Inside Pixar’s Secret Formula: How Magical Stories Are Crafted Behind the Scenes

Consider the great characters Pixar has created. Learn how and why they work, and bring those insights to your writing.

20 movies #1 at the box office. Worldwide B.O. gross $15 billion. Average B.O. per film: $714M by far the highest average per film of any studio in Hollywood history.

It’s not just dollars and cents, it’s also quality storytelling. 15 Academy Awards, 9 Golden Globes, 11 Grammys. Indeed, 8 Pixar films are in the IMDb Top 250 Movies of all time.

No disrespect to Disney, but I think the real Magic Kingdom lies 397.8 miles north of Anaheim in Emeryville, California where you’ll find this:

Longtime Go Into The Story readers know of my fascination with Pixar having blogged about them dozens of times. Due to having two sons who quite literally have grown up in what someday is likely to be called the Pixar Era, I have seen every one of the company’s movies, most of them several times. I even created a college level course on the subject at the DePaul University School of Cinematic Arts.

In my estimation, the filmmakers at Pixar are master storytellers. But how do they successfully wrangle magic in their films? Are there lessons we can learn from Pixar to inspire and upgrade our own writing

Up-up-upgrade your writing with Pixar story-crafting principles and practices.

Those are two key questions I undertook in creating the online course Pixar and the Craft of Storytelling which begins Monday, October 27, 2025. My answer: An emphatic yes!

First off, there are the practices Pixar uses in developing, breaking, writing and rewriting a script. In our 1-week class, we go through that process step by step, then see how we can adapt that approach to our own writing.