MAD About Pixar!

Last week Wednesday I was honored to be a guest speaker for “Pixar University” at the Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, CA!

This all came about thank’s to Pixar’s Josh Cooley, whom I met many years ago when he was a guest speaker at the annual meeting of the National Cartoonists Society North Central Chapter. Josh was a Pixar story artist at the time and had just worked on “Up” and was then working on “The Incredibles 2”. How the chapter officers convinced him to to go Omaha to speak at our little get together I have no idea. Turned out Josh was a big MAD fan. We exchanged drawings and he asked me if I’d ever be interested in coming to speak at Pixar. Right after I picked my jaw up off the floor I said, “SURE!”

Fast forward a decade and Josh is now a big time director at Pixar… in fact he just made his feature film directorial debut this year with the phenomenal “Toy Story 4”. This summer he dropped me a line and reminded me about maybe doing a talk at Pixar. As it happened I was going to be in the San Francisco Bay area for a family wedding in Oakland one weekend and then teach a workshop at the Cartoon Art Museum in the Wharf area the next weekend. Instead of flying home in between I stayed in town and went to Pixar on Wednesday to do two presentations (and to get a fun tour!).

First I did a talk about the history of and process of doing movie/TV parodies in MAD in a theater in the “Brooklyn” building of the Pixar campus. After a nice lunch with a bunch of super talented animators and story artists, I taught a mini-workshop on caricature for another group of ridiculously talented artists. No pressure.

I wasn’t able to take pictures except in a few specific areas where that is allowed, but here are some fun things I saw here and there on the campus:

This was great fun and a real privilege. Many thanks to Josh as well as Tia Kratter, Hannah Chu, and the Pixar University team for all the hospitality. Also thanks to fellow Minnesotan and Pixar head honcho Pete Doctor for taking the time to say hello and chat. What a gigantic source of inspiration and creative magic Pixar is. I’m submitting an application soon. I don’t think I have the chops to work in the art department but they have about 20 bistros in that place and I make a mean monte cristo.