A JoBlo Movie Network Exclusive (I want you to hit me as hard as you can)
In the history of filmmaking few production companies have had the track record of Pixar Animation Studios.
While not without a few duds, (you know who you are)
Pixar has maintained a level of quality, that is damn near flawless.
But that isn't to say that they haven't suffered production troubles like any other studio.
Toy Story 2 practically broke Pixar, just as they were revolutionizing the world of animation.
With an eleventh-hour restart Pixar turned production around on a film that was hurtling toward disaster,
and became one of the rare sequels that surpasses its original.
So let's take a look back at everything that went wrong
with a film that many didn't even know had problems to begin with.
And ask,
And ask, "What The F*CK Happened To This Movie?"
On November 22nd 1995
history was made with the release of the first fully computer-animated film Toy Story.
Made by the wizards at Pixar and directed by John Lasseter,
the movie was not only a technical marvel for its time,
it was also a heart-warming adventure story,
full of inventive ideas, bright characters, and good-natured humor.
Beyond the fact that it made 373 million worldwide off a budget of only 30 million,
it ushered film animation into the era that still exists today.
And it's hard not to overemphasize how revolutionary that was.
While plans for a sequel had been kicked around for over a year,
true talks began a month after the original film's debut.
John Lasseter and Pixar co-founders Ed Catmull and Ralph Guggenheim
met with Disney to discuss the future.
Disney, obviously, wanted to strike while the iron was hot.
However, the 'when' and the 'how' were an issue.
Disney at the time was riding high on the surprising success
of their first ever direct-to-video feature film.
The Return of Jafar, a follow-up to the mega-hit Aladdin was a VHS goldmine,
making 300 million on a fraction of the cost it took to make the first,
despite it being 'oh, oh so rough'.
"His lamp!
You destroy Jafar's lamp -
You destroy Jafar's lamp - you destroy Jafar."
So Disney started rolling out sequels to all their biggest properties,
made with lesser talent and smaller budgets.
And Toy Story 2 wasn't going to be any different.
Disney was originally going to produce the film in-house and possibly with traditional 2D animation.
But Pixar didn't want someone else handling their baby.
And Catmull believed that they could bring quality to direct-to-video.
They chose to take on the project,
even though they were already knee-deep on their next film, titled Bugs.
Lasseter took the opportunity to foster new talent.
And appointed Toy Story animation director, Ash Brannon, to lead the sequel.
Brannon dived into possible story threads.
If a toys greatest fear was never being played with, what would be the opposite of that?
The story of Toy Story 2 is based a lot on my own experience.
I'm a big toy collector and a lot of them are like antiques.
Well, I have five sons. And they come into Daddy's office and they look around, it's like,
"Oh!" and they're just wanting to play with everything!
And I'm sitting there, "Oh no that's.. that's.. no.. no.. that.. you can't play with that one.
Oh, no... Yeah, here you play without... Oh No.. Hey!
And so I found myself just sitting there, looking at myself and laughing.
Because toys are manufactured, put on this Earth to be played with by a child.
That is the core, the essence of Toy Story.
And the essence of Toy Story 2.
An obsessive toy collector was a previously cut idea from the first Toy Story.
And he made for an ideal villain.
And the catalyst for the film would be him stealing Woody just so he could sell him as part of a set.
The collection concept was inspired by children's TV shows like Howdy Doody,
which had similar character archetypes.
Jessie herself came from Lasseter's wife,
who asked that he include a character girls could look up to.
Something more substantial than Bo Peep.
In early 1997 pre-production was coming to an end,
but Pixar didn't have enough employees to produce two films at once.
The answer came in the form of interactive products group.
A team of 95 individuals that ran the video game division of Pixar.
Co-founder Steve Jobs created the unit in the hopes that it would bring in millions
for the growing video game market.
Their two Toy Story games were not overly fruitful.
But their animation experience with those characters made them the best team to kick start production.
In February of 1997 Steve Jobs renegotiated the deal with Disney,
who needed to keep Pixar in their corner and fend off any potential competitors.
They signed a five-picture deal, that split profits 50/50.
Instead of the meager 15 percent Pixar got off of Toy Story.
Then in March Jobs dissolved the video game arm.
And Disney announced production on Toy Story 2 had officially begun.
Straight-to-video with Tom Hanks and Tim Allen returning.
But direct-to-video meant low budget and that wasn't in Pixar's blood.
They were pioneers in a new medium.
And had cultivated talent that was without a doubt the best in the business.
"Right away we realized that we had made a terrible mistake.
Everything about the project ran counter to what we believed in.
We didn't know how to aim low, we just couldn't figure out how to go about it without sacrificing quality."
Pixar's endless quest for perfection slowed production down considerably.
By June Disney wasn't happy with how slowly the film was progressing.
And wanted a change in leadership.
They forced Pixar to remove producer and co-founder Ralph Guggenheim.
Guggenheim saw it as a sign,
as he felt Pixar's new direction towards feature films began smothering creativity.
So he left the company.
Karen Jackson and Helen Plotkin replaced him.
Still, Ed Catmull didn't like that Pixar was split into an A & B team.
And the effect it had on employee morale.
In November Disney executives were visiting Pixar to view some rough scenes.
Catmull took the opportunity to ask about pushing the film into theaters.
Disney had only released one animated sequel in theaters to that point.
The Rescuers Down Under in 1990.
It was a flop and discouraged Disney from ever doing it again.
So it was a long shot.
To his surprise, they said 'yes' as the quality was higher than they had anticipated.
On top of that, Disney agreed to pay for half of the production costs.
With the caveat that this film wouldn't count as part of their 5-picture contract.
At the beginning of 1998 Toy Story 2 was officially announced as a theatrical release.
Excited and motivated, the team resumed production with newly found vigor.
Then
Then they deleted everything.
(Pop! Coins clinking)
"Ah, all right, nobody look, 'till I get my cork back in."
In early 1998 Chief Technical Officer Oren Jacob was reviewing an issue.
When someone accidentally ran a delete command for unwanted files,
and it began deleting the entirety of Toy Story 2.
"Woody's hat disappeared. And then his boots disappeared.
And then as we kept checking.. he disappeared entirely, Woody's gone.
Seconds later, looking up the rest of the characters on the show,
Buzz, Potato Head, Hamm and Rex had all vanished!
And soon after that whole sequences, Toy barn and Andy's room were disappearing off the disk drive."
Jacob frantically called the system team to unplug all the servers.
They rebooted the computers.
And discovered that they had lost nearly 90 percent of the last two years of work.
Supervising Technical Director Galyn Susman calmed everyone's fears and loaded their backups.
Only the backups have been failing for over a month.
It took them a week to go through the salvaged files but they were all corrupt.
Dumbfounded by the predicament Susman and Jacob joined the heads at Pixar and discussed options.
Of which there were none.
"Oh well, we tried."
Then Susman suddenly remembered that she might have a copy of the film on her home computer.
"So as a mother who wanted to see her children I needed to have a computer at home.
And so I would copy the entire film to my computer."
Her home computer would auto copy the film every week but she had set that up six months prior.
And wasn't sure if it was still doing it.
Susman and Jacob raced to her house, wrapped her computer in blankets and drove it back to Pixar.
Going under the speed limit, hazards flashing, hoping for a police escort.
"I got to Pixar and four or five of us carried it in like it was an Egyptian pharaoh.
Okay, boot it up!
Machine turns on...
Oh look, there's the movie!"
After a weekend of surveying the damage they had only lost about a week's worth of work.
Per Catmull's direction no investigation was made into who made the mistake.
The lesson was learned and all that mattered is that they got their film back.
Well, kinda.
Because it wasn't gonna stick around much longer.
As 1998 went along, Catmull grew concerned
about how much director Ash Brannon required time with Lasseter.
It showed a lack of confidence and his progress reels weren't improving.
The heads of Pixar became worried.
After A Bug's Life released on November 25th,
Lasseter finally sat down to review everything Brannon and his team had done in the last three years.
Lasseter walked into Catmull's office and shut the door.
"Disaster is the word he used.
The story was hollow, predictable, without tension: the humor fell flat...
This was a full-fledged crisis." - Ed Catmull, Creativity Inc, 2014
And they were less than 12 months from release.
"So at that point we went down to Disney
and said, "The film isn't very good we have to redo it."
And they said, "It actually is good enough.
But more importantly, you literally do not have the time."
They then approached Jobs to see if he could get the film delayed.
The ever so understanding Steve Jobs
The ever so understanding Steve Jobs said, 'no'.
Mostly because of their commitment to toy makers.
Pixar was still independent at the time,
and if they missed this release date, it could sink the company and their relationship with Disney.
On December 15th production on Toy Story 2 was shut down
until the heads of Pixar could come up with a solution.
With A Bug's Life success, Pixar was two for two with audiences and critics.
And they couldn't bear the thought of releasing a shoddy sequel.
Catmull feared, acceptance of mediocrity would have consequences that were far more destructive.
They now had a reputation to uphold, but the clock was ticking.
Catmull, facing their history of nurturing the next generation of animators
decided to fire Ash Brannon.
"We decided that the only course of action was to ask John to go in
right after he come off of A Bug's Life, without any rest.
To go in and take over that film."
Lasseter promoted Pixar's editor Lee Unkrich to co-director,
sharing screen credit with Brannon.
Then Pixar made one of the craziest decisions they would ever make.
They decided to start over.
Ed Catmull, John Lasseter, and Lee Unkrich met with A Bug's Life co-director Andrew Stanton,
Toy Story supervising animator Pete Docter and story supervisor Joe Ranft for a one weekend retreat.
The meeting of these minds famously became known as the Pixar brain trust.
A group of brilliant storytellers, who put aside egos and credits to make the best films they could.
Together they took stock of everything the movie had that was worth keeping
and began reworking the entire film.
They returned to Pixar and Lasseter presented their vision for a reimagined Toy Story 2,
asking his team to do the impossible.
The overhaul would begin on January 2nd 1999.
According to Oren Jacob, the only things they kept were the characters,
Andy's room, and the sequence in Al's Toy Barn.
The rest, you know, the other 95% you see in the final film was made in nine months.
The amount of time it takes to model, texture, animate, and render films like these
generally takes three to four years.
And they were going to do it in nine months.
Even with that crushing deadline this was Pixar. The employees were the best of the best.
On the cutting edge of animation they didn't half-ass anything.
They needed to impress Lasseter with their skills.
The character models were all upgraded,
adding thousands of details mostly to improve the range of facial movements.
Perhaps fixing all that wacky blinking from the first one.
♪ Ominous music ♪
♪ ♪
One of their biggest goals was to improve the humans,
who didn't get the most attention the first time around.
With the villain Al they had to push their animations further than ever before.
And oh boy, were they excited about their breakthrough with dust!
Of course they couldn't create everything from scratch. They reused assets to save time.
Jessie's tree is the same from Ant Island.
As is most of the environment for the alien planet.
The toy cleaner was brought over from the short Geri's Game.
All of the TV channels were from Pixar's history of shorts and commercial work.
And of course there's the pizza truck.
Old concepts cut from the first Toy Story were repurposed.
Like a Buzz Lightyear cartoon, that became the video game opening.
Or Woody having a nightmare about being discarded by Andy.
The key to the rework film was the theme of abandonment
and the question of 'would you choose to live forever without love?'
They added Wheezy to introduce the idea of toys being discarded by their owner.
Then beefed up Jessie's role to carry this theme throughout the film,
especially with Randy Newman's heart-breaking song When She Loved Me.
♪ Randy Newman - When She Loved Me ♪
Overtime wasn't mandatory, yet people did it anyway.
Pixar was changing the film industry and the employees wanted to be a part of that history.
Soon, though, the crunch took its toll.
"Now you take the fact that we were having to make this film in about seven or eight months,
it was normally a four year process every single hour was like a ticking clock.
We were frequently actually working 36 to 48 hours straight.
It was like a psych experiment.
Okay there's a two-way mirror somewhere with some psychologists in a white coat saying,
(Whispering) "Now make the avid crash."
(Sobbing)
Yeah, I mean people bursting into tears.
Just a crazy, crazy amount of drama around everything.
Because you just had no perspective, it was just madness."
Working seven days a week, rarely seeing their families..
this obviously wasn't going to prove itself healthy.
By completion a third of the staff had repetitive stress injuries,
like carpal tunnel and computer vision syndrome.
It was not just bad.
♪ It Was a Shit Show ♪
People had breaking points and tempers flared.
But it was the lack of sleep that nearly killed someone.
One utterly exhausted animator drove to work but forgot to drop off his toddler at daycare.
He unwittingly left his child in the car under the burning California Sun for several hours.
By the time he realized his mistake and ran out to the car, his child was unconscious.
The paramedics came and everything turned out fine.
But it was a wake-up call for Pixar and the conditions they had put their employees in.
"Everybody was so dedicated to it and loved Toy Story and those characters so much...
And loved the new movie so much that we killed ourselves to make it.
And it... You know it took some people a year to recover.
It was tough, it was.. it was too tough."
"Toy Story 2 was the pivotal moment in this company.
It's when we actually defined who we were."
"From that we learned that the important thing is not the idea.
The important thing is the people.
It's how they work together, who they are that matters more than anything else."
Toy Story 2 barely made it to the finish line.
But they did it.
They pulled it off.
♪ Dramatic music ♪
Toy Story 2 opened on November 19 1999.
And for all of Pixar's tireless work..
And for all of Pixar's tireless work.. it was worth it!
On a budget three times as much as the original, probably from all that overtime,
the film grossed 497 million worldwide!
The reviews were unanimous in calling it hilarious, complex, beautiful, and almost perfect!
Placing it alongside the Godfather Part 2 or the Empire Strikes Back
as a sequel that is better in every way.
Against all odds the film came together better than anyone could have expected.
This definitely wouldn't be the last troubled production for Pixar.
The Incredibles director Brad Bird took over directing duties on Ratatouille
when the film hit a wall, rewriting the script and changing the art style.
The Bear And The Bow was going to be the first Pixar film written and directed by a woman, Brenda Chapman.
Until she clashed with Lasseter.
She left the studio when she was removed from the film and it was revamped into Brave.
The Good Dinosaur shifted directors, replaced the entire cast,
nearly started over and was delayed twice, pushing its release date by two years.
One announced title, Newt, was kicked around for years before being completely scrapped.
Disney even tried again to make another direct-to-video Toy Story sequel,
but it was cancelled, once Disney bought Pixar.
And Catmull-Lasseter were elevated to the heads of all Disney Animation productions.
And getting to Toy Story 4 has been a long difficult process.
Yet almost every time they have come out on top.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention Pixar as many controversies over the years.
For all their good fortune they have weathered a fair share of them.
But the worst by far
has been their lack of representation in their leadership and creative roles.
Giving rise to a boys club mentality at the top.
Which eventually led to John Lasseter's fall from grace.
Described as a crazy, horny thirteen-year-old,
who made endless unwanted advances on female subordinates,
Lasseter's genius shielded him from the consequences for decades...
Until it finally caught up with him in November 2017.
When he left the studio during the height of the #MeToo movement.
Like many others who were exposed, his legacy will forever taint the classic films he made.
Despite the controversies and setbacks, Pixar's filmography truly has no equal!
With Toy Story 4 Pixar has made 21 films and only one of them is widely regarded as bad.
No other studio could tout that record.
When audiences see that bouncing lamp, they know they are in for something special.
It will be unique and fun and you're probably gonna cry at some point.
Pixar's boundless creativity and impeccable storytelling
combined with their pixel-perfect craftsmanship.
It's filmmaking at its best.
They just seem really difficult to make.
♪ This Was a Shit Show ♪
♪ ♪
Written, Narrated & Edited by Ian Michael Jentzsch @TunkTheTank
Creative Consultant Jenirae Reynolds
Special Thanks: Gavin Bohne, Gordon Cooper, Corrin Reynolds, Jenirae Reynolds, TJ Snow.
The Return of Jafar (1994), Toy Story (1995), A Bug's Life (1998), Toy Story 2 (1999)The Pixar Story (2007)
Footage and Score Copyright of Walt Disney Company. It Was A S**t Show By Crazy Ex-Girlfriend Cast
JoBlo.com Copyright 2019 JoBlo Media, Inc.
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