Business rivalries can sometimes lead to some interesting places. Disney Animation and Pixar, for example, have had an interesting relationship since the latter was bought by Disney back in 2006. Although Pixar films had been released by Disney before that, the company was still independent, and their films were soundly out-selling Disney and everyone else’s animation.
While Disney and Pixar have remained on the top of the animation world, after Pixar was bought out, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull, who founded the company, were put in charge of Disney Animation as well. Since then, they’ve overhauled the way that studio works, and in fact they’ve done so well with it that it’s starting to out-perform Pixar.
Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur was a flop, the first in the studio’s history, but Disney has been putting out increasingly successful animated films, like Frozen, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia. Pixar had a hit with Inside Out, but that film wasn’t plagued by development issues like The Good Dinosaur. And many of the films they’ve announced through 2019, four out of five actually, are sequels, which will no doubt bring in money, but aren’t exactly creatively adventurous. Sequels tend to be a safe bet, for a while, but eventually people get tired of them and the franchise wanes.
So what’s the moral of the story here? Well, Disney Animation was able to take lessons from Pixar and change the way they did things, rekindling the creativity they had lost. Of course, they had the managers of Pixar to lead them in that journey, which a lot of companies can’t really claim, but the lesson can still be applied. Innovation can’t really be copied, but it can inspire innovation in others, so figuring out what your competition is doing right, and then trying to build on that, might not be a bad idea.