On November 6th, the Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco held its Seventh Annual Cartoon Art Museum Benefit at the Pixar Animation Studios. Since I’d always wanted to take a look at that bastion of animation excellence, I made the 6 hour drive up to the Bay Area to attend.

It’s a pretty boring drive.

There were two price tiers to the event–one was from 1pm-4pm and allowed guests to tour the facility, have snacks, meet assorted animators, see screenings of the Pixar shorts, and participate in learn-to-draw classes. A considerably more expensive tier went from 11am-4pm, and included all of the above in addition to lunch, shopping at the Pixar company store, and a screening of Toy Story 3 in the Pixar Theater.

As I drove over from the hotel that morning, I stopped to take a look at the main entrance gate to see how it compared with the Hollywood Studios replica. Sadly, it was under construction, so probably not a fair comparison.

In front of the building, there’s a huge representation of Luxo Jr., and his ubiquitous ball.

Entering the building, there is a large glassed-in central atrium, around which are situated the cafe, the store, the theater, various offices and meeting rooms, and a few recreational areas.

As anyone who’s ever been to any event similar to this knows, the first concern is to line up for the shopping. There are few things a Disney fan enjoys more than purchasing memorabilia, and one of those things is purchasing memorabilia not generally available. Unfortunately, the store was about the same size as a room at Pop Century, so people had to line up until enough people cleared out to admit more, and then navigate another line to check out.

One of the other fundraisers for the Cartoon Museum was an auction of art from various Pixar animators. They were as fabulously cute as you might imagine, and ended up commanding prices to match.

I think the idea behind all the recreational areas opening out into the central area is to encourage all the artists to constantly meet and interact with each other, and decrease the likelihood of people working in isolation.

I don’t know where you work, but if this doesn’t look like more fun than your workplace, you’re better off than I am.

Around this time, they began setting out lunch, which largely consisted of a fair selection of sandwiches and salads.

After I got my food and sat down, I noticed a small line of people gathering around one guy in a hat — it was Toy Story 3 Director Lee Unkrich!

So I abandoned my food and pretty much all my possessions and ran over to get some stuff signed by him. Fortunately, it must have been a fairly honest group of people visiting Pixar that day, because all my bags were still there when I got back.

After lunch, it was time for the Toy Story 3 screening, introduced by Unkrich. The theater was itself pretty cool, as stars shine from the ceiling once the lights come down, some of which are shooting stars.

Later, we had a couple hours left to attend Learn to Draw classes, taught by actual animators, wander around the lobby and upstairs encircling hallways, or hound other animators for autographs and sketches. While they were also offering a showing of their short films in a different theater, I opted to spend the time looking around since I had already seen them on DVD.

The lobby is decorated with large figurines (really, really big figs) of various characters.

On the walls hang large representations of more of their fantastic art.

In a prominent location near the front of the lobby is a large case holding all the many awards they’ve won throughout the years.

At the end of the day, they finished up the art auction, and a lot of money was raised for the Cartoon Museum. My personal favorite offered up for sale was this almost painfully cute one by Pete Doctor.

Alas, not having the extra thousands of dollars it went for as disposable income, I’ve had to settle for having a photo of it, instead of the real thing.

Ultimately they did shoo us out of the building sometime after 4pm, but it was a great day filled with activity. For anyone interested in checking out the Pixar compound, I highly recommend keeping an eye open for the Museum’s next benefit there, at their webpage http://cartoonart.org/.

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