(WHISTLING)
(THUNDER CLAPPING)
(WIND HOWLING)
And make a wish. . .
But you'll be hurt. You'll be killed!
John Henry's dead!
(TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWING)
ELMER FUDD: That was the wabbit.
Fifteen puppies!
To infinity and beyond!
NARRATOR: For the last 20 years,
a group of artists and scientists
have transformed
two-dimensional drawings
into their own
three-dimensional worlds.
BOO: Kitty!
SULLEY: Boo!
CELIA: Oh, Googly Bear.
SYNDROME: It's Syndrome.
MR. INCREDIBLE: Show time!
DORY: Just keep swimming.
Just keep swimming. Whee!
MARLIN: Dory!
DORY: Gotta go faster
if you wanna win!
JESSlE: Yee-haw!
WOODY: (GASPS) Ride like the wind,
Bullseye!
(HORSE GALLOPING)
JOHN LASSETER: The art challenges
technology,
technology inspires the art.
STEVE JOBS: The best scientists
and engineers
are just as creative
as the best storytellers.
ED CATMULL: We've got characters
that we want to come alive.
NARRATOR: Transforming the
hand-drawn line
into a new art form was no easy task.
Over the last 20 years,
these artists faced struggles
and the risk of failure
every step of the way.
This marriage of art and science was
the combined dream of three men,
a creative scientist, Ed Catmull,
a visionary entrepreneur, Steve Jobs,
and a talented artist, John Lasseter.
Together they have
revolutionized an industry
and blazed an unprecedented record
in Hollywood history.
This is The Pixar Story.
LASSETER: Ford's has a bullet nose.
NARRATOR: The creative force
behind Pixar Studios
and the director
of Toy Story , John Lasseter,
helped pioneer this new art form
from an early love
of bringing drawings to life.
LASSETER: When I was growing up,
I loved cartoons
more than anything else.
And when I was in high school,
I found this book, this old, ratty book,
called The Art of Animation.
And it was about the Disney Studios
and how they made animated films.
And it was one of those things,
that it just dawned on me,
people make cartoons for a living.
They actually get paid
to make cartoons.
And I thought,
"That's what I wanna do."
Right then, right there, it was like
I knew that's what I wanted to do.
NARRATOR: In 1975, John applied
to CalArts,
an art college founded
by Walt Disney in 1961 .
John was accepted
into the first program
that taught Disney-style
character animation.
LASSETER: What they were doing
is bringing out of retirement
all of these amazing Disney artists
to teach this class,
to get this program started.
It dawned on me pretty quickly
how special this was.
NARRATOR: Among John's classmates
were future
directors Tim Burton, John Musker
and Brad Bird.
Everyone was kind of
on fire about animation.
We didn't wanna leave it
at the end of the day.
And none of us had cars,
so, we were kind of stuck there.
When the teachers went home,
we taught ourselves.
MUSKER: It was a very collaborative
spirit at CalArts.
Everybody showed everybody their film
and everybody
was kind of their own director.
But it was totally supportive
and you'd get creative ideas
from the other people.
And we all learned as much
from each other
as we did from the instructors.
NARRATOR: The teachers at CalArts
were none other
than Disney's legendary collaborators
from the 1930s,
known as the "Nine Old Men,"
who taught the essence
of great character animation.
FRANK THOMAS:
We call it the warmth.
We call it
the inner feelings of the character.
It all comes back to their heart,
and then how they think about it.
And all those things.
How does a character feel,
and why does he feel that way?
BlRD: The Nine Old Men,
these guys were unbelievable masters
of this art form,
and yet every single one of them
had the attitude of a student.
NARRATCR: As a student, John
immersed himself in everything Disney,
getting a summer job
as a sweeper in Tomorrowland.
ANNOUNCER: Tomorrowland Station!
All out for the Magic Kingdom.
LASSETER: Disneyland was
a fantastic place to work.
Everybody was young working there
and it was just. . .
We had a blast. It was really, really fun.
NARRATOR: And he was soon
promoted
to a ride operator
on Disneyland Jungle Cruise,
before returning to studies at CalArts.
LASSETER: There's a few times
in my life
I feel like I'm in the right place
at the right time.
And definitely when we were at CalArts,
that was it.
Okay, everybody. Wake up, wake up.
Come on, everybody. Wake up!
NARRATOR: John animated
two short films at CalArts.
Lady and the Lamp
is about a lamp in a lamp store
who accidentally replaces
its broken bulb with a bottle of gin.
(SPUTTERING)
Oh, no.
(STAMMERS)
My lamps! My shop!
(SOBS)
My gin!
(HlCCUPS)
NARRATOR: John's second
short film, Nitemare,
is about a boy who sees monsters
when he turns out the lights.
Both films received back-to-back
Student Academy Awards,
an unprecedented record
that instantly propelled John
into the animation spotlight.
JOHN DAVlDSON: This is your
second year winning?
LASSETER: Yeah.
ls there a knack to making an
award-winning short film for a contest,
or is this the real world,
could this film make it commercially?
I think it could make it commercially,
because I think
the knack that you're talking about
is basically entertainment.
I think that's what. . .
People pay money
to go see a film that's entertaining.
NARRATOR: John's success
landed him his dream job
at the Walt Disney Studios.
Hello.
I'm Randy Cartwright.
-And this is Ron Miller!
-Randy, how are you?
-How are you?
-Good to see you. This is Randy.
Great way to start the film!
Well, we're off to a good start.
Here it is, April 9, 1980.
This is the past
to all you folks out there,
and we're gonna go inside
and see what it's like.
Come on. Come on!
GLEN KEANE: Walking into
the animation building
that was built with the money from
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves,
when I came in there in the '70s,
I just sensed this history around.
All of the experience
that had gone on before
was somehow impermeated
into the walls.
LASSETER: Hi, Glen. How are you?
This is...
CARTWRlGHT: Glen. Glen Keane.
-Thanks, John.
-LASSETER: ...Glen Keane.
He is our directing animator.
CARTWRlGHT: Cur cameraman,
John Lasseter.
KEANE: It was so great to meet John.
There was this immediate
sharing of information
of your passion
and excitement for animation,
and he knew a lot about the history
and the past.
NARRATOR: As his first animation
at Disney,
John handled
the introduction of a lead character
in the 1981
teature The Fox and the Hound.
Together, John and Glen collaborated
on the climactic fight scene.
But increasing budget cutbacks
had severely limited
the multi-plane dimensional look
Walt Disney had achieved
decades earlier.
KEANE: Animation was really at a point
where it seemed like it was
a dying art form.
All of the richness and the atmosphere
was budgeted out of our films,
and it was so frustrating.
(BUZZING)
NARRATOR: While the animation
department felt stagnant,
Tron, a live-action foature
using the latest computer technology,
was screened for employees
at the studio.
(ENGINES REWING)
Watch it, watch it! Auuughhh!
There Tron was, these light-cycles. . .
Moving in and out of the scene
and it's. . .
And we came back to my room
and just sat there
and the depression
started to turn towards a frustration,
like, "Well, why can't we?"
"Why can't we do that?
Wouldn't it be cool, if?"
LASSETER: Computer animation
excited me so much,
and not excited
about what I was seeing,
but the potential I saw in all this.
I was just amazed by it.
And we started thinking,
"Wouldn't it be cool if
"we had a background
that was moving like Tron did,
"but we animated
the character by hand."
It had never been done before,
but there's something about John
that you kind of get the feeling
that that doesn't matter
I mean,
if it had never been done before,
doesn't mean it can't be done.
NARRATOR: John and Glen
soon got approval
to experiment with animation
and computerized backgrounds.
But at the studio
there was a growing fear
that the computer was
going to make animators obsolete.
THOMAS: I'd say 95% of the fellas
at the studio were saying,
"You'd never get me to do anything
like that, they're ruining everything!"
And I talked to John Lasseter
about the things he was doing,
I said,
"'Gee, if you get that much imagination
"and new types of movement
done on a computer,
"but not by the pencil,
you'll be ahead of the game."
The potential was there at that time,
but no one wanted to do it
except for Lasseter.
NARRATOR: John and his story team
were given the approval
to develop a script
based on the short story,
The Brave Little Toaster.
It would mark
John's feature directorial debut,
and his own opportunity
to further explore the blending
of computer and traditional animation.
After eight months of development,
John was finally asked to present
the story to the head of the studio.
LASSETER: They'd said,
"Okay, it's time to show
"the head of the studio at the time
Brave Little Toaster."
So we got the presentation together,
he walks in with Ed Hansen,
and he had this scowI on his face
from the beginning, no laugh,
we pitched the whole thing
and he stood up and he asked,
"Well, how much is this gonna cost?"
And I said,
"Well, it's with computer animation,
"it's gonna be, you know, no more than
the regular budget of a film."
And he went, "The only reason
to do computer animation
"is if we could do it faster or cheaper."
And he walked up and he walked out.
And it was like, "What?" You know?
And so about five minutes later
I get this call,
and Ed Hansen
calls me down to his office.
And I come down, and he said,
"Well, John,
your project is now complete,
"so your employment with
the Disney Studios is now terminated."
DON HAHN: He got let go, he got fired,
because, honestly, the studio
didn't know what to do with him.
Even at that early day,
this Disney Studio
that he dreamed about working at,
turned out to be a really
dysfunctional place, in reality.
And he was a born director,
he was a born leader,
and his expectation and passion
excelled what the studio
was doing then.
During a lot of the early days,
artists were frightened of the computer,
because they were
under the impression
that it somehow
was gonna take their jobs away.
And we spent a lot of time
telling people,
"No, it's just a tool, it doesn't take. . .
"It doesn't do the creativity,
that's a misconception."
But there was this fear,
and it was everywhere.
ANNOUNCER: We interrupt
this program
for an important announcement.
A state of emergency
has been declared
and the entire police force
put on 24-hour duty,
(CROWD SCREAMING)
in an effert to stop
the mounting hysteria.
ANNOUNCER 2: There is no
reasonable cause for alarm.
These rumors are absolutely false!
(BEEPING)
NARRATOR: The reality of technology
was very different from the fear.
It was the computer
that would take us to new frontiers.
JOHN F. KENNEDY: I believe that
this nation should commit itself
to achieving the goal,
before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to the Earth.
ASTRONAUT: Lift off on Apollo 11 .
NARRATOR: The space race
ignited funding in computer research
for a select number of universities
around the country.
In the 1960s,
the University of Utah set up one
of the first labs in computer graphics,
headed by the top scientists
in the field.
Ed Catmull, an aspiring artist,
was among the few drawn
to the potential in computer graphics.
CATMULL: I drew a lot,
I wanted to be an animator.
I wanted to be an artist.
But at the same time, I believed that
I wasn't good enough
to be an animator,
so I switched over
to physics and computer science.
As soon as I took the first class,
I just fell in love with it,
it just blew everything else away.
'Cause here was a program in which
there was art, science, programming,
all together in one place, in a new field,
and it was wide open.
You could just go out
and discover things and explore,
you were right at the frontier.
NARRATOR: Ed's computer-animated
film of his own left hand
was the first step in the development
of creating curved surfaces,
wrapping texture
around those surfaces,
and eliminating jagged edges.
The footage debuted years later
in the science-fiction film Futureworld,
which became the first use
of 3-D animation in a live-action film.
Ed graduated with a PhD
in a new technology ahead of its time.
There was only one institution
in the country
willing to put millions of dollars
into its further development.
The word of any center of activity
spread rapidly,
and it quickly became known
that the place was New York Tech.
CATMULL: There the charter was
"Let's make computer graphics
usable in filmmaking."
That's exactly what I wanted to do.
NARRATCR: Alex Schure,
the president of New York Tech,
hired Ed to spearhead the new
computer graphics department
to develop paint programs
and other tools
to create art and animation
using the computer.
Ed himself developed software
called "Tween"
that transformed hand-drawn
animation into a digital medium.
Artists could now draw and paint
directly into the computer.
We were creating a revolution
and the older techniques
were really gonna be pass.
NARRATOR: These developments led
Ed to the far-reaching goal of someday
creating the first feature-length,
computer-animated film.
SCHURE: We were impacting
the conventional industry
and it was gonna be tremendous
because of the applications
that it would have.
NARRATOR: The applications
of Ed's developments
led Stor Wars director, George Lucas,
to see their potential
in live-action filmmaking.
LUCAS: After I did Stor Wars,
I decided that I would begin to move
into the world of computer animation.
We had made this computer controlled,
motion-control camera,
but I really wanted
to get to the next level.
I had a lot of ideas
that couldn't be conquered
in the traditional film technology.
NARRATOR: George Lucas brought
Ed Catmull aboard
to form a new computer division
at Lucasfilm
to invent digital production tools,
including a new digital-editing system
called EditDroid,
a digital sound system,
a laser scanner
and a powerful graphics computer.
Ed recruited the most talented team
of computer scientists
to create the futuristic tools for Lucas.
ROB COOK: Everybody who did it
got there in some really odd way.
People came from architecture,
from physics,
from art, from computer science,
from everywhere,
and somehow ended up
in this new area.
At that time
there was almost no graphics,
it was a pretty small thing.
And we were inventing
the techniques we were using.
We had no computers.
My wife remembers those days
because I came home at night, right?
You know? I didn't have any computer
to stay and hack on
or anything like that,
so I'd come home at regular hours
and she woes the days
when we started getting computers
and I would get carried away.
LUCAS: They really were kind of
the outlaw outfit, the rebel group,
and so that was kind of fun
because, you know,
we were doing all these things
that nobody really
understood the value of.
COOK: There was a big
breakthrough to start
doing things that were more artistic.
Vol Llbre, Loren Carpenter's film
in 1980, was a huge deal,
and not just because
it illustrated his academic technique,
but it was a huge deal
because it was a work of art.
CARPENTER: I've always been
interested in what's possible,
and, what's beyond
the boundary of what's known.
When I came to Lucasfilm,
these people were all very good,
and it was refreshing and exhilarating.
COOK: Even in those days,
everybody's dream
was to make a feature-length movie
with computers.
At least all of us,
that was what we wanted to do.
Even though it seemed impossible
at the time.
If you wanna make
a picture of the world,
you somehow have to get
all that data in the computer.
All the geometry, no matter what,
whether it's hairs or skin or whatever,
is broken down
into millions of little triangles
that are so small they would just be
a speck on the screen.
NARRATOR: The group soon realized
it would take not thousands,
but millions of triangles
to create the photo-realistic images
that compose
the animated films we see today.
CATMULL: It was an absurd number.
But it was meant to be
an absurd number,
because if you throw
some big numbers at something
and then you have to be able
to handle them,
then it makes you think
about the problem in different ways.
Right then and there, that changed
our whole, you know, kind of mindset
about the sort of problem
that we were trying to solve.
NARRATOR: The group got the chance
to prove their abilities
when Lucas' special-effects division,
lndustrial Light and Magic,
could not achieve a shot
using conventional film means.
Summary, please.
STAR TREK II THE WRATH OF KHAN
Alvy Ray Smith led the group
to create a spectacular sequence
using all their talents
and advanced techniques.
The camera's spinning and spiraling
and jerking and panning.
It's going through amazing motions,
completely impossible
for a gravity-bound, real camera.
PORTER: I think Ed and Alvy realized,
in order to get in the game,
we've got to put characters up
on the screen,
and that meant character animation,
and that changed everything
right there.
I had gone to this computer graphics
conference at the Queen Mary.
I'll never forget it. We walk in
and I was just so depressed,
'cause, like, all these dreams
for the last two or three years
kind of were shattered.
And Ed Catmull
was a speaker at this conference,
and he comes up
and he was so excited,
"How's Toaster going?
How's Brave Little Toaster going?"
You know, all that stuff, and I go,
"Well, to be honest, they shelved it."
He told me that he was leaving Disney.
He didn't tell me the circumstances,
but that he was leaving Disney.
And we spent a long time
talking about what we wanted to do,
and what the possibilities were,
because this is the first time
we really had a chance
of getting a real animator.
We couldn't get them at Lucasfilm.
NARRATOR: John was hired
on the spot
into Lucasfilm's
Bay Area computer division,
under the inconspicuous title
of "interface designer."
I came in there and immediately
I was intimidated by all the people
that were around me.
I mean, there were PhDs
everywhere around me.
Our group was in love with animation,
and we knew a lot about animation.
We couldn't animate very well,
but we understood it.
LASSETER: And the first thing they did
is they really challenged me
with the idea of,
"Let's try to do a little film
"with characters that are done
with a computer."
I was inspired looking at the limitations
of what I had to work with,
and then I went back
and looked at the early Mickey Mouse.
It's geometric shapes.
How more geometric can you get
than Mickey Mouse?
So I just started drawing,
and I created this little character.
His name is "Andr."
(BUZZING)
(SQUEAKING)
(LAUGHS)
NARRATOR: John inspired the
technical team to create new software
that would enable him to animate
the squash and stretch movements
he learned from traditional animation.
The results were new flexibility,
motion blur
and character action never before
achieved through the computer.
LASSETER: I loved working with these
guys, and I kept challenging them.
And then I was so inspired
by all the work that they were doing.
So it's become this way of working
that the art challenges technology,
technology inspires the art.
NARRATOR: John and computer
scientist Bill Reeves
put their animation skills to the test
while working with Lucas'
traditional special effects division, ILM,
to bring a stained-glass man to life
through the computer.
It was really amazing,
the meeting of these two completely
different backgrounds coming together.
(WHlMPERING)
MUREN: You could just design
the thing exactly
the way that your mind conceived it,
not only shape-wise
but also lighting-wise, or anything.
NARRATOR: The visual effects were
nominated for an Academy Award,
and many Hollywood
special effects wizards
had no idea how it was done.
LUCAS: There were areas they could
go to that they couldn't even consider
in traditional special effects.
Ed's group really equaled change.
NARRATOR: To improve speed
and resolution,
Ed's team developed
the Pixar lmage Computer,
the most powerful graphics computer
of its day.
lts software transformed
high-resolution imagery into 3-D,
and was used in medical imaging
and satellite photo analysis.
But after years of trying to sell
their high-end computer software
to limited markets,
George Lucas' interest
was growing thin.
I think it was very esoteric
and it was very hard
to make a business out of that.
So once we had the EditDroid
and we had all the things we needed,
then I decided that I didn't want
to run a company that sold software.
And John and Ed were dead set
on making animated films,
and their dream
was to make an animated feature.
And I said, "Great, but, you know,
to do this on a grand scale,
"it's gonna take at least, you know,
$30 , $40 million investment,
"which we don't have."
(LAUGHS)
NARRATOR: To keep the team
together,
Ed and Alvy gained Lucas' support
to spin off the division
and call it "Pixar."
Over the next year
they struggled to find the one investor
who could foresee their potential.
An unexpected visitor to Lucasfilm
was Steve Jobs.
Steve was 21 when he
co-founded Apple Computer,
revolutionizing the concept
of user-friendly
personal computing with
the Apple ll and the Macintosh.
By the age of 30,
he had become a multimillionaire,
selling his innovative computers
all over the world.
I was still at Apple at the time.
I was turned onto it by a guy
named Alan Kay, who I worked with.
And, so Alan and I hopped in a car
and rode up to Lucasfilm.
KAY: So on the limousine ride up there,
I explained to Steve
what these guys were,
what their history was,
what the potential was.
Then a very good thing happened.
JCBS: That was the first time I met Ed,
and he shared with me his dream
to make the world's first
computer-animated film.
And l, in the end,
ended up buying into that dream,
both spiritually and financially.
NARRATOR: Steve Jobs took a chance
and invested $1 0 million
to launch Pixar.
The stuff that Ed and his team
were doing was at the very high end,
and I could see that it was way beyond
what anyone else was doing.
CATMULL: We had the fortune
to have Steve Jobs,
who believes in passion and vision.
He was responding to this passion.
It was really exciting when Steve
was the one that bought our group.
I remember Ed came to me,
and he says,
"Let's do a little animated film,
something that says who we are."
I wanted something
simple and geometric,
and I was sitting there at the desk
kind of thinking.
And I just kept staring at this lamp,
and it was sort of like
a classic Luxo lamp.
I just started moving it around
like it was alive.
I love bringing
inanimate objects to life,
in maintaining
the integrity of the object,
and pull personality and movement
and physics out of that.
(SQUEAKING)
NARRATCR: In 1987 , Luxo Jr .
became the first three-dimensional
computer-animated film
nominated for an Academy Award.
CATMULL: Luxo is the one
that changed everything.
It was a pure little story.
And once we hit it with that,
then it became
a new goal for everybody.
(SQUEAKS)
(AlR ESCAPES)
JOBS: It was the combination
of the new medium
and John really bringing
a character to life
that made people say, "Oh my God."
You know, and the smart ones say,
"Look at this potential here."
NARRATOR: A hopping Luxo lamp
would become a symbol
of Pixar's optimism and determination.
The image I remember most
is John Lasseter
sitting there in that graphics lab
with deadlines approaching,
struggling with the machine.
Just one man, one machine,
trying to produce this animation.
LASSETER: Early in Pixar,
when we were sitting in a hallway,
sharing one computer,
me and Eben and Bill and Ed,
we'd sit there
and just kind of be sharing time,
and I would always
take the midnight shift.
Got most of my animation done
on all the short films
from about 10:30 at night
until 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning.
This evening I am animating a scene
from the dream sequence.
This is a rough level of detail.
MAN: How come your car
has the best parking spot?
'Cause it hasn't moved
in about three days.
(MAN CHUCKLES)
I've been sleeping here.
He'd leave me a note on my desk.
"D.W. , wake me up when you come in,"
and I would go to his common.
Of course, the door would be closed.
I'd have to bang on the door,
and John'd be asleep.
He used to bring in a mattress
or a futon or something
and sleep under his desk.
And then he would get up
and start animating again.
And he did that for weeks.
NARRATCR: Their next short,
Red's Dream,
was the story of a lonely unicycle
longing to perform in the circus.
OSTBY: We could show him
what was easy for us to do
and what was hard for us to do,
and he'd also push us.
We'd say, "Well, you know, John,
it's kind of hard for us to do a human."
Then first thing you'd know,
he'd be thinking about
human stuff he'd wanna do
and he'd encourage us to try to do it.
NARRATOR: Tin Tot , about a wind-up
toy tormented by a baby,
brought children's toys to life
through the computer.
(BABY BABBLES)
And in 1989,
Bill Reeves and John Lasseter
took home their first Oscars
for Best Animated Short Subject,
and the first ever awarded
to a computer-animated film.
With each subsequent short film,
John got more ambitious
and the team got more experience
and the software got better.
NARRATOR: In 1990, Pixar applied
their knowledge of animated shorts
to make commercials.
The new venture soon required
bringing in new animators.
John hired
two recent CalArts graduates.
PETE DOCTER: It was literally the day
after I graduated I showed up.
John sat down and showed me
the way the animation software worked.
It was pretty slow.
There was a lot of kind of
noodling and futzing around,
but I loved that stuff.
I didn't care what it was.
I said, "Commercials? Fine.
"I'll do, you know, soap bars,
soda cans, whatever. I don't care."
TRlDENT NARRATOR: Introducing
new Freshmint Gum!
The freshest mints.
The coolest cool.
For as simple as it was,
it was probably the hardest
learning experience I ever had,
because it was archaic.
I knew nothing about the computer.
I had never touched one,
never word-processed,
never even really looked at one
before I came up there.
So I'm a testament
that anybody can learn the computer.
(LAUGHS)
NARRATCR: At the same time,
Pixar began a collaboration
with the new leadership
at the Walt Disney Studios
headed by Michael Eisner,
Frank Wells,
Jeffrey Katzenberg and Roy Disney.
In a renewed effert to bridge
hand-drawn animation with computers,
Pixar invented CAPS,
a digital ink-and-paint system
which brought new technical advances
to 2-D animation.
The techniques gained critical notice
in Disney's Beauty and the Beast.
PETER SCHNElDER: Roy Disney was
a great champion of this.
He spent a lot of money
building the CAPS system,
and it was just the basis
of what was to come
in terms of the 3-D animation process.
It was the engine
that drove everything else forward.
NARRATCR: Pixar's software,
Renderman,
was also getting industry acclaim
for the creation
of photo-realistic special effects
that allowed Hollywood filmmakers
to tell stories
that could not be told any other way.
Renderman had become
the new standard in special effects,
and in 2000,
the technical team
garnered the first Oscar
ever awarded
for computer-animated software.
But the research and development
of all their technology
was costing more money
than the company was bringing in.
Steve Jobs had been losing over
a million dollars a year for five years.
It was all great stuff to do,
but none of it was a home run.
None of it really. . . It was a struggle.
Every step of the way,
it was a struggle.
We were trying to pay the bills
and just buy time.
And that strategy
really turned out not to work.
Steve was a very forgiving investor
at that time
and had a much longer term view
than your average venture capitalist
would've had
about our young company.
NARRATOR: With the survival
of Pixar at stake,
John pitched the Disney Company
a half-hour Christmas TV special
based on their short film Tin Tot .
All the while,
Disney executives had been trying
to lure John back to the studio
to direct a feature.
John is being asked this
for a third time,
to come down
and be a director at Disney.
Or he can stay up
in Northern California
with this company
that's bordering on collapse,
because they're losing money.
He stays up here with this company
bordering on collapse, right?
John came up with the idea of doing
this story from a toy's point of view,
done in this 3-D plastic world,
and the idea was sensational.
And they'd gone from commercials
to a short film being six minutes.
They felt they could expand
the system to a 30-minute movie.
And we said, "Oh, forget about that.
Make it a full-length feature."
NARRATOR: From John's initial pitch,
Disney offered the Pixar team
the chance to finally fulfill their dream
of creating the world's first
computer-animated feature film.
LASSETER: I remember Bonnie Arnold,
the producer,
and Ralph Guggenheim, the producer,
came around and they said...
GUGGENHElM: We're making a movie.
-Really?
-GUGGENHElM: Green light.
We got green light?
ARNOLD: We got it.
Just talked to Peter.
LASSETER: It happened,
and it was like,
"'Oh, my God, we're actually
gonna make this movie."
And I was so excited.
There was so much
positive enthusiasm. It was great.
(LAUGHING)
-GUGGENHElM: All right.
-ls that all right?
It was an attempt
to take the spirit of John Lasseter
and see if we could make
a full-length motion picture with it.
JOBS: It was fantastic.
There was no better partner
to do it with than Disney.
There was a lot
we could learn from them,
vast amounts
we could learn from them.
So it was the best thing
that ever happened to the studio.
You heard?
None of us had done
a movie ourselves before,
and a large portion of us
had never worked on a movie at all.
GUGGENHElM: Green light.
LASSETER: Ignorance was bliss.
We did not know what we didn't know.
It's like the
Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland things,
"Hey, my uncle's got a barn!
Let's put on a show!"
-Unpack. Unpack.
-You mean I can stay?
CATMULL: We were onto
something big
if we could just hold it together
and make it happen.
LASSETER: We did not want to
do a musical.
We did not want to do a fairy tale.
We did not want to do
what Disney was,
from Little Mermaid
and Beauty and the Beast
and all those films. . .
They had their thing going
and we wanted to be different.
NARRATOR: John set his sights
on one particular actor
for the voice of Woody.
They said, "Look, we just wanna
show you this thing,
"'cause it's too hard
to explain what it is."
Oh, no, no, no!
You're eating the car!
Don't eat the car! Not the car!
Oh, you stupid dog!
When I saw this loop,
it was startling, actually.
It was kind of, like, hypnotic.
"Let's see it again.
Can I see that again?"
I think we must have watched it
three or four times.
It didn't look like animation.
It looked like Plasticine come to life.
I couldn't explain it even to friends
what it was like.
I just said, "Well, it's gonna be
this whole new thing.
"They've just invented something
that is a brand new way of doing this."
(BEEPING)
Hi, pal. What you doing?
I'm Tempest from Morph!
Yeah, yeah, what's this button?
Say, you weren't thinking of flying,
were you?
You know, Andy loves toys that can fly!
Really? Well, then,
to infinity and beyond!
You know,
Andy loves toys that he can find!
LASSETER: There was this desire
at Disney to make Tot Story edgy.
Make it edgy.
Make it, like, something for adults.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, who at the time
was chairman of the Disney Studios
and had great interest in animation
would always in a story meeting
be pushing for what he called "edge."
Which really was
code for snappy, adult,
the edge of inappropriate,
and not to feel too young.
We were working our butts off
and jumping through every hoop,
addressing every note
that was given to us. . .
And that was the first year.
NARRATOR: By December, 1993,
John and his crew flew to Burbank
to present their completed storyboards
to Disney.
Their approval would finally
launch Pixar into production.
But what was to come
was a day they would never forget.
SCHNElDER: Nothing of it
was working.
It wasn't funny, it wasn't emotional,
it wasn't moving.
Characters didn't quite work.
Peter Schneider sent me this video,
which was, like, two cassettes.
It was so long.
It was like two hours, and it went on
and on and on and on and on and on
and I was fast-forwarding through it
and thinking,
"Oh, my God. This'll never end."
Which led to this horrible, horrible day
when things came to a crashing halt.
That was our Black Friday.
Black Monday, Black Tuesday. . .
I forget what day of the week it was,
but it was sure black.
WOODY: Hey, you wanna be
Mr. Mashed Potato Head?
You button your lip!
Nobody's getting replaced!
SCHUMACHER: It resulted in
the Woody character
being one of the most repellent things
you've ever seen on screen.
I mean, you couldn't watch it.
It was smart-alecky.
It was like a brand of insult humor.
It was kind of, like, negative.
WOODY: All right, that's enough!
You're all acting like
you've never seen a new toy before!
Get a grip, okay?
SCHUMACHER: Jeffrey said,
"Well, why is this so terrible?"
I said, "Well, because
it's not their movie anymore.
"It's completely not the movie
that John set out to make."
LASSETER: Disney forced us
to shut production down.
And they wanted us to lay people off,
and we refused.
(CLANGING)
We just said, "All right, screw it.
What do we want to do?
"What would be the funniest thing?"
We were also very brutally honest with
each other about what we thought.
LASSETER: We worked day and night.
STANTON: And we just really
went 100% with our gut.
We knew it was sort of our last chance.
We knew time was not on our side.
It was so refreshing, 'cause we were
making the movie we wanted to make.
RANFT: We'd just sit on our knees,
right on the floor
and draw with Sharpies on pads
and pin it all up.
And then, like, "Oh, this is great!"
We'd get all excited. "This is great."
STANTON: And re-boarded
the whole thing.
We did it much faster, much rougher
than anybody ever thought we could.
LASSETER: And we turned
the reels around
in two weeks or three weeks,
something like that,
unheard of amount of time.
And we showed it to Disney,
and they were all ready to completely
shut production down and call it a day.
And you know what? It was good.
It was not great, but it was good.
It showed the potential
of what Toy Stery would be.
And they said, "Okay."
Then we started production back up
and went from there.
NARRATOR: The first scene animated
was the army men sequence.
It was an early glimpse
of what was to come.
(CHlLDREN CHATTERING)
Go, go.
Go on without me! Just go!
A good soldier
never leaves a man behind!
LEE UNKRlCH: We were so flying
by the seat of our pants. It was nuts.
We would get all the stuff together
and we would send it off to animation
and let them animate it.
We would then get it back into editorial
and find that
nothing was cutting together at all.
It was so absolutely Stone Age,
yet at the time we were, like,
on the top of our mountain.
We thought we were being so cool
and no one was doing anything
like what we were doing.
REEVES: I think the biggest challenge
in Tot Story
was just dealing
with the length of the film.
Full of characters, full of sets,
all sorts of stuff.
And the story drove everything.
Every frame of that story
was in my head.
Working with the art department,
working with modeling,
working with layout,
working with the animators.
I would talk about the story
and tell them
how it fit in the framework of that.
CATMULL: And there's something
about having
the artists and the technical crew
working together that is exciting.
Even though we may do some things
that don't always necessarily
make the best sense,
the mix is exciting.
What did I tell you earlier?
No one is getting replaced.
Now, let's all be polite
and give whatever it is up there
a nice, big, Andy's room welcome!
Woody was a pendulum swing
from Woody being comfortable
with his position
to Woody being threatened
by the arrival of Buzz Lightyear.
(WOODY GULPS)
TlM ALLEN: Lasseter called me
and said,
"Would you look at these sketches
of this character?
"We think you're the perfect guy for it."
And the only thing that sold me
was his enthusiasm.
And I said, "What a neat idea."
Had no idea visually
what this would look like.
He let me stretch it a little bit
and really make it this really kind of
a closed-head-injury type of guy.
(BEEPS)
Star Command, come in.
Do you read me?
Why don't they answer?
(GASPS) My ship!
Blast!
This'll take weeks to repair!
ALLEN: He's full of himself,
but in a great way.
I don't think of Buzz
as really obnoxious.
Obviously, 'cause I think
he's the more popular of the toy.
(LAUGHS)
Buzz Lightyear Mission Log.
The local sheriff and I seem to be
at a huge refueling station
of some sort. . .
-HANKS (AS WOODY): You!
-According to my nava-computer. . .
Shut up, you idiot!
Sheriff, this is no time to panic!
This is the perfect time to panic!
I'm lost, Andy is gone,
and they're gonna move
from the house in two days.
And it's all your fault!
RANFT: John.
WOMAN: Tom.
I think the hard part for me and
probably for a lot of others was that
it was really hard to know, from those
story sketches to the finished product,
what it was gonna look like.
Which is really scary stuff.
I remember,
even halfway through the movie,
and we were seeing
most of the first half, say,
in fairly completed form in color,
I was still thinking, "I don't get
how this is gonna work at the ending,"
because there was this huge chase
through the streets
and the truck
and all of that kind of thing.
It was like they did that all in one day.
(WHOOSHING)
And suddenly, it was all in there, and
I remember saying to my wife, "I get it."
BINOCULARS: Look, look,
it's Woody and Buzz coming up fast!
Woody!
Some of the machines had to run 24/7 ,
three months straight.
Any hiccup in there
would've been disastrous, you know?
And it was Band-Aids.
That's the funny part.
(SCREAMS)
This is the part where we blow up!
Not today!
We were blown away with it,
and we really felt strongly that
the movie was gonna be a success.
But even we didn't have a clue
how much of a success
it was gonna be.
To infinity and beyond!
NARRATOR: Tot Story opened
nationwide
on Thanksgiving weekend in 1995,
and from a shoestring budget,
went on to earn more than
$350 million worldwide,
and paved the path to an entirely new
computer animation industry.
Kids loved it, critics loved it,
and people in the animation field
were knocked out.
DOCTER: I remember the reviews
starting to come in and going, "Wow."
First of all, the fact that this paper
has even heard of this movie
and they care about it is stunning,
and then they gave it a good review!
They were just glowing, and wow.
The most amazing thing to me was
that it was really, really good.
It was really entertaining.
Great story, great character.
That was the part where I was saying,
"Whoa, they really pulled this off."
People began to realize
that this was a big deal,
that we, in fact, had hit our stride,
and this was what
we were destined to do.
(YOU'VE GOT A FRlEND IN ME
PLAYING)
NARRATOR: The Academy
of Motion Pictures honored John
with a special achievement Oscar
for creating the first
computer-animated feature film.
In spite ofTot Story's success,
the original contract between Pixar
and Disney left the majority of the
profits and merchandising with Disney,
a long-term disaster for Pixar.
Financially, if one film did not do well,
we would be wiped off
the face of the earth.
We realized then
that we had to become a studio,
rather than just a production company.
And in order to do that,
we were going to need capital.
So that's when we decided
we had to go public.
It was a combination of things
that really hadn't been
accomplished before.
Creativity, technology, business.
And it was a small company
with those capabilities
going up against giants.
NARRATOR: One week
afterTot Story's release,
Pixar became the highest
lPO of the year.
From a $1 0 million investment,
Steve raised $1 32 million.
It was a wildly successful lPO ,
we got the money in the bank.
And then, shortly thereafter,
Disney came to us and said,
"We want to extend the contract."
And Steve said, "Okay, we will extend it
if we can be fifty-fifty partners."
And they said, "Okay, we'll do that."
So he actually nailed this
right on the head.
I was in awe.
DARLA ANDERSON: It was just
really surreal that we had gone from
riding around on scooters
past empty offices,
looking for extra office supplies,
to this meteoric success, really.
JOBS: We were in a place
called Point Richmond,
which was two miles away
from a few refineries.
A few times a year,
we'd have evacuation days
'cause the refineries would spew some
wonderful chemical
concoction into the air.
Pixar's facilities grew
with the company,
which meant that they were
a hodgepodge.
CATMULL: The animation bullpen
was this amazing building,
probably not legal at all
because of fire code.
RANDY NELSON: It looked
like a playground.
It was loose, it was free, it was rough.
It was like 200 people sharing
a college dorm room.
It was a place where you could go
and draw on the wall,
or make a hole in the wall
and not feel bad about it.
There was this infectious
enthusiasm in the building.
It's like I imagined it must be like, say,
for the guys in Monty Python
to be sitting around a table,
writing material.
You'd expect there to be this great
creative feeding frenzy at the table,
and that's what we had.
It was so innocent and so sweet,
and it was really, really a great time.
CATMULL: A lot of people said,
"Congratulations. You guys did what
you said you were gonna do,
"and you spent your
whole careers doing it."
So there was this great
feeling of elation,
and then when it was done
it was like, "Now what?"
There's a classic thing in business,
which is the second product syndrome,
if you will,
and that is companies that have
a really successful first product,
but they don't quite understand
why that product was so successful.
And their ambitions grow,
and they get much more grandiose,
and their second product fails.
Believe it or not,
Apple was one of those companies.
The Apple ll, Apple's first
real product in the marketplace,
was incredibly successful
and the Apple lll was a dud.
And so I lived through that,
and I've seen a lot of companies
not make it through that.
My feeling was if we got through
our second film, we'd make it.
The bigger fear was just, can you find
that lightning in a bottle again?
Can you make yourself as in love
the second time around,
and you realize you have
to actually work now
at making yourself as naive
as you were in the first round
without any effort.
There's nothing worse than any artist
facing their second
big piece of work, right?
'Cause it's the point
at which you find out whether
everything that's been written
about you is just hype,
and you're yesterday's news,
or whether you maybe
really are the real deal.
One of the things I learned is
the tricks that worked on the last movie
don't necessarily work on this movie.
You know, you think,
"Oh, we made Toy Sfory.
"This is good. Oh, we know how. . .
What we're doing now!"
And then you start on a movie
like Bug's Life,
and you're back in kindergarten again.
LASSETER: Research was
literally done
out in front of Pixar,
in our own backyard.
We ordered this tiny
little video camera.
We called it the bug-cam,
and put it on the end of a stick.
And we put little wheels from Lego
on the bottom of it,
and we were able to wheel it around
and literally look at things
from a half an inch above the ground.
The one thing we noticed
from this bug-cam
was how translucent everything was.
It was breathtaking.
(INSECTS BUZZING)
NARRATOR: For their second film
with Disney,
Pixar set out to prove
themselves again,
with a bigger story, scope
and organic characters.
Here I go. For the colony!
And for oppressed ants everywhere!
NARRATOR: A Bug's Life was the first
computer-animated
wide-screen movie.
Oh. The city!
I represent a colony of ants,
and I'm looking for tough bugs.
You know, mean bugs.
The sort of bugs. . .
A talent scout!
My colony's in trouble!
Grasshoppers are coming.
We've been forced to prepare
all this food!
-Dinner theater!
-Food!
Please! Will you help us?
This is it! This is Ant lsland!
DOT: Flik! Over here! Flik! Flik!
They seem to relish the idea, at Pixar,
of doing something difficult
and then seeing
how to solve the problems
in a creative and entertaining way.
What did you do?
It was an accident?
ANDERSON: There's
always something
that we haven't invented yet.
So, as a producer,
you are trusting a lot of R&D
to come through in the right time.
And you're pushing a lot of things
and you're gambling
and you're looking at people's eyes
and you're saying,
"Can you do this for me?"
LASSETER: It was just a giant story.
Too many characters,
too much going on
and we were just drowning
in this thing.
ANDERSON: So the producer goes to
John and says,
"John, we technologically
cannot do crowd shots
"with more than 50 ants in them.
"So can you design the movie
around this limitation?"
And he said, "I'm willing to accept that
if that's all you can do,
"but I think you guys can do better."
So he helped formulate
this crowd team.
He believed in them, he pushed them
and at the end of the day,
they were the heroes of the movie.
You ants stay back!
NARRATOR: Through new
technological advancements,
Pixar artists transformed
and brought an epic of
miniature proportions to the screen.
Pixar broke through
the second film syndrome
and A Bug's Life became
the highest-grossing
animated film of 1998.
After directing two back-to-back films,
John returned home from
the international promotional tour,
now ready for a much-needed break.
I was exhausted.
My family hadn't seen much of me
and we were going
to take the summer off.
Coming down the home stretch
of Bug's Life,
we were all feeling stressed.
And, you know,
we had been sharing John a lot.
As a family, you know,
we needed some family time.
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, a secondary
production team at Pixar
was making a direct-to-video
sequel ofTot Story ,
the first project not
supervised by John Lasseter.
In February 1998,
Disney decided to release
Tot Story 2 theatrically.
But at Pixar,
a creative crisis was growing within.
We knew Toy Sfory 2
was having troubles.
I don't think we realized
how bad it was really going,
and then we found out.
It just was not shaping up to be
at the level that we thought
it needed to be.
CATMULL: John came back from
his European promotional trip
and then came in
and saw the reels and said,
"You're right, it's not very good."
So at that point,
we went down to Disney and said,
"The film isn't very good.
We have to redo it."
And they said,
"It actually is good enough,
"but more importantly,
you literally do not have the time."
And what we said at the time was,
"We can't deliver it the way it is.
We have to do it over again."
We decided that
the only course of action
was to ask John to go in,
right after he'd come off of
A Bug's Life, without any rest,
to go in and take over that film.
My feeling was I could not ask
anybody at Pixar
to do something
I was not willing to do myself.
I said to him,
"Well, I support you all the way.
"I'd like to see you do this picture,
but we also have a family here,
"and you're gonna have to
"make changes in your
day-to-day routine.
"You're gonna have
to work normal hours."
This is a movie that was already
fully into production.
A lot of it was animated.
It was a bullet train heading
towards a release date.
NARRATOR: Over a single weekend,
John and his creative team
from the first Tot Story
reworked the entire script.
John came back and pitched that story
to the animation department.
Just in that pitch,
he totally fired everyone up
and inspired everyone
to really do the impossible.
Nine months before
it's supposed to come out,
John threw the vast majority
of the movie out and started over,
which is unheard of.
NARRATOR: With Tom Schumacher
overseeing production for Disney,
even he knew this was
beyond the studio's control.
LASSETER: After a while, he said,
"Guys, you know better than I do
"what it's gonna take
to make this, so just go.
"You have no time to wait
for my approvals.
"Just go, go, go, go, go."
DOCTER: There's kind of
a chemistry with us.
We just spin off each other well,
or build on top of each other.
It's always this core group of guys
keeping each other in check.
We were able to finish
each other's sentences
and take each other's ideas
and heighten them,
and someone else
would heighten it even more.
NARRATOR: They broadened
the scope of Toy Story 2,
introducing new characters
and special effects,
rivaling those of the best
live-action epics.
The animators were pushed
to their limits.
(BUZZ LIGHTYEAR GRUNTS)
(BUZZ LIGHTYEAR SCREAMING)
(GRUNTS)
LASSETER: The amount of footage
that was going through that studio
was staggering.
Seeing the work that's
coming out of the animators,
it's actually inspired me as a director.
Give it to a good animator,
"Okay, make this special,
make this funny,
"make this entertaining
for this moment."
Some animators have
the clear character stamps,
like Doug Sweetland.
I was thinking that Woody would be
coming outta the saloon.
Give us something like. . .boof!
LASSETER: There's reasons for every
single movement he does,
which is hilarious.
He's not, like, looking at her.
He's kind of, like,
looking over her shoulder, like,
"Say, little missy,
seen any trouble around these parts?"
Say, little missy, you notice any
trouble around these parts?
(LAUGHS) Nary a bit!
Not with Sheriff Woody around!
Wait, wait, wait! I got it, I got it.
This is great.
Okay, the bandits got the critters
tied up in the burning barn,
and now for the best part!
"Help us! The barn's on fire!"
"I've got you, critters. No need to worry.
Woody saves the day again!"
RANFT: You're trying to find what you
would hope the audience would feel
when they're watching this movie.
Every other department is
on board to use the environment,
the color, the lighting, the animation,
to make the strongest
possible statement
that when people are
in a theater they're gonna,
"Wow, this is something special.
"This is something that really
affected me."
Emily was just the same.
She was my whole world.
(WHEN SHE LOVED ME PLAYING)
(SINGING) When somebody
loved me...
RANDY NEWMAN: I thought it was
a very brave thing for them to do,
to think that five-year-olds would
sit still for three minutes of montage
and a ballad and something,
you know, very sad, really.
(SINGING) And when she was sad
I was there to dry her tears
And when she was happy
So was l
When she loved me
Tim Allen and I actually saw the movie
together at the same time
when it was all done,
and we had an understanding
of what everything goes on.
But then when Jessie's song came up,
we were just 40-year-old men
crying our eyes out
over this abandoned cowgirI doll.
(SINGING) Every hour
we spent together
lives within my heart
When she loved me
LASSETER: At that moment you know
that no one's thinking
"Well, this is just a cartoon.
"It's just a bunch of pencil drawings
on paper,
"or this is a bunch
of just computer data."
You know. No. These characters
are alive and they're real.
NARRATOR: Tot Story 2
made its debut
in theaters on its scheduled
release date,
Thanksgiving Day, 1999,
joining that rare number of sequels
judged to be as good as
or better than the original.
LASSETER: That was probably the
greatest sense of accomplishment
I'd ever had, and I think the studio's
ever had, in their life.
JOBS: Everybody was so
dedicated to it and loved Tot Story
and those characters so much,
and loved the new movie so much,
that we killed ourselves to make it.
And it, you know, it took some people
a year to recover.
It was tough. It was too tough.
Toy Sfory 2 was the pivotal moment
in this company.
It's when we actually
defined who we were.
From that we learned
the important thing is not the idea,
the important thing is the people.
It's how they work together,
who they are,
that matters more than anything else.
JOBS: Our business depends
upon collaboration,
and it depends upon
unplanned collaboration.
And so we were just too spread out,
and the groups were, you know,
developing their own styles.
We were growing into several
divisions, instead of one company,
and so the goal was pure and simple.
We want to put everybody
under one roof,
and we want to encourage
unplanned collaborations.
NARRATOR: With Pixar's facilities
bursting at the seams,
Steve set his sights on
where he envisioned a state-of-the-art
animation facility,
a home for the best artists
and scientists
to create and play under one roof.
LASSETER: Welcome, ladies
and gentlemen,
to the first annual
Pixar lnternational Air Show!
LASSETER: The building itself
has helped so much,
because Pixar is its people.
And we maintain the same philosophy
of "an office is an empty canvas,"
and it's so fun.
One of the things that we wanted
to do with this studio
is to grow it so that
we could be eventually
releasing one movie every year.
So that means we have to have
a bunch of overlapping productions.
And so that gave the opportunity
to where, some of my close colleagues,
give them a chance
to direct their own films.
The second animator, after me,
who was ever hired at Pixar
was Andrew Stanton.
And then Pete Docter
was soon after that.
And I knew right away that these guys
are good enough
to make their own films.
NARRATOR: John chose Pete Docter
to direct the next feature film at Pixar,
a decision that did not come
without doubts.
SCHUMACHER: I was not
convinced that
he could hold up this weight
without John.
He hadn't done it before.
He hadn't been an
associate director before,
he hadn't been the number two,
he hadn't been a co-director before.
It was really throwing him
into the lion's den.
DOCTER: My biggest challenge
was that I was
following in the footsteps
of John Lasseter.
To come in and say,
"Okay, now I'm gonna direct this,"
it was a tough act to follow.
SCHUMACHER: Pete had this
fundamental idea
that when children say,
"'There's a monster in the closet,"
they're actually telling the truth.
The rest of it was all over the map.
DOCTER: There were too many
possibilities.
Monsters, it could be anything,
anything in the world.
So, it was almost too much freedom.
We knew we wanted fur.
We had no idea how to do it.
And that was, of course,
one of the more difficult things to do.
(MlKE WAZOWSKI SHOUTS)
(SULLEY GRUNTING)
MlKE WAZOWSKl: Take that!
(BOTH GROWL)
(GASPS)
Welcome to the Himalayas!
These people think differently
than normal people.
They're strange. In the best way.
DOCTER: When we thought
of Billy Crystal,
we thought,
"Wow, this is gonna be great."
Of course, he just added his
own unique spin to it.
Mike was an appealing,
odd little guy who I thought
was a combination
of Mr. Toad and Sammy Davis, Jr.
Think romantical thoughts.
(SINGING) You and me
Me and you
Both of us together!
And the way he moves and his face
and stuff like that.
And then, when I decided on a voice,
it just all seemed to work.
Scary feet, scary feet, scary feet. Oh!
The kid's awake! Okay, scary feet,
scary feet, scary feet, scary feet, scar. . .
Kid's asleep!
The whole little guy
was one of my favorite characters
that I've ever played.
Twins! And a bunk bed!
(GROWLING)
Ooh, I thought I had you there.
What shocked me about the movie
was the size of it.
(SULLEY GASPS)
CRYSTAL: I was astounded by the
chase and the door sequence.
When you see the millions
of doors moving,
and they're all individually done,
that just blew me away.
Hold on!
(MlKE WAZOWSKI SCREAMING)
(SCREAMING)
SCHUMACHER: It was a wild ride,
because it was such a complex movie,
and it didn't find its center
for a very long time.
And then when it did,
its center was so good,
people went nuts for it.
DOCTER: The last shot of
Monsters, lncorporated animation
is now officially final!
(ALL CHEERING)
SCHUMACHER: Pete emerged as
a remarkably sensitive,
smart, really great director,
and he owns this movie.
He completely owns this movie.
NARRATOR: The historic success
of Monsters, lnc. ,
the highest-grossing animated film
released to its date,
now placed added stress
on the next director in line,
Andrew Stanton.
BlRD: So, the pressure. It's begun?
$62,577 ,067 .
(ALL CHEERING)
(WHlSTLING)
There's no reason, Andrew,
to be feeling any more pressure.
I'm fine! I'm fine!
STANTCN: I remember in '92,
when my son was just born,
going to Marine World,
and they had this shark exhibit,
where you kind of walk through
a tunnel and they swim over you.
It was like a glass tunnel.
You could get up really close,
see underwater and lose
all your peripheral vision
of anybody around you
in the man-made world.
And I remember thinking then,
you know, this is 10 years ago,
"We could make this world."
CG would be perfect for this world,
you could capture it so well.
MR. RAY: (SINGING) Oh, let's name
the species the species, the species
Let's name the species
that live in the sea
Whoa!
There's porifera...
STANTON: Without meaning to,
I sort of made this epic journey
that takes you all over the ocean.
That meant every set piece
had to be different.
The look of being underwater
is actually quite simple
from a technical standpoint.
It was just really tough to dial
all the different ingredients just right.
You know, I think if I had known that's
what I was gonna be signing up for,
and everybody else,
I don't think anybody would've done it.
(BREATHING THROUGH
OXYGEN TANK)
Big.
FINDING NEMO
NARRATOR: Seeing his son kidnapped
before his eyes,
the overprotective father, Marlin,
travels across the vast ocean
to find his son, Nemo.
And along the way,
learns to become a better father.
DOLPHIN: So, these two little fish
have been
searching the ocean for days
on the East Australian Current. . .
FEMALE BlRD: . . .which means that he
may be on his way here right now.
That should put them
in Sydney Harbor. . .
MALE BlRD: . . .in a matter of days!
I mean, it sounds like this guy's
gonna stop at nothing till. . .
MALE BlRD 2: . . .until he finds his son.
I sure hope he makes it.
That's one dedicated father,
if you ask me.
The challenge on Nemo
is the same challenge that we had
on the first Toy Story,
which is making a good movie.
It really comes down to that.
I mean, each film has its own technical
hurdles that we have to overcome.
But we spend the first
two-and-a-half years
making these films doing nothing
but working out the stories.
SEAGULLS: Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!
Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!
Would you just shut up!
You're rats with wings!
This bloke's been looking
for his boy, Nemo.
NlGEL: Nemo?
PELlCAN: He was taken off the reef
-by divers and this. . .
-NlGEL: There, take it! You happy?
Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!
(MAKES MARTlAL ARTS FlGHTING
SOUNDS)
Mine!
Every morning we get
together in the screening room
with the directors
and all the other animators
and we all show our shots
in various stages of completion.
Everybody is entitled to their opinion
and to say it out loud.
So it's a very healthy,
and sometimes intimidating, forum.
(MAN LAUGHS)
WOMAN: Doug is next.
MARLIN: Hey, guess what.
NEMO:What?
MARLIN: Sea turtles...
I met one, and he was 150 years old.
STANTON: You know, Nemo should be
looking at his dad
at the beginning of the shot.
SWEETLAND: All the time?
STANTON: Yeah.
He looks like he's dead.
(PEOPLE LAUGH)
STANTON: He looks like he's given up.
SWEETLAND: Okay.
STANTON: I think he's, anyway,
he looked at his dad,
and then looked at his fin,
and he should be, like,
looking at him for
acknowledgement the whole time.
SWEETLAND: Okay.
STANTON: Like they touch the fin
and they stay looking
at each other and. . .
SWEETLAND: Okay.
STANTON: I think that's missing.
(LAUGHING CONTINUES)
SWEETLAND: All right.
NEMO: 'Cause Sandy Plankton said
they only live to be 100.
MARLIN: Sandy Plankton? Do you
think I would cross the entire ocean...
SWEETLAND: I was, focusing primarily
on the father and not on...
Really not on Nemo.
So I just kind of had Nemo default
to this kind of eyes forward pose,
not even thinking about, like,
how it would read,
except that hopefully
you're looking at father, right?
But Andrew read it,
and he was totally right,
that it looks completely indifferent.
(LAUGHS) And, so now I have to give
the same treatment I gave father
to Nemo.
But you know, it's, you know,
it's not like starting over or anything,
but I have to imbue that
character with something.
So now what I can do is just go
back into the thumbnails
(LAUGHS) look, here's ghost of Nemo,
ghost of Nemo.
I have, like, father doing
all this acting to this lump.
So, now maybe what I could do
is just use these same drawings.
It'll be good, this shot'll be a lot better.
I had done all this stuff, too, where
the fin is, like, the symbol of the movie.
His accepting of his son
is also the letting go
of the past or the loss, the trauma.
And what is it. . .
What is it to take someone's hand?
Not only is it an opportunity
just to physically,
like touch and connect with his son,
it also marks the new relationship.
I'm so sorry, Nemo.
-Hey, guess what.
-What?
Sea turtles. . . I met one.
And he was 150 years old.
Hundred and fifty?
Yep.
'Cause Sandy Plankton said
they only live to be 100.
Sandy Plankton?
Do you think I would cross
the entire ocean
and not know as much
as Sandy Plankton?
(NEMO CHUCKLES)
MARLIN: He was 150, not 100!
Who is this Sandy Plankton
who knows everything?
NARRATOR: In 2003, Finding Nemo
surpassed Pixar's own previous marks,
making it the new highest grossing
animated film in history.
And director Andrew Stanton won
the Oscar for best animated feature.
But the enormous success
of Finding Nemo
meant that expectations
were now even higher,
as Brad Bird, the first outside director,
was invited in to direct a feature.
Well, here I am, pulling into Pixar,
first time, into Pixar. . . Yeah.
NARRATOR: Brad was
an old classmate
of John Lasseter's from CalArts.
He had made the critically acclaimed
The lron Giant.
LASSETER: Brad and I stayed in touch,
and he pitched us on an idea
called The lncredibles,
and it's a family of superheroes,
and originally he was thinking
of it being cell-animated,
but he thought it could work
in 3-D computer animation.
I fell in love with it right away,
but the thing I loved about it the most
was this story of this family.
It's got so much heart to it.
I've just been given my card key.
Now I can get into all
the secret chambers of Pixar.
This is where A Bug's Life was
actually filmed, on location, right here.
(YELLING)
BlRD: Good to see you.
Any company that had
four hits in a row
would not be open
to changing anything.
This place was the exact opposite.
They were saying,
"'Look, we've had four hits in a row.
"We are in danger
of repeating ourselves,
"or of getting too satisfied
and we need to shake this place up."
Keep it moving. Keep it,
Kate, nice to see you. Keep it moving.
I'm here to tell you, you guys are
kind of in your wood-fired pizza mode
and, a lot of you are,
"Yeah, I work at the place
where we make hit after hit."
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
But, you know, I'm telling you,
I've been out in that real world
as some of you also have been,
and you who have been out there
know what I'm talking about.
This is an anomaly,
this place is, A, really freakishly
alone in this hit-after-hit aspect,
and, two,
you know, these kind of projects
don't happen that often.
Grab this opportunity and run with it.
You know, film is forever,
you know, pain is temporary.
(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)
LASSETER: Once we brought Brad
into Pixar, we all were learning again.
And he has brought in his
clese colleborators on lron Giant,
and they are amazing.
BlRD: The 2-D people that I brought up
wrestled with the box,
you know, just trying to figure out
how to make the computer
do what you want it to do.
The computer exists in two worlds,
it's either the most brilliant thing
you've ever seen,
or it's completely mad.
(BEEPING)
NARRATOR: The 2-D animators took
the traditional storyboarding process
into the third dimension,
providing dynamic new ways
to visualize storytelling.
(CHUCKLES)
If you named the 10 most
difficult things to do in animation,
we had them all, and large amounts
of them all, humans. . .
POLlCE OFFlCER: Police officers!
BlRD: Hair, fabric.
Hair and fabric under water.
Hair and fabric
blowing through the air.
It was just endless.
(GUN FlRING)
(GRUNTS)
-See that?
-Yeah.
That's the way to do it.
That's old school.
(LAUGHS)
Yeah. No school like the old school.
NARRATOR: The lncredibles marked
Pixar's sixth hit in a row,
and Brad Bird won his first
Academy Award
for best animated feature.
BlRD: Now that I've made a Pixar film,
a lot of people have asked,
"What is the secret formula?"
As if there's some magical calculation.
And I say, "It's really pretty simple,
everyone here loves films.
"And they just wanna make something
that they themselves wanna see."
NARRATOR: By 2004, the success
ofThe lncredibles
and other computer-animated films
was leading to an industry-wide
belief that making CG movies
was a foolproof
formula for box office hits.
As many of the 2-D films
failed at the box office,
hand-drawn animation now faced
extinction for the first time in history.
There was this period
in this country,
and it happened at Dreamworks
and it happened at Disney Animation,
and that was that they had some films
which hadn't done well.
The stories weren't strong,
to be candid,
and the heads of the respective
studios at the time said,
"Well, the problem is they're in 2-D,
"and the audience
has lost the taste for 2-D."
And so they switched over to 3-D,
and basically shut down
The derived idea was, "Well,
nobody wants to see 2-D anymore."
(STUTTERS)
The fact was, they'd love
to see a good 2-D movie,
that was never the question,
you know, but. . .
It was horrible, you know,
to come to this conclusion
that only 3-D was
gonna be our future.
There was enormous
loss of morale,
there was an enormous
loss of the will to live,
in a sense, of making good product.
And they were selling off
animation desks,
they were, you know, just leading
talented artists out the door
by their nose and saying, you know,
"We don't need you anymore."
CLEMENTS: And there was
a very painful period
that was like someone dying,
just to see what happened,
I mean it had to do with so many,
many people losing their jobs.
But even more than that,
just, a sort of art form
that had been built up
over a period of decades,
was just abandoned, I think because it
was not the hot ticket at the moment.
CATMULL: Everybody at Pixar
loves 3-D animation,
you know, we helped develop it.
But we also love 2-D animation,
and to think that 2-D was shut down,
and that we were used as an excuse
to shut it down was awful.
We saw this
art form being thrown away,
so, for us, it was just,
it was a tragic time.
NARRATOR: As Pixar and Disney
faced the end of their contract,
the two studios clashed over terms
of a more equitable deal.
All the while, Disney prepared
to develop direct-to-video sequels
of the Pixar films
without Pixar's involvement.
Our belief is that,
since we created the characters,
the original creators are the ones
who should carry on with it,
and give them life.
And to turn it over to somebody
else for short-term economic gain
just didn't make any sense.
It was like turning over your children
to somebody else.
We were gonna lose those characters.
It was actually unfortunate at that time
because we'd had this
phenomenal relationship
with Disney all these years,
where we were
an independent company
and they did the distribution
and the marketing.
NARRATOR: By 2004, Steve Jobs
opened talks with other studios,
while at Pixar, a cloud of anxiety
hung over employees
who felt that a merger
with a larger company
could threaten the loss of their
unique spirit and creative culture.
CATMULL: It was very clear that none
of them wanted to do that.
They wanted to be
an independent company,
whereas if we were
to become independent,
we'd have to take on marketing
and distribution
and get another partner.
And it would change the culture in
ways that we didn't necessarily want.
NARRATOR: But by 2005,
a corporate shake-up
within Disney led
to the replacement of Michael Eisner.
Bob Iger was appointed
as the new CEC,
and expectations ran high
that he might repair
the broken relationship with Pixar.
As I neared the day
that I was going to become CEO ,
and I started to focus more and more
about the future of the company,
it became more and more clear that
for Disney to truly be
successful in the future,
we had to return to
the glory days of animation.
So I began focusing on how to do that,
and it really begins
with finding the right people.
The more I thought about it,
the more I realized that
Pixar had more of the right people
than probably any other
place in the world,
from an animation perspective.
I then went to the opening of
Hong Kong Disneyland in September,
and the parade went by.
It hit me that the characters
that were in the parade
all came from films that had been
made prior to the mid-'90s,
except for some of
the Pixar characters.
I felt that I needed to think
even more out of the box
than I had been thinking,
and I had a much
greater sense of urgency.
I became CEO October 1st.
I called Steve around that time
and said I thought we ought to talk,
I had some bigger ideas.
And that began
a long period of discussion,
because it was very
serious for both sides.
He really needed to feel comfortable
that Pixar was in the right hands
and, more importantly,
respect the talent and the culture.
We were extremely impressed with
his view of where Disney could go.
This changed
the equation dramatically,
and in the end
with weighing everything,
we came to the conclusion
that the best thing we could do
was to join up with Disney.
NARRATOR: The $7 .4 billion
acquisition deal
provided Steve Jobs a seat
on the Disney board
as the company's largest shareholder,
made John Lasseter
Chief Creative Cfficer,
and Ed Catmull, President of Disney
and Pixar Animation Studios.
We're convinced that Bob
really understands Pixar,
and we think we have
some appreciation of Disney
and love the unique Disney assets
like being able to get the characters
in the theme parks
and really express them throughout
all of Disney's incredible assets.
And we think we understand
how to keep Pixar being Pixar
and how to spread some of
that culture around and maybe,
you know, a few other parts
of Disney as well.
"Cause we think we got something
pretty good going here.
CATMULL: While we will
make 3-D movies,
we're also gonna make 2-D movies
'cause it's part of this wonderful
heritage that we've got here,
and it's a beautiful art form.
It feels like this is the true culmination
of the building of Pixar
and this amazing company into
something which will continue on
and continue to make waves
in the future.
This deal is expected
to close this summer
just about the time
that Pixar will release
its seventh feature film, called Cars.
(LIGHTNING McQUEEN WHOOPS)
NARRATOR: John Lasseter's return
to the director's chair
came with the release of Cars.
A film inspired by
a cross-country road trip
he took with his family in 1999.
Hi, this is great. Blue Ridge Parkway.
NARRATOR: Set in a bygone town
on Route 66,
John's personal love of cars
and the racing world
inspired a new level of beauty,
speed and a heightened reality
in computer animation.
Morning, Sleeping Beauty.
(GASPS)
(LAUGHS)
NARRATOR: Cars became the seventh
hit in a row for Pixar.
And the new relationship with Disney
was starting off on the right foot.
Ed and John now looked to the future
with the challenge of guiding
two animation studios.
And John, returning to his roots
to creatively oversee
all of Disney's theme parks
and attractions.
This. . . This is just, it's so beautiful.
Flik up there.
John's a real big Disney fan.
I mean, he worked
in the amusement parks,
he grew up on Disney.
(LAUGHS) Oh, look at. . . Look at this.
This is amazing!
(CHlLDREN CHATTERING)
MlLLER: He's thrilled to be on that lot
and kind of be able to go everywhere
he wants to go, and see what's there.
And bring things up
from the past, explore. . .
was the last time I skippered
a Jungle Cruise.
And I want everybody as we go...
His feelings are so good about it.
You had such
a remarkable man in Disney.
It was a great intuition that he had,
he seemed to know
everything ahead of time.
I find the same thing
there with Lasseter.
He's pretty much
an image of Walt, I think.
WALT DISNEY: When planning a new
picture, we don't think of grown-ups,
and we don't think of children.
But just of that fine,
clean, unspoiled spot
down deep in every one of us
that maybe the world
has made us forget,
and that maybe our pictures
can help recall.
LASSETER: Well, the future of Pixar
to me is going to be a continuing
making these great films,
with more and more
visionary directors.
And then give them creative
ownership of what they do,
so they can be proud
of it for the rest of their life.
There are so many young people today
that want to be animators,
that are fascinated by animation,
more than ever before.
So it's a field that is inspiring
and exciting.
There's a real advantage
being in a new medium.
We're still setting ourselves up
for things we've never done before.
HANKS: I foel like I'm in Dumbo,
I feel like I'm in Pinocchio.
This is truly going to be timeless
and forever
and will always land
in the consciousness
of yet another generation
of moviegoers.
JOBS: Pixar's seen by a lot of folks
as an overnight success,
but if you really look closely, most
overnight successes took a long time.
Kachow!