Creativity, Inc. — Ed Catmull on Childlike Originality & Experiments

Creativity, Inc. — Ed Catmull on Fragile Originality and Childlike Experiments

Creative children, derivative adults

Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull recalls visiting an art exhibition at his daughter’s elementary school one night. As he walked through the halls, he noticed “that the first- and second-graders’ [artworks] looked better and fresher than those of the fifth-graders.” It seems that the older they got, the “more stiled” and “less inventive” their drawings became. “Somewhere along the line”, Catmull suspects, children grow “self-conscious and tentative.”

The same can be said about adults too. Imagine for a moment that you have an art gallery of your own. Only this gallery shows a series of your artworks at every age, from your childhood through to present day. How might your drawings have changed with the times? Putting craft aside, I am willing to bet that for many of us, that sense of playfulness has since disappeared. The average adult drawing reaches almost instinctively for something ordinary.

Indeed, we condition ourselves and our children from a young age to fear failure. As social animals, self-preservation and social standing are high on our agenda. We spend a lot of time cultivating and worrying about our image in the eyes of others—doing whatever we can to avoid rejection, embarrassment, mistakes, and judgment. The carefreeness in children, that which makes their art so charming and enchanting, slowly melts away.

A beginner’s mind

In his book Creativity Inc, Catmull says there’s a quick test to know whether your company or community embodies an unhealthy attitude towards failure. Just “ask yourself what happens when an error is discovered.” “Do people shut down and turn inward, instead of coming together?” Is the big question “whose fault [is] this?” If your answer is yes, then “your culture is one that vilifies failure.”

When people are scared to fail, they will not try anything new. They will settle for good-enough. “Their work will be derivative, not innovative.” For creatives like Pixar, the fear of failure is an existential risk. What’s safe today can mean decline and death tomorrow. Pixar’s success, Catmull says, can be attributed in part to their “beginner’s mindset” and openness to the new and unexpected.

Decoupling fear from failure

An important first step in nurturing a creative culture “is to uncouple fear and failure.” Mistakes, big or small, must not terrify or paralyze our people. And “the antidote to fear”, Catmull says, “is trust”. For starters, parents, leaders, and teachers “can talk about [their] mistakes and [their] part in them” to create a safe place for everyone. Catmull himself likes to share his own battle with imposter syndrome with junior employees. “Even in the early years of Pixar, when [he] was the president, that feeling didn’t go away”, he notes—knowing full well that many of his colleagues were going through the exact same feeling at that moment.

Moreover, “everyone at Pixar [must] show incomplete work”, Catmull writes. Ego and embarrassment fades away when everybody is sharing something messy and imperfect. When cultivation overrides self-preservation, “people become more creative… [and] see more clearly”.

As Catmull writes:

“We must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future… Mistakes aren’t a necessary evil. They aren’t evil at all. They are an inevitable consequence of doing something new… Without them, we’d have no originality”.
Ed Catmull. (2014). Creative, Inc.

Mistake-making is so ingrained in Pixar’s culture that Catmull once offended his production crew by telling the press that Toy Story 3 was the only film in the company’s history without a major hiccup. To the team, it meant “that they hadn’t tried as hard as their colleagues on other films.” Catmull did not mean it in that way, of course. Their outrage, however, was a good sign that Pixar’s failure-embracing culture was alive and thriving. As Pixar writer Andrew Stanton explains, “we get worried if a [Pixar] film is not a problem child right away. It makes us nervous. We’ve come to recognize the signs of invention—of dealing with originality.”

Belly dancing at Pixar

As we’ve said, the beginner’s mindset is important. From sculpting to belly dancing to ballet, Pixar offers their employees a wide variety of extracurriculars. Whether you’re an experienced producer or graduate animator, everybody in these classes are newbies. And that’s the point. “Creativity involves missteps and imperfections”, no matter the hierarchy. It should be healthy and fun to try and fail at something new. While many companies find it difficult to justify such expenditures, creatives like Pixar understand the latent value in “keeping our brains nimble” and “remaining flexible.”

Learn to see like an artist

But why exactly are some artists more skillful or creative than others? As Catmull sees it, the amateur has a tendency to impose their own generalizations on the canvas. Where the trained artist sees shades and hues of microdetails that make up the whole, the amateur sees a circle for a face and pale blue for water.

Art school does not teach you how to draw. It teaches you how to see, Catmull says. Teachers, for example, may ask students to draw a still life upside down, or to focus only on the negative spaces. The objective here is to “see shapes as they are… [and to] learn to set aside preconception.” Great artists and scientists understand this aspect of creativity well.

But if you try to make a movie based purely on what you’ve seen so far or have in your head, a sort of “Frankensteining” inevitably takes place. “You doom your film to being derivative.” Sometimes, we need to get out and into the field to immerse ourselves in our subjects.

During the making of Ratatouille, a film about a rat named Remy who aspires to be a French chef, Pixar sent their team to France. They dined at fancy restaurants, toured their kitchens, and talked with chefs. They even spent time in the Parisian sewers where rats like Remy might find themselves. Similarly, many crew members became certified scuba divers during the making of Finding Nemo. Research trips, Catmull stresses, help to “challenge [our] preconceived notions” and to “fuel inspiration”. They provide the microdetails and authenticity that stay-at-home animators cannot hope to capture.

Geri’s Game and short experiments

Many companies today like to deliberate an awful lot before deciding. Whether the problems are big or small, they establish committees and hire legions of consultants to justify their proposals. Catmull reminds readers, however, that to make breakthroughs, sometimes you just have to experiment.

Pixar, for one, continues to make short films on “a kind of gut feeling that making shorts is a good thing to do.” Each five-to-ten minute animation “might cost as much as two million dollars to make”, and they don’t generate any income for the company. Many executives and Wall Street analysts, I’m sure, would find them an unnecessary, eye-watering expense.

But discarding them would deprive Pixar of many spillovers that are difficult to quantify. Take Geri’s Game, for instance, a short about an elderly man who challenges himself to a game of chess; which was shown right before the screening of A Bug’s Life in the late 1990s. While Geri’s Game went on to win an Oscar, its main achievement was in technology. Until that point, “humans had only been ancillary characters in [Pixar] movies.” Geri’s Game helped them to work out the knots, and to pave the way for films like The Incredibles and Up in the decade that followed.

Much of this is reminiscent of Walt Disney, who “was unrelenting in his determination to incorporate the cutting edge”, Catmull reminds. “He brought sound and color into animation. He developed matting for filmmaking, the multiplane camera, the Xeros room for animation cells”, and more. Enduring creatives will find “the impetus for innovation…. from the inside rather than the outside.”

What’s more, shorts help Pixar teams to grow by creating new responsibilities, challenges, experiences, and relationships. As a non-commercial venture, it also gives greater artistic license to the creatives, which helps to reinforce Pixar’s values. At the end of the day, shorts are also a nice treat for moviegoers and the Pixar faithful.

The fragility of originality

People wrongly assume, however, that Pixar shorts and movies are born beautiful—that the geniuses have it all figured out from day one. “Originality is fragile”, Catmull says. Pixar films start out as “ugly babies”. They’re like a caterpillar in a chrysalis that can take years of nurturing to reach maturity.

That’s not to say, however, that butterflies will form. Creativity is a process of open-ended discovery. The script for Monsters Inc, for example, was originally about a thirty-year old accountant who learns to cope with scary monsters in his life. If you’ve seen the film, then you know, of course, that the final product with Sullivan, Mike, Boo and the rest of the motley cast is altogether different.

Wonderful works like Monsters Inc need time for incubation. Filmmakers are like explorers on foggy seas. They don’t really know what they’ll find until they start searching. If you allow the judgment of every naysayer and inner critic to get you down in the first instance, you will never leave the shore.

As Catmull recalls:

“I can’t help but think of one of my favorite moments in any Pixar movie, when Anton Ego, the jaded and much-feared food critic in Ratatouille, delivers his review of Gusteau’s, the restaurant run by our hero Remy, a rat… “In many ways, the work of a critic is easy,” Ego says. “We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and themselves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.””
Ed Catmull. (2014). Creativity, Inc.

Get the story right

In the end, however, when it comes to creative filmmaking, you have to get the story right. No amount of artistic direction will suffice if you are unable to connect emotionally with moviegoers. So you cannot let technology, merchandising and marketing derail what matters most to your audience.

This helps to explain the “slow decline” that Disney Animation experienced in the 2000s, Catmull says. The success of Aladdin, The Lion King and other hits fuelled an insatiable hunger at Disney’s headquarters. They expanded their release schedule, animation studios, and infrastructure programs to keep up.

As is the case with any empire-building exercise, the “unintended effect is always the same: It lessens quality across the board.” In Catmull’s assessment, “[Disney] employees [began] thinking that their job was to feed the Beast.” And as Disney CEO Bob Iger recalls, he “didn’t [know] just how broken Disney Animation was” until their merger with Pixar in 2006.

To sustain creativity, you have to defend against such pressures. Catmull describes, for example, fighting “for five straight years… to do Toy Story [their] way.” Time and time again, Disney executives wanted Pixar to turn Toy Story into a musical because movies with songs sell. Pixar stuck instead to their guiding principle that “if we [make] something that we [want] to see, others [will] want to see it, too.”

Similarly, Catmull remembers how “hollow, predictable, [and] without tension” the narrative of Toy Story 2 had become during the production process. But “the Disney execs disagreed—the movie was good enough.” After all, “it’s only a sequel”, they’d say. Once again, Pixar rejected the notion and decided to redo the entire film.

Indeed, turning Toy Story 2 around was a grueling and costly affair. But the alternative, the “acceptance of mediocrity”, Catmull believes, “would have consequences that were far more destructive.” It would have set an unhealthy precedent at Pixar, risking not only their goodwill with moviegoers, but the artistic aspirations and standards of everyone involved.

“Toy Story 2 taught us another important lesson: There has to be one quality bar for every film we produce. Everyone working at the studio at the time made tremendous personal sacrifices to fix Toy Story 2… But by rejecting mediocrity at great pain and personal sacrifice, we made a loud statement as a community that it was unacceptable to produce some good films and some mediocre films. As a result of Toy Story 2, it became deeply ingrained in our culture that everything we touch needs to be excellent.”
Ed Catmull. (2008). How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.

Invention, the future, and creative cultures

People like to romanticize the creative process—that they somehow appear to us in a swift moment of inspiration. But “creativity is more like a marathon than a sprint”, Catmull says. “People discover and realize their visions over time and through dedicated protracted struggle.”

The challenge lies in tearing away our inhibitions: the fear of failure, self-preservation, preconceptions, the inner critic, and external pressures. To create something wonderful, we have to run with a beginner’s mindset and a desire to voyage into the unknown. When it comes to sustained creativity, adults have much to learn from young children.