Pixar's stories: an animation company's inspirational rise from Nowheresville to infinity, and beyond.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

FOR FANS OF animation--or anyone who has had to entertain someone under age 12 in the last decade and a half--Pixar's importance requires little explanation. The studio whose story is told in David A. Price's The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company (Knopf) has single-handedly remade the look and feel of the animated picture. In the process it has delighted millions of moviegoers (while causing some consternation among hide-bound devotees of old-style pen-and-ink animation, lake me).

Pixar's nine feature-length films, from 1995's Toy Story through 2008's Wall-E, have achieved a highly unusual streak of critical and commercial success. Pixar's enormous success is based on storytelling--stories filled with lessons about following your dreams, the importance of fellowship, and respect for the extraordinary. The company's own story offers more complicated lessons about some of those same ideas--and about the extraordinary richness and flexibility of our modern technological and artistic economies.

This book by David Price, whose academic degree is in the computer science on which Pixar's distinctive look is built, relates the story of what at first seemed like a failure of a company. The Pixar team bounced from purpose to purpose and owner to owner in the 1980s before becoming a titan of American pop culture.

At the heart of the original team that launched Pixar were the computer graphics pioneers Ed Catmull (a straight-laced Mormon) and Alvy Ray Smith (an erratic hippie), who came from backwater colleges, the University of Utah and New Mexico State University, segregated from the recognized centers of academia and culture.

Catmull and Smith fell under the wing of eccentric financier Alexander Schure, who founded the New York Institute of Technology and set them up there in the 1970s. The institute was, in Price's words, "somewhere between a third-tier university and a diploma mill," but it ended up birthing the multibillion-dollar Pixar experiment. Schure bought Catmull, Smith, and their crew all the insanely expensive equipment they needed to begin experiments in computer animation, just because he thought it was interesting.

In the late '70s, George Lucas realized he might have some use for experts in the nascent field of computer animation, and he slowly siphoned off Schure's brain trust. By the mid-'80s, Lucas had lost interest (and needed cash for a divorce settlement), so he sold off the division to the then-disgraced former Apple...