Creativity, Inc.

Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation, has won five Academy Awards. His creativity, management ability and strategic thinking skills remade animated film and generated billions in box office receipts. Catmull – with co-author Amy Wallace – weaves reminiscence, production tales and studio politics around a functional, bare-bones history of the rise and reign of computer-animated narrative.

Though the cover lists Amy Wallace as a co-author, this is Catmull’s book and he tells it in his first-person voice. Wallace, a magazine writer, took on the task of sorting, editing and composing Catmull’s tales, ideas and mores into an organized form and she does a fine job. She is a solid standard prose stylist; all the punch comes from Catmull. And, indeed, the essence of Wallace’s collaboration was to stay out of his way, and she succeeds.