Pixar Exhibition at Sapporo Art Park

By Noa Tanaka

Pixar Animation Studios is known as the creator of Toy Story, the world’s first 3D animated feature film, Monsters, Inc, and Cars, to name just a few. Pixar, in collaboration with the Museum Of Science in Boston, created an exhibition. It began in North America in 2015 as “The Science Behind Pixar” and was held in several cities in Japan a few years later, attracting more than 2.5 million people in total.

In this exhibition, the eight key processes of animation production were explained intelligibly, and participants could learn about them through hands-on exhibits. The exhibition was held at Sapporo Art Park Museum from April 19 to June 28. The general admission fee for adults was ¥1,500. The admission fee for high school students and junior high school students was ¥1,300 and ¥900 for elementary school students. There was also a set of two original books for free at the Sapporo venue with an admission ticket.

The eight key processes are modeling to create the character’s shape, rigging to create the muscles and joints that move the character, surfaces to create the character’s appearance, sets and cameras to capture the world of the story, animation to give action to characters, simulation of moving character’s hair and clothes, lighting to adjust lights such as day or night, and rendering ready to be enjoyed in movie theaters.

You can experience for yourself the production techniques used in Pixar films. For example, you can rotate a flat surface to create a three-dimensional object, move a lever to create a character’s facial expression, and learn how long it takes to render a scene from a movie.

There were also video exhibits that could only be seen at this exhibition, including behind the scene stories and hardships faced by the Pixar staff in the creation of the works. And at the venue, you can touch and take pictures with popular characters such as Buzz Lightyear, a Pixar animated character that was created very elaborately for this exhibition.

In addition, limited goods, such as T-shirts, bags, postcards, stickers, clear files, and official goods were sold there. Only people who had the ticket for this exhibition could buy them. This shop was a short distance from the venue.