colony!
And for oppressed ants everywhere!
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 Island!
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?
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?"
It was just a giant story.
Too many characters,
too much going on
and we were just drowning
in this thing.
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!
Through new
technological advancements,
Pixar artists transformed
50 original crowd shots into 431,
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.
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.
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,
"and you're gonna have to
"make changes in your
day-to-day routine.
"You're gonna have
to work normal hours. "
This is a movie that was already
fully into production.
A lot of it was animated.
It was a bullet train heading
towards a release date.
Over a single weekend,
John and his creative team
from the first Tot Story
reworked the entire script.
John came back and pitched that story
to the animation department.
Just in that pitch,
he