The National Review online has a fantastic interview with a long time Pixar employee, Craig Good, about how and why Pixar really, really works. Sounds to me like the absolutely perfect creative environment, and their culture, philosophy, and eye for talent have them leaps and bounds above everyone else, ever. This is a must read.

Here’s my favorite part:
NRO: The father of five, I’m something of an expert on animated feature films, if I do say so myself — and Pixar productions are simply and incomparably the best. Your stuff delights my three-year old, my thirteen-year-old, the three kids in between, and their parents and grandparents. How do you guys do it?

Good: Simple. We don’t make movies for kids. We make movies for adults, actually ourselves, and then just make sure there’s nothing in them that the little ones shouldn’t see. The local cineplex is littered with movies made by studios who want to second-guess what the audience wants. We find we get better results by making what we want, and then assuming that there are other people like us out there.

Now for my additional commentary. Everything Steve Jobs touches turns to gold. He knows business, he knows creativity, he knows design, and he knows technology. Video games are multi-multi billion dollar industry and have surpassed films for the first time ever in gross revenue for the year. The Mac platform has always been woefully behind in one area, games. Here’s the beautiful, scary future of entertainment, and nobody I have read has talked about it yet. Pixar, who develops much of its own technology and rendering platforms, filled with maybe the world’s best story-tellers, has got to be 2 seconds away from creating their own video game studio. Now I don’t mean the awfully lousy licensed crap like “The Incredibles” for PS2, I mean DEVELOPING games. From scratch. Brad Bird written and directed. Steve Jobs supervised. I mean, on the Mac, for the Mac, by Pixar. I mean beautiful, fantastic, funny, clever, and multigenerational, interactive experiences that will take the industry by storm. Watch. It’s coming. I know it. I know it. You heard it here first.

[via kottke.]