(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 feature 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 feature 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 effort 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 passé.
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, Industrial 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 "André."
(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 Image 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 effort 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 Story 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 Story.
"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 Island!
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 50 original crowd shots into 431 ,
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 Story 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 cowgirl 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 Story 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 20 acres in Emeryville, California,
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 International 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, Incorporated 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, Inc. ,
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
2-D hand animated film, The Iron Giant.
LASSETER: Brad and I stayed in touch,
and he pitched us on an idea called The Incredibles,
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 cldse colleborators on Iron 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 Incredibles 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 Incredibles
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 2-D animation in this country.
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 Officer,
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. . .
1978, 27 years ago,
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 feel 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!