Computer animation is seen as a work of art

As at any museum, visitors gather around the familiar. Upstairs at the Museum of Modern Art, it’s Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night.” Downstairs, in a small gallery alongside the museum’s sculpture garden, it’s a 14-inch-high model of Sulley, the soft-hearted creature of “Monsters, Inc.,” and a sculpted head of Edna “E” Mode, the pint-sized fashionista of “The Incredibles” with the giant glasses and the ego to match.

A quartet of teenage schoolgirls giggles before Edna, displayed in a glass case like some African mask, while a 4-year-old twirls in her father’s arms and points at the horned Sulley, all while a tour guide tells a passing group, “You remember the scene where ....”

The newest show at MoMA, “Pixar: 20 Years of Animation” is replete with such images already branded into its audience -- the characters and fantasy worlds of the Emeryville, Calif.-based studio’s computer-generated shorts and feature films, from “Toy Story” on, that have won it Oscars and box office fortunes. But the exhibit, which opened Wednesday, also resembles those museum shows designed to reveal the back story to an artist’s familiar piece, say the sketches that Edvard Munch used to come up with the frightened face in “The Scream.”

Here, in the same display case as the model of the James P. “Sulley” Sullivan finally used in 2001’s “Monsters, Inc.,” museum-goers can examine seven others that didn’t make the cut: an early Sulley that looks like an M&M; a Sulley that’s a blob, like “Star Wars’ ” Jabba the Hutt, and with an eerie row of tiny eyes; another Sulley with a massive head and miniature derby hat; and several Sulleys with octopus tentacles for legs, all rejected in favor of the Sulley with far more human feet, albeit with fewer toes -- no tentacles -- and only one set of lovable eyes on a head tilted to the side, as if wondering “What’s up?”

“One thing that excited me was how far they allow the artists to go into dark, unpleasant places. Some are frightening, grotesque, like the fat one with all the eyes,” said Ronald S. Magliozzi of MoMA’s Department of Film and Media, who helped assemble the Pixar works. “Then they pull back from that to something a little more sensible, a little cuter, more accessible.”

Magliozzi was offering his curatorial analysis on the second day the public got to see what’s turned out to be MoMA’s largest animation-inspired exhibit ever, with more than 500 pieces on four levels.

But he and co-curator Steven Higgins were not sure they would find much that was worthy of display when they first visited Pixar Animation Studios in November 2004 -- they did not know whether there would be anything like the artwork that is the basis for the traditional animation done by Disney, Warner Bros. and other companies.

“Computer animation, what’s it gonna be? It’s all gonna be computer screens; there won’t be any cels,” Magliozzi recalled. “Why would they need paper, why would they need clay?”

Their concerns vanished when Pixar officials led them to a warehouse full of “all this beautifully cool stuff no one gets to see in the final film,” he said, endless shelves of sketches and pastels and collages and clay and urethane models, both of characters such as Sulley and of the background fantasy worlds in which the stories play out. “One of the rooms they opened for us was this one of ‘sculpts,’ which they call maquettes, and there were thousands of them.”

Magliozzi said he thought some of the head models had a tribal quality and considered creating a totem pole from them before instead putting them in the corridor-like room next to the sculpture garden that displays Picasso’s “She-Goat.”

John Lasseter, Pixar’s pioneering artist and director, said that he had long dreamed of such a show but that he also knew what some critics would say: “I thought at one point they were going to look down and say, ‘OK, we’ve got Monet and Rodin -- and Pixar? Wait a minute here. Did we make a mistake or something?’ That’s what I was thinking.”

But there is no ignoring the studio’s effect on popular culture since Lasseter’s inspiration of bringing a flexible desk lamp to life gained Pixar its logo and a two-minute short, “Luxo Jr.,” a prelude to the animated features that three times in the last decade have grossed more than $500 million worldwide. With the 20th anniversary of the founding coming in February, Lasseter decided it was a “good time” for Pixar to allow its production art off its own campus for the first time.

Magliozzi noted with a laugh that the show had indeed drawn criticism, some before it opened. Some critics, “before they had any idea what was going to be in it,” suggested this was another case of a museum “selling out to a corporation,” he said, and compared it to the Guggenheim’s controversial show of Armani fashions, which was accompanied by a generous gift from the Italian designer, or the Met’s showcasing of Coco Chanel’s dresses.

One such critic, arts blogger Tyler Green, commented last week that the Pixar show “is unquestionably seven weeks of free advertising for a commercial business” and noted that one sponsor of the exhibit is Porsche, whose product is featured in Pixar’s next feature, “Cars.”

Such criticisms might have been more pronounced if that movie had been released last month, as originally scheduled. But the release date for “Cars” was switched a year ago to June 2006, to exploit the escapist summertime moviegoing season and set the stage for a Christmas 2006 DVD release -- and also fortuitously distance it from the museum show, according to Lasseter.

“We always wanted to separate the exhibit from a film opening,” he said. “This was not ever intended to be some sort of marketing thing for a movie. We really wanted the art to stand on its own.”

MoMA officials feel no need to apologize. They founded their film and media department in the mid-1930s and staged their first animation show in 1940, on the history of cartoons. Two years later, another show focused on the making of Disney’s “Bambi.”

And as with many exhibits on filmmaking, this one spotlights the process as much, if not more, as the skill of the artists or the beauty of any individual work -- it’s about the sausage-making. The scores of “character” and “world” studies and coloring experiments are crammed into spaces at the lowest levels of the museum, well below the prime galleries devoted to the pioneering works of modern art, and in places along walkways that posed challenges to the curators.

Also on view is Lasseter’s 1986 pastel of the Luxo desk lamp that changed his life after helping found Pixar with Steve Jobs. The 48-year-old Lasseter, who began producing animated shorts while a student at the California Institute of the Arts, said he was overwhelmed by the sight of his piece here: “Just to walk down in the Museum of Modern Art and look on the wall and see your own name sitting there and the way the Modern says ‘American born’ and your birthday.”

He also was touched when he returned to MoMA on Friday, when the galleries were crowded not with the earlier opening’s invited guests but with regular people, including small children likely making their first visit to an art museum.

And while the kids wanted to see the models of the characters they knew, such as Sulley and Edna, another exhibit, made specially for the MoMA show, drew squeals from them and sometimes applause. The show stopper is a re-creation of the 19th century’s version of high-tech entertainment technology, a zoetrope. During one of the six visits that MoMA curators made to Pixar in California, Pete Docter, director of “Monsters, Inc.,” mentioned how he’d seen one at the Tokyo museum of Pixar’s Japanese counterpart, Studio Ghibli, and one thing led to another.

The one in New York is 7 feet tall and has three-dimensional characters from “Toy Story” affixed to a oval base. When the thing starts spinning like a carousel and a strobe light flashes, it creates an illusion much like a frenzied animated scene: There’s Buzz bouncing atop a ball, Woody riding Bullseye the horse and tiny parachutists appearing to jump from a red, white and blue bucket. And on the very outside, there are tiny aliens, waving, right at the eye level of the toddlers who press their eyes to the glass, a touch suggested by Lasseter.

“For the last two months, this was all I worked on,” said one of the Pixar animators who created the zoetrope, Dan Mason, who was standing by to take in the reactions of the kids and adults alike -- and to make sure none of the pieces flew off. “We used a lot of epoxy,” he said. “We all had scary dreams about what it would look like if one broke off.”

This is one case in which the museum audience sees only the final product and none of the sausage-making. Mason said they first animated the scene in a computer, then created each Woody and Buzz out of plastic and glue with a three-dimensional printer, that alone taking 12 hours for each of the dozens of figures needed. The zoetrope figures to have a long life, going on with the show next to London after it closes here in February, then to Tokyo. Pixar officials say they expect to bring the exhibit to a museum in L.A. as well.