Pixar: 25 Years of Animation Exhibition Opens July 31, 2010 at Newly Transformed Oakland Museum of California

OAKLAND, Calif., July 27, 2010 -- The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) presents PIXAR: 25 Years of Animation, a major exhibition of over 500 works by the artists at Pixar Animation Studios, including drawings, paintings, and sculptures that illustrate the creative process and craftsmanship behind Pixar's wildly successful computer-animated films. The exhibition opens this Saturday, July 31, and runs through January 9, 2011. www.museumca.org.

This is a significantly enhanced presentation of the exhibition, which is returning home to Oakland after a successful worldwide tour that began at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2005. Expanding the presentation will be the integration of relevant artwork and objects from the OMCA collections that expand the exhibition including rare 19th century Eadweard Muybridge motion study photographs, an early zoetrope, and interactive stations in the art and history galleries that unlock the creative process and history of animation.

At the heart of PIXAR are the concept drawings, sketches, paintings, maquettes, storyboards and colorscripts created by Pixar artists over the past 25 years to bring to life the compelling characters and stories that have enchanted moviegoers of all ages around the world. Drawing on work from Pixar's eleven feature films and many of its short films, the exhibition spans some of the studio's first short films created in the 1980s; its first feature-length film, Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated feature film ever produced; Pixar's recent Academy Award®-winning feature Up; and its latest film, Toy Story 3. PIXAR will showcase more than 500 artifacts, including many of the pencil drawings; paintings in acrylic, gouache, and watercolor; and sculptures that form the backbone of the computer-generated images (CGIs) for which Pixar has become internationally recognized.

A highlight of the exhibition will be two special media installations�Artscape, an immersive, wide-screen projection of digitally processed images that gives the viewer the sensation of entering into and exploring the exquisite details of the original artworks; and the Toy Story Zoetrope, a three-dimensional device that displays a rapid succession of images, creating the illusion of motion.

A 208-page, full color catalog accompanies the exhibition, published by Chronicle Books for OMCA, available exclusively at www.museumca.org.