(LOS ANGELES)–A key to the success of a possible takeover of Pixar Animation Studios Inc (Nasdaq:PIXR – news) by Walt Disney Co (NYSE:DIS – news) is whether the entertainment giant can nurture the freewheeling culture that led Pixar to a string of box office successes.
The companies are in talks over whether Disney should buy Pixar for around $7 billion in stock, making Pixar Chief Executive Steve Jobs Disney’s top shareholder and potential board member.
The Disney board is meeting on Monday.
Pixar is known for its egalitarian ways where the lowest-ranking animator can share ideas with the bosses while Disney has a reputation for making creative decisions from the top down.
Disney’s new Chief Executive Robert Iger has acted to cut layers of management formed over the years and to drive decision-making to individual business units since taking office in October.
Analysts and industry experts wondered on Monday whether Disney, with its relatively strait-laced, layered corporate culture can preserve Pixar’s creatively driven atmosphere while increasing its output to at least one film per year.
“Avoiding the time-driven demands in favor of creative excellence is a key differentiator of Pixar versus all other studios,” Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto said in a note to clients. “Moving to two films a year and the corporate demands of a large company could destroy the culture of Pixar.”
DISNEYFIED
Pixar’s headquarters in Emeryville, California, was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a prepubescent’s paradise of foosball and pool tables, movie posters and cafeteria workers serving fun food” where Pixar animators delight in “showing their bosses better ways of doing things.”
“Dealing with middle management, departments and studio heads–we have none of that,” Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo, told the Chronicle in 2003. “That’s the thing that makes this place incredibly unique.
Disney animation has seen several “Golden Ages” but the studio was slow to make the transition from hand-drawn cells to computer-generated (CG) animation even after the 1995 release of Pixar’s Toy Story showed the technology’s promise.
Disney’s first fully computer-animated feature Chicken Little, debuted in November to mixed reviews and moderate box office success compared to Pixar films.
Pixar creative chief John Lasseter and Jobs have “a huge task” ahead of them in making sure Pixar, which is one-seventh the size of Disney, does not become “Disneyfied,” Anant Sundaram, a professor at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business said on Monday.
“It’s a classic case … a little, fabulous creative growth asset that is rich in intellectual property gets dissipated in a corporate takeover,” Sundaram said.
“The business world is littered with disappointments: IBM and Lotus, AOL and Netscape, Microsoft and WebTV,” he said. “It’s very difficult for a small newcomer to change an entrenched culture of a larger competitor.”
Disney has had success, however, with its acquisition of the sports cable network ESPN, which has been largely left to run itself as one of Disney’s most profitable and innovative businesses.
The animation community seems optimistic about the outcome of a Disney-Pixar merger because of hopes that Pixar will remind Disney how to make good animated films, said Ramin Zahed, editor-in-chief of Animation Magazine.
Ironically, the team-based creative techniques Pixar uses to hone its stories were developed by Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” the animators who presided over the Golden Age of such classics as Pinocchio and Bambi, Zahed said.
And Lasseter, a former Disney animator, is expected to take a leading role at Disney if the deal goes through.
“Everybody says Disney is going to benefit from it,” Zahed said of a potential merger. “The common feeling is that it’s going to be Pixar affecting the Disney culture.”
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