afterTot Story's release,
Pixar became the highest
IPO of the year.
From a $10 million investment,
Steve raised $132 million.
It was a wildly successful IPO,
we got the money in the bank.
And then, shortly thereafter,
Disney came to us and said,
"We want to extend the contract. "
And Steve said, "Okay, we will extend it
if we can be fifty-fifty partners. "
And they said, "Okay, we'll do that. "
So he actually nailed this
right on the head.
I was in awe.
It was just
really surreal that we had gone from
riding around on scooters
past empty offices,
looking for extra office supplies,
to this meteoric success, really.
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.
The animation bullpen
was this amazing building,
probably not legal at all
because of fire code.
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.
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.
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.
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