Wow… this is a sad day. Joe Ranft, Head of Story Development at Pixar has died in a car accident in California. Ranft was nominated for writing Toy Story and was also co-wrote A Bug’s Life. Before joining Pixar he was at Disney where he was a writer on Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.
What has always made Pixar by far the best animation company in the world was not it’s animation… but rather the brilliance of it’s story telling. The world of not just animation… but of film as a whole has lost a great family member. The folks at Yahoo give us this:
“Joe was an important and beloved member of the Pixar family, and his loss is of great sorrow to all of us and to the animation industry as a whole,” the company said in a statement to the Hollywood Reporter. Hundreds of Pixar employees gathered Wednesday in the animation company’s atrium to share their grief, according to blogs written by several Pixar animators.
Ranft, the head of story for more than a decade at Pixar, also co-wrote “A Bug’s Life” and was the voice for such characters as Heimlich in “A Bug’s Life” and Wheezy the Penguin in “Toy Story 2.”
We all mourn for the family and friends of Joe Ranft… and on a far less important note… I also mourn that we will never again be blessed with the sharing of his wonderful gift. If you’ll excuse me… I’m going to run out and rent A Bug’s Life.
Trust me, Joe was so much more than a writer. He was an entertainer, from top to bottom. Sure, he had a wonderful heart for a story. But, if you cannot BECOME the story and pitch it successfully, it stays in the scrapbook titled, “Things that they wouldn’t let me do.” We got Bugs Life because Joe could be the story. Same with just about every great Pixar movie you might name. Joe was a warm, kind hearted man, and he always left you wishing you had more time to spend with him. We lost much more than a storyteller, we lost one of the real, honest-to-goodness good guys.
This sucks. I was watching Nemo last night, and no matter how many times I watch it, hearing Nemo say “Love you, Dad” kills me.
I fully agree.
Joe was not only one of the most talented story guys I have ever known, but also one of most intelligent, kind and generous guys on the planet. The word Morn does not express this magnitude of a loss for the animation and film industry.
Quite seriously, Joe affected almost every major animated film success for the past 10 years. That he was humble and not one to strive for personal fame is just further example of how wonderful a human he was. When people say that PIXAR is the new Disney, it was to no small part because Joe personally understood the “Disney heart” of story and character and made sure everything he contributed reflected those values.
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Holy crap! Why hasn’t anybody commented on this? Good writers, great writers are hard to find. When one is lost, it should be morn. At the very least spoken about. Shame on you!