Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

by Ed Catmull

While they had hoped to convey the sense of their movie idea by displaying examples from other films, every single board was based on these iconic references, with the unintended result that everything presented felt terribly derivative. In one way, this made sense—every director gets into this business because they love movies; it is inevitable that references to other movies often pop up when talking about filmmaking. (At Pixar, we joke that only one mention of Star Wars is allowed per meeting.) References to movies, both good and bad, are part of the vocabulary of talking about filmmaking. And yet if you rely too much on the references to what came before, you doom your film to being derivative. Brad Bird noticed a similar phenomenon when he was studying at the California Institute of the Arts. He remembers a group of students that simply aped the animation of the masters, an approach he dubbed “Frankensteining.” “They’d have a character do the kind of walk that animator Milt Kahl did for Medusa in The Rescuers,” he says. “And then they’d have her wave her hands like Frank Thomas had Fauna do in Sleeping Beauty. And so on.… ”