Pixar 20 Years of Animation at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum

“The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art!” – John Lasseter

Animation. I never realized how much time and effort went into creating a full-feature animated film until we went to the Pixar: 20 Years of Animation exhibit at Taipei’s Fine Arts Museum this weekend. The exhibit runs from August 7 until November 1, and features the worlds, characters and stories of Pixar’s film-making over the past two decades. There are over 600 items in the exhibit, including paintings, sketches, 3D models, storyboards, colorscripts, short films, multimedia installations and film presentations of behind-the-scenes production techniques.

It’s an incredible exhibit showing the various stages of art production for films like Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., The Incredibles and Ratatouille to name a few. The storyboards for the Incredibles were fantastic. The artists actually cut out shapes and glued them onto paper to make the artwork look three-dimensional. The 3D models are also really cool, especially the models for Monsters Inc. The amount of time that went into carving all that fur is mind-boggling. I also loved the original charcoal, pen and pencil drawings which eventually progressed into digital paintings and have me itching to speed up my Photoshop tutorials.

The Toy Story Zoetrope was our absolute favorite, though. We came upon it in full motion and couldn’t figure out how some of the figures were jumping and disappearing into the floor. After a few minutes, they slowed it down and we were able to see the figurines on a large revolving disc. Turning at a rate of 18 frames per second, your mind interprets the whizzing images as one to make it look like they are in continuous motion.

Pixar 20 Years of Animation at Taipei Fine Arts Museum

It was a great way to spend the afternoon. The only thing we didn’t enjoy was the crowds of visitors. This is the third week of the exhibit, so we were really surprised to see hundreds of people waiting to get in. There were several exhibits we couldn’t get near, which was really disappointing. All in all though, it was a great way to spend the afternoon. I’d recommend going during the week if you can. This is one exhibit you’ll want to take your time with.