ABSTRACT
As evolutionary biologists express it, adaptations within a species are more extreme when a small population develops in isolation. Industrialization depends, after all, on repeatability and systematic training to support efficient division of labor. With Pixar several hundred miles away in a “hidden city,” the studio might as well have been an ocean apart from “the industry” in Southern California. By 2005, less than a decade after the release of Toy Story on film, 35mm projection was rapidly approaching extinction as a mass commercial format that had dominated for a century. Commercial animation's entire production and distribution chain, working all the way back to the storyboard artist's drawings, had also been completely subsumed by digital processes. Few animation directors from the time used the Moviola for anything other than playing back work-in-progress reels; it was not seen as a tool for shaping performance.
