Out of Juice? Recharge!

It's high noon at Pixar Animation Studios. The cubicles, beanbag lounges, and candy pit-stops are strangely serene. The off-deadline Nerf battles, the scooter races in the corridors, the toy-action-figure jousts are all on hold. The circuslike area where the animators work is as dead as an SAT testing site. The eerie calm can mean just one thing: Work is in progress.

Disney needs film. Michael Eisner, chairman and CEO of Disney, is waiting. Stockholders are waiting. Rival movie studios are not waiting. A Bug's Life, Pixar's much-anticipated, four-years-in-the-making follow-up to its box-office smash Toy Story, is down to the final production sprint.

The pressure to produce is relentless, and it's not about to let up. In January, Pixar and Disney inked a monumental deal with a monumentally hurry-up timetable. Pixar has committed to making five feature-length, computer-animated films in the next decade or so. By the year 2000, if everything goes as planned, it will become the second studio in history (after Disney itself) to produce three animated feature films in three years.

Each of Pixar's 400 employees has a clear but potentially crushing mission: Be more creative than ever before. Produce more than ever before. And do it all twice as fast as ever before. Which might seem like a formula for burnout and attrition. But the employee-turnover rate is holding steady at less than 5%. And one reason is that Pixar knows more than a little about helping people recharge their mental, physical, and emotional batteries.

Pixar focuses on things both big and small in order to keep folks charged up. Big thing: The techies and the animators are treated as equals. Little thing: Each Friday, there's a company-wide beer bash at which everyone watches "weeklies" of films in progress. Big thing: no contracts. People are free to leave whenever the place starts to suck. Little thing: extracurricular activities, such as lunchtime basketball and Lego auctions, that are organized through email lists. Big thing: Three years ago, the company created Pixar University (PU), an in-house operation that features free classes in data programming, tai chi, gesture drawing, improvisational acting, and juggling. Little thing: The classes are catered.

To find out if things great and small are really working, I ventured to Pixar's world headquarters in Point Richmond, California, submitted to wearing a name tag ("A Stranger! From the Outside!") and caught up with five hard-charging Pixarians: an operations guru, a film director, a computer-programming wizard, an animator, and a high-level administrator. Each of them has a very good reason to feel brain-dead - and each has a very real strategy for avoiding that fate.

The Doer

PU's 15-member improvisational-acting class is in progress. Katherine Sarafian, 29, arrives about 45 minutes late. She's having one of those days from hell. Formerly the manager of the art department, where she oversaw the production of about 4,000 drawings for A Bug's Life, Sarafian has moved into a critical new role. As creative-resources manager, she works with outside companies that want to make or merchandise products related to Pixar's short films. She took the new title - grudgingly - because the company had a need and she was best suited to fill it. Now she's wondering what possessed her to say yes.

Sarafian's workload is outrageous: She's still working part-time in the art department. She's racing to prepare a pressure-packed presentation to Pixar Chairman and CEO Steve Jobs. The word "PANIC" is taped to her office door. "I'm the one who can't get down the hall fast enough, so I sprint," she says. "Burnout? I'm high-risk."

But Sarafian is convinced that easing up won't help. She's hardwired to move fast, and so is Pixar. "I don't have time for a lot of slowdown-type things," she says. Tonight, after the improv class, she'll throw herself into a volleyball game. She also plays in a highly competitive basketball league two nights a week, takes an amateur drawing class, and performs from time to time with the Pixar Singers, an a cappella group.

"When I first signed up for improv, a friend told me that I was insane - that I should try yoga instead. But yoga doesn't calm me down; it calms down the person next to me. When I play hoops or go to improv class, I usually get results."

In improv, the energy boost comes from using a part of the brain that lies dormant during the workday. "You can't set up a scene unless you open your mind to it," she says. Being in the "now" and no place else has a potent restorative effect. "By break time, I usually can't remember what was pissing me off before I arrived."

Tonight's class is tough going at first, but Sarafian eventually gets into the scene setting, the endless riffing - even the mind-melding "one-voice" exercise, in which four teammates attempt to answer questions in perfect unison.

"Can you tell us the scientific name for your pet turtle?" someone shouts. There is a long pause as the teammates face the audience and say nothing. Then, with nary an out-of-sync note, comes the nonsense reply: "TorrrrrrtttaaaaaaLLLLEEEEEnnneee! Tortellini!"

Class ends. Sarafian doesn't dawdle on her way out the door, but when she leaves, she is smiling.