allowed Hollywood filmmakers
to tell stories
that could not be told any other way.
Renderman had become
the new standard in special effects,
and in 2000,
the technical team
garnered the first Oscar
ever awarded
for computer-animated software.
But the research and development
of all their technology
was costing more money
than the company was bringing in.
Steve Jobs had been losing over
a million dollars a year for five years.
It was all great stuff to do,
but none of it was a home run.
None of it really. . . It was a struggle.
Every step of the way,
it was a struggle.
We were trying to pay the bills
and just buy time.
And that strategy
really turned out not to work.
Steve was a very forgiving investor
at that time
and had a much longer term view
than your average venture capitalist
would've had
about our young company.
NARRATOR: With the survival
of Pixar at stake,
John pitched the Disney Company
a half-hour Christmas TV special
based on their short film Tin Tot .
All the while,
Disney executives had been trying
to lure John back to the studio
to direct a feature.
John is being asked this
for a third time,
to come down
and be a director at Disney.
Or he can stay up
in Northern California
with this company
that's bordering on collapse,
because they're losing money.
He stays up here with this company
bordering on collapse, right?
John came up with the idea of doing
this story from a toy's point of view,
done in this 3-D plastic world,
and the idea was sensational.
And they'd gone from commercials
to a short film being six minutes.
They felt they could expand
the system to a 30-minute movie.
And we said, "Oh, forget about that.
Make it a full-length feature. "
NARRATOR: From John's initial pitch,
Disney offered the Pixar team
the chance to finally fulfill their dream
of creating the world's first
computer-animated feature film.
LASSETER: I remember Bonnie Arnold,
the producer,
and Ralph Guggenheim, the producer,
came around and they said...
GUGGENHEIM: We're making a movie.
-Really?
-GUGGENHEIM: Green light.
We got green light?
ARNOLD: We got it.
Just talked to Peter.
LASSETER: It happened,
and it was like,
"'Oh, my God, we're actually
gonna make this movie. "
And I was so excited.
There was so much
positive enthusiasm. It was great.
(LAUGHING)
-GUGGENHEIM: All right.
-Is that all right?
It was an attempt
to take the spirit of John Lasseter
and see if we could make
a full-length motion picture with it.
JOBS: It was fantastic.
There was no better partner
to do it with than Disney.
There was a lot
we could learn from them,
vast amounts
we could learn from them.
So it was the best thing
that ever happened to the studio.
You heard?
None of us had done
a movie ourselves before,
and a large portion of us
had never worked on a movie at all.
GUGGENHEIM: Green light.
LASSETER: Ignorance was bliss.
We did not know what we didn't know.
It's like the
Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland things,
"Hey, my uncle's got a barn !
Let's put on a show!"
-Unpack. Unpack.
-You mean I can stay?
CATMULL: We were onto
something big
if we could just hold it together
and make it happen.
LASSETER: We did not want to
do a musical.
We did not want to do a fairy tale.
We did not want to do
what Disney was,
from Little Mermaid
and Beauty and the Beast
and all those films. . .
They had their thing going
and we wanted to be different.
NARRATOR: John set his sights
on one particular actor
for the voice of Woody.
They said, "Look, we just wanna
show you this thing,
"'cause it's too hard
to explain what it is. "
Oh, no, no, no!
You're eating the car!
Don't eat the car! Not the car!
Oh, you stupid dog !
When I saw this loop,
it was startling, actually.
It was kind of, like, hypnotic.
"Let's see it again.
Can I see that again?"
I think we must have watched it
three or four times.
It didn't look like animation.
It looked like Plasticine