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's time for another tech Stuff classic episode. Over the past two weeks, we have listened to classics from The Pixar Story Parts one and two, So this week it's The Pixar Story, Part three, which concludes the trilogy of episodes I did about Pixar from back in twenty sixteen. This one originally published August tenth, twenty sixteen, so there's a lot more to say since then, but let's sit back and listen to this classic episode. We left off last episode in two thousand and six, when Disney had officially announced its intent to acquire Pixar outright. It would no longer just be a partnership, a contractual partnership. It would be that the two companies would become united. So now we're going to pick up in two thousand and seven, when Pixar would release the first film it had as an official part of the Disney Company itself. That film was Rataituey with Patton Oswalt voicing the main character, Patton Oswald, one of my favorite comedians. Now, Rattue was again very successful. Like all the Pixar films that led up to this point, it was successful both financially and critically. It later would win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. We're getting to a point now where the people were starting to ask the question, are other movies ever going to have a real chance against Pixar movies in the category of animated feature? And we also see more and more push from companies like Pixar for the Academy to consider animated movies on the same playing ground as live action films. Now, Ratatuy would be another brad Bird directed film, although not Originally, Bradbird was brought in to replace a director, Jan Pinkava. I believe Jan might be Yon. Jan Pinkava was at the Helm and then brad Bird took over. One of the big challenges facing the animators with Ratatue was finding a way to animate Linguini. That's the human character who's under the control or partial control of Remy the rat. They're trying to figure out, well, how do we animate him where it's clear to the audience that he's not really in control of his own movements, or not in full control at any rate. That took a lot of work, so they ended up doing a lot of They studied a lot of puppet puppets like marionettes and stuff like that. That movie did quite well and over at Disneyland. In two thousand and seven, a new attraction called the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage opened up now that actually used the old submarine voyage ride, the twenty thousand leagues Under the Sea type ride, which had closed in nineteen ninety eight, so almost a decade after the ride had closed, it reopens with a new theme with Finding Nemo. Disney World would get its own version of this ride, but that would be housed in the Living Seas and not use the submarines. Instead, you get a Little Mermaid Submarine ride now instead of the Finding Nemo version. In two thousand and eight, Pixar would debut the film Wally, come out actually the day after My birthday that year, and Wally won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The Movie's Adorable and also debuted with the short film Presto. Wally was the first Pixar film to feature scenes with live actors. And the experience was so much faster than computer animation that Picks Her folks were really surprised and excited about it, because with animation, if you create a scene and you realize, oh, we need to have this character turn around a little faster, or we need to light this in a different way, or the entire pacing of the scene needs to slow down a bit for it to make sense, that requires animators to go back and do a ton more work, and it could be many, many many days before there's something else to look at, whereas with live action, if it doesn't work, you give the direction to the crew and to the cast, and you do it again and it's right there. So the animators were all kind of gaga over how different live action is to computer animation, and they said that the actors were kind of amuse used because that's what the actors were used to, but the animators, to them, was a whole new world. Oh. Also, the fact that the shoot was catered appeared to be a really big deal, which just tells you what kind of things people find important when they go to a film shoot. Man, I wish my shoots were catered. Anyway, it was an entertaining thing to see that this live action being incorporated into the movie had such an effect on the various Pixar employees, and it was also kind of interesting to just see live action showing up at a Pixar movie in the first place. But another big challenge with Wally was creating a story in which there's really no dialogue for the first act of the film. Now, obviously that makes the story much more of a a story challenge rather than a technical challenge, but it also meant that the team had to put in a lot of personality in the animations. They had to figure out, how can we animate these characters in a way where we understand what their emotional reactions are, what their motivations are, what they're feeling and thinking at any given time, considering the fact they're not able to talk or they're not they have nothing to talk too, And that actually ends up creating a pretty tough technical challenge. It's not just how do you animate this character, but what motions indicate those specific feelings and thoughts. So it involves animators studying themselves a lot, as they make different facial expressions and they have different body language in response to different types of ideas like, you know, you just got to you just open the door, and you just found out your friends are throwing you a surprise birthday party. What's your reaction? Or you got home to find out that your dog got out of the backyard somehow and is missing. What's your reaction? And studying yourself and then translating that into a character, and a character that's not human a robot is a big challenge, whether it's technical or just from a psychological standpoint, So pretty spectacular work that they were able to create characters that could give you that feeling that they wanted, even though they're not human or speaking. In two thousand and eight, Pixar would finish work on the first set of Car Tunes, which are in fact short cartoons about the car's characters. Jim Morris, who produced Wally, would become the general manager of Pixar, and in two thousand and nine, Up debuts at the can Film Festival, So the first animated film ever in the history of the festival to open the whole thing up. And I imagine that festival attendees were just as devastated by the first ten minutes of that movie that I am I still can't watch the first ten minutes of UP without turning into a blubbering mess. I know because I did it today. When I'm recording this, I was doing research on Pixar, specifically on UP, and I watched it twice. I watched the original sequence in storyboard format, and then I watched the actual finished sequence, and I was so thankful that on Fridays our office is pretty dead because no one was there to hear me blubbering at my desk. I'm not ashamed of it. I just don't want to make other people feel uncomfortable. The whole idea for UP began with just the notion of an old man floating his house away with a bunch of balloons, which is just kind of a comedic image. But while the image was really evocative and people at Pixar thought, yeah, it's a really cool idea, they had to come up with, well, why is he doing that, where is he going? What's the whole point? So they had to create a story around this picture, and that's where they started working on the ideas for UP. Now. The original opening had the character of Carl, who's the main character in UP, and his wife Ellie falling in love through a contentious and competitive relationship. It starts off with their kids. Originally, the two kids didn't get along with each other and would kind of ambush one another and punch each other. It was sort of a violent behavior, and it got to a point where those punches give way to the characters falling for each other, dating, getting married, and all the story beats that you see in the first ten minutes of Up that I'm not going to go over or I'll start crying on a podcast, and no one wants that, but at any rate, it's same sort of progression, but in a different emotional impact because people are getting punched. So they ended up reworking it because when they showed it to people, the reaction was pretty quiet and they said it's a little too violent. So they went back, reworked it and did a different take, which led to what you saw in the film. Technical challenges included creating a system that could guide the behavior of a lot of balloons, because that's how Carl's House moves to South America. So how many balloons were used, like in the movie, how were the balloons showing up? I mean, not real balloons obviously they're virtual balloons, but how many were on screen? According to one animator, two hundred and eighty six balloons or somewhere in that neighborhood were used to get Carl's house off the ground. And those balloons had to behave in a believable way. They had to be buoyant, so they had to rise up in the air, but they had to rise up in the air in a way that was natural, like if a breeze came by, it wouldn't be a straight line up, it would be moving off at an angle. They had to bounce off each other, They had to have presents. They had to be able to react off of each other's strings. So the first balloons that go up are followed by other balloons, But those balloons also have to move through strings, and that's going to restrict the way those balloons move. It all had to be believable or else it would just be distracting. So the modeling they did, the simulations they did to create the rules of physics for those balloons was pretty sophisticated. It was kind of like not unlike the hair simulator that they had to build for monsters, inc. They needed to have a system there that would make all of this work in a way that was, you know, that behaved a set of rules, and that wouldn't require animators to sit there and hand animate ten thousand balloons, which would for the number of shots, in the number of frames that it shows up on screen, it would be impossible. The movie would still be in development if all that had to be done by hand. The short Partly Cloudy would accompany Up and Up would win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. Also, it won an Oscar for Best Original Score. And that's really when people were beginning to ask, is any movie animated film besides Pixar ever going to have a shot at winning that best Animated category. The answer, by the way, is yes. But at the time it looked like Pixar could not produce anything but a surefire hit. In two thousand and nine, Edwin cat Mole was honored by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences would the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which is an award for an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry as a whole. Now cat Mole, of course, had been working on lots of different technologies related to film, not just directly to computer graphics, but other applications as well, and as a result, there were a lot of movie studios that were able to do some pretty incredible things using the technology he had invented, So it was not a big surprise that he was honored with this award. Also in two thousand and nine, Pixar created a wholly owned subsidiary called Pixar Canada because it was located in Mexico, just kidding, it was in Vancouver. The main purpose for Pixar Canada was to create short films based off the characters from Pixar feature films, So Pixar Canada would be focusing on short cartoons that had characters from Toy Story or Monsters Incorporator or that kind of thing, and it freed up animators at the main Pixar headquarters to focus on feature length films. In twenty ten, Pixar debuts Toy Story three, which of course breaks even more records. It becomes the highest grossing animated film of all time at that point. It also became the first animated film to rake in a billion dollars at the box office. It won the Best Animated Feature Oscar, and the composer Randy Newman won an Oscar for the song We Belong Together. So a very critically praised film. The first two films in the Toy Story series really explore the idea of if a toy could think and feel, what would it feel if it were lost or if it had been stolen. The third film explores the idea of why would a toy feel if the owner had outgrown the toy? Kind of explored a little bit in Toy Story two with Jesse, but now the characters of Woody and Buzz Lightyear have to deal with that. So some of these are pretty heavy concepts, the idea of being abandoned and mortality and purpose in life, and it's all being explored by three D animated toys. But what was the big challenge in this film? We've talked in some of the other movies about you know, fur in Monster z Inc was a big challenge. Getting those underwater effects just right and finding Nemo that was a big challenge. Was there anything left to be challenging by the time they hit Toy Story three? Well, according to Pixar, Yeah, and the big challenge they had at that point was creating a meaningful exchange between human characters as Andy gives his toys away to the little girl Bonnie at the end. Spoiler alert if you haven't watched Toy Story three by now, but it's been out for six years, so come on. That moment had to be really meaningful, and it's a moment between two human characters. Earlier Toy Story films had received criticism that the human characters looked kind of like toys too, they didn't really look like people. And Pixar had created human characters in previous films like Up and The Incredibles, but those characters have been pretty stylized, like they're not not so human, like, you know, they're supposed to be people, but they don't really look like people. But pix are also new. They couldn't go too far in the other direction. They couldn't make Andy look too human or Bonnie look too human. And that's because of the uncanny valley problem. And if you've never heard that term before, it really started to be applied in robotics, but the same is true for computer animation. The idea is that uncanny valley is the closer you get to looking like a human without getting it absolutely right, the more unsettling it is. Typically the real problem is with the eyes. The eyes if they don't look like they're really like there's any life behind those eyes, it looks like there's a and animated corpse acting in front of you, which for most people is probably not something that is really entertaining or fun to watch. It's unsettling. So this has been a real issue with robotics and with animation. How do you create a character that is believable and realistic enough so that people can empathize with that character and feel something when they see that character going through various issues without going so realistic that you make everyone kind of squirm in their seats because something is almost but not quite perfect. It's just wrong enough to be not good right. It's you don't want to look at it. And if you've seen certain computer animated films that have pretty realistic depictions of humans where things are just slightly off, polar Express jumps to mind for me, you know what I'm talking about. It just something doesn't look right and it is unsettling. So they had to get that fixed for Toy Story three because the scene is the end of the movie. It's really important that they got the scene right. So it took them a lot of time to work on designs for the characters that would work and do the story justice without making the audience feel uneasy in the process. And capturing that moment of Andy coming to the realization that he needs to let go of his toys. That was a huge challenge too. That would be a tough acting gig to ask a human being. To ask a human I need you to show us that your character has realized it's time to let go of a beloved piece of childhood, because it's the right thing to do, both for the child you're giving the toy two and for the toy itself. I need to see that. That would be tough to ask a human actor to do. I mean, good human actors would be able to do it, but it's not easy. It's even harder when you're talking about animation, because that's a huge group of people all working together to try and make that happen, and getting all those little details right is enormously challenging from a technical standpoint. Now, behind the scenes footage for Toy Story three, they reveal that the entire movie has one hundred and thirty nine thousand, six hundred and eighty frames in it, and each object in the film, every single thing you see in the movie, had to be built in several stages by several teams of people, even if it only appeared in a second or two of on screen time. So every single this old individual component had to be designed, sketched out, modeled, lit, textured, colored. All of these things all had to happen for all of the different pieces, for all the frames of the movie. And then you start to understand, Oh, now, I see why making a movie like this takes five years. That same year that Toy Story three came out, they published a short called Day and Night. And that also that same year, John Laster would become the first producer of animated films to win the Producer's Guild of America David O. Selznik Achievement Award in Motion Pictures. So Pixar again becomes a pioneer in the animation industry, really helping gain more legitimacy in the eyes of other parts of the industry. For a long time, I would argue that animated films have been kind of looked down upon by certain certain other areas of the film industry. I think that both Disney in general and Pixar in particular have done a lot to turn that around. Other studios also have done great work, DreamWorks among them. It's not like Pixar and Disney are the only two entities out there, but they really did pave the way for a lot of other successes. In twenty eleven, Pixar turns twenty five and releases Cars Too. Also, they released the first toy story short cartoon, Hawaiian Vacation, and another short film called La Luna. That year, a Lassiter would direct Cars Too, which was the first time he had directed a film since the original Cars, which came out I think two thousand and six. He had directed some of the other shorter cartoons Pixar had produced between Cars and Cars Too, but he hadn't directed a feature length film since Cars. Out of the seventeen movies Pixar has made, Car, Ours ranks number fifteen at the box office in the United States, so it's not at the very bottom, but it's two up from the very bottom. It ranks number nine globally, however, so nine out of seventeen when you look at worldwide box office. So what two films actually got less at the box office than Cars Two? That would be A Bugs Life, which was Pixar's second film, which made a little less than Toy Story did, and The Good Dinosaur, which is at the bottom of both the US and the global box office lists. We'll get to The Good Dinosaur in just a little bit and talk about the problems that movie had. We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more about the Pixar story. In twenty twelve, Brave is released by Pixar along with La Luna, which had been premiered the year before, but officially released with a movie in twenty twelve. Brave also would win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Brave was co directed by Brenda Chapman, who was the first woman to direct a Pixar film. She had previously been the first woman to direct a major studio animated picture, but that was with DreamWorks. She was one of three directors for the Prince of Egypt, and she was the first woman director to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature with Brave. That being said, she was not director from start to finish. She had the idea for Brave. She based it off her own relationship with her daughter, but there were some real creative issues behind the scenes while they were working on the story, so during the production of the film, Chapman was essentially fired from the production. According to Chapman herself and Mark Andrews stepped in her place. They both got co direc director credit, but she was no longer part of the production and she stayed on with Pixar until the movie came out, and then she left and for a while she worked as a consultant with Lucasfilm. She went back to dream Works for a while. She's done some other stuff since then, but yeah, she was not on for the entire film. Still was the first female director of a Pixar movie. Now, for Brave, they actually had to go back and create a new hair simulator. They built one for Monsters Inc More than a know around a decade earlier, but they needed a new one. Why because Meredith's hair is curly, and curly hair moves in a different way than straight hair, and they could not get curly hair to work properly using the old simulator, so they had to make a new one. In fact, it was so hard for them to get the curly hair to behave the way they wanted it to. For a while, they actually talked about giving Merita a haircut, but that was met with an intense negative reaction for pretty much everyone else in the company, and they said, no, you got to get this right. So it took more than a year just to get the hair right, to build a computer simulation that could take curly hair and make it behave in a natural way. When you think about the nature of curly hair, you can understand why. It's not like it's just a wire that's got some weight to it that needs to move around. That curl is going to extend or contract based upon the various forces that are acting upon it. It's a complicated thing to simulate, and you have to do it for a character who's in nearly every frame of the movie, and so there's a lot of motion that goes into that. Even when she has to have her hair pulled back, she still has a little curl that gets loose in the Witch's workshop. By the way, if you pay attention, there's some easter eggs with references to other Pixar films, including If You look closely. A pizza Planet car is on the table in the Witch's workshop before she clears it just a Pixar loves to work in Little Easter Eggs and all their movies, and I was going to talk about more of those, but I realized that if I did that, I'd have to do a three year or four more parts, and that's stretching it even for you guys. Twenty thirteen, Pixar releases Monsters University. Now. This is Pixar's first prequel film. Monsters University tells a story about how Mike and Sully met in college. The first pass at the story got a note that was a killer, which was, this story's too predictable. That's a hard, hard problem to overcome when you're talking about a prequel, because you already know where the characters end up. You've seen the original movie. In Monsters, Inc. They're working on the scare floor. So how do you create a movie where knowing how they end up is not leading to a predictable outcome. It also became a big challenge to define the character of Sully because in Monsters, Inc. The character of Sully really comes out because he's interacting with the human girl Boo. When he has Boo there, that's where you see Sullivan's personality come forward. But Boo is not in Monsters University. This is before Sullivan meets Boo. So for a while they were trying to make Sullivan the focus of the movie, but they couldn't figure out what character was there. And eventually they realized, hey, wait a minute, Mike Wazowski, maybe we focus on him instead. And once they did that, then they were able to really develop a story that they believed in. Now, in Monsters, Inc. There were five notable characters that had for in Monsters University, there were two hundred and fifty. So while they had created the simulator more than a decade earlier, they had to rely on it again, and they had to scale it up, which required way more computer power than what they were using ten years earlier. And like I said previously, Sullivan had about a million hairs just on his own, and animating all of those by hand is impossible. So the simulation guided the way each hair would move depending upon the forces acting on it, and it even included momentum, which meant that once a character stops moving, the hair would continue to move just a little bit because it still had some momentum, some inertia keeping it going, and or rather inertia would keep it still until it starts moving. But you get what I'm saying. Like it behaved according to physics. It wasn't just it moves when he moves and stops when he stops. There's a little bit of a lag there, which is realistic. It's kind of cool. One of the problems they noticed was whenever Sullivan would make really big fast movements, his hair would stretch out across the screen. It would be like a rubber band where it would extend all the way on to the other end of the screen. And this was a problem. It looked awful, you know. It wasn't like the hair just looked elongated. It was looking grotesque. They eventually figured out what the problem was. The simulation was calculating that those hairs were being subjected to forces of up to one hundred g's with Sullivan at the mass and speed he moved was creating forces of one hundred g's and so the hairs were stretching and deforming because of those massive forces acting on them in the simulation. So they came up with a way to solve this, they created little kind of force field areas that they called inertial field generators, which sounds like a Star Trek kind of thing to me. And these ended up creating new rules for those hairs, saying, even though Sullivan moves really fast and he's a big, big monster, you never really experienced more than ten g's of four, And that allowed the hair to behave itself and not stretch across the screen and ruin everything. In twenty thirteen, also Disney's film Planes comes out. Now Planes is tied to Pixar's Cars series, but Planes is not produced by Pixar, so instead the Plane series comes out of Disney Tones Studios. If you look at the movie Planes, it clearly is inspired by Cars. The animation style is very much in keeping with Cars. The character creation is unquestionably of that style, but it's not Pixar. So I wanted to point that out just because it was interesting to see that other elements of Disney started to create movies that were leveraging the property of Pixar but were not actually produced by Pixar itself. Fourteen it was a weird year for Pixar. That was the first year in a really long time that did not have a feature film debut from the studio. The reason why no movie came out in twenty fourteen was because of huge problems that were happening with the films that were currently in development at Pixar. There were some major, major story issues happening that were holding up the release of a couple of movies. In one case, the movie that came out ended up being a success despite those problems. In the other case, a movie came out and failed to find that level of success. But in twenty fourteen we did get some Pixar stuff. There was a TV special that came out for the holidays and it aired on ABC called Toy Story That Time Forgot. And also Pixar released a free, non commercial version of its in house renderings software called render Man. The company also licensed a commercial version of this software to other parties. And with render Man, you can create these virtual three dimensional camera placements, you can define geometry, you can place lights on lots of other stuff. Now, it's not a three D modeling suite, you would need other programs to do that. It's not an animating suite. You would need other programs to do that. But it can act as a liaison between those two types of softwarees modeling and animation, so very useful, and now people have access to a non commercial free version of it because of the release in twenty fourteen. Now twenty fifteen would be when those movies that had been in trouble during their development cycles finally come out. The first was Inside Out. Pixar story department had to research a lot of information in neuroscience and psychology to get this story right, because of course, it's all about how our brains process information and emotions. It's really about how emotions can guide our decisions and affect us and change over time. That's the heart of the story, and several emotions were workshopped in the development process but eventually dropped from the final version of the story. There were emotions like hope and envy, pride on we even Shotenfreude was part of the original story development, and at one point the story had twenty seven different emotions as characters, but that just wasn't manageable, so they had to figure out what were the most important ones, what could you peel away and have as your core of characters, And that story was really hard to get right. Pete Doctor, who was leading the project, even thought about giving up after three years of working on the story and not getting anywhere or feeling like it just wasn't heading in the right direction. Originally, the prime story was not going to be about an eleven year old girl's reaction when her family moves from one part of the country to another. That's kind of the event that precipitates all the action of the film as it stands, but that wasn't the original story. The original story was going to be that Joy the emotion. Joy decides she doesn't want the girl Riley, to grow up into an adult. She wants Riley to be a kid because kids experienced Joy on a level that is orders of magnitude greater than adults, and so Joy was going to take every opportunity to keep Riley from developing into an adult. But then they realize that it turned Joy into a really unlikable character, so they scrapped that. They had to go back to the drawing board and they had to re storyboard the entire movie. They had hit the point where they had storyboarded the film. Now, typically Pixar doesn't start storyboarding until they feel that the general story is pretty good. That the script is done, then they would storyboard a movie, and then the next step once the storyboard is approved is to go into animation, modeling and animation. But this one had been storyboarded and then they had to scrap it and redo it, so it really was a dramatic change, and they still had to try and get the movie out before it got too late. On top of that, Inside that was the first Pixar film made without the input of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs had passed away in twenty eleven, and while Jobs hadn't really been in a real leadership role for many years, he was still active in the process of hearing story ideas and giving his input all the way up to his death, and John Lassiter was also largely absent. John Lassiter was over at Walt Disney Animation trying to get that department to turn around because they had had their own series of disappointing films, films that weren't necessarily bad but were not performing well at the box office, Movies like The Princess and the Frog, which is a perfectly fine film but failed to capture an audience. So Lassiter was trying to fix that and wasn't really around to help out with Inside Out. There are also big technical challenges with that movie. A big one being that the character of Joy has these little particles that radiate from her skin, and since Joy is the primary protagonist, that meant having to replicate that effect for hundreds of shots in the movie, and that took a lot of computer power as well. Ultimately, all that hard work paid off. The movie was a huge success. It was the third highest grossing Pixar film in both US and global box office numbers, so it worked. Also, it was released with the short film Lava. We've got a little bit more to say about Pixar circa twenty sixteen, but first let's take another quick break. Twenty fifteen also saw the other troubled movie come out, that is The Good Dinosaur, and The Good Dinosaur is a black sheep in Pixar. It's the movie that when I talked to my coworkers, they some of them didn't even realize that was a Pixar movie. Some of them hadn't even heard the movie at all. So twenty fifteen is the first year in which two different Pixar feature length films come out to theaters. But the Good Dinosaur does not perform the way Inside Out did. In the United States, it earned one hundred and twenty three million. Now globally it earned almost three hundred and thirty two million dollars. That's not chump change. That's a lot of money, but it still makes the movie the lowest performing film in Pixar's history as an animation studio. That one hundred and twenty three million dollars, that's less than what Toy Story one made at the box office. If you adjust for inflation, it's much less than what Toy Story made. And if you you know, not just inflation, but the inflation of movie ticket prices much much less, it means way fewer people saw that movie. The story of the film, which if you haven't seen it, it's about a dinosaur. It's it's the takes the premise of what if the meteor that struck the Earth and helped precipitate the mass extinction that led to all the dinosaurs dying off? What if it never hit the Earth? What if it missed and dinosaurs continued to live on Earth and humans evolved least to caveman status, and you had both coexisting on the same planet. That's kind of the world, it said in and that's not the premise of the story, but it is the world that the characters exist within. That whole story was reworked several times. The idea of well, what is the actual point A to point B two point C storyline? We understand what the world is, but what are we trying to say? It was a huge problem, an enormous problem. It caused the film to miss its original release date. It was supposed to come out in twenty thirteen, It got pushed to twenty fourteen, and then pushed again to twenty fifteen. So when the story was not where it needed to be by twenty thirteen, when it was supposed to debut, and it hadn't even been finished or really gone beyond that story development stage, Bob Peterson and John Walker, who were leading the project at that time, were removed from the project. Peterson would remain with Pixar but work on other things, and Denise Reim, who was a producer in the film, would replace John Walker. Peterson, who had first worked on the story when Bob Peterson came up with the idea back in two thousand and nine, would become the director of the movie, and things got pretty dark for Pixar in twenty thirteen. It wasn't just that The Good Dinosaur was having problems. There were other issues as well. Pixar had closed down Pixar Canada in twenty thirteen and laid off eighty employees as a result. A few months later, the company laid off another sixty seven employees from its main office, and by then Pixar was up to more than twelve hundred employees. The movie was reworked, and reworked, and reworked, and even recast. They had cast the movie because they thought they were getting toward a complete story in twenty thirteen, but it didn't happen, so they had to recast it because when they came up with the finished story, they had dropped a lot of characters or replaced them with other characters. So there's I think. Francis McDorman, I think, was the only actress who was attached to the original film and remained on the cast for the reworked version. A Monsters University short called Party Central was supposed to premiere with The Good Dinosaur, but eventually Pixar shifted that to go in front of him up, it's most wanted. So instead, a different Pixar short called Sanjay's Super Team debuted with The Good Dinosaur. And I've seen The Good Dinosaur, but I haven't seen Sanjay's Super Team because I saw The Good Dinosaur on a plane and they didn't have the short film to go in front of it. So I'm curious how Sanjay's Superteam matches up. I've heard about it, I knew what it was, but I had not seen the actual shorts. I need to do that. Moving to twenty sixteen, wrapping up this epic series on Pixar, we get the release of Finding Dori, the sequel to Finding Nemo. Finding Dory was originally supposed to come out on November twenty fourth, twenty fifteen. That's when The Good Dinosaur actually premiered, so Finding Dory was pushed back to the summer of twenty sixteen. And it's the only feature length Pixar film I have not seen yet. It's not because I didn't like Finding Nemo. Actually, Finding Nemo might be my favorite Pixar movie to date. I think it might be the top one for me. It's tough because there are a lot of Pixar movies I think are really really good, but Finding Nemo in particular speaks to me. Finding Dory I have not seen yet. It's only because I don't have a whole lot of times, so I haven't been to the theater in several months. There are a lot of movies that came out this year that I have not yet seen, but a lot of people did go see it. It had the largest opening for an animated film of our third largest opening I should say, third largest opening of an animated film of all time, and grossed four hundred and fifty one million dollars in North America alone to date as of July twenty second, twenty sixteen, and it's probably more than that at that point. And that's just North America, that's not globally. So it has done incredibly well and I can't wait to see it. I don't have any behind the scenes information about Finding Dory, other than the fact that it had been teased that there was going to be a Finding Nemo sequel for a while. In fact, there was originally going to be a Finding Nemo sequel produced by that Circle seven group that had been formed when Disney wanted to try and continue making films based off Pixar movies but not made by Pixar itself, but of course Circle seven had already been dissolved, and Finding Dorry is not based off anything that Circle seven came up with. Can't wait to see it. Future films that Pixar has planned include Toy Story four, which I don't think most people even thought was going to be a thing, Cars three, The Incredibles two, It's another SEQUEA was never expecting, and an original film that is not based off any former Pixar or are previous I should say previous Pixar movie called Coco, will come out in twenty seventeen. Coco being inspired by Dia de Muertos, the Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead, the very colorful holiday, and in fact, there was some some controversy around that not having anything to do with Disney producing a Day of the Dead holiday themed movie, in particular, especially once they started bringing on cultural experts to make certain that the movie is respectful and reflects the cultural values of people of Mexico and not just exploit them, which would be horrible. But also there was an issue when Disney moved to trademark the phrase Dia de las Mortos, and a lot of people, myself included, felt that that move was perhaps a little dumb. Dumb is a fine word. It was a dumb move on Disney's part. It would be like trying to trademark Christmas or Halloween or Memorial Day, trademarking that so that you can use it and no one else can. That just it struck people as being incredibly shortsighted and insensitive. Don't know who had Disney filed for that trademark. I'm guessing it probably wasn't John Lassiter. It doesn't sound like something he would have done. But at any rate, that did not happen. Disney dropped it, and like I said, they brought on and some cultural consultants to make sure that the stuff that Pixar was developing was respectful while still being an entertaining movie. And I'm really looking forward to it. I love the artistic style of Dia de Muertos and sugar skulls and things of that nature, and I'm very curious to see what story they have. From my understand and this is from a friend of mine, so I apologize if I get this wrong. If I get it wrong, it's because of me, not because of my friend. It's because I misinterpreted. But as I understand it, Coco sort of refers to the concept of a boogeyman, so that's probably going to play some sort of role within the story, which follows a character named Miguel. And that's all I know about Coco, but I'm very much looking forward to it. There's some unannounced films that are on Pixar's slate. They have not publicly said what they will be, but they have said that those movies are original works. They are not sequels, which gave came as something of a relief to a lot of people because seeing Toy Story four, Cars three, and Incredibles two on the schedule, people begin to ask, well, this Pixar just going to be in the business of churning out sequels now, or are we going to get more original works? Because originally the idea was there would be an original movie pretty much every year and a sequel every other year, and that hasn't quite worked out, But maybe that will change after this upcoming slate of films that wraps up the Pixar Story Part three that catches us up to present day, and maybe we will have more to say about Pixar in the future. It is a fascinating company. It's history with other major companies Disney and Apple make it really fascinating from a technology standpoint. The business side of things incredible. Also the idea that the animator who was fired from Disney came on to Pixar became a public face of Pixar. Even though he was not the technical leader. He was the public face and a lot of people look at John Lassiter as being the leader of Pixar. Then going over to become a chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation, becoming an important voice in the company that once fired him phenomenal. Also, never forget he started off as a skipper on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. We should all be so lucky. And that concludes our three part series about the Pixar story. As I have said a couple of times during these classic episodes, I could go back and do a follow up to talk about what Pixar has been doing since then. There's also some interesting stuff to talk about with the incorporation of Pixar into the various theme parks that Disney has notably over in Disneyland. They have Pixar pere, but their other wants to talk about as well, So maybe I'll do that because that's always fun to chat about as well. And let's just talk about some of the movies that Pixar has pushed out and some of the innovation the company has continued to pursue since twenty sixteen. But until then, 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.

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's time for another tech Stuff classic episode. Over the past two weeks, we have listened to classics from The Pixar Story Parts one and two, So this week it's The Pixar Story, Part three, which concludes the trilogy of episodes I did about Pixar from back in twenty sixteen. This one originally published August tenth, twenty sixteen, so there's a lot more to say since then, but let's sit back and listen to this classic episode. We left off last episode in two thousand and six, when Disney had officially announced its intent to acquire Pixar outright. It would no longer just be a partnership, a contractual partnership. It would be that the two companies would become united. So now we're going to pick up in two thousand and seven, when Pixar would release the first film it had as an official part of the Disney Company itself. That film was Rataituey with Patton Oswalt voicing the main character, Patton Oswald, one of my favorite comedians. Now, Rattue was again very successful. Like all the Pixar films that led up to this point, it was successful both financially and critically. It later would win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. We're getting to a point now where the people were starting to ask the question, are other movies ever going to have a real chance against Pixar movies in the category of animated feature? And we also see more and more push from companies like Pixar for the Academy to consider animated movies on the same playing ground as live action films. Now, Ratatuy would be another brad Bird directed film, although not Originally, Bradbird was brought in to replace a director, Jan Pinkava. I believe Jan might be Yon. Jan Pinkava was at the Helm and then brad Bird took over. One of the big challenges facing the animators with Ratatue was finding a way to animate Linguini. That's the human character who's under the control or partial control of Remy the rat. They're trying to figure out, well, how do we animate him where it's clear to the audience that he's not really in control of his own movements, or not in full control at any rate. That took a lot of work, so they ended up doing a lot of They studied a lot of puppet puppets like marionettes and stuff like that. That movie did quite well and over at Disneyland. In two thousand and seven, a new attraction called the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage opened up now that actually used the old submarine voyage ride, the twenty thousand leagues Under the Sea type ride, which had closed in nineteen ninety eight, so almost a decade after the ride had closed, it reopens with a new theme with Finding Nemo. Disney World would get its own version of this ride, but that would be housed in the Living Seas and not use the submarines. Instead, you get a Little Mermaid Submarine ride now instead of the Finding Nemo version. In two thousand and eight, Pixar would debut the film Wally, come out actually the day after My birthday that year, and Wally won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The Movie's Adorable and also debuted with the short film Presto. Wally was the first Pixar film to feature scenes with live actors. And the experience was so much faster than computer animation that Picks Her folks were really surprised and excited about it, because with animation, if you create a scene and you realize, oh, we need to have this character turn around a little faster, or we need to light this in a different way, or the entire pacing of the scene needs to slow down a bit for it to make sense, that requires animators to go back and do a ton more work, and it could be many, many many days before there's something else to look at, whereas with live action, if it doesn't work, you give the direction to the crew and to the cast, and you do it again and it's right there. So the animators were all kind of gaga over how different live action is to computer animation, and they said that the actors were kind of amuse used because that's what the actors were used to, but the animators, to them, was a whole new world. Oh. Also, the fact that the shoot was catered appeared to be a really big deal, which just tells you what kind of things people find important when they go to a film shoot. Man, I wish my shoots were catered. Anyway, it was an entertaining thing to see that this live action being incorporated into the movie had such an effect on the various Pixar employees, and it was also kind of interesting to just see live action showing up at a Pixar movie in the first place. But another big challenge with Wally was creating a story in which there's really no dialogue for the first act of the film. Now, obviously that makes the story much more of a a story challenge rather than a technical challenge, but it also meant that the team had to put in a lot of personality in the animations. They had to figure out, how can we animate these characters in a way where we understand what their emotional reactions are, what their motivations are, what they're feeling and thinking at any given time, considering the fact they're not able to talk or they're not they have nothing to talk too, And that actually ends up creating a pretty tough technical challenge. It's not just how do you animate this character, but what motions indicate those specific feelings and thoughts. So it involves animators studying themselves a lot, as they make different facial expressions and they have different body language in response to different types of ideas like, you know, you just got to you just open the door, and you just found out your friends are throwing you a surprise birthday party. What's your reaction? Or you got home to find out that your dog got out of the backyard somehow and is missing. What's your reaction? And studying yourself and then translating that into a character, and a character that's not human a robot is a big challenge, whether it's technical or just from a psychological standpoint, So pretty spectacular work that they were able to create characters that could give you that feeling that they wanted, even though they're not human or speaking. In two thousand and eight, Pixar would finish work on the first set of Car Tunes, which are in fact short cartoons about the car's characters. Jim Morris, who produced Wally, would become the general manager of Pixar, and in two thousand and nine, Up debuts at the can Film Festival, So the first animated film ever in the history of the festival to open the whole thing up. And I imagine that festival attendees were just as devastated by the first ten minutes of that movie that I am I still can't watch the first ten minutes of UP without turning into a blubbering mess. I know because I did it today. When I'm recording this, I was doing research on Pixar, specifically on UP, and I watched it twice. I watched the original sequence in storyboard format, and then I watched the actual finished sequence, and I was so thankful that on Fridays our office is pretty dead because no one was there to hear me blubbering at my desk. I'm not ashamed of it. I just don't want to make other people feel uncomfortable. The whole idea for UP began with just the notion of an old man floating his house away with a bunch of balloons, which is just kind of a comedic image. But while the image was really evocative and people at Pixar thought, yeah, it's a really cool idea, they had to come up with, well, why is he doing that, where is he going? What's the whole point? So they had to create a story around this picture, and that's where they started working on the ideas for UP. Now. The original opening had the character of Carl, who's the main character in UP, and his wife Ellie falling in love through a contentious and competitive relationship. It starts off with their kids. Originally, the two kids didn't get along with each other and would kind of ambush one another and punch each other. It was sort of a violent behavior, and it got to a point where those punches give way to the characters falling for each other, dating, getting married, and all the story beats that you see in the first ten minutes of Up that I'm not going to go over or I'll start crying on a podcast, and no one wants that, but at any rate, it's same sort of progression, but in a different emotional impact because people are getting punched. So they ended up reworking it because when they showed it to people, the reaction was pretty quiet and they said it's a little too violent. So they went back, reworked it and did a different take, which led to what you saw in the film. Technical challenges included creating a system that could guide the behavior of a lot of balloons, because that's how Carl's House moves to South America. So how many balloons were used, like in the movie, how were the balloons showing up? I mean, not real balloons obviously they're virtual balloons, but how many were on screen? According to one animator, two hundred and eighty six balloons or somewhere in that neighborhood were used to get Carl's house off the ground. And those balloons had to behave in a believable way. They had to be buoyant, so they had to rise up in the air, but they had to rise up in the air in a way that was natural, like if a breeze came by, it wouldn't be a straight line up, it would be moving off at an angle. They had to bounce off each other, They had to have presents. They had to be able to react off of each other's strings. So the first balloons that go up are followed by other balloons, But those balloons also have to move through strings, and that's going to restrict the way those balloons move. It all had to be believable or else it would just be distracting. So the modeling they did, the simulations they did to create the rules of physics for those balloons was pretty sophisticated. It was kind of like not unlike the hair simulator that they had to build for monsters, inc. They needed to have a system there that would make all of this work in a way that was, you know, that behaved a set of rules, and that wouldn't require animators to sit there and hand animate ten thousand balloons, which would for the number of shots, in the number of frames that it shows up on screen, it would be impossible. The movie would still be in development if all that had to be done by hand. The short Partly Cloudy would accompany Up and Up would win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. Also, it won an Oscar for Best Original Score. And that's really when people were beginning to ask, is any movie animated film besides Pixar ever going to have a shot at winning that best Animated category. The answer, by the way, is yes. But at the time it looked like Pixar could not produce anything but a surefire hit. In two thousand and nine, Edwin cat Mole was honored by the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences would the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which is an award for an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry as a whole. Now cat Mole, of course, had been working on lots of different technologies related to film, not just directly to computer graphics, but other applications as well, and as a result, there were a lot of movie studios that were able to do some pretty incredible things using the technology he had invented, So it was not a big surprise that he was honored with this award. Also in two thousand and nine, Pixar created a wholly owned subsidiary called Pixar Canada because it was located in Mexico, just kidding, it was in Vancouver. The main purpose for Pixar Canada was to create short films based off the characters from Pixar feature films, So Pixar Canada would be focusing on short cartoons that had characters from Toy Story or Monsters Incorporator or that kind of thing, and it freed up animators at the main Pixar headquarters to focus on feature length films. In twenty ten, Pixar debuts Toy Story three, which of course breaks even more records. It becomes the highest grossing animated film of all time at that point. It also became the first animated film to rake in a billion dollars at the box office. It won the Best Animated Feature Oscar, and the composer Randy Newman won an Oscar for the song We Belong Together. So a very critically praised film. The first two films in the Toy Story series really explore the idea of if a toy could think and feel, what would it feel if it were lost or if it had been stolen. The third film explores the idea of why would a toy feel if the owner had outgrown the toy? Kind of explored a little bit in Toy Story two with Jesse, but now the characters of Woody and Buzz Lightyear have to deal with that. So some of these are pretty heavy concepts, the idea of being abandoned and mortality and purpose in life, and it's all being explored by three D animated toys. But what was the big challenge in this film? We've talked in some of the other movies about you know, fur in Monster z Inc was a big challenge. Getting those underwater effects just right and finding Nemo that was a big challenge. Was there anything left to be challenging by the time they hit Toy Story three? Well, according to Pixar, Yeah, and the big challenge they had at that point was creating a meaningful exchange between human characters as Andy gives his toys away to the little girl Bonnie at the end. Spoiler alert if you haven't watched Toy Story three by now, but it's been out for six years, so come on. That moment had to be really meaningful, and it's a moment between two human characters. Earlier Toy Story films had received criticism that the human characters looked kind of like toys too, they didn't really look like people. And Pixar had created human characters in previous films like Up and The Incredibles, but those characters have been pretty stylized, like they're not not so human, like, you know, they're supposed to be people, but they don't really look like people. But pix are also new. They couldn't go too far in the other direction. They couldn't make Andy look too human or Bonnie look too human. And that's because of the uncanny valley problem. And if you've never heard that term before, it really started to be applied in robotics, but the same is true for computer animation. The idea is that uncanny valley is the closer you get to looking like a human without getting it absolutely right, the more unsettling it is. Typically the real problem is with the eyes. The eyes if they don't look like they're really like there's any life behind those eyes, it looks like there's a and animated corpse acting in front of you, which for most people is probably not something that is really entertaining or fun to watch. It's unsettling. So this has been a real issue with robotics and with animation. How do you create a character that is believable and realistic enough so that people can empathize with that character and feel something when they see that character going through various issues without going so realistic that you make everyone kind of squirm in their seats because something is almost but not quite perfect. It's just wrong enough to be not good right. It's you don't want to look at it. And if you've seen certain computer animated films that have pretty realistic depictions of humans where things are just slightly off, polar Express jumps to mind for me, you know what I'm talking about. It just something doesn't look right and it is unsettling. So they had to get that fixed for Toy Story three because the scene is the end of the movie. It's really important that they got the scene right. So it took them a lot of time to work on designs for the characters that would work and do the story justice without making the audience feel uneasy in the process. And capturing that moment of Andy coming to the realization that he needs to let go of his toys. That was a huge challenge too. That would be a tough acting gig to ask a human being. To ask a human I need you to show us that your character has realized it's time to let go of a beloved piece of childhood, because it's the right thing to do, both for the child you're giving the toy two and for the toy itself. I need to see that. That would be tough to ask a human actor to do. I mean, good human actors would be able to do it, but it's not easy. It's even harder when you're talking about animation, because that's a huge group of people all working together to try and make that happen, and getting all those little details right is enormously challenging from a technical standpoint. Now, behind the scenes footage for Toy Story three, they reveal that the entire movie has one hundred and thirty nine thousand, six hundred and eighty frames in it, and each object in the film, every single thing you see in the movie, had to be built in several stages by several teams of people, even if it only appeared in a second or two of on screen time. So every single this old individual component had to be designed, sketched out, modeled, lit, textured, colored. All of these things all had to happen for all of the different pieces, for all the frames of the movie. And then you start to understand, Oh, now, I see why making a movie like this takes five years. That same year that Toy Story three came out, they published a short called Day and Night. And that also that same year, John Laster would become the first producer of animated films to win the Producer's Guild of America David O. Selznik Achievement Award in Motion Pictures. So Pixar again becomes a pioneer in the animation industry, really helping gain more legitimacy in the eyes of other parts of the industry. For a long time, I would argue that animated films have been kind of looked down upon by certain certain other areas of the film industry. I think that both Disney in general and Pixar in particular have done a lot to turn that around. Other studios also have done great work, DreamWorks among them. It's not like Pixar and Disney are the only two entities out there, but they really did pave the way for a lot of other successes. In twenty eleven, Pixar turns twenty five and releases Cars Too. Also, they released the first toy story short cartoon, Hawaiian Vacation, and another short film called La Luna. That year, a Lassiter would direct Cars Too, which was the first time he had directed a film since the original Cars, which came out I think two thousand and six. He had directed some of the other shorter cartoons Pixar had produced between Cars and Cars Too, but he hadn't directed a feature length film since Cars. Out of the seventeen movies Pixar has made, Car, Ours ranks number fifteen at the box office in the United States, so it's not at the very bottom, but it's two up from the very bottom. It ranks number nine globally, however, so nine out of seventeen when you look at worldwide box office. So what two films actually got less at the box office than Cars Two? That would be A Bugs Life, which was Pixar's second film, which made a little less than Toy Story did, and The Good Dinosaur, which is at the bottom of both the US and the global box office lists. We'll get to The Good Dinosaur in just a little bit and talk about the problems that movie had. We're going to take a quick break, and then we'll be back with more about the Pixar story. In twenty twelve, Brave is released by Pixar along with La Luna, which had been premiered the year before, but officially released with a movie in twenty twelve. Brave also would win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Brave was co directed by Brenda Chapman, who was the first woman to direct a Pixar film. She had previously been the first woman to direct a major studio animated picture, but that was with DreamWorks. She was one of three directors for the Prince of Egypt, and she was the first woman director to win an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature with Brave. That being said, she was not director from start to finish. She had the idea for Brave. She based it off her own relationship with her daughter, but there were some real creative issues behind the scenes while they were working on the story, so during the production of the film, Chapman was essentially fired from the production. According to Chapman herself and Mark Andrews stepped in her place. They both got co direc director credit, but she was no longer part of the production and she stayed on with Pixar until the movie came out, and then she left and for a while she worked as a consultant with Lucasfilm. She went back to dream Works for a while. She's done some other stuff since then, but yeah, she was not on for the entire film. Still was the first female director of a Pixar movie. Now, for Brave, they actually had to go back and create a new hair simulator. They built one for Monsters Inc More than a know around a decade earlier, but they needed a new one. Why because Meredith's hair is curly, and curly hair moves in a different way than straight hair, and they could not get curly hair to work properly using the old simulator, so they had to make a new one. In fact, it was so hard for them to get the curly hair to behave the way they wanted it to. For a while, they actually talked about giving Merita a haircut, but that was met with an intense negative reaction for pretty much everyone else in the company, and they said, no, you got to get this right. So it took more than a year just to get the hair right, to build a computer simulation that could take curly hair and make it behave in a natural way. When you think about the nature of curly hair, you can understand why. It's not like it's just a wire that's got some weight to it that needs to move around. That curl is going to extend or contract based upon the various forces that are acting upon it. It's a complicated thing to simulate, and you have to do it for a character who's in nearly every frame of the movie, and so there's a lot of motion that goes into that. Even when she has to have her hair pulled back, she still has a little curl that gets loose in the Witch's workshop. By the way, if you pay attention, there's some easter eggs with references to other Pixar films, including If You look closely. A pizza Planet car is on the table in the Witch's workshop before she clears it just a Pixar loves to work in Little Easter Eggs and all their movies, and I was going to talk about more of those, but I realized that if I did that, I'd have to do a three year or four more parts, and that's stretching it even for you guys. Twenty thirteen, Pixar releases Monsters University. Now. This is Pixar's first prequel film. Monsters University tells a story about how Mike and Sully met in college. The first pass at the story got a note that was a killer, which was, this story's too predictable. That's a hard, hard problem to overcome when you're talking about a prequel, because you already know where the characters end up. You've seen the original movie. In Monsters, Inc. They're working on the scare floor. So how do you create a movie where knowing how they end up is not leading to a predictable outcome. It also became a big challenge to define the character of Sully because in Monsters, Inc. The character of Sully really comes out because he's interacting with the human girl Boo. When he has Boo there, that's where you see Sullivan's personality come forward. But Boo is not in Monsters University. This is before Sullivan meets Boo. So for a while they were trying to make Sullivan the focus of the movie, but they couldn't figure out what character was there. And eventually they realized, hey, wait a minute, Mike Wazowski, maybe we focus on him instead. And once they did that, then they were able to really develop a story that they believed in. Now, in Monsters, Inc. There were five notable characters that had for in Monsters University, there were two hundred and fifty. So while they had created the simulator more than a decade earlier, they had to rely on it again, and they had to scale it up, which required way more computer power than what they were using ten years earlier. And like I said previously, Sullivan had about a million hairs just on his own, and animating all of those by hand is impossible. So the simulation guided the way each hair would move depending upon the forces acting on it, and it even included momentum, which meant that once a character stops moving, the hair would continue to move just a little bit because it still had some momentum, some inertia keeping it going, and or rather inertia would keep it still until it starts moving. But you get what I'm saying. Like it behaved according to physics. It wasn't just it moves when he moves and stops when he stops. There's a little bit of a lag there, which is realistic. It's kind of cool. One of the problems they noticed was whenever Sullivan would make really big fast movements, his hair would stretch out across the screen. It would be like a rubber band where it would extend all the way on to the other end of the screen. And this was a problem. It looked awful, you know. It wasn't like the hair just looked elongated. It was looking grotesque. They eventually figured out what the problem was. The simulation was calculating that those hairs were being subjected to forces of up to one hundred g's with Sullivan at the mass and speed he moved was creating forces of one hundred g's and so the hairs were stretching and deforming because of those massive forces acting on them in the simulation. So they came up with a way to solve this, they created little kind of force field areas that they called inertial field generators, which sounds like a Star Trek kind of thing to me. And these ended up creating new rules for those hairs, saying, even though Sullivan moves really fast and he's a big, big monster, you never really experienced more than ten g's of four, And that allowed the hair to behave itself and not stretch across the screen and ruin everything. In twenty thirteen, also Disney's film Planes comes out. Now Planes is tied to Pixar's Cars series, but Planes is not produced by Pixar, so instead the Plane series comes out of Disney Tones Studios. If you look at the movie Planes, it clearly is inspired by Cars. The animation style is very much in keeping with Cars. The character creation is unquestionably of that style, but it's not Pixar. So I wanted to point that out just because it was interesting to see that other elements of Disney started to create movies that were leveraging the property of Pixar but were not actually produced by Pixar itself. Fourteen it was a weird year for Pixar. That was the first year in a really long time that did not have a feature film debut from the studio. The reason why no movie came out in twenty fourteen was because of huge problems that were happening with the films that were currently in development at Pixar. There were some major, major story issues happening that were holding up the release of a couple of movies. In one case, the movie that came out ended up being a success despite those problems. In the other case, a movie came out and failed to find that level of success. But in twenty fourteen we did get some Pixar stuff. There was a TV special that came out for the holidays and it aired on ABC called Toy Story That Time Forgot. And also Pixar released a free, non commercial version of its in house renderings software called render Man. The company also licensed a commercial version of this software to other parties. And with render Man, you can create these virtual three dimensional camera placements, you can define geometry, you can place lights on lots of other stuff. Now, it's not a three D modeling suite, you would need other programs to do that. It's not an animating suite. You would need other programs to do that. But it can act as a liaison between those two types of softwarees modeling and animation, so very useful, and now people have access to a non commercial free version of it because of the release in twenty fourteen. Now twenty fifteen would be when those movies that had been in trouble during their development cycles finally come out. The first was Inside Out. Pixar story department had to research a lot of information in neuroscience and psychology to get this story right, because of course, it's all about how our brains process information and emotions. It's really about how emotions can guide our decisions and affect us and change over time. That's the heart of the story, and several emotions were workshopped in the development process but eventually dropped from the final version of the story. There were emotions like hope and envy, pride on we even Shotenfreude was part of the original story development, and at one point the story had twenty seven different emotions as characters, but that just wasn't manageable, so they had to figure out what were the most important ones, what could you peel away and have as your core of characters, And that story was really hard to get right. Pete Doctor, who was leading the project, even thought about giving up after three years of working on the story and not getting anywhere or feeling like it just wasn't heading in the right direction. Originally, the prime story was not going to be about an eleven year old girl's reaction when her family moves from one part of the country to another. That's kind of the event that precipitates all the action of the film as it stands, but that wasn't the original story. The original story was going to be that Joy the emotion. Joy decides she doesn't want the girl Riley, to grow up into an adult. She wants Riley to be a kid because kids experienced Joy on a level that is orders of magnitude greater than adults, and so Joy was going to take every opportunity to keep Riley from developing into an adult. But then they realize that it turned Joy into a really unlikable character, so they scrapped that. They had to go back to the drawing board and they had to re storyboard the entire movie. They had hit the point where they had storyboarded the film. Now, typically Pixar doesn't start storyboarding until they feel that the general story is pretty good. That the script is done, then they would storyboard a movie, and then the next step once the storyboard is approved is to go into animation, modeling and animation. But this one had been storyboarded and then they had to scrap it and redo it, so it really was a dramatic change, and they still had to try and get the movie out before it got too late. On top of that, Inside that was the first Pixar film made without the input of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs had passed away in twenty eleven, and while Jobs hadn't really been in a real leadership role for many years, he was still active in the process of hearing story ideas and giving his input all the way up to his death, and John Lassiter was also largely absent. John Lassiter was over at Walt Disney Animation trying to get that department to turn around because they had had their own series of disappointing films, films that weren't necessarily bad but were not performing well at the box office, Movies like The Princess and the Frog, which is a perfectly fine film but failed to capture an audience. So Lassiter was trying to fix that and wasn't really around to help out with Inside Out. There are also big technical challenges with that movie. A big one being that the character of Joy has these little particles that radiate from her skin, and since Joy is the primary protagonist, that meant having to replicate that effect for hundreds of shots in the movie, and that took a lot of computer power as well. Ultimately, all that hard work paid off. The movie was a huge success. It was the third highest grossing Pixar film in both US and global box office numbers, so it worked. Also, it was released with the short film Lava. We've got a little bit more to say about Pixar circa twenty sixteen, but first let's take another quick break. Twenty fifteen also saw the other troubled movie come out, that is The Good Dinosaur, and The Good Dinosaur is a black sheep in Pixar. It's the movie that when I talked to my coworkers, they some of them didn't even realize that was a Pixar movie. Some of them hadn't even heard the movie at all. So twenty fifteen is the first year in which two different Pixar feature length films come out to theaters. But the Good Dinosaur does not perform the way Inside Out did. In the United States, it earned one hundred and twenty three million. Now globally it earned almost three hundred and thirty two million dollars. That's not chump change. That's a lot of money, but it still makes the movie the lowest performing film in Pixar's history as an animation studio. That one hundred and twenty three million dollars, that's less than what Toy Story one made at the box office. If you adjust for inflation, it's much less than what Toy Story made. And if you you know, not just inflation, but the inflation of movie ticket prices much much less, it means way fewer people saw that movie. The story of the film, which if you haven't seen it, it's about a dinosaur. It's it's the takes the premise of what if the meteor that struck the Earth and helped precipitate the mass extinction that led to all the dinosaurs dying off? What if it never hit the Earth? What if it missed and dinosaurs continued to live on Earth and humans evolved least to caveman status, and you had both coexisting on the same planet. That's kind of the world, it said in and that's not the premise of the story, but it is the world that the characters exist within. That whole story was reworked several times. The idea of well, what is the actual point A to point B two point C storyline? We understand what the world is, but what are we trying to say? It was a huge problem, an enormous problem. It caused the film to miss its original release date. It was supposed to come out in twenty thirteen, It got pushed to twenty fourteen, and then pushed again to twenty fifteen. So when the story was not where it needed to be by twenty thirteen, when it was supposed to debut, and it hadn't even been finished or really gone beyond that story development stage, Bob Peterson and John Walker, who were leading the project at that time, were removed from the project. Peterson would remain with Pixar but work on other things, and Denise Reim, who was a producer in the film, would replace John Walker. Peterson, who had first worked on the story when Bob Peterson came up with the idea back in two thousand and nine, would become the director of the movie, and things got pretty dark for Pixar in twenty thirteen. It wasn't just that The Good Dinosaur was having problems. There were other issues as well. Pixar had closed down Pixar Canada in twenty thirteen and laid off eighty employees as a result. A few months later, the company laid off another sixty seven employees from its main office, and by then Pixar was up to more than twelve hundred employees. The movie was reworked, and reworked, and reworked, and even recast. They had cast the movie because they thought they were getting toward a complete story in twenty thirteen, but it didn't happen, so they had to recast it because when they came up with the finished story, they had dropped a lot of characters or replaced them with other characters. So there's I think. Francis McDorman, I think, was the only actress who was attached to the original film and remained on the cast for the reworked version. A Monsters University short called Party Central was supposed to premiere with The Good Dinosaur, but eventually Pixar shifted that to go in front of him up, it's most wanted. So instead, a different Pixar short called Sanjay's Super Team debuted with The Good Dinosaur. And I've seen The Good Dinosaur, but I haven't seen Sanjay's Super Team because I saw The Good Dinosaur on a plane and they didn't have the short film to go in front of it. So I'm curious how Sanjay's Superteam matches up. I've heard about it, I knew what it was, but I had not seen the actual shorts. I need to do that. Moving to twenty sixteen, wrapping up this epic series on Pixar, we get the release of Finding Dori, the sequel to Finding Nemo. Finding Dory was originally supposed to come out on November twenty fourth, twenty fifteen. That's when The Good Dinosaur actually premiered, so Finding Dory was pushed back to the summer of twenty sixteen. And it's the only feature length Pixar film I have not seen yet. It's not because I didn't like Finding Nemo. Actually, Finding Nemo might be my favorite Pixar movie to date. I think it might be the top one for me. It's tough because there are a lot of Pixar movies I think are really really good, but Finding Nemo in particular speaks to me. Finding Dory I have not seen yet. It's only because I don't have a whole lot of times, so I haven't been to the theater in several months. There are a lot of movies that came out this year that I have not yet seen, but a lot of people did go see it. It had the largest opening for an animated film of our third largest opening I should say, third largest opening of an animated film of all time, and grossed four hundred and fifty one million dollars in North America alone to date as of July twenty second, twenty sixteen, and it's probably more than that at that point. And that's just North America, that's not globally. So it has done incredibly well and I can't wait to see it. I don't have any behind the scenes information about Finding Dory, other than the fact that it had been teased that there was going to be a Finding Nemo sequel for a while. In fact, there was originally going to be a Finding Nemo sequel produced by that Circle seven group that had been formed when Disney wanted to try and continue making films based off Pixar movies but not made by Pixar itself, but of course Circle seven had already been dissolved, and Finding Dorry is not based off anything that Circle seven came up with. Can't wait to see it. Future films that Pixar has planned include Toy Story four, which I don't think most people even thought was going to be a thing, Cars three, The Incredibles two, It's another SEQUEA was never expecting, and an original film that is not based off any former Pixar or are previous I should say previous Pixar movie called Coco, will come out in twenty seventeen. Coco being inspired by Dia de Muertos, the Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead, the very colorful holiday, and in fact, there was some some controversy around that not having anything to do with Disney producing a Day of the Dead holiday themed movie, in particular, especially once they started bringing on cultural experts to make certain that the movie is respectful and reflects the cultural values of people of Mexico and not just exploit them, which would be horrible. But also there was an issue when Disney moved to trademark the phrase Dia de las Mortos, and a lot of people, myself included, felt that that move was perhaps a little dumb. Dumb is a fine word. It was a dumb move on Disney's part. It would be like trying to trademark Christmas or Halloween or Memorial Day, trademarking that so that you can use it and no one else can. That just it struck people as being incredibly shortsighted and insensitive. Don't know who had Disney filed for that trademark. I'm guessing it probably wasn't John Lassiter. It doesn't sound like something he would have done. But at any rate, that did not happen. Disney dropped it, and like I said, they brought on and some cultural consultants to make sure that the stuff that Pixar was developing was respectful while still being an entertaining movie. And I'm really looking forward to it. I love the artistic style of Dia de Muertos and sugar skulls and things of that nature, and I'm very curious to see what story they have. From my understand and this is from a friend of mine, so I apologize if I get this wrong. If I get it wrong, it's because of me, not because of my friend. It's because I misinterpreted. But as I understand it, Coco sort of refers to the concept of a boogeyman, so that's probably going to play some sort of role within the story, which follows a character named Miguel. And that's all I know about Coco, but I'm very much looking forward to it. There's some unannounced films that are on Pixar's slate. They have not publicly said what they will be, but they have said that those movies are original works. They are not sequels, which gave came as something of a relief to a lot of people because seeing Toy Story four, Cars three, and Incredibles two on the schedule, people begin to ask, well, this Pixar just going to be in the business of churning out sequels now, or are we going to get more original works? Because originally the idea was there would be an original movie pretty much every year and a sequel every other year, and that hasn't quite worked out, But maybe that will change after this upcoming slate of films that wraps up the Pixar Story Part three that catches us up to present day, and maybe we will have more to say about Pixar in the future. It is a fascinating company. It's history with other major companies Disney and Apple make it really fascinating from a technology standpoint. The business side of things incredible. Also the idea that the animator who was fired from Disney came on to Pixar became a public face of Pixar. Even though he was not the technical leader. He was the public face and a lot of people look at John Lassiter as being the leader of Pixar. Then going over to become a chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation, becoming an important voice in the company that once fired him phenomenal. Also, never forget he started off as a skipper on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. We should all be so lucky. And that concludes our three part series about the Pixar story. As I have said a couple of times during these classic episodes, I could go back and do a follow up to talk about what Pixar has been doing since then. There's also some interesting stuff to talk about with the incorporation of Pixar into the various theme parks that Disney has notably over in Disneyland. They have Pixar pere, but their other wants to talk about as well, So maybe I'll do that because that's always fun to chat about as well. And let's just talk about some of the movies that Pixar has pushed out and some of the innovation the company has continued to pursue since twenty sixteen. But until then, 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.