Walt Disney Links - 'Best idea wins': How Pixar grew up 

The men and women behind two decades of hit films, from Toy Story to The Good Dinosaur, explain how they build the world's greatest animation studio

On November 22, it will be exactly 22 years since the American release of Pixar’s Toy Story, the world’s first computer-generated (CG) feature film. A few days later Pixar will open its sixteenth film, The Good Dinosaur. The years in between have seen the studio grow from a scrappy, little-known operation to

the most celebrated animation house in the world, possibly even the most celebrated movie studio of our time. What’s the secret? Here, in their own words, the men and women behind Pixar explain all.   

Pixar was founded in 1986 by computer scientist Ed Catmull, computer graphics pioneer Alvy Ray Smith and Steve Jobs, the Apple chief. Initially the company made computers; when that venture proved unsuccessful, it moved into creating CG animation for commercials, hiring ex-Disney animator John Lasseter. In the early Nineties Pixar began working on its first feature, Toy Story.

John Lasseter  Pixar chief creative officer; director: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Cars, Cars 2, Toy Story 4: “It was a very small group [when I joined], but it was the smartest, most amazing computer researchers from around the world. They brought me in to work on the very first 3D computer animation of a character. It was [a short film] called The Adventures of André and Wally B. I was developing stuff at Disney with computers doing the backgrounds and the characters still animated by hand. But Ed challenged me and said, ‘Let’s try to do everything with the computer.’ ” 

Ed Catmull  co-founder and president: “John was the only animator here and we could never have made it to feature films with him alone, but by doing commercials we could bring in new talent.”

Lee Unkrich editor: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo; co‑director: Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo; director: Toy Story 3: “When I first joined Pixar we were in rented office space in an industrial park and it was a very small operation. [Pixar] sold 3D software, it was making commercials and doing a lot of varied stuff. I joined at the time it was trying to get Toy Story made. It struck me as a company of mostly young people. I was in my 20s, like most of the people there. We had no idea if we were going to be able to pull off what we wanted to do, which was make the world’s first CG feature.”

Lasseter: “Disney kept trying to hire me back after each of the short films I had made. I kept saying, ‘Let me make a film for you up here [at Pixar]’. It always said, ‘No, a Disney animated film will always be made at Disney.’ It had no interest in doing an outside project. What changed their mind was Tim Burton. Tim and I went to college together and he had developed a feature idea [while employed by Disney] called The Nightmare Before Christmas. He went on to become a successful live-action director and was trying to buy Nightmare back from Disney. And it said, ‘Why don’t you just make it for us?’ That opened the door for Disney to think of these ‘niche’ animated films that could be done.” 

After Pixar won its first Oscar for the short Tin Toy, about a wind-up toy being terrorised by a toddler, Ed Catmull pitched to Disney the idea of making a 30-minute television special based on it.

Catmull: “Peter Schneider [the producer of Disney’s The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast] said to me, ‘If you can do a half-hour, you can do 70 minutes.’ So I thought about it for about one nanosecond – like, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ ” 

Lasseter: “We knew what computer animation could do. What its strengths were. And we knew what it couldn’t do. Everything tended to look like plastic. So why not have the main characters made of plastic? Having toys as characters really lent itself. Humans were by far the most difficult to create, so we told the story from the toys’ point of view.” 

Andrew Stanton director: Finding Nemo: “[Originally it was] sort of a Rip Van Winkle story. This little tiny toy gets left on the side of the road at a rest stop and goes on a road trip to find his owners, and he bumps into this hand-me-down ventriloquist’s doll who tries to help him. It was very convoluted, but we thought it was great at the time.” 

Lasseter: “We realised it should be a buddy comedy, with these contrasting toys. So you have the cowboy doll and the spaceman.”

Christine Freeman Pixar archivist: “There are so many different iterations of what Buzz and Woody might have looked like. In the archive we have boxes of ‘Pointy Nose Woody’, ‘Big Hair Buzz’, ‘Scary Woody’… We have a lot of artists’ good taste to thank for the film we saw.”

Unkrich: “Even Toy Story had its problems. There were a lot of changes to the story as it went.”

Lasseter: “Every film we’ve made from Toy Story onward has had some point in development where the story just isn’t working. When we screened the film after about a year of production we saw that we’d made Woody a real jerk. He was mean…”

voice of Woody: “At first pass, Woody was a very acerbic kind of guy, edgy and unpleasant. It was hard to believe in him as the most popular toy in the bedroom.”

Freeman: “There are characters that didn’t make it: a fox puppet and a floppy puppy, a tiger teething ring. Some of these characters had long and in-depth storylines. There’s so much art for all these characters you never saw. The Tiger Teething Ring I think was this old curmudgeon, like the lifer at the prison.”

Tim Allen voice of Buzz Lightyear: “It took me a while to realise Lasseter was the director. I thought he was a guy delivering scripts to the studio. He’d explain where I was supposed to be [in each scene]. It took so long, you never got a view of what the overall movie looked like.”

Unkrich: “We learnt a lot making Toy Story and made a lot of mistakes. I couldn’t believe we got the movie made. It was really held together with spit and rubber bands. We were just making stuff up as we went along. We always said when we were making Toy Story that it would be the ugliest movie we ever made. That’s true. As great as it looked [at the time] it was a little rough around the edges by today’s standards.”

Toy Story was a huge hit, making some £240 million worldwide. As traditional hand-drawn animation was becoming less profitable, attention turned to Pixar as the future of the medium. 

Lasseter: “I vividly remember having dinner with Steve Jobs in San Francisco [just before the release of Toy Story]. I remember standing outside the restaurant afterward and he said, ‘John, at Apple the lifespan of a computer is maybe three years; after five years it’s a doorstop. If you do your job right, what you create can last for ever’.”

Unkrich: “After the success of Toy Story we could have very easily made a dud. Then we could have faded from existence and that would have been the end of Pixar.”

Lasseter: “It was really with the second movie that it was different. When we made Toy Story nobody knew who we were but now… I felt like we were making A Bug’s Life in a fishbowl. Steve said, “I’ve been there. We had the Apple II, then came out with our second computer, the Lisa, and it bombed. I’ve been through the sophomore slump: I’ve had the first great album, and the second that isn’t any good. We can’t do that with A Bug’s Life’. So that was great!”

Unkrich: “A Bug’s Life was an opportunity to be grown ups really and get some systems in place and plan things. It was a bit more complicated than what we’d done with Toy Story…It’s a bit of a cliché to say this, but [often when] directors have a success with a smaller film with the second film they want to make their epic. John Lasseter took that on and really made his epic with A Bug’s Life. The log line for the film was “An epic of miniature proportions”. It certainly was an epic compared to Toy Story. It felt when we were making it like we’d bitten off more than we could chew. But we pulled it off.”

Lasseter: “During that time after Toy Story we started looking at what we were doing. We’d been making one movie and then the next. We started overlapping the developing of projects. We had Pete Docter [Director of Monsters Inc., Up and Inside Out], we got Brad Bird [Director of The Incredibles] in and started building a studio where multiple filmmakers made movies. So it grew from a small group making one movie to an actual studio. Now of course it has been for a while a 

Toy Story 2 is known as one of the blackest times at Pixar. Originally intended as a straight-to-video release, the sequel was promoted to a theatrical release. Part-way through production Lasseter felt the movie needed to be completely restarted. Disney refused to move its release date so Pixar had to start the movie from scratch and complete it in nine months.

Lasseter: “Just because it was supposed to be direct-to-video it doesn’t mean [you can put out a worse picture]. We can’t do anything half-assed. It had to be a great movie. And [the original version] wasn’t very good.”

Unkrich: “We’d been putting our heart and soul into one movie at a time…We were making Toy Story 2 at the same time as A Bug’s Life and we lost focus of the problems that we were having with Toy Story 2. We lost control of it.”

Buzz Lightyear and friends escape from the Crusher in 1999's Toy Story 2

They assembled The Brain Trust, the pet name for the original Pixar filmmakers: Lasseter, Unkrich, Docter, Stanton and Joe Ranft, a beloved story supervisor who sadly died in a car crash in 2005.

Stanton: “Getting together in the room again, thinking like Toy Story filmmakers, sort of unlocked these ideas…that would never have come up if we hadn’t all worked and think-tanked together on the first one.” [To Infinity and Beyond]

Unkrich:  “I remember something said by Steve Jobs…There was a point where we thought we’d figured the story out and could do to it, we just didn’t think we had enough time…We all had to collectively hold hands and gulp and do it. Steve said to me that looking back on his own career all the thing that were the most difficult that he had done wound up being the things that he was most proud of…Toy Story 2 really showed us what we were capable of and what we were made of, because we did turn around the film in time…There were times when I would have [said that was the toughest time] but I don’t know if I’d say that any more.”

In 2006, Pixar was bought by Disney, which had previously served only as distributor of its movies. Lasseter was promoted to chief creative officer of both Pixar and Disney Animation. Before 2009, the studio had only ever released one sequel, Toy Story 2. Of the five films it released between 2010 and 2015, three were sequels. The company received criticism for allowing sequels to overtake original ideas.

Jim Morris Pixar president; producer: Wall-E: “We’re now trying to [do] three movies every two years. The idea is to make an original film every year and a sequel every other year.”

McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) and Mater (voiced by Larry the Cable Guy) in Pixar's Cars 2

Lasseter: “When any other company has a hit it madly starts developing a sequel to capitalise on it. We don’t. We only start developing a sequel when we have an idea that’s good enough.”

Morris: “The sequel thing is always interesting to me. There’s a cynicism about sequels, but audiences love them. And if you ask anyone they’ll usually have a couple of sequels in their top 10 favourite films. The Godfather II, the second Star Wars movie…”

Lasseter: “Steve Jobs always said the way people feel about your brand is like a bank account. You can make deposits or you can make withdrawals. A deposit is when everything that comes out bearing your studio’s name is really great. A withdrawal is putting out something you know isn’t as good as it should be. We refuse to do that.”

Morris: “If you look at it we’re pretty pitiful at exploiting the possibility of sequels. Finding Dory is coming out 10 years after Finding Nemo! [With] Cars 3 we wanted to wait until we had an idea. We’re not conforming so well to the Hollywood sequel model.”

Unkrich: “If you look at the movies Pixar makes you don’t see any other studio taking those chances. Look at Inside Out. Who else do you see releasing a movie like Inside Out?”

Morris: “And take Wall-E. Not only was [the first half] silent, it was about a trash compactor! We were making Ratatouille at the time too. So we’ve got one movie about a rat in a kitchen and one about a trash compactor, then next we’ve got one about an old man and a boy scout [Up]. All of those sound dubious. None of those should work.”

Pixar has cancelled a movie in production just once. Newt, announced in 2008, was due to be a romantic comedy about two newts who were the last of their kind and brought together to mate, which they were not keen to do. It was cancelled in 2010.

Lasseter: “There have actually been a handful of [ideas that we’ve stopped partway through production]. Newt was the only one we stopped after we’d announced it. There are others that we started at different times and just felt like they weren’t right. It’s very common to develop stuff and it just doesn’t gel and you put it on the shelf. Newt was one of those…We did a big announcement in New York where it was important, because it was at the time Disney was buying Pixar, to go way out and tell the world all these movies we were making. But it’s not unusual.” 

Unkrich: “Telling a good story is really hard. Making a good film is hard but it’s not excruciatingly hard. Crafting a good 

story is excruciatingly hard and it’s never going to get any easier. It’s been hard for as long as we’ve been telling stories and just because we have a bunch of hit films it doesn’t mean it gets any easier or we’re any more expert at it. I think we’re just more resilient to the pain and know it comes with the territory.”

Lasseter: “We’re always challenging the story…We have a discipline that every 12-16 weeks we watch the movie’s story reels in a theater. We gather Pixar people and watch it as an audience then get together and talk about it…Only the best notes are used. There’s no hierarchy to the notes. My notes are no more important than anyone else’s…Best idea wins.”

After Up came Pixar’s biggest hit to date, Toy Story 3. Directed by Lee Unkrich it made over a billion dollars at the worldwide box office.

Unkrich: “With Toy Story 3 I was handed the keys to a very shiny, expensive sports car by John [Lasseter] and entrusted with taking care of it. I felt probably more personal pressure and stress on that film than on anything else I’ve done…In every possible way it was a huge challenge. It was a challenge to make a third film that was good. We didn’t really have any examples of that ever having been done. And it was this beloved film franchise and I didn’t want to be the one to run it into the ground. There were so many pressures on that film and the fact that it came out as well as it did and was so well regarded both critically and by audiences around the world, I count my lucky stars every day that that film worked out as well as it did.”

Mr. Potato Head, Jessie, Woody and Buzz Lightyear

Lasseter: “Well, Lee did an amazing job. There were some people who were cynical about us returning to Toy Story but those are great characters and it’s a great world… When you define what makes a good movie, it’s the story and characters. Pure and simple.”

Unkrich: “I can link it thematically to The Good Dinosaur. The Good Dinosaur is all about finding your grit and what you’re made of in really adverse conditions. Toy Story 3 showed me what I’m capable of doing even when it’s difficult to get out of bed in the morning.”

The Good Dinosaur is Pixar’s 16th movie. It began development in 2009, with long-time Pixar employee Bob Peterson as director. Originally slated for a November 2013 release it was moved first to May 2014, then to November 2014. Peterson was replaced as director by Pixar animator Peter Sohn. 

Peter Sohn: “All Pixar movies begin with a ‘What if?’ The Good Dinosaur started with, ‘What if the meteor that killed the dinosaurs missed?’ In the film they became this very agrarian society. Herbivores farm. Our main character is an apatosaur called Arlo, who’s the runt of the litter. Something terrible happens and he finds himself lost in the wilderness alone, until he meets a human boy. But the boy is more like his dog.”

Spot the difference: Pixar director Peter Sohn was the visual inspiration for Russell in 'Up'

Lasseter: “Sometimes the story problems are really small and sometimes they’re really big. On Good Dinosaur it was big and we reworked the whole story based on the original concept.”

Sohn: “This is the first Pixar film in which our characters are two young kids, essentially. It does have a different tone because of that.”

Lasseter: “The one fundamental difference between now and when we started on Toy Story is experience. Now, when we have a major story problem – and it happens every single time so we’ve grown to anticipate it – we have a better sense of when it’s coming.”

Sohn: “Andrew Stanton would always say, ‘Fail as fast as you can.’ That’s how you get to the heart of the story. It’s all trying to get to the best story possible.”

Unkrich: “The world will never know the specifics of what [The Good Dinosaur] went through to get to where it is, but I do and I’m especially proud of knowing the challenges that it had.”

Pixar has announced a release schedule up to 2020. The slate includes sequels to Finding Nemo, Cars, Toy Story and The Incredibles, plus the original film Coco, a story about the Mexican Day of the Dead, directed by Lee Unkrich. 

Unkrich: “Pixar’s certainly bigger now. I walk the halls and I don’t know half of the people in the hallway.” 

Lasseter: “What’s really special about Pixar is that it’s a film-driven studio and every movie is original, every movie is coming from a small group of filmmakers. It’s still run by filmmakers. On that side it hasn’t changed all that much.”

Denise Ream producer: Cars 2, The Good Dinosaur: “I think everyone’s excited to see what comes from this new generation. There are a lot of young women who are dazzling, so I’m excited about that.”

Morris: “We should have more diversity and female directors. It’s been a tricky thing. To be honest, women had been coming up through the tracks that would take them to directing, [but] we haven’t had a huge number in the animation business. It has got much better and we have a lot of women who we think are qualified now, but it takes a while to get things going. But we need to do a better job with it.”

Following his last directing job on 2011’s Cars 2, John Lasseter will be returning to filmmaking with Toy Story 4 in 2018. The film will focus on Woody’s romance with Jessie the Cowgirl. 

Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl (voice: Joan Cusack), Buzz Lightyear (voice: Tim Allen), Woody (voice: Tom Hanks)

Lasseter: “Myself and the creative leadership of Toy Story – Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich – got together after Toy Story 3 and we made a promise to each other that we would not make another Toy Story unless we came up with an idea that was as good as or better than any of the other three movies and was really different. Andrew and I were talking one day and we came up with a nugget of an idea and thought it could be really cool. Then we started developing it quietly. We didn’t tell anybody. Nobody at Pixar, nobody at Disney, because we didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up…”

Morris: “I know that in the age of new media this sounds a little old-school, but we just want to keep making cool movies that people want to see. It doesn’t sound very new age but we want to just keep on doing what we’re doing. They’re big films but they’re ultimately personal stories.”

Lasseter: “I remember I had this great opportunity once to meet a family whose grandmother was a cel painter on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs all those years ago. They spoke with such pride about their grandmother. That’s the way I want the families of anyone who works on our movies to feel one day.” 

To Infinity and Beyond: The Making of Pixar Animation Studios, Karen Paik; Entertainment Weekly, John Young, 2011; Entertainment Weekly, 1995; cnet.com, Richard Nieva, 2015; LA Times, 2015, Susan King; The Verge, Bryan Bishop, 2015

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