Pixar's Ugly Baby

 

Every Idea Starts Out As An Ugly Baby

In his memoir, Creativity, Inc., Pixar founder Ed Catmull writes that “early on, all of our movies suck.”  The trick, he points out, is to go beyond the initial germ of an idea and undergo the time consuming and laborious work it takes to get something “from suck to not-suck.”

People tend to think that great works are born out of sublime inspiration.  There may be some truth to that, but it’s only a small part of the story.  Catmull calls Pixar’s initial ideas “ugly babies,” because they start out, “awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.” Not everyone can see what those ugly babies can grow into.

The problem is that there is always a tendency to compare an early idea to a finished project. What’s more, we tend to compare them to the best of the genre.  It’s much easier to remember a classic scene from Casablanca than an outtake from Ishtar.  So it’s crucial to see a new idea’s potential, as well as its shortcomings.

That’s very hard to do.  Everybody’s seen runaway hits like Toy Story and Finding Nemo, yet very few knew them when they were awkward, ugly babies. That makes it tempting to want to kill new ideas in the cradle, but it’s important to protect them.  Every great work was an ugly baby at some point.

“Originality is fragile,”  Catmull writes.  The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations.  The new needs friends.”  “Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly.  Our job is to protect the new.”