Ed Catmull's Pixar Retirement Is an Opportunity, Not a Loss

It's hard to imagine anyone has had a career like Ed Catmull's. He was hired by George Lucas to run Lucasfilm's computer division in 1979; seven years later, after Steve Jobs bought that division from Lucas, he co-founded Pixar with Jobs and then-Disney-ex-pat John Lasseter. There, he helped develop RenderMan, the studio's revolutionary computer animation software, which it still uses today. By 2006—after Pixar changed the film landscape with Toy Story, and after Disney bought his studio for an insane $7.4 billion—he was president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. If you've recently cried at an animated film, be it Coco or Frozen, you have Catmull to thank.

Late Tuesday night, after 32 years, Ed Catmull announced he would be retiring at the end of this year. This is not sad news, though—it's a chance to give Pixar a new future.

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So far, Disney hasn't named Catmull's replacement. Jim Morris, president of Pixar, and Andrew Millstein, head of Walt Disney Animation Studios, will be running their respective outfits for now. But if Catmull's previous statements on the subject hold true, they've already been primed for the job. Around the release of his book Creativity, Inc. in 2015, he noted that he wanted to create a culture that would endure after he was gone; Disney movies had slumped after Walt Disney's passing because he hadn't put in place the next generation of filmmakers, Catmull said, and Apple had succeeded because Jobs had. If Catmull has decided now is the time to retire, one can only hope he's taken his own advice and made sure everyone on the corporate ladder is a strong rung.

But it goes deeper than that, all the way to the ground beneath that ladder. Disney announced earlier this year that Lasseter would be leaving at the end of 2018 following what he called "missteps" that made his employees feel "disrespected and uncomfortable." (He'd faced accusations of inappropriate conduct in the period leading up to the announcement.) That leaves Pixar in the position of being able to rebuild. During that same interview a few years back, Catmull stressed the importance of Pixar hiring more female directors, noting that the company was running Girls Who Code programs to get young women into the tech side of the company. Should Pixar continue that path, it'll have a bullpen of new innovators ready to be, well, the next Ed Catmull.

It could also be a time for Pixar to look beyond animation entirely. Pixar's rendering software changed how animated films were made, but that was a quarter of a century ago. It's time the company started developing the next filmmaking tool—even if that tool doesn't just make films. Last year, the company dipped its toe into virtual reality with a VR experience centered around its film Coco. If it ever actually put its brain and computing power into VR, there's no telling what it could make. Pixar vet Saschka Unseld demonstrated what could be done with animation in VR with projects like Dear Angelica and Henry (as have many others), and there's no reason Pixar couldn't have a VR division. If Jon Favreau can use the technology to work on his forthcoming Lion King reboot and Lucasfilm can have a whole department (ILMxLab) for immersive storytelling, Pixar should be getting into the game, too.

Speaking of immersive, there's also augmented reality. The format is still so new it's only barely on consumers' radar, but as Pokémon Go proved folks are open to it. Now that Magic Leap is a real company with a real headset, AR's presence in the world is only going to grow. Perhaps not as fast as VR's, but as smartphones get faster and other hardware gets better, AR could soon catch up. ILMxLab and Peter Jackson's Weta Workshop have already been working on content with Magic Leap for months—some of which Jackson hopes can be released next year—Pixar would be smart to join the pack.

The company can, of course, also rebuild itself into something new entirely. No one necessarily knew animation tools needed an upgrade until Pixar designed one in the mid-'80s. If the company brings on the next generation of storytellers and innovators, they'll be able to find out what the company needs to invent next. Then, perhaps, Catmull's greatest contribution to Pixar will be truly realized.

CULTURE