And then there was Pixar. What hasn’t Pixar done for my childhood, teenage, and now young adult years? I’ve been lost in the ocean with Nemo, love struck over Eva with Wall-e, and to infinity and beyond with Buzz. So many of Pixars stories have touched my heart over the years and I was so excited when we had the opportunity to go to the Pixar exhibit that was visiting Bonn. The exhibit is being housed until January 2013 in the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland aka the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany. Lucky for us, the AIB brought us on an excursion to this awesome exhibit. So, on the Tuesday evening of our pre-production class week, we all headed off on the metro to learn about Pixar magic.
We had a guided tour through the exhibit, which was really helpful. All over the walls were different artifacts from Pixar’s history and films. Sketches, molds, notes, x-rays, and so many other things lined the wall that having a guide really helped narrow down all the information. He started talking about the beginning of the company and the first shot they created, “Luxo Jr.”
Knowing that we were all film students, he was able to gear our tour more toward what we wanted to know about and what we were interested in. One interesting thing I remembered was about Toy Story 2: there were x-rays that the animators wanted to create for when the toys were going through the airport in a scene, however, they weren’t sure how to animate it. So, they went out and bought action figures of their own characters and took x-rays of them. The x-rays never ended up being used in the film, but the original x-rays were discovered in Pixar’s archive of things.
Later on our guide brought us up to this wall of animated fish and explained how Pixar’s employees brought in their children and relatives’ children and had them figure out which fish they liked the best. Clearly the clown fish won their hearts before winning ours. The rest of the fish that were popular with the children became the other supporting characters in Nemo’s tale. Our guide continued to lead us through rooms of Pixar artifacts and history, but the next thing he lead us to was one of the highlights of the exhibits.
The Pixar exhibit had a zoetrope, which was made up of characters from Toy Story, to display the principles of animation. There were 18 statues of each character around the circle that were in a fixed position. So, for example, Jesse was throwing a lasso around her head so there were 18 of her, and each of the 18 Jesse’s actions would vary a little so when the zoetrope was spinning there would be an illusion of motion. It was like a 3D flip book on steroids.
Overall, being able to visit the Pixar exhibit in Bonn was a really nice experience that I didn’t want to miss.
Written by Sarah Bush
