Pixar pioneer hopes for animation comeback after Disney ousting

Like many kids growing up in the 1990s, the Hollywood film producer David Ellison was captivated by Pixar’s Toy Story. But Ellison’s connection to the computer-animated classic was much deeper than the average fan’s. 

His father is Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, who was a close friend of Apple co-founder and Pixar chief executive Steve Jobs. The story of Pixar’s difficult early years and eventual triumph was a part of the Ellison family conversation.

Now it is Ellison, 39, who is building an animation studio — and he has hired John Lasseter, the creative force behind Toy Story and other Pixar classics, to run it. Next week, the animation division of Ellison’s 12-year-old studio, Skydance Media, will release its first feature, Luck, on Apple TV Plus as part of a four-picture deal with the streaming service. Lasseter is a co-producer of the film.

“I’ve always loved animation,” Ellison told the FT. “My entry into the film space growing up in Silicon Valley was Pixar.” 

It is an ambitious undertaking that will put his upstart animation group in competition with Disney, DreamWorks, Illumination and, of course, Pixar (a unit of Disney since 2006). 

One of the biggest challenges of starting an animation business is staffing — it remains an incredibly labour-intensive medium, even with computers — and Ellison has aggressively poached veteran writers, producers and animators to build Skydance Animation since its launch in 2017. The animation group has 900 people, making it by far the largest division at Skydance.

Chief among those hires was animation president Holly Edwards, Lasseter’s second-in-command at Skydance, who was involved in some of the biggest franchises at DreamWorks, including Shrek, Madagascar and Trolls. 

“John [Lasseter] and Holly have got $38bn in box office between them,” Ellison said. “That level of experience has been invaluable.” 

Hiring Lasseter in 2019 was not without controversy, however. A pioneer in computer animation — his early short films were made to show off Pixar’s hardware before Jobs pivoted the company to entertainment — Lasseter was forced to resign from Disney in 2018 after complaints of unwanted touching.

Among Ellison’s critics was actress Emma Thompson, who withdrew from a voice role in Luck after Lasseter was hired. “It feels very odd to me that you and your company would consider hiring someone with Mr Lasseter’s pattern of misconduct,” she wrote in a letter at the time. 

Ellison said he has “zero regrets about hiring John Lasseter”, but he does regret how he handled it. 

“He has been transformative to the company both in terms of the content he’s creating and also in terms of the culture that we’re creating behind the scenes,” Ellison said. “With the benefit of hindsight I do believe there was a better way to have handled the hire and put [the] news out into the world.”

Tom Nunan, a professor at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, said: “This is Lasseter 2.0. This is his chance at redemption, and the big question is whether he is going to make the most of it or not.”

“Ellison appears to be aiming high,” added Nunan, who was the executive producer of the Oscar-winning film Crash. “This isn’t modest.”

Ellison views animation as a uniquely valuable category of intellectual property, particularly in the streaming era. In the days of the VHS tape and DVD, it was generally known that children would watch The Lion King, Shrek or Toy Story over and over, but no one knew exactly how many times. 

But now it is possible to know — and animated films are consistently among the most viewed on streaming services, delivering the kind of sticky engagement metrics that streamers crave. According to Nielsen, four of the top 15 streamed movies in 2021 were animated. Last week, Netflix beefed up its animation unit with the acquisition of Australian studio Animal Logic, which has worked on Hollywood films such as Happy Feet, the Lego movies and Peter Rabbit.

“The rewatchability for animated movies is completely different from anything in live action,” Ellison said. “At a time when everyone’s talking about churn, having content that people will watch 20, 30 or sometimes 100 times makes a lot of sense from a streaming standpoint . . . The life cycle of [animated] content is genuinely second to nothing.”

Work on Luck began in 2018, a year before Lasseter joined. After he arrived, the film was overhauled, with director Alessandro Carloni being replaced by Peggy Holmes.

The movie follows Sam Greenfield, an 18-year-old girl who was raised in foster care and considered the “unluckiest girl in the world”. She finds a lucky penny, promptly loses it, and then begins a quest to find another one with the assistance of a black cat who speaks with a Scottish accent. Its star-studded cast includes Jane Fonda and Whoopi Goldberg. 

Luck is part of a larger push by Apple to build a family audience for its streaming service. It has already greenlit two more Skydance animated features, Spellbound and Pookoo, and a fourth feature, Ray Gunn, is in the works by Brad Bird, the Oscar-winning writer-director behind Pixar’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Once it is up to full speed, Skydance Animation is expected to produce two features per year.

The release of Luck comes as Skydance is enjoying a blockbuster moment. Ellison was the driving force behind the release of Top Gun: Maverick, having approached producer Tony Scott about the idea of a sequel to the 1986 Tom Cruise film 12 years ago. Since its release on May 27, the film has raked in more than $1.28bn at the US box office, making it the ninth-highest grossing film in its home market.

“It’s our first billion dollar movie, so needless to say, we could not be more proud of that,” Ellison said.