Mater – the toothy rust-bucket tow truck from the hit animated film Cars – will be flying straight out of Vancouver’s new Pixar Canada studio to audiences around the world.
That was the scoop at the official opening of Pixar Canada’s hip new office in Gastown on Tuesday. At the exclusive event, attended by Premier Gordon Campbell and Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, Pixar executives briefly drew the veil off “top secret” sketches of a winged Mater flying with his bucktoothed grin.
They wouldn’t allow photos of the sketches but confirmed that Mater will star in the new studio’s first production, with film work starting in August.
Dylan Brown, Pixar Canada’s creative director, said putting popular “legacy” characters like Mater, or Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear, in funny new situations is the exclusive role of the new studio, a satellite of award-winning Hollywood animation studio Pixar.
Pixar Canada will create three- to five-minute short films to be seen on cable and possibly aired before feature films.
The studio also revealed a few of the Canadian-content tricks up its sleeve with clips of Pixar characters frolicking in iconic Vancouver locales.
Buzz Lightyear bravely probed through massive Stanley Park trees in one short scene, and trash robot WALL-E basked with his girlfriend EVE in an English Bay sunset.
Amir Nasrabadi, Pixar Canada’s general manager, said the studio scoured the globe for the perfect satellite office, and chose B.C. for tax incentive reasons, for Vancouver’s deep computer-generated animation talent pool and for time-zone compatibility with the Hollywood studio.
Pixar Canada’s three-year plan is to produce “legacy” shorts only, but “anything is possible” beyond that, Nasrabadi told The Province.
The studio already has a staff of 20, including 16 Canadians, and wants to hire about 55 more staff within 18 months, said chief technical officer Darwyn Peachey.
Campbell agreed that B.C. has a “competitive tax regime,” but said he believes Pixar came to Vancouver because “we have thousands of creative people.”
Robertson said a whopping one-third of Vancouver’s jobs are in the “creative economy” and that industry growth faces “no limit with Pixar in the mix.”
“Thanks for putting us on the map as a global hub for digital entertainment,” he said to Pixar brass.
Julie Pantoja, who just graduated from a one-year animation program at BCIT, said she was thrilled to be hired as an apprentice at Pixar Canada this summer.
“I always dreamt of working for Pixar, but I just never thought I’d start so soon,” she said.
Pixar, a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, burst into prominence with the first-ever full-length computer-generated feature Toy Story in 1995, and has released hits such as Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars and Ratatouille. Toy Story 3 is coming out in June.
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