Who composed the Pixar theme and the lamp intro

Pixar is my second most ordered style, and it's parents who choose it far more often than kids. I've never fully worked out why. My guess (and it's only a guess) is that the adults remember the lamp from a cinema seat or the spine of a worn VHS box, while the kids just know that something funny is about to happen to a letter.

The question that comes up most with this style is about the music.

So who composed the Pixar theme? Mostly Randy Newman, with a caveat. The cue people hum when they picture the lamp is the logo music Newman wrote for Toy Story in 1995. Pixar has never had one official theme, though. The hops and the squeak are Gary Rydstrom's sound design, and plenty of films swap in their own music.

That caveat is where the fun is, frankly. Pixar's ident is the only one I can think of that's also a joke, and it's been running since 1995 without anybody getting bored of it. Most studio logos go for grandeur with castles and mountains in them, whereas Pixar spends its few seconds letting a desk lamp bully a letter. I think the joke survives because it's built on timing rather than a gag line. There's nothing to get tired of hearing, no catchphrase and no punch you can see coming, just a small object with a mind of its own and some physics. You can watch a toddler fall over a cushion a hundred times.

A short from 1986 and a logo from 1995

The lamp is older than the logo by nine years. John Lasseter directed Luxo Jr. in 1986 as his directorial debut, and Pixar unveiled it at SIGGRAPH in Dallas that August before it played in Los Angeles cinemas in November (Pixar's own history page has the dates).

The whole thing runs under two minutes. A big lamp and a small one play with a ball until the ball bursts.

My favourite production detail comes from the Computer History Museum's write-up. Lasseter shrank and reproportioned the parts of his own desk lamp to make the baby, with a co-worker's toddler as the model for the chubby head. The lightbulbs he didn't model at all. He bought them at a store. It went on to become the first fully computer-animated film nominated for an Academy Award.

Then nothing, logo-wise, until Toy Story opened in November 1995 and the lamp hopped onto the I for the first time. Pete Docter animated that version, according to Lee Unkrich as quoted by Logo Design Love. What strikes me is how much of the short got thrown away. No parent lamp and no ball. Just the little one's habit of jumping on things, now aimed at the studio's own name. I'd have expected a young studio with one hit short to lean on the full story, the parent shaking its head and all of it, because that's the bit that made the SIGGRAPH crowd react. They kept the hop. Somebody understood that the character was already in the audience's head and only needed a cue, and that a logo with a plot would have aged far faster than a logo with a habit.

Newman wrote it fifty seconds at a time

Newman scored Toy Story in short cues of roughly fifty seconds each, and Filmtracks' review of the score singles out the Pixar logo music as "among the most vibrant and enjoyable single short pieces ever written by Newman." The same reviewer says it's still instantly recognisable years later. I'd agree, which is odd for something that lasts about as long as a doorbell.

Both the score and "You've Got a Friend in Me" were nominated for Oscars, but neither nomination was for a Pixar theme because there wasn't one.

I suspect the theme label grew out of repetition more than intent. Toy Story was the first feature and those tapes got played to death in a lot of homes, so Newman's little cue got welded to the lamp in people's memories even after later films went their own way. I couldn't find Pixar calling it the studio's theme anywhere. It just stuck.

The lamp's voice is a lightbulb

The detail that changed how I hear the whole ident is in a Designing Sound piece on Gary Rydstrom. Rydstrom's first Pixar job was Luxo Jr., and Lasseter later said it taught him "how sound can be a partner in the storytelling of a film." The example Lasseter gave was the lamp's voice, which came from the squeak of a lightbulb being screwed in. I'd always assumed the squeak was a stock cartoon noise pulled off some library disc. It wasn't. The lamp is talking with its own body part, the one bit Lasseter didn't even bother to model, and once you know that it's hard to hear the squeak on the I as anything other than the lamp complaining (or gloating, depending on your mood that evening). That's kind of the whole trick of the logo for me. On its own the picture is a pretty dry piece of typography, five letters spaced out on a pale blue ground, and it's the sound that turns a lamp landing on a letter into a small creature doing something it shouldn't.

Fan-run logo archives credit the clank of each hop and the rubbery landing on the logo itself to Rydstrom at Skywalker Sound.

The music around those noises is allowed to wander. The same archives note a tolling bell over the lamp on Coco and a guzheng on Turning Red, and on a lot of films the movie's opening theme simply plays straight through it. I like that a lot. The noises stay put while the score changes from film to film, a bit like a house band backing whoever's on stage that night.

Married Life is a different tune

There's a second piece that gets called the Pixar theme, and honestly I understand why. "Married Life" from Up is Michael Giacchino's work, and it carries the roughly four-minute montage of Carl and Ellie's marriage, opening on a muted trumpet before strings and piano take it over. /Film has a good rundown of his Pixar scores, which started with The Incredibles. He won his first Oscar for Up in March 2010.

Newman's cue gets you into your seat and then gets out of the way. Within the first act of Up, Giacchino has most of the audience in pieces, which is a weird thing for a family film to try so soon and the opposite brief.

Why it still works on a family video

Put the lamp next to the castle that usually plays before it and the difference is plain. I've written about why the Disney castle changed over the years, and almost every version of that one asks you to look up at something. Pixar's asks you to look down at a lamp misbehaving on the floor of the frame.

That's probably why parents go for it. A family name in a castle-style opening can tip into grand quite quickly, while in the lamp's world a name gets bounced on a bit and nobody minds. It's the style people pick from the Priyansh Animations catalogue when they want something warm and slightly silly, and a custom Pixar style intro suits a short name best, one that can take a hop without losing its shape.

Pixar re-animated the logo in 2019 with a remodelled lamp and a colour pass, according to the same fan archives. Even then the joke went untouched, and the I still ends up squashed under the lamp before the film starts.