Heather L Holian
A Professor of Art History, Heather L. Holian teaches classes on the art of early modern Europe, Disney, and Pixar. She is a specialist on the third decade of production at Pixar, where she gathered more than 100 hours of interviews with the studio’s artists, animators and directors during that period. This research has appeared in edited volumes for Bloomsbury, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, McFarland, and the Animation Studies journal. She continues to work and write on Pixar as well as a new area of research focused on the preservation and presentation of early Disney Studio artwork. Holian has also published several studies on the Italian Renaissance, her doctoral field.
less
InterestsView All (13)
Uploads
Papers
Conference Presentations
This paper goes behind the final mass media film and reveals that while Pixar artists work in concert with a director, they have a surprising amount of creative agency. Indeed, Pixar seeks out individuals with strong artistic personalities and vision, despite the stylistically homogenizing production process. Further, my study demonstrates that Pixar’s creative culture offers a notably different model of collaborative art making, distinct from traditional fine arts, but rooted in individual contribution. Ultimately, my paper contributes to the larger topic of collaboration dynamics and the individual artist by complicating the notion and traditional understanding of “commercial collaboration.”
Books
In this case the complete cloaking of an animator’s identity, endemic to the medium, brings both the required consistency of style necessary in large projects, but also artistic anonymity outside the walls of a given studio. Indeed, according to Pixar animator and director Angus McLane the best animation does not attract attention to itself since “…the nature of animation is to cover up what the animator actually does...” Given the huge collaboration necessary to make an animated film, whereby as many as 45 animators may be involved, with several animating the same character, being an “ideal animator” is in large part about being able to deftly put on and take off a persona or “mask” at will, and at times, wear more than one.
Using Pixar as a case study, this essay will seek to identify and analyze the nature and various contemporary effects and implications of the “masked” animator. Consideration will focus on how this role impacts practitioners themselves, the individual animated film, as well as the place of animation in the larger world of cinematic entertainment.
As this chapter will demonstrate, Pixar artists cast to design the sequels necessarily worked within the iconic visual world of the first Toy Story, and sought to make their own contributions in step with trilogy story developments, technological advances and changes of director. In so doing this talk will explore the influences, design challenges and collaborative processes of Eggleston and his artistic team, before considering how the art departments of Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 inherited, reinterpreted and extended the trilogy’s aesthetic, most notably in the third installment. Here the particular cinematic tastes of director Lee Unkrich and the design sensibilities of Dice Tsutsumi combined to create a visually rich world that believably ranged from the warm, saturated palette of sunlit suburbia to the stark, harsh hues of a working dump. Technological advances, which enabled the realization of evolving visual and stylistic goals will also be considered.
This paper goes behind the final mass media film and reveals that while Pixar artists work in concert with a director, they have a surprising amount of creative agency. Indeed, Pixar seeks out individuals with strong artistic personalities and vision, despite the stylistically homogenizing production process. Further, my study demonstrates that Pixar’s creative culture offers a notably different model of collaborative art making, distinct from traditional fine arts, but rooted in individual contribution. Ultimately, my paper contributes to the larger topic of collaboration dynamics and the individual artist by complicating the notion and traditional understanding of “commercial collaboration.”
In this case the complete cloaking of an animator’s identity, endemic to the medium, brings both the required consistency of style necessary in large projects, but also artistic anonymity outside the walls of a given studio. Indeed, according to Pixar animator and director Angus McLane the best animation does not attract attention to itself since “…the nature of animation is to cover up what the animator actually does...” Given the huge collaboration necessary to make an animated film, whereby as many as 45 animators may be involved, with several animating the same character, being an “ideal animator” is in large part about being able to deftly put on and take off a persona or “mask” at will, and at times, wear more than one.
Using Pixar as a case study, this essay will seek to identify and analyze the nature and various contemporary effects and implications of the “masked” animator. Consideration will focus on how this role impacts practitioners themselves, the individual animated film, as well as the place of animation in the larger world of cinematic entertainment.
As this chapter will demonstrate, Pixar artists cast to design the sequels necessarily worked within the iconic visual world of the first Toy Story, and sought to make their own contributions in step with trilogy story developments, technological advances and changes of director. In so doing this talk will explore the influences, design challenges and collaborative processes of Eggleston and his artistic team, before considering how the art departments of Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3 inherited, reinterpreted and extended the trilogy’s aesthetic, most notably in the third installment. Here the particular cinematic tastes of director Lee Unkrich and the design sensibilities of Dice Tsutsumi combined to create a visually rich world that believably ranged from the warm, saturated palette of sunlit suburbia to the stark, harsh hues of a working dump. Technological advances, which enabled the realization of evolving visual and stylistic goals will also be considered.