Pixar Animated Studios see's its saddest day

(from yahoo news)

The production home of Toy Story and A Bug's Life was in mourning following the death of Joe Ranft, a leading creative force behind those two hit films and more than a dozen other major animated releases since the late 1980s.

Ranft, a member of Toy Story's Oscar-nominated writing team, and the voice of Wheezy the penguin in Toy Story 2 and Heimlich the caterpillar in A Bug's Life, was killed Tuesday afternoon when the 2004 Honda Element he was riding in veered off a California coastal highway, and plunged 130 feet into the water below. He was 45.

The driver, a 32-year-old Elegba Earl of Los Angeles, also was killed. A second passenger, a 39-year-old Eric Frierson, survived with what were described as "moderate" injuries. He managed to climb out through the vehicle's moon roof.

According to the Marin (California) Independent Journal, Ranft and the two men had been on their way to Mendocino, California, to take part in a retreat for a mentoring organization. Ranft is survived by his wife, Su, and two children, Jordy, 13, and Sophia 9.

News of Ranft's death hit the animation community hard. Easily, it hit hardest at Pixar, where Ranft had spent the past decade-plus as head of story at its animation studio, storyboarding, storytelling and lending voices to everything from The Incredibles to Finding Nemo (he was Jacques, the cleaner fish) to Toy Story 2.

"Joe was an important and beloved member of the Pixar family," the company said in a statement.

Director John Lasseter, Pixar's creative chief, hailed Ranft's knack for stories. "He told them better than anyone," Lasseter said in the Los Angeles Times. "He was funny, poignant, original; and he had an infallible sense for how to structure a story."

A 1999 Salon.com profile described Ranft simply as "a story man."

Ranft told the Website that he loved how Pixar films took shape in freewheeling story meetings. "I imagine it's what it must have been like in the Mack Sennett silent clown days, with a bunch of guys selling ideas, then going off and making the movie," he said.

Ranft's studio career began in 1980 with Disney. There, he worked on the breakthrough films Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, among others.

At Pixar, he had a hand, or voice, in every one of its hit features: Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. According to the Times, he supervised the story on Pixar's latest, Cars, scheduled for summer 2006, and rated an executive producer credit on Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, a Warners release due out in September.

Wrote Ronnie del Carmen, the blogging Pixar story artist, in a tribute to Ranft: "Mighty big shoes."

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