The Way They Do Things Around There: An Analysis of the ‘Pixar Culture‪’‬

The history of Pixar (Pixar Animation Studios, 2009a) goes back to 1984 when John Lasseter, today’s chief creative officer of both Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, started working for the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm which two years later was bought by Steve Jobs and renamed “Pixar”. In 1991, after a number of short films and commercials with some of them winning various awards, Pixar and Disney pooled forces aiming to make the first full-length com-puter-animated movie. Released in 1995, Toy Story was a great success and marks the beginning of Pixar’s unbroken triumph to date. Having once prolonged their agreement to work together in 1997, and having released Toy Story 2, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredi-bles, all major successes, Pixar eventually was acquired by Disney in 2006. How-ever, instead of absorbing Pixar, people in charge at Disney explicitly agreed to let Pixar continue as it did before and even secured the preservation of the ‘Pixar Culture’ in their contract (Telegraph Media Group Limited, 2009). In fact, Disney used the merger to revive its own spirits, for example by promoting John Lasse-ter to his above-mentioned position.