Pixar Case Study

Have you ever wonder how Pixar create their movies? Although Pixar movies look like drawings there is a lot of math and science that goes into them. Danielle Feinberg is Pixar’s director of photography she uses math, science, and code to help create our favorite Pixar characters. During the TED Talk, The magic ingredient that brings Pixar movies to life the speaker Danielle uses pathos, ethos, logos in the speech to keep the audience engaged.

Disney used the character of Mickey Mouse and others to create movies that customers enjoyed like “Beauty and the Beast” while Pixar was producing made up animated characters to create films like “Cars” and “Wall-E”. Disney was creating animated movies but struggling to generate the amount of money Pixar was making on producing only one movie a year. Disney wanted to grow in creating more animated movies and decided to buy out Pixar in 2006 for $7.4 million dollars. (Barnes, 2008) According to Disney’s CEO Robert

A long time ago Disney company turned into some kind of Hollywood «machine» of making animation hits with the same parttern and also they missed the moment when computer animation has become much more interesting in the audience of animated cartoons. Pixar is representing some kind of new wave (especially, on the technological side) in the cartoon field . Also, they are succesful. Teir «Toy Story» and «Finding Nemo» were real hits:

Disney’s acquisition of Pixar had both benefits and implications for both parties involved. By acquiring Pixar, Disney was given access to Pixar’s proprietary technology, which was an important factor, as well as access to new characters. These characters provided a new source of income for Disney, not just for movies, but also to use in theme parks, merchandise stores, etc., meaning new characters would supply immense revenue streams for Disney in several forms. Disney also gained strengthened market power, as acquiring one of their rivals would give them a competitive advantage and would simultaneously make them more powerful in the market. Additionally, Disney was never very successful with their animated movies, and acquiring Pixar would

Pixar had a few alternatives besides being acquired by Disney. One alternative for Pixar was to vertically integrate forward and enable distribution of its own content instead of relying on Disney by acquiring smaller media companies. However, this would be a highly unrelated diversification for Pixar and possibly create diseconomies of scope. Pixar would also face rigorous competition from other media conglomerates like Disney, Universal and Paramount.

This study examines how leadership, teamwork, and organizational learning can contribute in making mergers and acquisitions work. Our intention is to identify critical factors and practices needed for merger success. Our research is part of an ongoing project, and builds on previous analysis of merger success/failure in such organizations as Standard Oil, Exxon Mobile, and Time Warner-AOL. In this paper, we turn our attention to the recent merger of Pixar and Disney. In our view, the Disney-Pixar case seems to be a good example of a successful merger in progress. This is demonstrated very clearly by recent box office successes such as Academy Award

Founded in 1934, The Walt Disney Animation studio is the oldest surviving animation studio in the world. The studio is documented with creating new techniques for the day, which are now considered standard. Disney produces the most animated motion picture films. Another major animation studio based out of California is Pixar Animation Studios. However, Disney agreed to purchase Pixar in early 2006, for 7.4 billion dollars. Pixar has produced films that have won seven academy awards including Toy Story, Cars, and Finding Nemo.

Pixar provides its employees freedom to innovate and communicate in the process of making films. That is one of the most important factors in making the finest products in a creative industry. Also it is the most efficient and least time-consuming method to solve problems. The company has several feedback and review sessions during film production. The biggest one is the brain trust session. The brain trust is a group of experienced directors and producers who provide peer reviews for the films being made. These feedback sessions have played one of the most important roles in making the products better in the company’s history.

● Pixar relies heavily on intrinsic motivation to motivate and inspire its employees, which is

As Schein (2010, p.32) himself had concluded, any group’s culture can be studied at the three levels. The three levels of culture allows for an analysis of Pixar’s organizational cultural from an observational level. Information can be readily drawn from business reviews, news articles on Pixar, interviews with Pixar’s employees and Pixar’s website, thus making Edgar Schein’s three levels of culture an ideal model for analysis of Pixar’s culture.

The demographics of the population that like animation encompasses baby boomers, adults and large numbers of children alike, leads to an improvement in the revenue and exposure for the animation industry (See Exhibit 1 for Percentage of total births). Therefore the social factors are also favorable.

Pixar Animation Studios was founded in 1979, initially specializing in producing state of the art computer hardware (Carlson, 2003). In 1990, due to poor product sales the company diversified from its core business and began producing computer animated commercials for outside companies. Success came for Pixar after the production of its first computer animated film ‘Toy story’ in 1995 (Hutton and Baute, 2007). Since then, Pixar has made many innovative animated feature films, with well known ones including - A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille and WALL-E, six of which are in the top grossing animated

Known to be one of the largest producers of multi-media content, Walt Disney and Pixar greatly impacted the entertainment industry with the use of three-dimensional generated content. It quickly gained popularity with the release of its animated movies and especially got the attention of children from their sequels. With the growing popularity, the competition in the media industry began to increase. Disney was then faced with a difficult decision regarding its relationship with Pixar on whether they should acquire or not acquire the company.

Established in 1923, Disney Studios released the first ever full-length animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937. By 2015, Disney Studios employed about “6,500 employees, and spent $2 billion producing films annually”. Alan Horn, Chairman of the Walt Disney Studios, oversees five studios, that together made up Disney Studios. The Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures ‘Disney Live Action’ and Walt Disney Animation Studios ‘Disney Animation’ are directly from Walt Disney’s original studio. The three others were acquisitions made during Bob Iger’s time as chief executive officer of The Walt Disney Company. The first was Disney's competitor animation studio, Pixar, which was purchased for $7.4 billion in 2006; second, Marvel Entertainment, which had its roots in comic books, for $4 billion in 2009; and finally the legendary filmmaker George Lucas’ Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion in 2012. During this time, Disney Studios began pursuing a “tentpole” strategy, which entails investing in higher budget films that would hopefully produce a larger profit by pulling in a large portion of the market. The larger profit would also help compensate for losses that may occur in smaller budgeted films. As it stands, Disney studios currently produces 10-12 films annually with approximately eight of them with production budgets in excess of $150 million. The current breakdown of tentpole films expected annually is as follows: two from Marvel, one from Lucasfilm, one from Pixar,

The Walt Disney Company is one of the largest media and entertainment corporations in the world. Disney is able to create sustainable profits due to its heterogeneity, inimitability, co-specialization and immense foresight. During the late twentieth century, Michael Eisner founded and gave a rebirth to Walt Disney Company. Eisner revitalize TV and movies, Themes Park and new businesses. Eisner's takeover for fifteen years had climbed the revenues and net earnings of the company. It also successfully uses synergy to create value across its many business units. After its founder Walter Disney's death, the company started to lose its ground and performance declined. Michael Eisner became CEO