By the late ’90s we all wondered if Disney would remain Disney, synonymous with beautiful animation and great storytelling. The quality was steadily going down while the “sacred fire” seemed to have deserted the Studio and gone to a company founded only a decade earlier, whose string of successes was unbroken: Pixar Animation Studios. It took the buying of Pixar in 2006 to restore the Disney Studio to its glory. The two men who were at the helm of Pixar since 1986, John Lasseter (today Chief Creative Officer of Disney and Pixar) and Ed Catmull (today President of Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar Animation Studios) are behind this resurrection.
However, while John is world famous, Ed Catmull is not. And yet, without Ed, John would not have been hired by the digital division of Lucasfilm (which became Pixar after being bought by Steve Jobs in 1986). Without Ed, without his technological and executive genius, there would have been no Pixar.
It is high time to focus on the role that Dr. Edwin Earl Catmull played and still plays in the making of the new Disney. […]
