November 29, 1995: Capitalizing on the success of Toy Story, Pixar floats 6.9 million shares on the stock market. The IPO makes Steve Jobs, who owns upward of 80% of the animation studio, a billionaire.
After the windfall, one of the first people Jobs calls is his friend, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who’s already a member of the billionaire’s club.
“Hello, Larry?” Jobs tells his friend on the phone. “I made it.”
The 24-inch-by-36-inch poster was signed by Jobs back in 1995. Its high price tag was due to the relative scarcity of Jobs’ autograph. While Toy Story isn’t widely thought of as one of the most important moments of Jobs’ life, it was actually a major turning point for him.
Pixar co-founder John Lasseter has become the latest high profile person to be accused of inappropriate behavior toward women. In a statement released today, Lasseter apologized for his alleged pattern of showering female employees with hugs and that he’s taking a six-month leave of absence.
As Chief Creative Officer of both Disney and Pixar, Lasseter is one of the most prominent persons in the animated film industry. Steve Jobs and Lasseter had a close relationship for years after the Apple CEO purchased Pixar from Lucasfilm.
The biggest Apple keynote of 2017 is just a few short hours away. And according to the rumors, its going to be one of the most memorable tech events in years.
When Tim Cook and Co. take the stage at the Steve Jobs Theater on September 12, we expect them to unveil not one, not two, but three new iPhones. A bunch of other new hardware and software is also on the docket, making this an Apple keynote not to be missed.
Apple’s software vision for the Apple Watch was unveiled during the company’s WWDC 2017 event today in San Jose, revealing a host of new features coming to wearers’ wrists later this year.
With watchOS 4, Apple’s designers have focused on making the device more personal than ever. Siri is more powerful than ever thanks to some new machine learning tricks that make the personal assistant absolutely indispensable.
November 22, 1995:Toy Story, Pixar’s first feature-length movie, lands in theaters. The charming film wows the world with the wonders of computer animation.
The most successful of Steve Jobs’ business ventures during his wilderness years outside Apple, the box office smash hit makes his belief in the power of computer graphics pay off in a big way.
We got it wrong last week, when we thought a cryptic Disney teaser was a clue to something we’ve been salivating over for a few months: the arrival of Android and iOS at Disney’s Infinity platform.
Instead, Disney has released a beautiful Toy Story 3D puzzler game for iOS and Android; and even though it’s not exactly what we’ve been waiting for, it still looks really freaking cool.
About a month ago, right after the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, Disney held a small, invitation-only press conference in Los Angeles where they revealed their ambitious, stunning new cross-platform Infinity game universe. They invited us, of course. Only problem was, Infinity had practically nothing to do with anything Apple.
After all the fanfare, when the event was almost over, I pulled aside one of the Disney folks and asked why the heck they’d invited me; turns out iOS is why I was there, and that they had a big mobile-related announcement coming — and this picture just might be its enigmatic messenger.
Kyle Lambert is one of the best iPad artists on the web. He also happens to be a big fan of Pixar’s animation team, so when he started following Lee Unkrich – the director of Toy Story 3 – he noticed how passionate Lee is about Stanley Kubrick and his film The Shining. Combining Toy Story 3, with Lee’s obsession for The Shining and Lambert’s iPad drawing talent resulted in one of the more interesting artistic mashups we’ve seen in a while – Toy Shining.
We could tell you more, but we’ll just let you oogle at Kyle’s awesome iPad drawings of Woody occupying Jack Torrance’s spot in Kubrick’s cinematography masterpiece, but remember, everything was created just using an iPad.
Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol hits theaters everywhere tomorrow. Surprisingly, the movie actually got really good reviews and is positioned to be one of the top movies of the holiday season. We went and watched the film this weekend at IMAX and enjoyed the dose of big-budget popcorn entertainment that reminded us how huge action movies used to be a lot more fun than the annoying and cringe-worthy action flicks that hit the screen en masse nowadays. Thanks a lot Michael Bay.
The success of Mission Impossible 4 shouldn’t come as a huge surprise though to anyone who is familiar with the director Brad Bird. Having worked at Pixar for a number of years, Bird has directed popular films such as The Iron Giant, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles, as well as leading the creative teams behind Toy Story 3 and Up. Being a Pixar alum, Bird had the opportunity to work with Steve Jobs and remarks that, “he wasn’t about making something that was going to be cool next week, he was about making something that was going to be cool 100 years from now.”
As a fan of Apple, Bird places Apple products throughout his newest movie and uses them as tools for Ethan Hunt and his team to do some really awesome stuff. Here’s some of the coolest uses of Apple technology in Mission Impossible 4 (we’ll try and keep the spoilers at a minimum).
A Steve Jobs memorial held at Stanford Memorial Church on Sunday attracted a huge number of people who came to pay their respects to Apple’s former CEO and co-founder. Among them were a long list of celebrities, musicians, CEOs, and even a former president.
“Toy Story 3” director Lee Unkrich gave something for his seat mate to gawk at as he sat at 36,000 feet editing the latest animated tale of plaything adventures.
With not a second to waste — the release date is June 18, 2010 — Unkrich worked on a MacBook Pro, with what looks like shortcut color codes for Avid Media Composer. (Crane as I might, all I ever see are Excel spreadsheets. Need to get upgraded from Economy more often, perhaps.)
Apple products often feature in Pixar movies (perhaps in a nod to history?), the trailer for Toy Story 3 already has a nice bit of iProduct placement.