TechStuffHow did the success of Toy Story affect Pixar the company? Why was there tension between Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner? And what happens when Disney and Pixar merge?
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech are you? It is time for a tech Stuff classic episode. So last Friday I brought you The Pixar Story Part one, so it should come as no surprise that today we're going to listen to The Pixar Story Part two. This episode originally published on August third, twenty sixteen.
Hope you enjoy.
So with the last episode, I left off just before Pixar was going to debut its first feature length computer animated film, which of course is Toy Story, and I left it off as a fake cliffhanger. Would the company succeed? Of course they did. But one thing I want to out is that Toy Story itself was partly made possible because of another movie, not a Pixar film, but the movie A Nightmare Before Christmas, And the reason I say this is a Nightmare Before Christmas was a stop motion animated film produced by Tim Burton, and it was the first animated film that Disney agreed to distribute. Even though the animation itself was not done by Walt Disney Animation Studios, and that actually laid the groundwork for Pixar to follow along with Toy Story. Also one other connection between the two, John Lassiter of Pixar fame and Tim Burton both attended cal Arts at the same time. So that's kind of cool, little kind of a connection.
So one thing I got to get off the bat, this is going.
To be true for all the different movies that I talk about that Pixar has worked on. Each film required many years to finish.
A team.
He might work on a movie for five years at a time. It's not that unusual, particularly with these computer animated films, and during the development of Toy Story, the characters and script went through lots and lots of changes. Also not unusual with Pixar. They've always said that story comes first. They have to get the story right, and if they don't have the story just right, people don't care how good your animation is. If the story doesn't hold your attention, you eventually just say, well that was pretty and flashy, but I didn't really care about anything. Back in the original run, when they were first drafting out the story for Toy Story, buzz Light Year had a totally different name. He was called Tempest, which was a reference to the classic arcade machine, and Woody originally wasn't a pull string toy. He was a Ventriloquists dummy. But Michael Eisner, who at the time was Disney's CEO, stepped in and asked Pixar to change it because he said, dummies are inherently creepy, and it is difficult for me to.
Disagree with that.
I don't agree with a lot of things that Michael Eisner did, but I definitely agree that ventriloquist dummies are creepy.
And another major change.
Was Buzz's whole worldview. In those early drafts, Buzz light Year knew that he was a toy, and he knew that there was a television show that tied in with a toy. But then they had Tim Allen come in to do the voiceovers the acting, and Tim Allen's take on Buzz was that the character was completely oblivious. He lived the role of a space ranger. That is what Buzz was. He wasn't a toy of a space ranger. He was a space ranger. And the writers thought, well, that's way more interesting, So they actually reworked the story based upon Tim Allen's performance, and they started to change things. So this whole process goes on for a long time, and according to people at Pixtar, those characters were really tough to nail down. Disney executives found the initial characters a little too wholesome and boring, which is kind of interesting to think that Disney execs would say.
Yeah, you know, these guys, there's not a lot.
There's not a lot going on here. We need some more conflict, We need them to not be these just perfect toys. So the next iteration went a little too far in the other direction, and Pixar says, yeah, we kind of accidentally turned Woody into a real jerkface.
He became just unlikable.
So they had to figure out where was the balance between these two extremes, and fortunately the writers were able to come up with that balance, though for a while it actually looked like Disney might pull the plug on toy story. Keep in mind, Disney was providing the funding here. Disney was giving Pixar twenty well not giving, but providing twenty one million dollars for Pixar to produce three movies, and they were Disney was also going to provide the distribution for Pixar, and in return, Disney was taking an enormous share of the revenue should these movies prove to be successful. The whole project required way more resources than Picks are anticipated. They had only been working on short films up to that point and did not realize what a different creature a feature length film can be. It's not just oh, this one short we did require ten people, but this movie is four times longer, so we'll need forty people. It's way more complicated than that. They originally thought they could get away with just using eight animators for toy story, and on top of that, they would have people in lighting and textures, but eight animators to actually create the animation. They ended up with thirty three by the end of the production, and all the other departments also needed more people than they originally estimated, so with each film, Pixar would typically add a few more animators.
By the time Monsters Inc.
Rolls around, for example, there were fifty animators working on that movie. So it became clear that this feature link game was different and not a big surprise that Pixar had to learn this. It was new territory for them.
Now.
They also had to make sure that everyone who was working on animation was going to animate the characters in a consistent way. You couldn't have different animators manipulate characters so that they have their own quirks. When one animator is working on it but not on another, it's inconsistent and disorienting. So typically a lead animator would be assigned to every major character to create the desired performance, but an individual animator might work on every single character in a film at some point or another. It may just be that the characters in the background for that sequence, but they still have to act in character.
Acting is interesting because normally.
We think of it as a creation between an actor and maybe a director, or perhaps a couple of actors and a director, but in this case, it's an entire department of people coming together to determine what acting is for each individual character, sometimes multiple departments of people, so much more complicated than a live.
Action sort of production.
The first bit that they actually animated for Toy Story was the sequence in which the toy soldiers deploy to see what Andy is getting for his birthday. So to get an idea of how those soldiers would actually move around. The animators ended up strapping their feet to boards, and then they tried to move around with their feet connected to each other on these solid wooden boards. Supposedly the first person to try this actually was nailing their shoes to the boards and did so the wrong way, in other words, nailing up from the board through.
The shoe, which seems to be a little poorly thought out in my mind.
But at any rate, you had these animators trying to get around so that they could get a good basis for how the characters should move in the actual film, and apparently it was quite the scene it pisar HQ.
Now, computer animation.
Takes several steps to complete, just like traditional animation does. So in computer animation, you have to build the computer models for the characters, so this is the three dimensional representation of your character. You have to also do that for sets and props. You can't just do it for just the characters, otherwise everything else is flat, and you animate the sequences according to the storyboard and performances. But at that point, even after you've modeled everything and you've figured out the physics and you know how different parts move in relation to each other. You still end up with kind of a featureless and plastic figure. Everything looks kind of like it's just a simple solid body plastic. So then you have to overlay color textures and shading to give more definition to the characters. And then you have to add lighting sequences to create the mood you want for that scene and the effects you need, and.
This gets really complicated.
In a physical space where you're actually shooting live action, you can move lights around and see what sort of effects you get. You know what happens if you light the scene from the back as opposed to from the front. But in computer animation you have to actually program all that in, at least initially. You might eventually come up with a lighting software suite that does most of this automatically, and then you can make minor tweaks at that point, but when you start out, you have to program how the light behaves. The computer doesn't magically know that light from one direction is going to create a different effect than light from another direction. You have to build all that in, so it's incredibly time consuming and work intensive. It involves a lot of technical know how and artistic know how as well, so it's not an easy job.
Now.
Originally Pixar employees thought they could render the entire film in twenty months using fifty three processors. That's just the rendering stage, mind you, that's not the animation, but twenty months just to render the work that they had created. But turned out they needed three hundred machines to do the job, not fifty three processors, three hundred computers, and today Pixar has more than twenty thousand processors to work on render jobs, which means they could take that raw footage from Toy Story and render it in real time by the end of If you were to start rendering all that footage and you started the DVD of Toy Story at the same time, you would be done with both at around the same time. Not necessarily true with later Pixar films, which are more complicated than that first Toy Story movie, but it does illustrate how much more sophisticated things have become since then. And once again we see that Moore's law has brought down the cost of computing to a point where this sort of thing is possible. It's not outside the reach of a production studio now. At the time that would have been impossible. It would have been too expensive to have twenty thousand processors, let alone the idea of well, how do we power them and keep them cold enough so that they work, and where do we put them and all that kind of stuff. But we've seen the chips get smaller, we've seen them get more powerful, we've seen more sophisticated processors with multiple cores, including graphics processors, and of course we've seen that price come down over time, so now it's less of an insurmountable obstacle. Still expensive, just not as expensive as it would have been back then. So after making Toy Story, John Lassiter realized that a feature link computer animated film was way too much work for a single director. He was the director for Toy Story, but he realized this is too big a job for one person to head up. So from that point forward, the Pixar films would have multiple directors, with normally one acting as kind of the primary director to steer the vision of the film, and others to oversee specific aspects of the production like cinematography and lighting and that sort of stuff. The movie came out on November twenty second, nineteen ninety five, and it was directed by John Lassiter. Several writers worked on the story, including Joss Whedon, who is of course the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly and Angel and things like that. Whedon, by the way, wrote a couple of my favorite lines, including You're a sad, strange little man and you have My Pity and one of my favorite lines of all time, wind the Frog. This movie also marked the first time Pixar worked with the musician Randy Newman, who would go on to compose the music for six more Pixar movies. So he hasn't worked on all of them, but he worked on a lot of them. And also on a personal note, Toy Story was the first movie I saw while dating the woman who would later on become my wife. It took some convincing to get her to the theater to go and see a movie called Toy Story, but I eventually convinced her to do so, and afterwards she became a lifelong Pixar fan.
So I did something right. Nineteen years woo now, Toy Story was a really big hit.
According to box office Mojo, Toy Story's global box office amounted to three hundred and sixty two million dollars, but Pixar's deal with Disney meant it only received a small percentage of the profits. Between ten and fifteen percent of the profits. Most of that money went to Disney, not to Pixar. Some folks over at Pixar felt that this was kind of unfair that Disney was providing the distribution in marketing and that initial maybe seven million dollars you could argue for the budget of the movie, but otherwise wasn't responsible for the actual success of the movie. Disney, apart from giving some notes, didn't determine the story. They didn't do the animation, they didn't do the effects, they didn't hire the voice actors.
So some folks over at Pixar were.
A little not happy with this arrangement, but that's how things were at the time. Shortly after Toy Story premier, like a week after Toy Story came out, Steve Jobs made the big move and took Pixar public with an initial public offering or IPO. It ended up being the biggest technology IPO in nineteen ninety five, which was also a year that saw Netscape go public. If you don't know what Netscape is, go look it up. It used to be the name in computer.
Browsers for the Internet back in the day.
Now before the IPO, the estimated value of a share of Pixar stock was between twelve and fourteen dollars. That's what analysts were predicting that Pixar shares would be between twelve and fourteen bucks per share, But when trading opened, the initial share price was actually twenty two dollars, and toy Story's incredible opening was probably part of the reason why it was higher than originally estimated. During that first day of trading, the stock reached its highest point at forty six dollars per share, which means it more than doubled its value from the opening bell of the stock exchange. Now, granted it didn't end at forty six dollars per year on that first day. It actually settled to thirty nine dollars per year, so still higher than what it opened at.
Because Steve Jobs.
Owned practically all the shares in the company before taking it public, it turned him into a billionaire a billion air overnight. He had spent fifty million dollars on this company over time trying to keep it afloat. That gamble paid off big time and of course, it gave Pixar a bit more leverage.
It was a force to be reckoned with a.
One point four six billion dollar market value force. So imagine that. Imagine that you were working for a company that, over the course of a week, has its first feature length film come out and then is valued at one point four to six billion dollars. It must have been incredible. Also, in nineteen ninety five, David di Francesco, whom we talked about in the last episode, received an Academy Award for the develop element of a film input scanning technique. And Pixar was continuing to develop new technologies in the film industry, and eventually it was also licensing those technologies out to other companies. So it wasn't just that they were developing tools in house to get their stuff done.
They were innovating in.
Technology and then making money through licenses so that other production companies could take advantage of those advancements.
We'll be back with more about Pixar after this quick break.
In nineteen ninety seven, Pixar completed work on their short animated film Jerry's Game, which would win a Best Animated Short Film Oscar for Pixar that would be their second best animated short film, Oscar. They would win many, many more. And also in nineteen ninety seven, Pixar hired Randy S. Nelson, who would become the dean of Pixar University. Now this is not like a giant college campus somewhere akin to Monsters University.
This is Pixar's.
Internal skills development department, which gives Pixar employees the opportunity to take classes in all sorts of fields and disciplines, from story development and screenwriting to drawing and sculpting. And this Nelson guy, he sounds like someone I'd really get along with. He was a founder of the Flying Karamtsov Brothers, so he's a juggler, and as a juggler, if you didn't know, I'm also a juggler.
I really respect that.
He had also worked with Steve Jobs both at Apple and at Next. Remember Jobs had been essentially forced out of Apple and had founded a new company called Next Computers, eventually abandoning the hardware side of Next Computers and developing software instead. Now, according to Nelson, if you were to take all the courses, or to take a full suite of courses at Pixar University, you would have the equivalent of a bachelor's degree education in fine arts. That's how comprehensive their internal development department was. They were dedicated to making certain that employees had the opportunity to learn new skills and develop ones that they had already started to create or to build on previously. And this included all sorts of different types of activities, including improvisational acting. So you might end up finding yourself sitting next to the head of the company, but you're both classmates at that class. So it also helped break down the hierarchical barriers between bosses and employees. The motto of Pixar University is alienis not, which I know I'm terribly mispronouncing because I have little Latin and less Greek, just like a mister Shakespeare Shakespeare, but the Latin phrase actually means alone no longer. And it also is a secondary Latin inscription on the Pixar University crest, which says tempus pecunia somnum, which means time, money, sleep. The three of those, I think sleep is the one that the typical Pixar employee has the least.
Of, maybe time. It's kind of hard to say.
Moving on over to talk about nineteen ninety seven a bit. Pixar and Disney renegotiated their agreement at that time.
So if you.
Remember, they originally had come up with an I this deal that that Pixar was going to make three movies for Disney, after which there would be time to negotiate a new relationship instead, and in return, Disney was going to get the massive majority of the profits from those movies. But the renegotiation went a little better for Pixar. They agreed to do a ten year, five film deal and in that deal, Pixar would receive fifty percent of the profits from the films. The New York Times reported on the change in agreements and revealed that the new Pixar film was going to.
Be called Bugs.
So this was before the movie had come out. Obviously, they were still working on it. It was still in development, so the title had not been finalized. Now that arrangement, with the new deal of being a ten year, five film contract, answered some of the criticisms industry analysts had about the Pixar IPO, because when Pixar went public, some analysts were saying, this seems really like investors are pushing this company beyond its actual value, because keep in mind, while they're doing great work, and while their movies are making huge amounts of money in the box office, that most of that money is not going to Pixar, it's going to Disney. So maybe you shouldn't drive the value of this company up so high since it's really not earning money for itself. Once this new arrangement came in, that took some of that criticism away. Bugs of course ended up being A Bugs Life, which would come out in nineteen ninety eight, and it broke the record for a Thanksgiving weekend film opening in the United States. The movie combines a couple of famous stories you got ESOPs the Ant and the Grasshopper as part of it, and a very healthy dose of the Seven Samurai as the various core story elements.
And the Pixar team said that A Bugs Life was particularly.
Challenging and rewarding. The movie called for a lot of characters on screen at once. I mean hundreds and hundreds of insects all on screen at the same time, which requires a lot of processing power. You're talking about a ton of animation. You don't want your characters all just standing still, and that requires a lot of computer power. Also, on top of that, the characters had lots of limbs. I mean, insects have lots of legs, so most of these creatures had six legs. Some of them also had wings or also antenna. On top of that, these settings were on uneven surfaces, and those surfaces had to have an organic look to them. There was also fire and smoke in the movie, which is notoriously difficult to get just right with computer animation, or at least it was at that time, and so it was very resource heavy. It was a very ambitious project to take on after toy story. Now, one of the defining looks of the film is the translucent nature of the various leaves and flowers. So John Laster said it was like characters were living in a world of stained glass, and that the animators had to create ways for light to behave properly to shine through these surfaces. And again it meant creating new rules, making up new rules so that things looked right. They didn't just look pretty, but they looked natural. And the story of a bug's life changed a lot too over the course of its production. Originally, the main character was the head of the circus bugs, and that was an ant named Red. But the film didn't find a voice with that main character in place. They couldn't figure out, well, what's the story here, where's the character arc? Why would this character stick with this plan of pretending to be a group of warriors to fight off grasshoppers.
He has no steak, he could just leave.
And that's when they realized that perhaps a couple of the ants that would be asking the circus performers for help are the real main characters. And eventually those ants were reduced to a single ant, Flick, and that became the main character.
So it was interesting to see that story remained the chief concern. These other technical.
Issues, while really fascinating, they were secondary. It wouldn't matter how pretty the screen was. Again, if you went and saw it, you didn't care about the characters. Now, while A Bug's Life was in production, a team led by David D. Francesco created a new way to transfer computer animation onto film stock.
Now remember this.
Is before most theaters were able to have digital projectors. There were only a few digital projectors in place in a couple of theaters around North America. So we're still talking about an era in which physical reels of film are produced and projected onto screens. So Defrancesco's method was using a laser recording system that became known as Pixar Vision. Used solid state lasers to record images onto film. So film is photo reactive, meaning that when light hits it, there's a chemical change, and that's where we're able to capture images on film. Lasers are really really precise, way more precise than cathode ray tubes, which was the typical way to transfer computer animation over to film. So using lasers allowed for a much higher quality color reproduction and sharper images on film than the earlier versions did. Plus d Francesco's invention was faster than the cathode ray tube method. If you wanted to use a CRT method, it would take thirty five seconds to record a single frame of computer animation onto film. With the laser method it took eight seconds, so much much faster, four times faster than the traditional method. So DeFrancesco would receive a Technical Academy Award for this invention. He started he was starting to rack up those those Academy awards for his technological contributions to the film industry. Now, the big advantage of using that laser recording system is that allowed for that much higher quality transfer of an image onto film, and the first time it was used was on A Bugs Life, So the transfers that were made for A Bugs Life relied upon the system, and it would be used on lots of future films.
Though by the time we get around to Monsters.
Incorporated, Pixar was really starting to push for digital projectors in more movie theaters, saying that the digital projection is just superior. You get more vibrant colors and sharper images than you ever will with film. You don't have the jitter that you would have with film, you don't have other physical limitations of film. There, you would have pure digital experience, which for computer animated film makes perfect sense.
If you're talking about other types of movies, you can have.
A legitimate argument that the film creates a certain sensibility that you cannot easily replicate using digital projection. Quentin Tarantino would go bonkers if you told him from now on you can only do movies in digital, you cannot do them in film, and it does have a very different effect. But in computer animated movies, that's less of a problem because the whole film is digital. It's only when you put it onto film that it becomes analog. There was never a physical object for you to shoot on film in.
The first place. Now, in nineteen ninety nine.
Toy Story two comes out that would end up being a bit of a point of contention a little bit later between Disney and Pixar, and this development process was uneasy from the beginning, actually, because Disney originally wanted this to be a direct to video sequel.
If you remember the nineties.
In the early two thousands, Disney was really into creating directive video sequels of a lot of its very popular feature length films, so much so that it became.
A bit of a joke in the industry.
But John Laster and his team fought for a cinematic release, and eventually Disney agreed. They said, all right, fine, we will make this a theatrical release film, not a directive video sequel. Now, during the making of the movie, there were some really huge setbacks. A terrible sequence of events happened. So first, the files for the film were all saved on a Linux system and someone ran the function r M star on the hard drive holding all the Toy Story two files. Our M stands for remove, essentially, it's to delete stuff, and STAR pretty much means everything you find. So someone was essentially deleting all the material off of a hard drive, and that hard drive happened to have all of Toy Story two's assets on it, including reference files, animation, the completed movie. Up to that point, all of it was on this hard drive. So when this was detected, people saw that various assets were starting to disappear, including entire sequences and even characters. They began to get deleted, and to make matters worse, the official backup for the film. They found out it hadn't been backing up for a couple of months. There had been a failure that had not been corrected or addressed. Instead, the team which was working furiously to try and get this movie done on time, was relying on the primary copy of the movie and the backup was outdated. Now, if this is where that story ended, things would have turned out very differently. The whole film would have been set back a huge amount. But the technical director for the movie happened to have a copy of all the files on her work computer. Her computer that she used to work from home. She had requested that computer so that she could occasionally spend time at home with her family and not just live at the office, And so the team actually sent people to her house to physically take her computer, secure it in the backseat of her car, and then very gently transport it back to Pixar so that they could recapture all the assets that had been lost in the Great file deletion.
And they were able to do it, and the.
Movie was able to continue in development and not suffer this terrible setback. But then they had another major challenge when Disney executive, seeing an early cut, said they didn't like where it was headed, so the team had to rework the film, but Disney said, we are not going to change the release date. You still have the same deadline to get the movie finished, even though you have to go back and rework a lot.
Of this stuff.
So teams would start putting in as many as thirty six to forty eight hours in a row of work, so just working for two days non stop, like not even to take a real night's sleep, just working on sequences to get this movie finished in time for the deadline. Lee Unkrich who oversaw cinematography for the film, said that while they were technically capable of putting a camera anywhere within a scene and have it do anything that could disobey the laws of physics, because it's a virtual camera, you can place the virtual camera anywhere you want.
It doesn't have to follow the rules of a real world camera.
He said that if you did that, they found that audiences responded as if things weren't right. If it didn't behave the way an actual camera did, you lost the audience. So you actually had to restrict the virtual camera, give it the same limitations a physical camera would have, which is pretty interesting that despite the fact you have the technical capability, you couldn't really take advantage of it in that way and still manage to keep your audience. Now, Toy Story two was the first sequel to earn more money than the original film. It broke opening weekend records in the UK and the US and in Japan, and it was the first film to be created, mastered, and exhibited digitally. Now not exclusively digitally, because again at this time, not that many theaters had digital protectors, but the ones that did showed Toy Story two in digital format. In two thousand, Pixar would premiere the short for the Birds, which would of course go on to win an Oscar for Best Short Animated Film, and Pixar would relocate to a new headquarters in Emeryville, California. In two thousand and one, they debuted Monsters Inc. Now, this was the first Pixar film not directed by John Lassiter. He had worked on Toy Story, A Bugs Life and Toy Story two, but Pete Doctor came in as the main director and David Silverman and Lee Unkrich co directed it.
Billy Crystal, who voiced the part.
Of Mike Wazowski, was originally offered the role of Buzz light Year for Toy Story, but he turned it down, and he said that this was such a huge mistake that he leapt at the opportunity to voice a character in a new Pixar movie. One of the big advancements they made in computer animation for Monsters Inc. Was building realistic looking fur, and when you think about it, you realize how important it was for them to develop this, considering the types of furry creatures they had in Monsters Inc.
If you don't create a.
System to animate the fur automatically, it means that you would have to animate every strand of fur by hand.
And if you didn't even.
Allow it, like maybe maybe you say, all right, let's not animate every individual hair. That's ridiculous. Sully has more than a million hairs over his entire body and animating every single one of those individually by hand.
Is not possible. Let's group them together.
Well, if you did that, then you would end up with this weird, matted look where hair still wouldn't seem to move naturally. So they had to find a way to solve that, and they did that by building a simulator so each hair behaves according to the rules set in this simulator. It took Home a long time to get the simulator just right so that hairs would behave properly, So the team had to test the program to make sure that the fur and hair is moving in the right way. They'd had to make tweaks whenever it didn't look right, and I had to work very hard to solve collision problems with the fur. And some of the other issues were that if a character moved too quickly, the fur would sometimes go crazy and stretch too far like it suddenly it would act like a rubber band and stretch across the screen, and it wasn't until later that they figured out where that problem was coming from. Also, they went ahead and made a decision that certain fur, like the fur around Sully's face, wouldn't be animated by this dynamic computer simulation.
Because they wanted to have really tight.
Control for the purposes of performance and expression. They didn't want the fur to be distracting. So for those cases the fur was not dynamic. It was actually static and could be animated by hand if necessary. But the rest of the fur, the stuff that was over Sully's body in general, that followed the rules of the simulation they also want to have then created a program to simulate the natural movements of clothing. In Toy Story two, they had to animate all of Awl of Owl's toy barn. They had to animate all of his clothing by hand, and according to the animators, this was a real pain in the butt because not only did it take a lot of time to get clothes to animate in the way that they looked right and they behaved according to the contours of the person wearing the clothing, and.
So the worst part is if you do your job right, no one notices. They only notice if you don't do.
Your job right because it doesn't look right. So it's a frustrating thing to think you spend a lot of time to get something to work just right so that people.
Do not notice it.
And so as a result, they created this automated program that would save time and frustration and the animators could work on other stuff that was more important from a performance standpoint.
We're going to take a quick break for some messages from our sponsor and be back with more about the Pixar story. Glenn McQueen, who was a supervising animator for Monsters Zinc, spoke to an interview about how the increase in computer power was.
Both good and bad.
It was good in that it gave animators more power to create visual complexity, but with that complexity comes the challenge of making sure all the details in the frame are working properly. And as we've seen in all realms of computers, not just in animation, if you add more power, programmers or animators or directors will find ways to make use of that power, so you're never actually ahead of the game.
You know.
This is why when we get a new computer with an even more powerful processor. You start to think, well, this thing isn't isn't faster than what my old computer was, Like, well, that's not because the processor isn't more powerful. It is the problem is that software developers are building software to take advantage of that power, and they may not be taking the most efficient path to doing that. So you have this constant issue with the fact that software is taking up all the power that the new shiny processors can generate, and it feels like we're kind of treading water.
Same thing's true with animation.
You can do more stuff, but once again you just start pushing up against the boundaries of what the technology is capable of doing. Now, the most difficult sequence for the team to nail down, both from a story perspective and technical challenges, was the sequence inside the Yeti's Cave, and it was so hard for them to get that scene right that they started using the phrase Yeti's Cave as code for any scene in any Pixar film that is near impossible to get right. They would say, oh, this is turning into another Yeti's Cave, just to explain, like, we know this isn't where it needs to be yet and we Need to Fix.
It Monsters, Inc. Did really well.
It hit one hundred million dollars in domestic box office in just nine days, which was faster than any other animated film in history up to that point. Edwin Cattmull officially became the president of Pixar again, and the company had six hundred employees at that point. Now two thousand and one would see ed Edwin Catmull, Lauren Carpenter, and Rob Cook receive an Academy Award of Merit for the Pixar in house rendering software package known as Pixar's RenderMan, which have been used in many other films to render CGI effects, not just Pixar's movies. They had licensed it out to other production companies, and this would.
Represent the first OSCAR ever awarded specifically for the development of software. In two thousand and two.
Pixar would debut a new short film called Mike's New Car, and this was the first time Pixar had ever released a short film starring characters from one of their feature length films. It was nominated for an Academy Award, but it did not win one. But that same year, the first Disney Park attraction based off of Pixar property opens, that would be a bugs Land at Disney California Adventure Park. Of course, Disney's California Adventure would eventually become home for the Car's Ride, which if you've not had the chance to go on it, if you ever do go to Disneyland, I would say that a trip over to California Adventure is completely worth it just for the Car's Ride. It is really really well done. In two thousand and three, Finding Nemo premieres with a remastered version of the classic Pixar short Nick Knack. That was one of the ones that they had made back when they were trying to sell hardware. Nick Knack was kind of their demo for saying, hey, look at the kind of stuff we can do. So this time a remaster version comes out with Finding Nemo, and Finding Nemo would break more opening weekend box office records for an animated film and would win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
And back in Monsters, Inc.
Where the fur effects were the big challenge with Finding Nemo, obviously, the big challenge was getting those underwater effects just right. All sorts of stuff need to be right. The way that particulates floated in the water had to be modeled correctly. The light had to be just right for each of the different water environments they were in the colors, how those colors and light would affect the way characters appear on screen. All of that had to be researched and developed, and it was pretty incredible. They were eventually able to create underwater scenes so convincingly. They would take some reference material some actual film shot underwater an attempt to recreate that film using computer generated imagery. They got so good at it that you couldn't tell the difference between the two if you showed them side by side. It would be very difficult to say, this one's the real footage and this one's the computer animated footage. At that point, they then had to dial back the realism because in the world of Fighting Nemo, they wanted it to be somewhat like a make believe world, but based in the underwater world we know of, so it had to be It couldn't be too realistic or it would lose the audience, and it couldn't be too cartoony or it wouldn't be what they wanted. And they also had to study how fish moved through water to make sure that the animation made sense. They had to research aquatic life to understand their anatomy, and every animator was required by John Lassiter to get certified in scuba and to take several dives to have first hand ex experience underwater around these environments. They also had to develop the color palette that particulate movement all of that stuff, and this was a huge undertaking. Oh and they also had to figure out how can you make a compelling character out of a fish because traditionally fish have very limited abilities to emote. They don't do a lot of emoting, so they had to cheat a bit on that one. They had to give fish things like eyelids, which fish do not have, and to give them more expressive faces and be able to move their brows and things like that so that they could have characters have expressions on screen.
That was a bit of a challenge too to get that just right. And of course developing the story was a big tough thing to do. It's a story that.
Begins with a character losing his wife and most of his children. Of course, that's not the only time that happens in Pixar, and it's not the only time you see it in Disney, But you have to be a to treat that just right so that it has an emotional impact but doesn't become so overpowering that people you lose everybody at the very opening of your movie.
It's a delicate thing.
Also, in two thousand and three, Pixar debuted the short Bounden, and in two thousand and four, Pixar would release The Incredibles, which I would say is arguably one of the best superhero films ever made. I'm including all the live action films, and The Incredibles broke all of Pixar's box office records for opening weekend up to that point. It also would eventually win the Best Animated Film Oscar. Now, this movie was a little bit different from earlier ones. Pixar brought on brad Bird. He actually ended up joining Pixar becoming part of the company. But when brad Bird came on board, he also brought some folks that he had been working with in previous productions, and so at first there was kind of a Pixar versus brad Bird and his guys sort of feeling. It took a while for the two groups to meld together and work together effectively, and brad Bird was apparently something of a and abrasive is probably the wrong word, but he definitely seemed to come across as a bit aggressive because in various drawings of brad Bird that were made around the time, it always looks like he's screaming at everybody, which in the behind the scenes footage for The Incredibles, brad Bird seems to take a little bit of an exception to He's mostly amused by it, but he's like, come on, guys.
Eisner reportedly didn't.
Like the pitch for The Incredibles at all and thought the film would have to be a live action picture. He would just essentially dismiss the idea that this should be animated, but Lasser was able to change Eisner's mind and get the film greenlit.
Now.
Early ideas had a slightly different take on a story than what we saw in the finished film. For example, originally everyone in the family could fly except for the dad Bob, which meant that he would end up behind the wheel of the family station wagon trying to keep up with all the rest of his members who are flying away. Brad Bird decided that that didn't make a whole lot of sense, and he didn't want any of his characters to have unlimited superpowers. He didn't want any character to be like Superman because he wanted those characters to get into situations that were difficult to get out of. And if you make a characters too powerful, it's really really tricky to come up with complications that that character can't just immediately fix, right. I mean, that's the problem with a lot of Superman stories is how do you create a situation for Superman that he can't just fix right away? And it tends to mean you have to escalate everything. So instead of escalating everything to a ridiculous level, Brad Bird's and let's make certain that the powers, while cool and beyond the capabilities of your typical human, don't get to the point where any one character is invincible. Now, the animators had the challenge of making unrealistically proportioned characters move in a believable way. If you've seen the Incredibles, you know, while they're unmistakably human, they don't have the proportions of humans. Bob, for example, has these tiny little feet and legs compared to a massive, massive Torso it's not realistic. It's a stylized version of a human being. So animating a character like that so that the character appears to move in a natural way when the character itself is an unnatural shape is a pretty tough problem. And also they had to create a look to the character so that they didn't look like toys.
You know, that was the issue with Toy Story.
In fact, some people pointed out that in Toy Story and Toy Story two kind of toy like himself, he didn't look very much like a human. So they had those challenges ahead of them. They needed to get that just right. But you could argue that maybe by going the stylized route they didn't really nail it. I think it's perfect for the way the movie is. Two thousand and four, Finding Nemo would go on to become the best selling DVD of all time, with twenty four million copies in North America alone. Also in two thousand and four, over at Epcot Walt Disney World, there was a new attraction that opened called Turtle Talk with Crush, which was part of the Living Seas Pavilion.
So Turtle Talk with Crush is really cool.
The basic premise is you go into a little theater and Crush from Finding Nemo. That's the sea Turtle shows up and he has a conversation with audience, an actual conversation. He can talk to specific people in the audience, ask them questions and tell jokes and that sort of stuff. So it's an incredible thing to see, and it's it can at least be It can be a little mind blowing at first because it looks like they're doing three D computer animation in real time.
That's not exactly what's happening. It's more like a video game.
Like think of a video game where you're able to control the characters make the move around, and it's similar to that. So there's a performer who's behind the scenes who can control Crush. They can make the turtle move around and do tricks and move his mouth, and then the performer actually provides the voice.
So they always have to have someone on staff.
Usually a couple of people who could do the Crush voice really really well. You need to have a couple because sometimes the person's voice isn't up to snuff and you.
Have to call in the backup.
So it's kind of interesting that that's become an actual job. Like if you can do a good crush voice and you can learn this system. You got a good you got some good job security there. So this is really kind of a type of machinema. That's machinema with a lowercase M, and that's machine animation, the idea of using a pre existing three D virtual environment in order to render animation in real time. In this case, this was a custom built system meant just for this this attraction. It's not like they bought a video game off the shelf and they're using it for that purpose. They developed it from the ground up. But it's the same basic principle, and the performer can hear audio thanks to a handheld mic and possibly some other mics that might be positioned around the room, and also can see people through a camera system, so that's where that interactivity can come in. In two thousand and five, another Pixar short film debuts. This one is called One Man Band, and the New York Museum of Modern Art would host an exhibition called Pixart Twenty Years of Animation in December of two thousand and five, though to be fair, the actual twentieth anniversary happens in two thousand and six, so the exhibition opened a little early, but yeah, Pixar was coming up on twenty years as an entity, although it only had been making feature length films for about ten years. In a sad piece of news from two thousand and five, Joe Raft, who had worked both with Disney Animation and with Pixar, died in a car accident. Raft had worked on Disney films like Who Framed Roger, Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and The Lion King as a story artist, a storyboard supervisor, and occasionally as a voice actor, his specialty being cartoon screams. He would go on to work on Toy Story as a story supervisor. He provided the voice of Heimlich in A Bugs Life, and he also served as story supervisor for that movie. He voiced Wheezy the Penguin in Toy Story two. He worked on Monsters, Inc. And he voiced Jacques the Shrimp in Finding Nemo, and he co directed Cars. So it was very tragic Pixar was lost a real superstar in Joe Raft when he passed away. Now, that same year, Disney did something pretty controversial, at least in the eyes of some Pixar employees. So in two thousand and five, Disney created a new division of Walt Disney Animation called Circle seven Animation. The entire purpose for Circle seven Animation was to focus exclusively on developing computer animation for Disney, with a primary goal of creating sequels to Disney owned Pixar films. Now, that led some folks to dismiss Circle seven, calling it picks Aren't instead of Pixar It's picks aren't.
But the studio never actually produced a single film, nor were any of.
The scripts that they wrote at while they were still a thing, ever used by Pixar in any of their movies. This was really Disney's move to try and leverage the intellectual property that Pixar had created under that agreement for those five films, and specifically they wanted it so that if Pixar left Disney, Disney could continue to make money off of those properties by creating sequels, even though those sequels would be made by people not connected to the original film. Now, there wasn't really any hard feelings between or there weren't, I guess any hard feelings between Pixar executives and the folks who were working for Circle seven Animation. They I'm guessing that John Lassen wasn't thrilled that Circle seven Animation became a thing. He was probably very torn up about it, but he didn't hold it against the people who had been hired by Disney. It was more of a problem with Disney's move in the first and in fact, when Circle seven ended up dissolving later on, Lasseter would actually bring on a lot of that staff and bring them into Walt Disney Animation Studios.
In fact, Andrew.
Milstein, who had been the head of Circle seven, became the general manager of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
So there weren't any hard feelings, but it definitely was.
A tense move, and there were some battles going on at the top levels of Disney and Pixar.
At this time.
Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner were having some pretty nasty fights over which movies were counting toward the deal that they had made. Eisner was arguing that Toy Story two should not count.
That is not one of those five.
Movies that we agreed on because it's a sequel and sequels don't count. Jobs said, what are you talking about. Of course it counts. It's a full length feature film, and ISA are saying, well, it was meant to be a direct to video sequel, so it doesn't count. And there was this back and forth arguing, and Jobs was very visibly looking at other potential partners for Pixar once the Disney deal was done. So tension was high at this point between Disney and Pixar.
We'll be back with more about Pixar after this quick break.
Now. Two thousand and six Rolls Around and Cars.
It's a film that a lot of kids love, but I think it's really just okay. It's not at the top of my list for my favorites among Pixar's films.
It comes out in two thousand.
And six, it does really well. It actually does very well at the box office. But the reason that the movie exists in the first place is because John Lassiter loves cars.
And maybe I'm not into.
The movie so much because I don't like driving. So that's perhaps the problem. The whole romanticism of driving doesn't do anything for me, and that's on me. That's not the fall of the movie. So Bugs Life was a new take on Esop's Fables and the seventh Samurai Cars is kind of a new take on Doc Hollywood. It's really very similar story. So, while Finding Nemo made it challenging to create characters from fish, cars presented a new challenge. How do you create a character that's a believable entity and still recognizably a car like You can't change it so much that it doesn't like a car anymore, but you have to change it enough so that you can have a character there where that can express him or herself, that can move around in his or her environment and manipulate it. How do they carry and hold things? This was actually a really big deal. The animators were saying, well, how does a car pick something up? How do they carry things around? Apart from Mater who could tow things by using the hook on the end of his cable, how do you have these characters move things around?
And they experimented with that a lot, with.
Things like prehensile antenna or windshield wipers, or the ability to hold onto things with a car door, and eventually they just decided it wasn't important and they dropped all that. So, like Finding Nemo, the acting had to be focused in the face, even more so since, with a few exceptions, most of the characters didn't have a lot of ways to communicate. They couldn't do big gestures with their tires. They could do little ones, you know. They took a lot of liberties with the way stuff moves, but mostly it had to be the acting had to be concentrated in the face, and the team had to figure out how to make chrome look realistic. Chrome's very which means it's reflective, so that means you should be able to see reflections in the chrome, and that actually was a big technical challenge for the crew, but they were able to figure that all of that out and they were able to get the movie together and release it. And two thousand and six, when the movie came out, ended up being a huge year for Pixar. It wasn't just when Cars debuted, it was also when Pixar and Disney were able to come to an agreement. Disney announced that it intended to purchase Pixar, and under this new arrangement, Edwin Capmoll would become the president of Pixar and John Lassiter would become the chief creative officer of Disney and Pixar Animation Studios.
So a huge change.
Here where Lassiter the man who had been fired from Disney because he had been too enthusiastic about computer animation, was going to become the chief creative officer of that animation department. Huge Turnaround, Crazy Story, And in September of two thousand and six, Pixar debuted the short film Lifted, just one of my favorite short films Pixar has ever done, and Pixar employee and story artist Joe Raft would be named a Disney Legend, which is an actual designation within Disney. It's not just it's not just a term. It actually really means something. It's like a hull of fame within Disney, and they induct only a few people every year, and he joined that.
List that year.
Well, guys, I've got a lot more to talk about with Pixar, but I figured this is a good place to end in two thousand and six. End of two thousand and six, when Disney and Pixar joined forces, and Pixar becomes an integrated part of Disney, still largely independent in the sense that it can develop its own movies internally, but now officially part of this company, no longer a separate thing. So we'll pick up in two thousand and seven for our next episode.
All right, that wraps up the Pixar Story Part two. Next week we will conclude this retroactive classic series about Pixar with the Pixar Story Part three. And as I said, maybe I'll do a part four now because enough time has gone by that there's other stuff to chat about. So if you want me to talk about Pixar some more, let me know and I'll do a follow up to talk about what's been going on since twenty sixteen. In the meantime, I hope you are all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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