The Pixar Touch is a story of technical innovation that revolutionized animation, transforming hand-drawn cel animation into computer-generated 3-D graphics. It is a triumphant business story of a company that began with a dream, remained true to the ideals of its founders---antibureaucratic and artist driven---and ended up a multibillion-dollar success.

We meet Pixar's technical genius and founding CEO, Ed Catmull, who, inspired by Disney's Peter Pan and Pinocchio, dreamed of becoming an animator; however, realizing he would never be good enough, he instead enrolled in the then new field of computer science at the University of Utah. It was Catmull who founded the computer graphics lab at the New York Institute of Technology and who wound up at Lucasfilm during the first Star Wars trilogy, running the computer graphics department. He also found a patron in Steve Jobs, just ousted from Apple Computer, who bought Pixar for five million dollars. Catmull went on to win four Academy Awards for his technical feats and helped to create some of the key computer-generated imagery software that animators rely on today.

David A. Price also writes about John Lasseter, who catapulted himself from unemployed animator to one of the most powerful figures in American filmmaking; animation was the only thing he ever wanted to do (he was inspired by Disney's The Sword in the Stone), and Price's book shows how Lasseter transformed computer animation from a novelty into an art form. The author writes as well about Steve Jobs, as volatile a figure as a Shakespearean monarch.

Based on interviews with dozens of insiders, The Pixar Touch examines the early wildcat years, when computer animation was thought of as the lunatic fringe of the medium. We also see the studio at work today---how its writers, directors, and animators make their astonishing, and astonishingly popular, films.