The Ugly & The Beast!
Visual summary for "Creativity Inc " part 7
Hello there! Did you miss me? Regardless, I'm back 😉, had to take a pause to care for my family and myself. Now, I'm ready to continue our exploration of "Creativity Inc." by Ed Catmull.
If you're new to this series, you can start with part 1, or check the last one below:
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In the previous post, Ed described how embracing failure contributed to Pixar's continued success, as shown with "Monsters Inc."
However, in this chapter, he questions whether they could have accelerated this process… Which brings us to:
Chapter 7 - The Hungry Beast and the Ugly Baby
Ed Catmull often take Disney as a point of comparison, and from 1994 to 2010, Disney seemed focused on merely "Feeding the Beast" – losing the magic that made their earlier movies successful.
The Beast, as Ed defines it, is any system demanding a constant flow, prioritizing efficiency while minimizing waste of effort, resources, and time.
… Sounds reasonable, right?
Pixar tested this approach with "Finding Nemo," attempting to streamline production by finalizing the story early… Yet they ended up making just as many adjustments as with their other films. They couldn’t get the film’s idea to an acceptable level of quality without spending the extra effort of re-writes.
"Finding Nemo" became 2003's second-highest-grossing film, demonstrating that excellence is a better goal than Efficiency.
Below you can see the team talking for a few minutes about that challenge:
Original ideas are Fragile, they are like –"Ugly Babies," as Ed calls them – with little chance of surviving the Beast without protection.
While efficiency isn't inherently negative, it can become all-consuming. The key is finding balance: protecting new ideas until they can stand on their own while acknowledging the Beast's needs..
Take Pixar's internship program, (an example from the book). Initially, managers resisted taking on interns due to costs. Ed protected the program by making it a corporate expense rather than departmental. Eventually, the fresh perspectives and energy interns brought won managers over, and they became willing to absorb the costs themselves.
The lesson? While criticizing new ideas is easy, protecting them requires effort – but that is how the future is built!
That’s it for now, hope you enjoyed it. Let me leave you with some question.
Do you sometime have the feeling of only feeding the Beast?
What kind of ideas do you think are Ugly babies, bad looking today but with a lot of potential worth protecting?
Find the next chapter here 👇
https://ludtoussaint.substack.com/p/chaos-change-and-creativity-at-pixar?r=1bc09s