” he said. Geri’s “tactile and fleshy” look stood out to him, but these traits didn’t lapse into uncanniness.
Pixar’s human-heavy movies of the ‘00s show the lessons of Geri’s Game. Bird’s Incredibles leans into archetypes and broad strokes, and the cast of Ratatouille (originally Pinkava’s film) is visibly Trnka-inspired. And so, despite the age of these characters, they hold up well.
Not everything from the era did. Bob Parr and Edna Mode appeared roughly three years after The Spirits Within (2001), a synthespian project and a big technical achievement.22 That film’s humans were high-fidelity — and yet they’re stiffer, colder and less believable than Geri and the characters made in his mold.
There’s no doubt that tech breakthroughs played a role in Pixar’s discovery: the software and hardware to make Geri’s Game didn’t exist in 1988. But the studio tapped into something older, too, that went beyond tech. As art director Ralph Eggleston said about The Incredibles:
In my opinion it’s always been a fallacy, the notion that human characters have to look photo-realistic in CG. You can do so much more with stylized human characters. Audiences innately know how humans move and gravity works, so if a human character doesn’t feel right, they’ll feel something’s wrong. But if the weight works for stylized characters, the audience doesn’t question it — like the dwarfs in Snow White.23
2. Newsbits
A new site, Animation Hub, links to watchable copies of European animation from the festival circuit and beyond. It’s a project by CEE Animation, an EU group headquartered in Czechia.
Speaking in America, Guillermo del Toro discussed GenAI. “We are told images can be generated by artificial means. The existence of an image is not just to be there,” he said. “It is to connect us, to make us feel beauty.”
Check out A Rabbit Slipping on Banana Peels: The Movie, a student film from Japan, newly uploaded to Geidai’s animation channel.
Belgian artist Britt Raes is showing off her new series Luce and the Rock, including a clip. It’s based on her very good short of the same name — watchable on YouTube.
In Croatia, the top prize for shorts at Animafest went to Winter in March by Natalia Mirzoyan. See the complete list of winners.
Pablo Leon’s feature To the Other Side, produced by Dinamita Animación in Colombia, as a teaser and details.
On Friday, Australia’s Glitch posted the last episode of The Amazing Digital Circus on YouTube. Views are already close to 50 million.
The government of Russia is suing Soyuzmultfilm over subsidies handed out more than a decade ago, when the studio was state-owned. Scholar Pavel Shvedov weighed in on the lawsuit.
The American Center of Puppetry Arts, based in Atlanta, is running an exhibition of stop-motion film materials until November.
Finally: a look at the inner workings of Jiří Trnka’s stop-motion studio.
3. Last word
Thanks for reading today! As usual, we’re wrapping up with personal comments from the two of us (co-runners):
John: The Annecy Festival started today, and I’ll be interested to see what stories it brings. We aren’t on the ground for the 2026 event (things didn’t line up for it), but we’ll have an eye on the news as always, and we’ll definitely be covering it. Attending in 2025 was an experience I won’t forget, and it’s our hope to be there next year. The big, overriding goal is to take Animation Obsessive on the road across Europe, touring animation scenes and festivals in person and writing about what we see — and I’d love to be doing it by the time Annecy 2027 rolls around. If you’re there this year, hope you enjoy!
Jules: Earlier this week, I was creating the design for a character who travels through a fantastical world. I noticed myself defaulting to giving them a 20th-century-style hand-carried suitcase, and it occurred to me that many children today have only ever known wheeled suitcases. It made me think about other visual iconography and kinds of stories we have hanging on from previous eras that no longer reflect how we live; how there seems to be a certain reluctance in us to mythologize the present. Maybe we could gain something in our understanding of our lives in the contemporary world if we had a few more stories with fantastical wheeled suitcases — just like Kenneth Grahame once put Toad in an automobile, all the way back in 1908.
Until next time!
See The Buffalo News (March 13, 1988).
From Animation Magazine (Fall 1988), a major source for the Tin Toy section. All of Good’s quotes come from here.
See The Daily Progress (February 15, 1990).
The quote comes from The Ottawa Citizen (October 9, 1988).
For the origin of Billy’s name, see Animation Magazine (Fall 1989), page 12. The quote comes from American Cinematographer (October 1989), used heavily for the Tin Toy section.
That last quote comes from CineFex (December 1995), used a few times today.
These foregoing quotes about Billy come from The Record-Journal (July 23, 1989), Animato (Winter 1990), MicroTimes (February 17, 1992) and The Art of Pixar Short Films. The last was used several times.
See The Peninsula Times Tribune (March 27, 1989).
See Cinefantastique (November 1995).
From Computer Graphics World (August 1995), used a few times.
See CineFex (April 2000) and the foregoing sources.
From Starlog (December 1995).
From an archived Pixar interview with Pinkava.
See the Animated Views and Cartoon Brew interviews with Pinkava. Both valuable, and the latter was a core source for the Geri’s Game section.
From Catmull’s book Creativity Inc.
See the paper “Subdivision Surfaces in Character Animation” and the foregoing sources.
From Computer Graphics World (February 1998), used a few times.
Quote from the San Francisco Chronicle (April 8, 1998).
See Nový Život (November 1, 1955).
From Film 1/24 (January 20, 1978) and Nový Život.
From The Art of the Incredibles.
Wow! I never knew how much of a snowball effect Tin Toy had on Pixar’s evolution (and the rest of the animation industry as a whole), especially with the character designs for human characters! Just goes to show you never know where something will lead!
For a while, I’ve been thinking about how the “exaggerations of human features” is also very integral to the world of motion capture (with characters like Gollum and the Na’Vi from Avatar, just to give a couple of examples) in order to avoid “uncanny valley.” Truly fascinating how intricate the human mind works!
Once again, such a great read! Keep up the awesome work, you guys!
Loved the last word from Jules today - I think telephones are probably the biggest example of that phenomena! For objects at least, I think there's more appeal to the clunkier, analog artifacts of the past compared to today's items built for convenience. That said, we are missing a chance to capture our present reality in our stories by not including such updates!