This Day In Pixar History: Brave Theatrical Release

Five years ago today, on June 22, 2012, Pixar's 13th film, Brave, had its theatrical release. It opened in first place with over $66 million and went on to make over $540 million worldwide. Brave won a number of awards, including the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film, the BAFTA for Best Animated Film and the Golden Globe award for Best Animated Feature Film.

Brave was released with the excellent short film La Luna by Enrico Casarosa, with a beautiful score by Michael Giacchino.

Brave was a great, fresh take on the fairy tale story with strong female characters and a new interpretation of a princess character. It's really the relationship between Merida and Elinor that moves the story forward and sets it apart.

The archery scene where Merida declares she will shoot for her own hand, and splits Dingwall's arrow with her own, still gives me goosebumps. The film then jumps to the fight inside the castle between Merida and her mother; the animation is beautiful and full of such emotion. I also just love the music; I still often listen to the soundtrack (composed by Patrick Doyle), and think Touch the Sky is an awesome song.

I remember being stunned by the complexity of the film - the number of sets; all the atmospheric conditions -  rain, water, mist and fog; the different light conditions - full sunlight, candles and torches, moonlight,  and dark shadowed forests. And how can we forget Merida's wild and crazy hair?! It was a huge leap forward in simulations, photorealistic sets and environments.

Here are some fun facts:

• The inspiration for the story came from director Brenda Chapman's relationship with her daughter.
• Sadly, there isn't a director's commentary to the film, but fortunately there is a LARGE number of interesting and entertaining bonus features including ones on the music, the design language of the relationship between Merida and her mother, alternate and deleted scenes, computer-generated bloopers and an in-depth look at director Mark Andrews. The promos for the film were also hilarious!
• To blow off steam (and to help rejuvenate the creative juices) during the production of the film, the crew would partake in Scottish activities such as eating haggis, wearing kilts and Nerf wars (not sure if that last one really qualifies as purely Scottish!)
• Two of the songs in the film, Touch the Sky and Into the Open Air, were created by Alex Mandel, who was a Pixar manager. Director Mark Andrews helped come up with the lyrics with Alex on Touch the Sky.
•  111,394 storyboards were created for the film, compared to 80,000 for Cars 2 and 92,854 for Toy Story 3.

The Science Behind Pixar at the Science Museum of Minnesota

The museum is on the banks of the Mississippi River in downtown St. Paul

My wife and I went to The Science Behind Pixar last week on its opening night at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, and I wanted to share some thoughts and photos from this amazing exhibition.

Inside the lobby

I want to start with the Science Museum as it has some significance to my wife Lynn and myself. Our first date was at the museum in January of 1982, where we saw Genesis on the domed Omnitheater during a blizzard. We've been to the museum many times since then, at first just the 2 of us, and then with our 3 children. For many years we had family annual passes, and the museum always had creative and interesting exhibits and films. But as the kids got older and became more involved in school activities and sports, we started going less and less. So I was super excited that, 35 years after our first trip there, Lynn and I would be going there to see this exhibition.

And we weren't disappointed! As its name suggests, The Science Behind Pixar is an incredible exhibit that demonstrates the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) concepts involved in creating Pixar films. It shows off these concepts in a multitude of ways making it easy for everyone to participate and learn.

The Science Behind Pixar is a 13,000 square foot exhibit that was created by the Museum of Science, Boston in collaboration with Pixar. It opened on June 28, 2015, and began a 10 year traveling tour in early 2016. It's been to The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, PA and the California Science Center in Los Angeles. It will next be at the Telus World of Science in Edmonton, Alberta and The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI.

The exhibit starts with a short introductory video, very similar to the Pixar in a Box introductory video and hosted by a couple of characters from Pixar films. Once the film ends you enter the main exhibition area. And the area is huge! My first thoughts when I walked in were how expansive and elaborate it was.

The exhibit is broken up into areas representing the steps of filmmaking, such as rigging, sets & cameras, simulation and lighting. Each of these areas has a number of stations to help you learn more about the concept.

What makes the exhibit so great is the variety of activities, with many that are hands on. For instance, in the rigging area there is a station to adjust Jessie's eyelids and eyebrows to match her expression to different ones from the Toy Story films.

Or you can explore and apply different arm rigs to Woody, Eve and Elastigirl.

I really enjoyed the Working at Pixar stations. These are videos of employees describing what they did at Pixar, maybe how they became interested in computer graphics and animation, and included great nuggets of information on making our favorite films: how they used lighting to make WALL•E stand out amongst the dust and trash, or why they had to move the location of the Eiffel Tower in Ratatouille.

Interspersed among all of this are life sized statutes of characters and plenty of wonderful artwork, maquettes and sculpts.

The Science Behind Pixar is an engaging, informative and fun exhibit. I had walked through most of the areas and tried a number of activities, and was shocked that we had already been there for more than 2 hours! I'll definitely need to go back and check out the areas I missed.

I strongly recommend trying to see this exhibition! It will be at the Science Museum of Minnesota until September 4th.

Cars 3 Sneak Peek at Hollywood Studios

Cruz Ramirez topiary at Epcot's Flower and Garden Festival

I just returned from a trip to Disney World. We had a great time and saw some wonderful Pixar exhibits and shows, such as topiaries that were part of Epcot's Flower and Garden Festival, and the brand new The Music of Pixar Live! at Hollywood Studios.

There was also a Cars 3 preview at Hollywood Studios. Inside the Walt Disney: One Man's Dream exhibit, they were displaying artwork, storyboards and maquettes from the film. 

They also had a 10-15 minute sneak peak of the film, which included a large portion of the Thunder Hollow scene. You've probably seen portions of this in the trailers for the film, with the crazy explosions, a lot of mud and a crazed looking school bus! The extended cut shown in the preview maintains that high energy, and it's a gorgeous scene that must've been a technical nightmare to pull off.

If you're going to Disney World this summer you'll really want to get over to Hollywood Studios and check out this exhibit and sneak peek. I'm hoping that as we approach fall, they'll have a similar exhibit for Pixar's next film, Coco!

Cars 3 will be in theaters in exactly 2 weeks from today, on June 16th!

Jackson Storm poster at Hollywood Studios