Animating Management: Nonlinear Simulation and Management Theory at Pixar

Scientific management and early industrial animation

When industrial management techniques were first introduced to the craft of animation in the 1910s, they brought about certain points of tension; the rigid and routinized style of industrial management had to be reconciled with a discourse of chaotic, unpredictable creativity. On the one hand, animation studios promoted their ability to bring things to life, creating unpredictable situations and characters with a mind of their own yet, on the other hand, they accomplished this feat through a highly routinized, deterministic, and linear process. Scott Bukatman (2012: 16–19) observes this dynamic in both animation and early American comics, and he attributes it to the historical context of turn-of-the-century America, where an ideology of opportunity and self-determination existed in tension with the highly regulated realities of industrial labor. This dynamic between creative chaos and management is still relevant in contemporary animation production. What has changed is the conceptual framework used to understand it.

The industrialization of early animation coincided with the ascendance of scientific management, which approached the management of labor as an engineering task (Witzel, 2016: 110–113). With a focus on output and efficiency, scientific management employed empirical and technical analytical tools to understand labor tasks, and to improve worker efficacy and efficiency. Scientific management is associated with a few key figures from the early 20th century such as Frank Bunker Gilbreth and Henri Gantt but the movement has become synonymous with Taylor’s (2009[1911]) book The Principles of Scientific Management. The idea of applying ‘science’ to the management of labor is a somewhat vague concept, more indicative of the desire for epistemic authority and a declaration of alignment with a positivist zeitgeist rather than any specific set of methods or theories. Yet the title of ‘science’ is more appropriate when one considers Taylor’s key contribution to the history of management. While he invented a number of concepts and techniques, his fundamental contribution was the idea of examining the practice of management itself: to theorize the role of management and make it more than the mere oversight of workers (Witzel, 2016: 113). This was the study, or science, of management. While new approaches to management that focused on hierarchies, bureaucracy, and psychology would replace scientific management in a relatively short period of time, this reflexive disposition toward management would be Taylor’s enduring legacy. Theorization of management would have an important influence on animation production over time, both in terms of how animation production processes were designed and also in terms of how the process of animation was understood and represented.

Although the first forms of cinematic animation were largely the product of craftwork by individual artists like Winsor McCay or Émile Cohl, by 1913, cinematic animation started to take on elements of industrial production. During the following years, both Bray Productions and Fleischer Studios began implementing techniques and technologies in the name of improved consistency, efficiency, and output. Examples include the use of celluloid, registration pegs, rotoscope, standard production references, and the emergence of specialized below-the-line labor roles like inkers and inbetweeners (Sammond, 2015: 94). Donald Crafton’s research offers substantial evidence that John Randolph Bray was particularly engaged in applying Taylor’s ideas to animation (1993: 163–167). Animation studios were thus studying the animation process and reflecting on how it might be done differently with the implementation of different configurations of labor and technology.

Evidence of this management theorization can be seen both in the films produced by these studios, and in promotional communications about them. In the case of promotional materials, Nicholas Sammond’s (2015) research on fan magazines and trade publications finds that studios like Fleischer’s were eager to show off their ‘rationalized’ and efficient industrial animation processes. This should not be taken to mean that they wanted to look cold and mechanical though. Sammond notes that, while the earliest representations of the task of animation by Winsor McCay represented animation as an onerous grind, as studios became more industrialized they tended to represent the process of animation as being more ‘playful and capricious’ while also being more efficient, ‘rational and productive’ (p. 91). These Hollywood studios were interested in showing that their workers were lively and fun, but also that the studio producers and managers were able to ‘corral the rambunctious energy of its animators’ (p. 92). The promotional material portrayed this relationship not as one of animosity but of paternalistic guidance. Sammond further finds that the complexity of this relationship between unpredictable liveliness and managing direction is more obliquely evident in animations from this period, like the Fleischers’ Out of the Inkwell series. Here the rebellious and mischievous animated character Koko the Clown is contained and managed by the live-action animator that drew him. ³ Sammond (2015: 110) finds that ‘animators created a commodity that appeared to speak back to its creators and assert its independence from the social and material order of its making . . . only inevitably to be put in its place.’

This transitional period of early-industrialized animation eventually gave way to more settled and conventionalized portrayals of animation production, typified by Walt Disney. Here the work of creating an animated film was no longer portrayed as the manual work of drawing, but as the industrial management task of directing an extensive studio with numerous departments of specialized workers. ⁴ A promotional film that followed the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937, dir. Mike Disa) titled How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made (1939) offers a good example of this practice. The film portrays Walt Disney overseeing the studio’s many departments, directing the inking department, filled with ‘hundreds of pretty girls in a comfortable building all their own’, as well as the story department, where writers and the studio’s ‘hard boiled directors’ develop ideas. The film is careful to note that, although many people work on a given film, Disney always gives direction and final approval. The management of labor, particularly its division, thus affords creativity. The ‘pretty girls’ are compartmentalized, rendering their labor as rote, menial, and linear. Animation is thus rhetorically transformed into management by Disney: the people in charge are the creators, and the ones that do the work merely follow directions.

Pixar has also sought to convey its management theory through public relations and promotional material. Their representations of management seek to negotiate this dynamic between anarchic liveliness and control. However, these concepts are mediated through a very different epistemic frame. While early studios like Bray and the Fleischers focused on management as routinized, efficient, and rigid, Pixar focuses on embracing unpredictably, flexibility, and resilience. Disney used the linear work undertaken by departments of below-the-line workers to make above-the-line animators and executives seem livelier and more creative. Pixar, by contrast, promotes its use of nonlinear processes that purport to integrate input from all levels of staff in an egalitarian fashion and inspire the unpredictable chaos that studios like Fleischer and Disney sought to corral and rationalize. By couching their approach to management in the same concept of nonlinearity that drives many of their animations tools, Pixar furthers this collapse between animation as making moving images and animation as management, and it obfuscates points of labor conflict in a black box of computational paradigms.

Nonlinear simulation at Pixar

While linear simulation is used to model simple, predictable chains of causality, nonlinear simulation is used to model processes and systems with uncertain outcomes like the weather or the stock market. As computer scientist Melanie Mitchell (2011: 23) puts it, ‘A linear system is one you can understand by understanding its parts . . . A nonlinear system is one in which the whole is different from the sum of the parts.’ In a nonlinear system, one may start with relatively simple conditions, but the result of those conditions will be unpredictable. Modeling and simulating nonlinear systems thus requires some element of unpredictability. One way of doing this is simply to use a random number. By inserting some random factor into an otherwise predictable simulation you can see what types of outcomes are possible. This is referred to as a stochastic simulation. Another approach is to use dynamics. Here, if you set up multiple sets of rules that influence each other in turn (A influences B, which influences C, which influences A), the result is complex and unpredictable. The concept of nonlinear simulation has influenced a variety of research and engineering fields, including computer graphics and management science (Gowanlock, 2017: 20–36). This way of thinking has been fundamental to Pixar since before it was an independent company, and it continues to influence the way the company constructs itself.

The computer graphics scientists who founded Pixar – William T Reeves, Loren Carpenter, Alvy Ray Smith, and Ed Catmull – are all well versed in the concept of nonlinear simulation. Indeed three of the four founders made some of the most important early contributions to nonlinear animation technology. Many of the early technologies they developed are on display in their first Hollywood contract, the ‘genesis sequence’ in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982, dir. Nicholas Meyer), which they completed while still under the aegis of Lucasfilm’s computer division. This short sequence depicts a computer simulation of a planetary-scale explosion and subsequent terraformation reaction. The genesis sequence was led by Smith, a computer science researcher who had been teaching at NYU. Smith did his doctoral research on cellular automata, a type of simulation where simple rules applied to a grid of squares lead to unpredictable patterns through dynamic interactions. The genesis sequence also prominently features technology developed by Carpenter, a former researcher at Boeing. Carpenter’s technology draws naturalistic topographies algorithmically using the random (stochastic) patterns of fractals (Fournier and Carpenter, 1982). In addition to these fractal landscapes, the genesis sequence features technology developed by Reeves, a former researcher at the University of Toronto. Reeves’s (1983) concept of particle systems is a way of rendering volumetric shapes like fire or smoke as individual points whose motion paths are generated algorithmically, creating nonlinear shapes and movement.

The genesis sequence is the first of many examples of nonlinear animation that this group would produce. Following their separation from Lucasfilm, Pixar released a series of new nonlinear simulation techniques at the Association for Computing Machinery’s special interest group on graphics (SIGGRAPH), with each new technical advance illustrated with an animated tech demo. For example, in 1986, Reeves worked with researcher Alain Fournier to develop a system for animating ocean waves and rippling fabric, a technique they showcased in a demo titled Flags and Waves (Reeves and Fournier, 1986). Since then, Pixar has consistently developed nonlinear simulation technology, many of which come from long-time Pixar scientist Michael Kass. Over his career, Kass helped develop an influential fluid simulation (Kass and Miller, 1990), a cloth simulation used in the short Geri’s Game (1997, dir. Jan Pinkava), and Pixar’s FizT dynamic hair and cloth animation software, which was used in Monsters, Inc (2001, dir. Pete Docter).

When a new nonlinear animation technology is on display in a Pixar feature, the film is traditionally accompanied by a media campaign that promotes the new technology through press pieces, DVD extras, and promotional videos. For example, a piece on the tech website CNET about Finding Dory (2016, dir. Andrew Stanton) talks about the technology Pixar developed to animate the elastic-yet-soft properties of an octopus and also their new ‘auto-swim’ software for procedurally animating fish (Tong, 2016). This rhetoric of innovation is echoed over and over in promotional material. For example, a video produced by Pixar for Monsters, Inc. resembles a sort of infomercial, with a cast of famous voice actors including Billy Crystal and James Coburn praising Pixar’s FizT fur and cloth simulation software as revolutionary (Pixar Animation Studios, 2001). A popular trope of this kind of promotion is to compare the challenges of the last feature project to the one currently being promoted. In a website article for Finding Nemo, supervising technical director Oren Jacob is quoted as saying ‘This film is far more complicated than “Monsters, Inc.” in that almost every shot involves some kind of simulation program or simulated movement’ (Arkoff, 2006).

Depictions of these nonlinear animation tools also gesture toward their role in production labor. They highlight their new technology’s ability to perform animation work instead of animators. For example, an uncredited worker in Pixar’s promotional piece for FizT explains that animating every single hair on a furry creature would be impossible, ‘all our animators would quit.’ The solution was to remove this task and displace it onto a new technology so, in his words, ‘our animators don’t have to worry about it at all’ (Pixar Animation Studios, 2001). An article in Wired on FizT that coincided with the release of Monsters, Inc. offers a rather idiosyncratic take on this logic. The author argues that, while films with spectacular computer graphics have a tendency to suffer in terms of story, the way these technologies save animator labor allows the filmmakers to focus on nuanced characters and story instead (Clewley, 2001). This discourse resembles the logic of some of the representations of early industrial animation. Just as Walt Disney Productions represented the work of inkers and inbetweeners as allowing animators and managers to focus on creative work, nonlinear animation tools seem to provide a way of minimizing and compartmentalizing repetitive work. Much like registration pegs or rotoscoping, nonlinear simulation technologies are management tools.

With both the cases of Walt Disney and Pixar, this emphasis on enabling creativity puts a very positive face on management tools that makes for a more compliant and productive workforce. However, nonlinearity puts a different frame on management than these early industrial techniques. If Bray, Fleischer, and Disney depicted industrial management as enabling creativity because it enabled direct and linear control, Pixar sees management enabling creativity because it occasions the unpredictable as well as flexible, responsive control. Fostering the unpredictable and shaping the results works just as well for simulations of monster fur as it does for a workforce. This approach positions creativity and control so close as to be indistinguishable.

Management science

Pixar’s application of nonlinear animation to management did not happen in a vacuum. Management science is one of the many fields where nonlinear simulation has been employed as a tool. The jump from animation software to management theory is not as great as it might seem because nonlinear simulation is applied to all manner of complex, unpredictable phenomena. It has become an important part of many engineering and research disciplines, including aerospace, geology, climate science and meteorology, economics and finance, and social science. In many cases, the development of tools for these disciplines has come to constitute its own field in computer science. While simulation techniques for animation are shared at the computer science special interest group ACM SIGGRAPH, management science simulation technology is shared at the Simulation and Modeling group (SIGSIM) or the Management Information Systems group (SIG MIS).

While management science follows the tradition of Taylor in that it theorizes management, management science and scientific management are two discrete concepts with important historical and conceptual differences. While scientific management studied particular industrial cases so that their efficiency and productivity might be improved, management science studies the organizational nature of systems themselves. Management science, in other words, seeks to uncover fundamental principles of systems in order that they can be applied as organizational techniques. As historian of management thought Morgen Witzel (2016: 180) writes, ‘Scientific management was about exploring new methods; management science was and still is engaged in the quest for systems.’ This implies a different way of seeing the world, a different epistemology, an epistemology that is entwined with computer science and nonlinear simulation.

When management science emerged, it was covalent with concepts like Norbert Wiener’s (1961) cybernetics and Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s (2015) general systems theory. The key early text of management science, Stanford Beer’s (1987[1958]) book Cybernetics and Management, demonstrates this very clearly. Early cybernetics and systems theory were generally focused on self-regulating systems. In other words, they sought to understand how systems remained stable through self-correction, as the name, from the Greek cybernḗtēs or steersman, indicates (Martin, 2005: 19). Computers, of course, provide an important conceptual model and tool for modeling such systems.

Very quickly the paradigm of homeostasis began to be replaced with a greater interest in the way a given system interacts complexly and dynamically with other systems. Simulation tools were an important part in this turn. Even the very earliest computer simulations provided an opportunity to factor in for unexpected and random events. For example, the first computer simulation, the Monte Carlo Method, used pseudorandom numbers to calculate the possible trajectory of protons in nuclear fission reactions. This is a stochastic nonlinear simulation. The Encyclopaedia of Operations Research and Management Science offers the following example of how simulations such as these are used in complex management science scenarios. Say a small company signs a new supply contract and it wants to be prepared to fulfill it. It can simulate the stages of manufacture using discrete-event simulation and simulate the orders coming in at random intervals, thus testing its preparedness for an unpredictable amount of orders (Gass and Fu, 2013: 626). Nonlinear simulation is thus a powerful tool for testing management systems against the unpredictability of reality.

The key text that summarized the use of these techniques for management science was Jay Wright Forrester’s book Industrial Dynamics (2013[1961]). During the 1970s these ideas evolved even further, from asking how an organization could maintain stability in the face of uncertainty to asking how organizations themselves change. The concept of resilience originated in a paper by Canadian ecologist CS Holling titled ‘Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems’(1973). At its most simple, Holling’s contribution was to ask why we assume the natural world is in a state of equilibrium when it is clearly not. The concept of organizational resilience extends from this because it asks how systems persist despite the fact of constant change. Holling writes that resilience ‘is a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables’ (p. 14). While randomness, dynamics and unpredictability had been used to understand and manage systems for some time, Holling’s study of ecological resilience was a new way of thinking that did not abhor change but instead embraced it as a necessary component of preserving a system. Resilience joined various other popular concepts in the 1970s such as chaos theory, catastrophe theory, and fractals that made unpredictable nonlinearity central and even desirable.

Nonlinear simulation has continued to play an important role in management science. The contemporary management discipline of business process management (BPM) makes extensive use of nonlinear computer modeling (Witzel, 2016: 181). A subfield of study focused on the management of ‘creativity-intensive-processes’ has also emerged, and it too is informed by these principles (Seidel, 2011). The combination of computational tools and an epistemology of nonlinear systems has led to forms of management that are more flexible and responsive, more at home with uncertainty and contingency. If Taylor was focused on increasing output on a regulated, standardized, repetitive, linear production line, these techniques are more focused on processes with uncertain outcomes and on flexible, responsive forms of management. As the following section will discuss, Pixar’s representations of its management theory show the influence of some of these more recent management science discourses, although Pixar puts its own inflection on management because its approach is also informed by its nonlinear animation tools and with its connection to the history of animation. Pixar approaches workers like a simulation of splashing water or flowing hair. This approach offers a more harmonious vision of management that minimizes dissent, offering a sanitized, technologized vision of creativity.

Management theory at Pixar

Pixar emerged amidst a discourse of a post-industrial information society that privileges cognitive and symbolic labor and a discourse of technological disruptive innovation. One of the dominant paradigms of post-Fordist management focuses on the idea of workers as independent, self-managed, and self-promoting contractors (Bilton, 2010: 81–87). In the case of technology industries this takes the shape of entrepreneurship and disruption, as promoted by management theorist Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma (2016) and by the resurrection of Joseph Schumpeter’s (2003) theory of creative destruction, which pits the heroic entrepreneur against the entrenched power of bureaucratic ‘giant concerns’ (also see McCraw, 2010). The discourses of self-management, worker autonomy, and entrepreneurialism are certainly present in Pixar’s representations of itself. Its identity as the studio that brought ‘Silicon Valley bravado’ to Hollywood and disrupted entrenched powerful studios is a classic of heroic Schumpeterian entrepreneurship (Levy, 2017: 170). Yet Pixar’s identity and its approach to management are more complex than this context would suggest.

Pixar’s representation of its management theory fits delicately into its greater corporate image. On the one hand, Pixar seeks to style itself in the tradition of industrial animation studios, especially Disney. ⁵ The Incredibles (2004, dir. Brad Bird) featured a cameo from the two living members of Disney’s ‘nine old men’, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, and in his co-authored book Creativity Inc., Ed Catmull (Catmull and Wallace, 2014) notes how he was influenced by Walt Disney as a child. Catmull describes with admiration how Disney would acknowledge the importance of his forerunners like McCay and the Fleischers, suggesting Catmull himself does the same (pp. 17–18). On the other hand, as Malcolm Cook (2015: 65) notes, Pixar has been a hardware and software company for a significant part of its history. As a company that was once owned by Steve Jobs, had an IPO (initial public offering) two years before Amazon, and weathered the dot-com bubble like few other start-ups, it is one of the archetypal Silicon Valley tech companies (even if it is based in the East Bay). Pixar’s approach to management straddles these identities as an animation studio in the Fordist tradition and a Silicon Valley tech company, and its use of nonlinear paradigms frequently works to smooth over potential contradictions between the two.

The influence of a nonlinear epistemic paradigm is quite evident in Catmull’s own writing on management. He situates the company’s relationship to the unforeseen and unpredictable as the core of their management theory. In Creativity Inc., he discusses an innate cultural fear of ‘random unforeseen events’ and our tendency to look for patterns rather than randomness (Catmull and Wallace, 2014: 139–145). He contends that we should overcome this way of thinking and embrace the reality of randomness by designing organizations so that failure and the unexpected are not fatal threats. In the Harvard Business Review he writes ‘we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks’ (Catmull, 2008). One can see the clear influence of management science and of the epistemology of nonlinear simulation in these statements. Rather than seeing ‘unforeseen random events’ as something to resist and avoid, Catmull, like Holling (1973), emphasizes how unpredictable complexity and randomness are central to any organization.

Further points Catmull makes seem to have been inspired directly by nonlinear animation technology. He writes, ‘to my mind randomness is not just inevitable; it is part of the beauty of life . . . The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs’ (Catmull and Wallace, 2014: 139). The language he uses here evokes a fluid simulation, or the ‘genesis sequence’ from Star Trek II. Animations such as these revel in the natural beauty of randomness and complexity. Indeed, Catmull makes this connection quite explicit. He writes that his insights about randomness and the unforeseen are attributable to his background in mathematics and physics (p. 148). Catmull is clearly influenced by the epistemology of nonlinear simulation, ideas that feed into Pixar’s corporate or brand image as both an animation studio and a tech company.

Pixar’s techniques for fostering the unforeseen and the unpredictable focus on three interlinking strategies. Catmull addresses all of these strategies in his book, but they can also be found in a diversity of promotional material produced by the studio. Much of this material represents these strategies with notable lock-step consistency, indicating how carefully the studio controls the representation of its management theory. The first of these strategies is what Catmull refers to as ‘protection’: giving workers space to develop their ideas, experiment, and fail. Second is the studio’s identity as a non-hierarchical organization that invites input from all workers, which is modeled on the concept of ‘total-quality-management’ (TQM). Third is the way the architecture of the studio’s buildings is designed to foster unpredictable interactions between workers. Notably, these principles contradict many of the Taylorist and Fordist principles promoted by the likes of Fleischer, Bray, and Disney. All of these strategies promote the opposite of efficiency and direct top-down managerial control. Indeed, behind-the-scenes material about Pixar offers a sort of spectacle of superfluous labor. Scholars including Paul Flaig (2016) have described Creativity Inc. as a sort of manual for post-Fordism, in part for the way it promotes concepts like worker self-management (p. 71). Yet there is more to Pixar’s approach to management than the difference between industrial and post-industrial labor. Looking at the influence of nonlinear management concepts and the studio’s relationship to animation’s industrial past helps nuance our understanding.

The first strategy, Pixar’s principle of protection, refers to protecting ideas so that workers have a chance to explore their potential, even if they end up contributing nothing in the end. Catmull writes that experimental projects and new ideas are often sacrificed in the name of efficiency. This, he argues, leads to stasis and ossification in old established institutions like film studios (Catmull and Wallace, 2014: 123–130). There needs to be room for experimentation, for play, in order for the unforeseen to emerge. The idea of protection is tied to the studio’s origin myth. In promotional material, many senior staff express a great deal of affection for the early days of Pixar when their offices were in Point Richmond, because it was a period when the company explored every idea of how they could make money. ⁶ There was room for experimentation and play, even if it was obviously fruitless. Promotional videos about Pixar’s history feature figures such as Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, and Dylan Brown reminiscing about racing scooters around the office and trying to lodge stuffed animals in the ceiling (Lasseter, 2010).

While this childish play at Point Richmond pushes the definition of experimental work to the point of absurdity, it is still related to the idea of protection. The point is that workers have been given the space to experiment, to discover something unexpected. The irreverent and playful activities of Pixar workers are a particularly popular subject for promotional behind-the-scenes footage of the studio. They can be seen sliding across the Emeryville Campus’s slippery floors in their socked feet, or riding down flights of stairs in cardboard boxes wearing Viking helmets (The Incredibles Disc 2, 2005, dir. Brad Bird). Pixar has collected several stories of worker playfulness in a series titled Pixar Studio Stories. These shorts are narrated by Pixar workers with accompanying limited two-dimensional animation, conveying a sense of childish playfulness. They first appeared as promotional videos and extras for the Blu-ray release of Toy Story 3 (2010, dir. Lee Unkrich), the re-release of Toy Story (1995, dir. John Lasseter) and Toy Story 2 (1999, dir. John Lasseter), although Pixar has continued to produce them. One story describes the studio’s annual Halloween costume contest (Disney Pixar, 2018), another the studio’s annual battle-of-the bands called Pixarpalooza (Disney Pixar, 2019). These activities, the narrator stresses, are not the product of over-achieving human-resources workers. They are organized by the workers.

Perhaps the most typical example of this is the myth of the ‘Love Lounge’. Animator Andrew Gordon discovered an empty space through an air-conditioning duct behind his office and set about turning it into a little club house. As he relates in Pixar Studios Stories, he thought he would get into trouble when he was found out, but instead management embraced his idea. ⁷ These images of workers goofing off recall the Fleischer Studio’s representations of their animators’ mischievous and unruly behavior. Both examples strive to imbue the often monotonous process of creating animations with a sense of liveliness. Yet, as Flaig (2016) notes, this ‘whistle while you work’ discourse is a convention of post-Fordist creative labor. Furthermore, stories like the one from Point Richmond are narratives of entrepreneurial beginnings, a trope that evokes autonomy and self-management. These two sides of protection might seem to cooperate quite well, but there are some contradictions here. While the Fleischers tended to emphasize their ability to paternalistically manage the liveliness of their animators, Pixar erases any semblance of hierarchy or control. This contradiction is managed by the paradigm of nonlinear simulation, which focuses on the studio’s ability to foster liveliness, to animate its production process, in other words. Like a nonlinear animation, they set parameters that create the conditions for the unexpected and their management embraces the change that follows.

Richard McCulloch (2015) notes that these sorts of behind-the-scenes extra-textual communications style the studio brand as fun and playful, and thus condition the reception of their films. Pixar’s promotion of its theory of protection works in harmony with this playful corporate ethos. The way they create spaces for creativity to happen conveys that the studio is a fun and playful place, but it also conveys the studio’s ability to extract ideas from their creative workers through a technologically advanced management theory that is styled along the same principles as their computational animation technology.

The second strategy, Pixar’s supposedly anti-hierarchical management philosophy, serves a very similar function as the concept of protection, ameliorating their corporate image, communicating the effectiveness of their nonlinear organizational paradigm, and negotiating their hybrid identity as modern tech company and traditional animation studio. Pixar’s organizational identity is grounded in the principle of total-quality-management (TQM). Developed by mathematician W Edwards Deming during the post-war reconstruction of Japanese industry, TQM puts the responsibility of ensuring the quality of a product on all workers. ⁸ This puts it at odds with the Taylorist emphasis on efficiency. Under the Taylorist paradigm, the assembly line is supposed to never stop, because this has catastrophic consequences for output efficiency. TQM holds that any worker should be given the power and responsibility to stop the line if they see a problem. This is an early example of post-Fordism because it shifts the responsibility of management onto the worker. Catmull (Catmull and Wallace, 2014) was an early adopter of TQM in the United States. He describes it as ‘making production a creative endeavour that engages workers’ (pp. 50–55). TQM is not itself an example of the influence of nonlinear thinking. It emphasizes the uniformity and consistency of a product, abhorring the unpredictable. Yet, in the hands of Pixar, it both connects with animation’s industrial past and becomes inflected with nonlinear epistemology. It becomes a way of embracing unpredictable change.

In his book on Pixar CFO, Lawrence Levy (2017: 84) argues that the strict hierarchies of Hollywood studios and even large tech companies like IBM make them change and risk averse because everyone is trying to protect their position. Any disruption endangers entrenched power. Undermining hierarchy therefore invites the unexpected. Consider how the Fleischers and Disney represented their labor organization. The majority of the workers were a linear means to an end. Directors, producers, and top-level animators were constructed as the sites of creativity and the workers merely followed their instructions. In the case of the Fleischers, most of the workers below the animator were invisible, while Disney compartmentalized their ‘pretty girl’ inkers and inbetweeners into their own buildings. These hierarchies served a discourse of creativity in their own way, but they are highly linear. Pixar’s TQM approach, by contrast, is not represented as a linear process of workers completing tasks exactly as directed. Instead, they ‘empower’ workers to have input on the final creative product. The film thus emerges from an unpredictable nonlinear process that includes many sources of input. Catmull (2008) writes in Harvard Business Review, ‘Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization . . . It’s like an archaeological dig where you don’t know what you’re looking for or whether you will even find anything. The process is downright scary.’ As with all of these examples, this talk of non-hierarchical organization likely does not reflect actual practices. There are, of course, labor divisions within Pixar. And it is not as though anyone can make a change without oversight. ⁹ Indeed, in other cases Pixar paradoxically promotes more hierarchical features of their company like the ‘brain trust,’ a panel of the most senior creative minds. Pixar is quite keen to show off their non-hierarchical TQM-styled management philosophy regardless.

Pixar’s third management strategy is workspace design, more precisely the design of their studio headquarters in Emeryville, California. The Emeryville campus and its single main building, the Steve Jobs building, are the most central feature of their corporate identity (McCulloch, 2015: 175). The Emeryville campus was constructed following Pixar’s second feature A Bug’s Life (1998, dir. John Lasseter) and their 1995 IPO, which raised the considerable funds necessary for such a project. The central design principle of the campus is fostering random unpredictable events. In the early stages of planning the building, several ideas were put forward. John Lasseter, a director with a background in Disney animation, wanted to have a different building for each production (see Isaacson, 2015: 430). By contrast, the final design saw everyone in a single building, with technical staff on one side and animations staff on the other, and both forced to congregate in the center. ¹⁰ At the center is a large atrium with a coffee bar and a large staircase connecting the first and second floors. The purpose behind this design is to cause interactions between workers from different departments. Indeed, an early design had only one set of bathrooms in the middle of the building, forcing maximal interaction. ¹¹

The story of the Steve Jobs building’s design is rehearsed constantly in behind-the-scenes public relations studio tours, with titles such as ‘Behind the Scenes at Pixar’ (MacInnes, 2010) and ‘A Rare Look Inside Pixar Studios’ (Beiler and Ryzik, 2011). ¹² All of these publicity pieces follow almost the exact same set of talking points. Pieces by The New York Times, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post all marvel at the playful work culture and the Love Lounge, and they all talk about the design of the building as a way to foster ‘chance meetings’ (Morrison, 2016). Much like Pixar’s concept of protection and their anti-hierarchical TQM philosophy, these stories model Pixar’s corporate ethos as both playful and dynamically innovative. The visual imagination of these interactions is homologous with some of the software Pixar founders themselves developed for animation, such as Particle Systems or cellular automata: simulations where individual points moving along unpredictable paths interact with each other and give rise to unexpected shapes and movements. One can imagine a blueprint of the atrium with such simulations overlaid, with all of the employees represented by dots moving in random directions as they collide and interact. The atrium is a designed set of parameters that occasions unpredictable nonlinear events, a sort of synthetic creativity, a creativity that emerges not from direct deterministic fulfilled orders and efficiency but from mistakes and collisions.

The Steve Jobs building is perhaps the best symbol of the hybrid logic of Pixar’s representation of its management theory. On the one hand, there is something very unlike post-Fordism about the building’s representation. While other similar industries like the visual effects industry hire workers on 6-month contracts and subcontract out work to competitive bidders, Pixar emphasizes having a brick-and-mortar building where they retain and cultivate their workers (Catmull and Wallace, 2014: 79; Taylor, 2008). Indeed, their desire to retain workers became the subject of controversy when it was revealed they had secret agreements with other studios not to poach each other’s workers. As Eric Herhuth (2016: 3–4) points out, this desire to retain workers, even to the point of breaking labor laws, contradicts ‘California-style’ neoliberalism. However, on the other hand, the Steve Jobs building is distinctly unlike Disney’s approach to dividing labor into different buildings, the way Lasseter apparently originally wanted. The building reinforces the image of Pixar as a non-hierarchical fun factory. Thus, neither of these discourses is sufficient to explain Pixar’s promotion of the building. In order to understand it, one needs to understand the logic of nonlinear simulation behind their management theory. The Steve Jobs building is like a simulation, it is a field, a set of parameters, within which unpredictable creativity takes place. Pixar builds a box for their workers to be independent in. All of these examples of protection, worker playtime and non-hierarchical structures are about creating conditions and manipulating parameters to occasion the unexpected and the unlooked-for. This discourse offers a harmonious, utopian, vision of animated production where there is no conflict between creative chaos and control.

Conclusion

Vivian Sobchack (2009), Paul Flaig (2016), and Eric Herhuth (2016) have all noted the way Pixar films like WALL-E (2008, dir. Andrew Stanton) build a bridge between the past and the present, between an age of mechanical photochemical media and Fordist employment and an age of frictionless digital media and self-managed creative work. In Herhuth’s (2016: 5) words WALL-E ‘mitigate(s) extremes and render(s) transition more palatable’. It is possible to interpret Pixar’s representation of its management theory in this way, as a bridge between past and present, but it is first and foremost a bridge between the identity of an animation company and a technology company. Pixar promotes a hybrid approach to management, in tune with both animation’s industrial past and with post-Fordist management principles. It does this by employing a computational logic that seems to have the ability to resolve any conflict, to maximize control, and to respond to unforeseen change while also facilitating creativity and animating workers. It animates workers much the way their nonlinear software animates pixels. Far from being halfway between the present and the past, this approach to management has been disseminated by its proponents as a solution to the demands of cognitive capitalism and creative work.

Studios like Disney constructed animation as management. Through the studio’s mobilization of regimented disciplined workers, they spared their creative minds the labor of physically doing the animation, enabling them to direct the process. Their promotional material uses this above-and-below-the-line division to reassure the audience that, even though hundreds of people worked on a cartoon, it was the product of a few creative minds. Their work as animators was directing the work of others. Pixar, by contrast, constructs management as animation. Through the vital animating force of nonlinear contingency, the studio constructs its vision of management as enlivening work by introducing unpredictability. This is a different way of conceiving of control, one where the job of the studio is not to control the liveliness of workers, but to enliven them.

Given Pixar’s now mythic status as a successful Bay Area tech company once owned by Steve Jobs and, given the success of Catmull’s (2008) essays in the Harvard Business Review and his book Creativity Inc. (Catmull and Wallace, 2014), this conception of management as nonlinear animation has spread to varied businesses that seek post-Fordist goals of creativity and innovation. True, concepts like open-plan offices and designing for creativity have been around at least since advertising company Chiat/Day opened their radical new offices in 1994, which Wired describes as being motivated by ‘egalitarian utopianism’ (Berger, 1999). But it is easy to see the logic of nonlinear animation at work in contemporary urban office spaces, enlivening workspaces, animating workers, and setting the conditions for unpredictability. The history of animation and of nonlinear simulation has had a greater influence on contemporary work life than one might assume.

Pixar’s approach to management offers a recent chapter in the egalitarian utopianism of both office spaces and technology. Their seamless harmonious image of managing creativity recalls some of the more utopian visions of Californian techno-neoliberalism. Richard Barbrook and Andrew Cameron’s (1995) essay on the ‘Californian ideology’ was one of the first to note how an ‘emancipatory faith’ in new technologies is linked to a ‘libertarian form of politics’ that elides real-world inequities. This use of emerging technologies to erase politics is also at work in the discourse of digital media platforms, which present themselves as ‘neutral’ and ‘egalitarian’, hiding the way they exercise algorithmic control and the political consequences that they entail (Gillespie, 2010). As recent work by Cathy O’Neil (2016) and Safiya Noble (2018) demonstrates, algorithms are far from being politically neutral. Instead, the logic of algorithmic control can act as a veneer of objective neutrality that makes bias seem impossible and irrelevant. But, of course, as recent events have made clear, Pixar is not a harmonious utopia for everyone. News came out in 2017 about Lasseter’s pattern of sexual harassment (Masters, 2017). Furthermore, in 2018, former Pixar graphic designer Cassandra Smolcic criticized the pervasive sexism baked into Pixar culture, offering a variety of examples based on her five years working there. Interestingly, in Lasseter’s vaguely contrite memo to the workers of Pixar that responds to accusations of sexual harassment, he frames his behavior as a failure in managing creativity. He writes, ‘This kind of creative culture takes constant vigilance to maintain. It’s built on trust and respect, and it becomes fragile if any members of the team don’t feel valued’ (Masters, 2017). Even when issues of justice and equality emerge, Pixar’s approach to management feels sanitized of history, politics, and difference. Instead it is all about creating conditions and parameters.