computerized backgrounds.
But at the studio
there was a growing fear
that the computer was
going to make animators obsolete.
I'd say 95% of the fellas
at the studio were saying,
"You'd never get me to do anything
like that, they're ruining everything!"
And I talked to John Lasseter
about the things he was doing,
I said,
"'Gee, if you get that much imagination
"and new types of movement
done on a computer,
"but not by the pencil,
you'll be ahead of the game. "
The potential was there at that time,
but no one wanted to do it
except for Lasseter.
John and his story team
were given the approval
to develop a script
based on the short story,
The Brave Little Toaster.
It would mark
John's feature directorial debut,
and his own opportunity
to further explore the blending
of computer and traditional animation.
After eight months of development,
John was finally asked to present
the story to the head of the studio.
They'd said,
"Okay, it's time to show
"the head of the studio at the time
Brave Little Toaster. "
So we got the presentation together,
he walks in with Ed Hansen,
and he had this scowI on his face
from the beginning, no laugh,
we pitched the whole thing
and he stood up and he asked,
"Well, how much is this gonna cost?"
And I said,
"Well, it's with computer animation,
"it's gonna be, you know, no more than
the regular budget of a film. "
And he went, "The only reason
to do computer animation
"is if we could do it faster or cheaper. "
And he walked up and he walked out.
And it was like, "What?" You know?
And so about five minutes later
I get this call,
and Ed Hansen
calls me down to his office.
And I come down, and he said,
"Well, John,
your project is now complete,
"so your employment with
the Disney Studios is now terminated. "
He got let go, he got fired,
because, honestly, the studio
didn't know what to do with him.
Even at that early day,
this Disney Studio
that he dreamed about working at,
turned out to be a really
dysfunctional place, in reality.
And he was a born director,
he was a born leader,
and his expectation and passion
excelled what the studio
was doing then.
During a lot of the early days,
artists were frightened of the computer,
because they were
under the impression
that it somehow
was gonna take their jobs away.
And we spent a lot of time
telling people,
"No, it's just a tool, it doesn't take...
"It doesn't do the creativity,
that's a misconception. "
But there was this fear,
and it was everywhere.
We interrupt
this program
for an important announcement.
A state of emergency
has been declared
and the entire police force
put on 24-hour duty,
in an effert to stop
the mounting hysteria.
There is no
reasonable cause for alarm.
These rumors are absolutely false!
The reality of technology
was very different from the fear.
It was the computer
that would take us to new frontiers.
I believe that
this nation should commit itself
to achieving the goal,
before this decade is out,
of landing a man on the moon
and returning him safely to the Earth.
Lift off on Apollo 11.
The space race
ignited funding in computer research
for a select number of universities
around the country.
In the 1960s,
the University of Utah set up one
of the first labs in computer graphics,
headed by the top scientists
in the field.
Ed Catmull, an aspiring artist,
was among the few drawn
to the potential in computer graphics.
I drew a lot,
I wanted to be an animator.
I wanted to be an artist.
But at the same time, I believed that
I wasn't good enough
to be an animator,
so I switched over
to physics and computer science.
As soon as I took the first class,
I just fell in love with it,
it just blew everything else away.
'Cause here was a program in which
there was art, science, programming,
all together in one place, in a new field,
and it was wide open.
You could just go out
and discover things and explore,
you were