Pixar Artist Explains Why Pixar Has Made So Few Feature Films

I’m not going to bother to do it right here and now, but I’m sure someone could write a compelling essay about how Pixar, Valve, and Apple have all created success and considerable goodwill by bringing similar approaches on animation, gaming, and consumer tech, respectively: Rather than chasing trends or spamming the market with new products every 3 months, they focus and execute with laserlike precision.

In a recent Quora thread, Pixar camera artist Craig L. Good provides an inkling as to how this process works when he explains to a questioner why Pixar “makes so few feature films”:

The way we make movies is just really, really hard. It takes years just to get the story right.

Animation is a very labor-intensive process. It takes a large crew a long time just to produce the film.

There’s a limit to how many people and, more importantly, how many production crews can effectively be managed and still retain the quality.

There’s a very limited number of directors capable of conceiving, writing, and directing one of these productions.

So I think the answer is that we’re both time and resource limited, and that there’s a limit to how many resources can even practically be applied. Nine women cannot make a baby in a month.

In other words: Dude, we’re pedaling as fast as we can

See also: Wired’s revealing 2010 article on Pixar’s creative process.

(via Quora.)