Hail the conquering hero: Pixar's John Lasseter at MoMA (Photos: STV)

When it comes to animated films, I actually tend to side with Armond White, who told the Meet the Critics crowd the other day at Makor that he likes "films with people in them." Oversimplification? Absolutely. But if I HAD to watch animation, and you cruelly took South Park away from me, I guess I would go with a Pixar flick.

Not that the billionaire geniuses at Pixar need my default-favorite-animation status as some validation or anything, but that type of go-to, household-name appeal is arguably the studio's most resonant qualification for MoMA's "Pixar: 20 Years of Animation" exhibit. And I guess they have some fairly amazing output, as well: Opening today, the show features more than 500 sketches, maquettes, paintings and storyboards associated with the making of Pixar's seven features and 11 short films (the short One Man Band will have its North American premiere at MoMA January 27). Pixar is also donating new prints of its work to MoMA's permanent collection.

As such, museumgoers greeted Pixar mastermind John Lasseter like a folk hero yesterday as he introduced a preview of the exhibition. "I hope that as people come through this exhibit in the next few months, they are amazed by the traditional art needed to make our films," he told a crowd gathered around Barnet Newman's Broken Obelisk. "Everybody assumes that the computer does a lot more than it really does at Pixar. One of the foundations of Pixar is the collaboration between art and technology. We do have the most cutting edge technology, and we have more Ph.D's working on our films than anybody else in Hollywood. We've invented much of the computer animation, but art is at the foundation of it."

The sort-of multimedia Artscape--which traces the conventional art roots of Pixar's films--and Toy Story Zoetrope are probably the exhibit's highlights, although I brought back a few other samples of the various work on display (click below). If animation IS your thing, you have until Feb. 6 to check it out.

A few of the character "maquettes" from Pixar's upcoming Cars (L-R): Doc Hudson, Sally and Mater

An oil-paint representation from Toy Story 2

A storyboard for the 1989 short film Knickknack

Monsters, Inc.'s Waternoose in sort-of beautiful 3-D