Pixar’s Toy Story almost didn’t happen. From Pixar tells story behind ‘Toy Story’:
Disney, which was bankrolling the project, peppered the young animators with notes and suggestions. The story was too juvenile, the higher-ups said, and the characters had to be edgier. Afraid to trust themselves, Lasseter and his crew tried to follow all the directions.It was, nearly everyone agrees, a train wreck. Disney hated the movie and the idea — and shut it down.
‘Yeah that was fun,” jokes Pete Docter, who was nominated for Oscars for ‘Toy Story” and ‘Monsters, Inc.” ‘And it happened right around Christmas, too.”
Lasseter recalls that he ‘begged” for two weeks to fix things. The animators went back, took out all of Disney’s suggestions and made the movie they wanted to make in the first place.
And, naturally, when they screened the new version, Disney execs loved it. There’s your corporate minds at work: First they screw it up and hate it, and then don’t even realize that they’re watching what they hated in the first place.
But if Lasseter’s last-second fixes hadn’t worked, there would be no Pixar campus, first in Richmond, and now in Emeryville today, or a potential expansion with building permits available through 2012. Nor would the Bay Area be known as the epicenter of computer animation. It was one of those behind-the-scenes moments that dramatically changes the culture of a community.
(Hat tip to GeekPress.)