So the Pixar purchase of Disney seems to have gone ahead, making Steve Jobs the most powerful man in the universe, but the good effects haven’t stopped there. Disney may have lost their soul some time ago but it appears that the positive influence of the top dogs at Pixar is having some effect.

First of all Toy Story 3 has been canned by John Lasseter, and now the animation wings of Disney and Pixar won’t cross each other’s boundaries. Lasseter and Ed Catmill told Pixar Feature Animation employees:

Sequels should only be made if there is a really great story that demands it, and should be the domain of those who created the original film.

So, in other words, Toy Story 3 won’t be made simply because it’s a cash cow, and Pixar’s movies are Pixar’s movies. Pixar didn’t want to be involved and even the likes of John Ratzenberger (Hamm) had refused to reprise their roles, so it was going to be another soulless Disney DTV sequel.

If that wasn’t enough this appeared in the New York Times (registration not required):

Another hotly discussed question among artists has been whether Mr. Lasseter – despite having made Pixar’s fortune with a brilliant series of computer-generated hits – will bring back the traditional 2-D animation on which the Disney empire was built. Mr. Lasseter and other Pixar artists are known for their enthusiasm for the classic Disney films, and for the drawn features of the Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki.

Mr. Cook commented, “I’ve talked about reviving 2-D with John for some time, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if these a project emerged that we would want to do in 2-D.”

Lasseter is the man responsible for the excellent treatment of Studio Ghibli movies in the localisation process and he obviously realised what the rest of us knew – the last few Disney movies had shitty box office receptions because they were shit, not because people didn’t want to see the hand-drawn medium. With Pixar remaining autonomous but actually showing influence over Disney, are there any negative sides to this purchase?

Just thought I’d spread the word about this fun little game, Fastr. You get shown a series of ten images, one at a time, and have to guess what the common Flickr tag is between them. My best is 53 points in one round so see what you can get.

What surprised me with it is that out of the hundreds of millions of photos on Flickr that could have come up, when I played it the second batch of images to appear included my entry to the often-hilarious Crappy Pirate DVD Covers Pool (mine is this one and is also by far my most-viewed photo), under the tag “pirate”. I couldn’t believe the coincidence of that.

No, not the TV show.

I just realised that I haven’t mentioned this even though I’ve known about it for a couple of weeks now, but this year’s holiday has been booked and everything. My Dad retired at the beginning of the year so he’s paying I assume as a kind of last hurrah before he has to become a poor pensioner. I doubt that going away with my father and brother (Mum won’t go because she hates long flights and won’t leave the dog due to its bad seperation anxiety) will be as good as Japan last year but hey, I’m not turning down a free holiday.

My brother is going out to Australia at the beginning of August to do some vetinary work experience while staying with friends in Botany Bay, near Sydney. On 10th August me and my Dad are going out to join him and spend a couple of weeks there. I’m not sure what exactly but I know that they plan to fly to the north at some point to visit the Great Barrier Reef and my Dad is intent on visiting Uluru. Whatever else will surely revolve around my ability to find something in a country where games and DVDs are actually more expensive than here. The savages!

When we finish up there we’re heading to Tokyo for a week on the way home. I’m told that what we get up to depends on me and my experience so I’m sure that another day in Kyoto and more than one trip to Akihabara will be on the cards. With a summer launch for the PS3 in Japan looking increasingly likely, if this can coincide with that (please Sony? I won’t talk about how much I dislike you anymore) so that I can meet up with friends out there, so much to the good.

It’s been said that Guitar Hero (finally coming to the UK in April) does an amazing job of making you feel like you can play the guitar like a pro, only to turn into a humbling experience when you try it and find that you actually have a sense of rhythm as poor as it always was. I guess that made it just a matter of time before an enterprising nerd went and used it to create their own instrument, the nerdstrument. How great is that?

Admittedly the Daily Telegraph are the only ones reporting that it’s definitely going to happen, but you have to envy Steve Jobs if Disney actually do buy Pixar. Not just for pocketing $3.5 billion from his original $10 million investment in Pixar, either.

This man is the CEO in Apple, the company that just announced $5.7 billion in sales for the third quarter of 2005 and makes what it probably my current most-wanted product. He is also the CEO of Pixar, the movie company which on current evidence seems to be infallible (people are pessimistic about Cars, but they said the same things about Finding Nemo and The Incredibles as I remember) and has yet to make a movie grossing less than $150 million, not to mention the fact that it’s more talented than Disney has been in some time.

With this deal he becomes the largest single shareholder in Disney which gives him tremendous power in one of the biggest studios in the world – most people might not associate Disney with anything more than children’s animation (both their own and as distributor of the Ghibli movies in the West) but they also have huge media interests, release live action stuff through Buena Vista, and releases Oscar bait and more adult pictures through Miramax. Bet you didn’t know that Pulp Fiction is a Disney movie.

Massive power in Apple, Pixar, and Disney? As well as having three of the coolest jobs (no pun intended) in the world I think this guy is going to overtake Microsoft and Google in the race to conquer the universe. Not that I’m jealous…