first year.
By December, 1993,
John and his crew flew to Burbank
to present their completed storyboards
to Disney.
Their approval would finally
launch Pixar into production.
But what was to come
was a day they would never forget.
Nothing of it
was working.
It wasn't funny, it wasn't emotional,
it wasn't moving.
Characters didn't quite work.
Peter Schneider sent me this video,
which was, like, two cassettes.
It was so long.
It was like two hours, and it went on
and on and on and on and on and on
and I was fast-forwarding through it
and thinking,
"Oh, my God. This'll never end. "
Which led to this horrible, horrible day
when things came to a crashing halt.
That was our Black Friday.
Black Monday, Black Tuesday...
I forget what day of the week it was,
but it was sure black.
Hey, you wanna be
Mr. Mashed Potato Head?
You button your lip!
Nobody's getting replaced!
It resulted in
the Woody character
being one of the most repellent things
you've ever seen on screen.
I mean, you couldn't watch it.
It was smart-alecky.
It was like a brand of insult humor.
It was kind of, like, negative.
All right, that's enough!
You're all acting like
you've never seen a new toy before!
Get a grip, okay?
Jeffrey said,
"Well, why is this so terrible?"
I said, "Well, because
it's not their movie anymore.
"It's completely not the movie
that John set out to make. "
Disney forced us
to shut production down.
And they wanted us to lay people off,
and we refused.
We just said, "All right, screw it.
What do we want to do?
"What would be the funniest thing?"
We were also very brutally honest with
each other about what we thought.
We worked day and night.
And we just really
went 100% with our gut.
We knew it was sort of our last chance.
We knew time was not on our side.
It was so refreshing, 'cause we were
making the movie we wanted to make.
We'd just sit on our knees,
right on the floor
and draw with Sharpies on pads
and pin it all up.
And then, like, "Oh, this is great!"
We'd get all excited. "This is great. "
And re-boarded
the whole thing.
We did it much faster, much rougher
than anybody ever thought we could.
And we turned
the reels around
in two weeks or three weeks,
something like that,
unheard of amount of time.
And we showed it to Disney,
and they were all ready to completely
shut production down and call it a day.
And you know what? It was good.
It was not great, but it was good.
It showed the potential
of what Toy Stery would be.
And they said, "Okay. "
Then we started production back up
and went from there.
The first scene animated
was the army men sequence.
It was an early glimpse
of what was to come.
Go, go.
Go on without me! Just go!
A good soldier
never leaves a man behind!
We were so flying
by the seat of our pants. It was nuts.
We would get all the stuff together
and we would send it off to animation
and let them animate it.
We would then get it back into editorial
and find that
nothing was cutting together at all.
It was so absolutely Stone Age,
yet at the time we were, like,
on the top of our mountain.
We thought we were being so cool
and no one was doing anything
like what we were doing.
I think the biggest challenge
in Tot Story
was just dealing
with the length of the film.
Full of characters, full of sets,
all sorts of stuff.
And the story drove everything.
Every frame of that story
was in my head.
Working with the art department,
working with modeling,
working with layout,
working with the animators.
I would talk about the story
and tell them
how it fit in the framework of that.
And there's something
about having
the artists and the technical crew
working together that is exciting.
Even though we may do some things
that don't always necessarily
make the best sense,
the mix is exciting.
What did I tell you earlier?
No one is getting replaced.
Now, let's all be polite
and give whatever it is up there
a