In 1996, while Pixar was making A Bug’s Life, its second film, it started on a sequel to Toy Story.
There were enough technical leaders to run a second production. The creative leaders were another matter. Everyone who had made Toy Story, Ed Catmull wrote later, was busy on A Bug’s Life: the director John Lasseter, the writer Andrew Stanton, the editor Lee Unkrich and the head of story, Joe Ranft. So the sequel went to a creative team of people who had never headed a movie production.
“We felt this was OK,” Catmull wrote. After all, Lasseter and the others had never led a full-length animated film before Toy Story either.
Disney, which was then distributing and cofinancing Pixar’s films, at first encouraged Pixar to make Toy Story 2 as a direct-to-video release, sold only on home video. That was Disney’s way of keeping the characters of a hit alive, and the expectation was that cost and quality would both be lower. Pixar decided early that two quality standards in one studio would be “bad for our souls,” Catmull wrote, and Disney agreed to put the sequel in theaters.
“The creative leadership, though, remained the same, which turned out to be a problem.”
At Pixar, a film begins as story reels: storyboards edited together with dialogue and temporary music. The first versions are very rough, and each version typically gets better. On Toy Story 2, Catmull wrote, “we had a good initial idea for a story, but the reels were not where they ought to have been by the time we started animation, and they were not improving.” The directors and producers, by his account, were not pulling together.
Then A Bug’s Life was finished, and Lasseter, Stanton, Unkrich and Ranft took over the creative leadership of the sequel. “Given where the production was at that point, 18 months would have been an aggressive schedule,” Catmull wrote, “but by then we had only eight left to deliver the film.”
Pixar shut down all its other productions. The crew worked what Catmull called inhumane hours, and lots of people suffered repetitive stress injuries. With the new leadership, he wrote, they pulled it off. Toy Story 2 became a critical and commercial success, and, in his words, “the defining moment for Pixar.”
The lesson he drew was about people, not ideas: “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.”
Afterward, Pixar changed what its development department was for. It stopped coming up with ideas for movies. Its job became assembling small teams to help directors refine their own, and finding individuals who would work effectively together.