If you're a connoisseur of hyperbole, these sentences - the opening of Chapter 2 of David A. Price's new history of Pixar Animation Studios, The Pixar Touch, is a choice morsel:

Now and then in history one finds a time and a place that seems to be charmed, where talent has assembled in a way that appears to defy all laws of probability - drama in Elizabethan London, philosophy in Athens during the third century BC, painting in the late-fifteenth-century and early-sixteenth-century Florence. One of the lesser know among these is Salt Lake city in the 1960's and early 1970's - to be precise, computer graphics at the University of Utah computer science department.

Price goes on to describe the halcyon days when Dave Evans and Ivan Sutherland ran the U. of U.'s computer-graphics department and attracted all kinds of hot talent - notably Ed Catmull, the Granite High grad who went on to become one of the founders of Pixar.

The book - which The New York Times Book Review section reviewed and excerpted Sunday - is a bright read, most valuable for its description of the early days of computer-animation leading up to the formation of Pixar. (After 1995, the year "Toy Story" is released, the narrative is too dependent on news reports and P.R. material - apparently Pixar discovered the importance of non-disclosure agreements with its former employees.)

Labels: Pixar