To Infinity and Beyond! by Karen Paik

Author:Karen Paik [Karen Paik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2007-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

Woody and Bullseye. Rendered character pose.

First lineup of the Roundup gang. Pete Docter, marker.

Trying to Do Two Things at Once

The core idea of Toy Story 2 was so good, and the project was judged to have so much potential, that when its crew started pulling hard to have the movie upgraded to a theatrical release, the studio agreed. This promotion actually solved a moral dilemma for Pixar, which had been uneasy about having effectively created a caste system within the company—expensive, high-quality theatrical releases and low-budget, mediocre direct-to-video releases. “We came to believe that this division was bad for our souls; it wasn’t the right way to think about things,” said Catmull. “But even so, it still wasn’t felt that Toy Story 2 was going to be at the same level as A Bug’s Life.” It was still understood that the sequel would have a shorter schedule and a smaller budget.

Pixar wanted Toy Story 2 to be more than the direct-to-video rush job that had originally been planned, but its status as the cheaper secondary effort was, to a certain extent, inescapable. As Galyn Susman, Toy Story 2’s supervising technical director, explained, “We went from not knowing what we were doing and barely getting one film done to now trying to put two things into production, and the only reason we were foolhardy enough to do that was because we believed that Toy Story 2 was going to be direct-to-video. Even then, the whole notion that we would bifurcate our talent was very complicated. How do you decide who goes on the lesser project, Toy Story 2? Who stays on the main project? You need to seed that lesser project with enough talent so that it’ll be successful, but you really don’t want it to be a drain on the core resources that are there to build and to create A Bug’s Life.”

Pixar was having enough trouble just finding experienced story people and animators to staff A Bug’s Life. At that time, animation was booming in what Ranft called “the post–Lion King gold rush. Kids straight out of school were getting signed to great deals and driving Humvees. It was the roaring late ’90s.” Between Disney, Warner Bros., Turner, and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new DreamWorks Animation, competition for the available talent was fierce—and in such a high-rolling job market, Pixar didn’t have the money to hire all the people it needed.

The studio had come to accept that each movie would have its own idiosyncrasies, but as time went on, Toy Story 2 seemed to accumulate more than its share of troubles. The creative and production teams were experiencing internal conflict, and the personnel changes made to address the problems seemed to have little effect. Most troublingly, the reels were not getting better with time. Slowly but inexorably, the executive team came to the conclusion that Toy Story 2 would require drastic corrective action. But little could be done while the studio’s primary creative talents were still busy getting A Bug’s Life out the door.

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