The Pixar Story Page #7

JOBS:
We were in a place

called Point Richmond,

which was two miles away

from a few refineries.

A few times a year,

we'd have evacuation days

'cause the refineries would spew some

wonderful chemical

concoction into the air.

Pixar's facilities grew

with the company,

which meant that they were

a hodgepodge.

CATMULL:
The animation bullpen

was this amazing building,

probably not legal at all

because of fire code.

RANDY NELSON:
It looked

like a playground.

It was loose, it was free, it was rough.

It was like 200 people sharing

a college dorm room.

It was a place where you could go

and draw on the wall,

or make a hole in the wall

and not feel bad about it.

There was this infectious

enthusiasm in the building.

It's like I imagined it must be like, say,

for the guys in Monty Python

to be sitting around a table,

writing material.

You'd expect there to be this great

creative feeding frenzy at the table,

and that's what we had.

It was so innocent and so sweet,

and it was really, really a great time.

CATMULL:
A lot of people said,

"Congratulations. You guys did what

you said you were gonna do,

"and you spent your

whole careers doing it."

So there was this great

feeling of elation,

and then when it was done

it was like, "Now what?"

There's a classic thing in business,

which is the second product syndrome,

if you will,

and that is companies that have

a really successful first product,

but they don't quite understand

why that product was so successful.

And their ambitions grow,

and they get much more grandiose,

and their second product fails.

Believe it or not,

Apple was one of those companies.

The Apple ll, Apple's first

real product in the marketplace,

was incredibly successful

and the Apple lll was a dud.

And so I lived through that,

and I've seen a lot of companies

not make it through that.

My feeling was if we got through

our second film, we'd make it.

The bigger fear was just, can you find

that lightning in a bottle again?

Can you make yourself as in love

the second time around,

and you realize you have

to actually work now

at making yourself as naive

as you were in the first round

without any effort.

There's nothing worse than any artist

facing their second

big piece of work, right?

'Cause it's the point

at which you find out whether

everything that's been written

about you is just hype,

and you're yesterday's news,

or whether you maybe

really are the real deal.

One of the things I learned is

the tricks that worked on the last movie

don't necessarily work on this movie.

You know, you think,

"Oh, we made Toy Sfory.

"This is good. Oh, we know how. . .

What we're doing now!"

And then you start on a movie

like Bug's Life,

and you're back in kindergarten again.

LASSETER:
Research was

literally done

out in front of Pixar,

in our own backyard.

We ordered this tiny

little video camera.

We called it the bug-cam,

and put it on the end of a stick.

And we put little wheels from Lego

on the bottom of it,

and we were able to wheel it around

and literally look at things

from a half an inch above the ground.

The one thing we noticed

from this bug-cam

was how translucent everything was.

It was breathtaking.

(INSECTS BUZZING)

NARRATOR:
For their second film

with Disney,

Pixar set out to prove

themselves again,

with a bigger story, scope

and organic characters.

Here I go. For the colony!

And for oppressed ants everywhere!

NARRATOR:
A Bug's Life was the first

computer-animated

wide-screen movie.

Oh. The city!

I represent a colony of ants,

and I'm looking for tough bugs.

You know, mean bugs.

The sort of bugs. . .

A talent scout!

My colony's in trouble!

Grasshoppers are coming.

We've been forced to prepare

all this food!

-Dinner theater!

-Food!

Please! Will you help us?

This is it! This is Ant lsland!

DOT:
Flik! Over here! Flik! Flik!

They seem to relish the idea, at Pixar,

of doing something difficult

and then seeing

how to solve the problems

in a creative and entertaining way.

What did you do?

It was an accident?

ANDERSON:
There's

always something

that we haven't invented yet.

So, as a producer,

you are trusting a lot of R&D

to come through in the right time.

And you're pushing a lot of things

and you're gambling

and you're looking at people's eyes

and you're saying,

"Can you do this for me?"

LASSETER:
It was just a giant story.

Too many characters,

too much going on

and we were just drowning

in this thing.

ANDERSON:
So the producer goes to

John and says,

"John, we technologically

cannot do crowd shots

"with more than 50 ants in them.

"So can you design the movie

around this limitation?"

And he said, "I'm willing to accept that

if that's all you can do,

"but I think you guys can do better."

So he helped formulate

this crowd team.

He believed in them, he pushed them

and at the end of the day,

they were the heroes of the movie.

You ants stay back!

NARRATOR:
Through new

technological advancements,

Pixar artists transformed

and brought an epic of

miniature proportions to the screen.

Pixar broke through

the second film syndrome

and A Bug's Life became

the highest-grossing

animated film of 1998.

After directing two back-to-back films,

John returned home from

the international promotional tour,

now ready for a much-needed break.

I was exhausted.

My family hadn't seen much of me

and we were going

to take the summer off.

Coming down the home stretch

of Bug's Life,

we were all feeling stressed.

And, you know,

we had been sharing John a lot.

As a family, you know,

we needed some family time.

NARRATOR:
Meanwhile, a secondary

production team at Pixar

was making a direct-to-video

sequel ofTot Story ,

the first project not

supervised by John Lasseter.

In February 1998,

Disney decided to release

Tot Story 2 theatrically.

But at Pixar,

a creative crisis was growing within.

We knew Toy Sfory 2

was having troubles.

I don't think we realized

how bad it was really going,

and then we found out.

It just was not shaping up to be

at the level that we thought

it needed to be.

CATMULL:
John came back from

his European promotional trip

and then came in

and saw the reels and said,

"You're right, it's not very good."

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."

And what we said at the time was,

"We can't deliver it the way it is.

We have to do it over again."

We decided that

the only course of action

was to ask John to go in,

right after he'd come off of

A Bug's Life, without any rest,

to go in and take over that film.

My feeling was I could not ask

anybody at Pixar

to do something

I was not willing to do myself.

I said to him,

"Well, I support you all the way.

"I'd like to see you do this picture,

but we also have a family here,

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes