To Infinity and Beyond!

I just visited the Pixar exhibition at Singapore Science Centre today! I went there filled with high expectations, fresh from my Studio Ghibli experience in Japan (which was magical to say the least). I expected something similar, though secretly acknowledging nothing could possibly exceed that experience. Well, the Pixar experience was nearly there.

After trekking halfway across Singapore to Jurong East (a place I had last visited six, seven? years ago on my first and only ice skating misadventure), my friends and I stepped into the Science Centre tingling with excitement since we were all huge Pixar fans. Upon our entrance into the exhibition, we were first greeted with a timeline with Pixar's beginnings and development and a video from John Lasseter (the head guy of Pixar) explaining what this exhibition was about. "I could get these information from wikipedia and youtube," I thought "give me my twenty dollars worth!!"

And so we walked on. It was slightly crowded, since it was a Saturday and also the penultimate day of the exhibit. The body of the exhibit is the behind the scenes storyboards and character sketches that we would not have otherwise had a chance to study. The raw, computer untouched drawings of our favourite animated films were a reminder that even though Pixar films prides itself on its computer graphics and 3D effects, ultimately these pieces of art come from the most basic form - drawing and colouring by hand by talented artists. Storyboards of hundreds of pictures are a testament to these artists' skills, it doesn't just take a computer to create pretty pictures.

John Lasseter also constantly reminds us in the form of video interviews that the story is always the heart of Pixar films and they are always wholesome family goodness. This is one reason why I love Pixar so much. I've never really liked the crude American humour found in many Hollywood comedies these days (and some other animated films) that preferred making fun of others for their ugly appearance and various shortcomings. Pixar never had to resort to such cheap gags for laughs, but every one of their movies are always so much fun to watch.

For me, the best part of the exhibition has to be the little spaces where they showed films. Short films that had been previously made, and also this fantastic movie/motion picture (yes, literally) called Artscape which made us feel like we were on an amusement park ride. The camera panned and zoomed into storyboard images, bringing us between layers of brush strokes, beyond the grainy canvas into a 3D world where we were moving as a character in the pictures. It was amazing.

Another fun part was the zoetrope, a spinning carousel like device with figurines of toy story characters mounted on. It was inspired by the Totoro zoetrope in Studio Ghibli (which the same friend and I had ogled at until our eyes went misty). Basically, when this thing isn't spinning, you will see figurines placed in equal distance away from each other in a circle, each layer a different character doing a different action. But when the device spins, the magic begins. These figurines come to life - they hop, they dance, they jump off cliffs with parachutes, it is a truly a sight to behold in wonder.

Catch this exhibit on its last day tomorrow!

note: photography is not allowed in the exhibition so these images are grabbed from google and the official pixar website.