The Pixar Story Page #10

His accepting of his son

is also the letting go

of the past or the loss, the trauma.

And what is it. . .

What is it to take someone's hand?

Not only is it an opportunity

just to physically,

like touch and connect with his son,

it also marks the new relationship.

I'm so sorry, Nemo.

-Hey, guess what.

-What?

Sea turtles. . . I met one.

And he was 150 years old.

Hundred and fifty?

Yep.

'Cause Sandy Plankton said

they only live to be 100.

Sandy Plankton?

Do you think I would cross

the entire ocean

and not know as much

as Sandy Plankton?

(NEMO CHUCKLES)

MARLIN:
He was 150, not 100!

Who is this Sandy Plankton

who knows everything?

NARRATOR:
In 2003, Finding Nemo

surpassed Pixar's own previous marks,

making it the new highest grossing

animated film in history.

And director Andrew Stanton won

the Oscar for best animated feature.

But the enormous success

of Finding Nemo

meant that expectations

were now even higher,

as Brad Bird, the first outside director,

was invited in to direct a feature.

Well, here I am, pulling into Pixar,

first time, into Pixar. . . Yeah.

NARRATOR:
Brad was

an old classmate

of John Lasseter's from CalArts.

He had made the critically acclaimed

The lron Giant.

LASSETER:
Brad and I stayed in touch,

and he pitched us on an idea

called The lncredibles,

and it's a family of superheroes,

and originally he was thinking

of it being cell-animated,

but he thought it could work

in 3-D computer animation.

I fell in love with it right away,

but the thing I loved about it the most

was this story of this family.

It's got so much heart to it.

I've just been given my card key.

Now I can get into all

the secret chambers of Pixar.

This is where A Bug's Life was

actually filmed, on location, right here.

(YELLING)

BlRD:
Good to see you.

Any company that had

four hits in a row

would not be open

to changing anything.

This place was the exact opposite.

They were saying,

"'Look, we've had four hits in a row.

"We are in danger

of repeating ourselves,

"or of getting too satisfied

and we need to shake this place up."

Keep it moving. Keep it,

Kate, nice to see you. Keep it moving.

I'm here to tell you, you guys are

kind of in your wood-fired pizza mode

and, a lot of you are,

"Yeah, I work at the place

where we make hit after hit."

(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

But, you know, I'm telling you,

I've been out in that real world

as some of you also have been,

and you who have been out there

know what I'm talking about.

This is an anomaly,

this place is, A, really freakishly

alone in this hit-after-hit aspect,

and, two,

you know, these kind of projects

don't happen that often.

Grab this opportunity and run with it.

You know, film is forever,

you know, pain is temporary.

(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

LASSETER:
Once we brought Brad

into Pixar, we all were learning again.

And he has brought in his

clese colleborators on lron Giant,

and they are amazing.

BlRD:
The 2-D people that I brought up

wrestled with the box,

you know, just trying to figure out

how to make the computer

do what you want it to do.

The computer exists in two worlds,

it's either the most brilliant thing

you've ever seen,

or it's completely mad.

(BEEPING)

NARRATOR:
The 2-D animators took

the traditional storyboarding process

into the third dimension,

providing dynamic new ways

to visualize storytelling.

(CHUCKLES)

If you named the 10 most

difficult things to do in animation,

we had them all, and large amounts

of them all, humans. . .

POLlCE OFFlCER:
Police officers!

BlRD:
Hair, fabric.

Hair and fabric under water.

Hair and fabric

blowing through the air.

It was just endless.

(GUN FlRING)

(GRUNTS)

-See that?

-Yeah.

That's the way to do it.

That's old school.

(LAUGHS)

Yeah. No school like the old school.

NARRATOR:
The lncredibles marked

Pixar's sixth hit in a row,

and Brad Bird won his first

Academy Award

for best animated feature.

BlRD:
Now that I've made a Pixar film,

a lot of people have asked,

"What is the secret formula?"

As if there's some magical calculation.

And I say, "It's really pretty simple,

everyone here loves films.

"And they just wanna make something

that they themselves wanna see."

NARRATOR:
By 2004, the success

ofThe lncredibles

and other computer-animated films

was leading to an industry-wide

belief that making CG movies

was a foolproof

formula for box office hits.

As many of the 2-D films

failed at the box office,

hand-drawn animation now faced

extinction for the first time in history.

There was this period

in this country,

and it happened at Dreamworks

and it happened at Disney Animation,

and that was that they had some films

which hadn't done well.

The stories weren't strong,

to be candid,

and the heads of the respective

studios at the time said,

"Well, the problem is they're in 2-D,

"and the audience

has lost the taste for 2-D."

And so they switched over to 3-D,

and basically shut down

The derived idea was, "Well,

nobody wants to see 2-D anymore."

(STUTTERS)

The fact was, they'd love

to see a good 2-D movie,

that was never the question,

you know, but. . .

It was horrible, you know,

to come to this conclusion

that only 3-D was

gonna be our future.

There was enormous

loss of morale,

there was an enormous

loss of the will to live,

in a sense, of making good product.

And they were selling off

animation desks,

they were, you know, just leading

talented artists out the door

by their nose and saying, you know,

"We don't need you anymore."

CLEMENTS:
And there was

a very painful period

that was like someone dying,

just to see what happened,

I mean it had to do with so many,

many people losing their jobs.

But even more than that,

just, a sort of art form

that had been built up

over a period of decades,

was just abandoned, I think because it

was not the hot ticket at the moment.

CATMULL:
Everybody at Pixar

loves 3-D animation,

you know, we helped develop it.

But we also love 2-D animation,

and to think that 2-D was shut down,

and that we were used as an excuse

to shut it down was awful.

We saw this

art form being thrown away,

so, for us, it was just,

it was a tragic time.

NARRATOR:
As Pixar and Disney

faced the end of their contract,

the two studios clashed over terms

of a more equitable deal.

All the while, Disney prepared

to develop direct-to-video sequels

of the Pixar films

without Pixar's involvement.

Our belief is that,

since we created the characters,

the original creators are the ones

who should carry on with it,

and give them life.

And to turn it over to somebody

else for short-term economic gain

just didn't make any sense.

It was like turning over your children

to somebody else.

We were gonna lose those characters.

It was actually unfortunate at that time

because we'd had this

phenomenal relationship

with Disney all these years,

where we were

an independent company

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