Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio, and how the tech
Speaker 1: are you. It's time for another tech Stuff classic episode.
Speaker 1: Over the past two weeks, we have listened to classics
Speaker 1: from The Pixar Story Parts one and two, So this
Speaker 1: week it's The Pixar Story, Part three, which concludes the
Speaker 1: trilogy of episodes I did about Pixar from back in
Speaker 1: twenty sixteen. This one originally published August tenth, twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: so there's a lot more to say since then, but
Speaker 1: let's sit back and listen to this classic episode. We
Speaker 1: left off last episode in two thousand and six, when
Speaker 1: Disney had officially announced its intent to acquire Pixar outright.
Speaker 1: It would no longer just be a partnership, a contractual partnership.
Speaker 1: It would be that the two companies would become united.
Speaker 1: So now we're going to pick up in two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven, when Pixar would release the first film it
Speaker 1: had as an official part of the Disney Company itself.
Speaker 1: That film was Rataituey with Patton Oswalt voicing the main character,
Speaker 1: Patton Oswald, one of my favorite comedians. Now, Rattue was
Speaker 1: again very successful. Like all the Pixar films that led
Speaker 1: up to this point, it was successful both financially and critically.
Speaker 1: It later would win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
Speaker 1: We're getting to a point now where the people were
Speaker 1: starting to ask the question, are other movies ever going
Speaker 1: to have a real chance against Pixar movies in the
Speaker 1: category of animated feature? And we also see more and
Speaker 1: more push from companies like Pixar for the Academy to
Speaker 1: consider animated movies on the same playing ground as live
Speaker 1: action films. Now, Ratatuy would be another brad Bird directed film,
Speaker 1: although not Originally, Bradbird was brought in to replace a director,
Speaker 1: Jan Pinkava. I believe Jan might be Yon. Jan Pinkava
Speaker 1: was at the Helm and then brad Bird took over.
Speaker 1: One of the big challenges facing the animators with Ratatue
Speaker 1: was finding a way to animate Linguini. That's the human
Speaker 1: character who's under the control or partial control of Remy
Speaker 1: the rat. They're trying to figure out, well, how do
Speaker 1: we animate him where it's clear to the audience that
Speaker 1: he's not really in control of his own movements, or
Speaker 1: not in full control at any rate. That took a
Speaker 1: lot of work, so they ended up doing a lot
Speaker 1: of They studied a lot of puppet puppets like marionettes
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. That movie did quite well and
Speaker 1: over at Disneyland. In two thousand and seven, a new
Speaker 1: attraction called the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage opened up now
Speaker 1: that actually used the old submarine voyage ride, the twenty
Speaker 1: thousand leagues Under the Sea type ride, which had closed
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety eight, so almost a decade after the
Speaker 1: ride had closed, it reopens with a new theme with
Speaker 1: Finding Nemo. Disney World would get its own version of
Speaker 1: this ride, but that would be housed in the Living
Speaker 1: Seas and not use the submarines. Instead, you get a
Speaker 1: Little Mermaid Submarine ride now instead of the Finding Nemo version.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and eight, Pixar would debut the film Wally,
Speaker 1: come out actually the day after My birthday that year,
Speaker 1: and Wally won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. The
Speaker 1: Movie's Adorable and also debuted with the short film Presto.
Speaker 1: Wally was the first Pixar film to feature scenes with
Speaker 1: live actors. And the experience was so much faster than
Speaker 1: computer animation that Picks Her folks were really surprised and
Speaker 1: excited about it, because with animation, if you create a
Speaker 1: scene and you realize, oh, we need to have this
Speaker 1: character turn around a little faster, or we need to
Speaker 1: light this in a different way, or the entire pacing
Speaker 1: of the scene needs to slow down a bit for
Speaker 1: it to make sense, that requires animators to go back
Speaker 1: and do a ton more work, and it could be many,
Speaker 1: many many days before there's something else to look at,
Speaker 1: whereas with live action, if it doesn't work, you give
Speaker 1: the direction to the crew and to the cast, and
Speaker 1: you do it again and it's right there. So the
Speaker 1: animators were all kind of gaga over how different live
Speaker 1: action is to computer animation, and they said that the
Speaker 1: actors were kind of amuse used because that's what the
Speaker 1: actors were used to, but the animators, to them, was
Speaker 1: a whole new world. Oh. Also, the fact that the
Speaker 1: shoot was catered appeared to be a really big deal,
Speaker 1: which just tells you what kind of things people find
Speaker 1: important when they go to a film shoot. Man, I
Speaker 1: wish my shoots were catered. Anyway, it was an entertaining
Speaker 1: thing to see that this live action being incorporated into
Speaker 1: the movie had such an effect on the various Pixar employees,
Speaker 1: and it was also kind of interesting to just see
Speaker 1: live action showing up at a Pixar movie in the
Speaker 1: first place. But another big challenge with Wally was creating
Speaker 1: a story in which there's really no dialogue for the
Speaker 1: first act of the film. Now, obviously that makes the
Speaker 1: story much more of a a story challenge rather than
Speaker 1: a technical challenge, but it also meant that the team
Speaker 1: had to put in a lot of personality in the animations.
Speaker 1: They had to figure out, how can we animate these
Speaker 1: characters in a way where we understand what their emotional
Speaker 1: reactions are, what their motivations are, what they're feeling and
Speaker 1: thinking at any given time, considering the fact they're not
Speaker 1: able to talk or they're not they have nothing to
Speaker 1: talk too, And that actually ends up creating a pretty
Speaker 1: tough technical challenge. It's not just how do you animate
Speaker 1: this character, but what motions indicate those specific feelings and thoughts.
Speaker 1: So it involves animators studying themselves a lot, as they
Speaker 1: make different facial expressions and they have different body language
Speaker 1: in response to different types of ideas like, you know,
Speaker 1: you just got to you just open the door, and
Speaker 1: you just found out your friends are throwing you a
Speaker 1: surprise birthday party. What's your reaction? Or you got home
Speaker 1: to find out that your dog got out of the
Speaker 1: backyard somehow and is missing. What's your reaction? And studying
Speaker 1: yourself and then translating that into a character, and a
Speaker 1: character that's not human a robot is a big challenge,
Speaker 1: whether it's technical or just from a psychological standpoint, So
Speaker 1: pretty spectacular work that they were able to create characters
Speaker 1: that could give you that feeling that they wanted, even
Speaker 1: though they're not human or speaking. In two thousand and eight,
Speaker 1: Pixar would finish work on the first set of Car Tunes,
Speaker 1: which are in fact short cartoons about the car's characters.
Speaker 1: Jim Morris, who produced Wally, would become the general manager
Speaker 1: of Pixar, and in two thousand and nine, Up debuts
Speaker 1: at the can Film Festival, So the first animated film
Speaker 1: ever in the history of the festival to open the
Speaker 1: whole thing up. And I imagine that festival attendees were
Speaker 1: just as devastated by the first ten minutes of that
Speaker 1: movie that I am I still can't watch the first
Speaker 1: ten minutes of UP without turning into a blubbering mess.
Speaker 1: I know because I did it today. When I'm recording this,
Speaker 1: I was doing research on Pixar, specifically on UP, and
Speaker 1: I watched it twice. I watched the original sequence in
Speaker 1: storyboard format, and then I watched the actual finished sequence,
Speaker 1: and I was so thankful that on Fridays our office
Speaker 1: is pretty dead because no one was there to hear
Speaker 1: me blubbering at my desk. I'm not ashamed of it.
Speaker 1: I just don't want to make other people feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: The whole idea for UP began with just the notion
Speaker 1: of an old man floating his house away with a
Speaker 1: bunch of balloons, which is just kind of a comedic image.
Speaker 1: But while the image was really evocative and people at
Speaker 1: Pixar thought, yeah, it's a really cool idea, they had
Speaker 1: to come up with, well, why is he doing that,
Speaker 1: where is he going? What's the whole point? So they
Speaker 1: had to create a story around this picture, and that's
Speaker 1: where they started working on the ideas for UP. Now.
Speaker 1: The original opening had the character of Carl, who's the
Speaker 1: main character in UP, and his wife Ellie falling in
Speaker 1: love through a contentious and competitive relationship. It starts off
Speaker 1: with their kids. Originally, the two kids didn't get along
Speaker 1: with each other and would kind of ambush one another
Speaker 1: and punch each other. It was sort of a violent behavior,
Speaker 1: and it got to a point where those punches give
Speaker 1: way to the characters falling for each other, dating, getting married,
Speaker 1: and all the story beats that you see in the
Speaker 1: first ten minutes of Up that I'm not going to
Speaker 1: go over or I'll start crying on a podcast, and
Speaker 1: no one wants that, but at any rate, it's same
Speaker 1: sort of progression, but in a different emotional impact because
Speaker 1: people are getting punched. So they ended up reworking it
Speaker 1: because when they showed it to people, the reaction was
Speaker 1: pretty quiet and they said it's a little too violent.
Speaker 1: So they went back, reworked it and did a different take,
Speaker 1: which led to what you saw in the film. Technical
Speaker 1: challenges included creating a system that could guide the behavior
Speaker 1: of a lot of balloons, because that's how Carl's House
Speaker 1: moves to South America. So how many balloons were used,
Speaker 1: like in the movie, how were the balloons showing up?
Speaker 1: I mean, not real balloons obviously they're virtual balloons, but
Speaker 1: how many were on screen? According to one animator, two
Speaker 1: hundred and eighty six balloons or somewhere in that neighborhood
Speaker 1: were used to get Carl's house off the ground. And
Speaker 1: those balloons had to behave in a believable way. They
Speaker 1: had to be buoyant, so they had to rise up
Speaker 1: in the air, but they had to rise up in
Speaker 1: the air in a way that was natural, like if
Speaker 1: a breeze came by, it wouldn't be a straight line up,
Speaker 1: it would be moving off at an angle. They had
Speaker 1: to bounce off each other, They had to have presents.
Speaker 1: They had to be able to react off of each
Speaker 1: other's strings. So the first balloons that go up are
Speaker 1: followed by other balloons, But those balloons also have to
Speaker 1: move through strings, and that's going to restrict the way
Speaker 1: those balloons move. It all had to be believable or
Speaker 1: else it would just be distracting. So the modeling they did,
Speaker 1: the simulations they did to create the rules of physics
Speaker 1: for those balloons was pretty sophisticated. It was kind of
Speaker 1: like not unlike the hair simulator that they had to
Speaker 1: build for monsters, inc. They needed to have a system
Speaker 1: there that would make all of this work in a
Speaker 1: way that was, you know, that behaved a set of rules,
Speaker 1: and that wouldn't require animators to sit there and hand
Speaker 1: animate ten thousand balloons, which would for the number of shots,
Speaker 1: in the number of frames that it shows up on screen,
Speaker 1: it would be impossible. The movie would still be in
Speaker 1: development if all that had to be done by hand.
Speaker 1: The short Partly Cloudy would accompany Up and Up would
Speaker 1: win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. Also, it
Speaker 1: won an Oscar for Best Original Score. And that's really
Speaker 1: when people were beginning to ask, is any movie animated
Speaker 1: film besides Pixar ever going to have a shot at
Speaker 1: winning that best Animated category. The answer, by the way,
Speaker 1: is yes. But at the time it looked like Pixar
Speaker 1: could not produce anything but a surefire hit. In two
Speaker 1: thousand and nine, Edwin cat Mole was honored by the
Speaker 1: Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences would the Gordon E.
Speaker 1: Sawyer Award, which is an award for an individual in
Speaker 1: the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit
Speaker 1: to the industry as a whole. Now cat Mole, of course,
Speaker 1: had been working on lots of different technologies related to film,
Speaker 1: not just directly to computer graphics, but other applications as well,
Speaker 1: and as a result, there were a lot of movie
Speaker 1: studios that were able to do some pretty incredible things
Speaker 1: using the technology he had invented, So it was not
Speaker 1: a big surprise that he was honored with this award.
Speaker 1: Also in two thousand and nine, Pixar created a wholly
Speaker 1: owned subsidiary called Pixar Canada because it was located in Mexico,
Speaker 1: just kidding, it was in Vancouver. The main purpose for
Speaker 1: Pixar Canada was to create short films based off the
Speaker 1: characters from Pixar feature films, So Pixar Canada would be
Speaker 1: focusing on short cartoons that had characters from Toy Story
Speaker 1: or Monsters Incorporator or that kind of thing, and it
Speaker 1: freed up animators at the main Pixar headquarters to focus
Speaker 1: on feature length films. In twenty ten, Pixar debuts Toy
Speaker 1: Story three, which of course breaks even more records. It
Speaker 1: becomes the highest grossing animated film of all time at
Speaker 1: that point. It also became the first animated film to
Speaker 1: rake in a billion dollars at the box office. It
Speaker 1: won the Best Animated Feature Oscar, and the composer Randy
Speaker 1: Newman won an Oscar for the song We Belong Together.
Speaker 1: So a very critically praised film. The first two films
Speaker 1: in the Toy Story series really explore the idea of
Speaker 1: if a toy could think and feel, what would it
Speaker 1: feel if it were lost or if it had been stolen.
Speaker 1: The third film explores the idea of why would a
Speaker 1: toy feel if the owner had outgrown the toy? Kind
Speaker 1: of explored a little bit in Toy Story two with Jesse,
Speaker 1: but now the characters of Woody and Buzz Lightyear have
Speaker 1: to deal with that. So some of these are pretty
Speaker 1: heavy concepts, the idea of being abandoned and mortality and
Speaker 1: purpose in life, and it's all being explored by three
Speaker 1: D animated toys. But what was the big challenge in
Speaker 1: this film? We've talked in some of the other movies
Speaker 1: about you know, fur in Monster z Inc was a
Speaker 1: big challenge. Getting those underwater effects just right and finding
Speaker 1: Nemo that was a big challenge. Was there anything left
Speaker 1: to be challenging by the time they hit Toy Story three? Well,
Speaker 1: according to Pixar, Yeah, and the big challenge they had
Speaker 1: at that point was creating a meaningful exchange between human
Speaker 1: characters as Andy gives his toys away to the little
Speaker 1: girl Bonnie at the end. Spoiler alert if you haven't
Speaker 1: watched Toy Story three by now, but it's been out
Speaker 1: for six years, so come on. That moment had to
Speaker 1: be really meaningful, and it's a moment between two human characters.
Speaker 1: Earlier Toy Story films had received criticism that the human
Speaker 1: characters looked kind of like toys too, they didn't really
Speaker 1: look like people. And Pixar had created human characters in
Speaker 1: previous films like Up and The Incredibles, but those characters
Speaker 1: have been pretty stylized, like they're not not so human, like,
Speaker 1: you know, they're supposed to be people, but they don't
Speaker 1: really look like people. But pix are also new. They
Speaker 1: couldn't go too far in the other direction. They couldn't
Speaker 1: make Andy look too human or Bonnie look too human.
Speaker 1: And that's because of the uncanny valley problem. And if
Speaker 1: you've never heard that term before, it really started to
Speaker 1: be applied in robotics, but the same is true for
Speaker 1: computer animation. The idea is that uncanny valley is the
Speaker 1: closer you get to looking like a human without getting
Speaker 1: it absolutely right, the more unsettling it is. Typically the
Speaker 1: real problem is with the eyes. The eyes if they
Speaker 1: don't look like they're really like there's any life behind
Speaker 1: those eyes, it looks like there's a and animated corpse
Speaker 1: acting in front of you, which for most people is
Speaker 1: probably not something that is really entertaining or fun to watch.
Speaker 1: It's unsettling. So this has been a real issue with
Speaker 1: robotics and with animation. How do you create a character
Speaker 1: that is believable and realistic enough so that people can
Speaker 1: empathize with that character and feel something when they see
Speaker 1: that character going through various issues without going so realistic
Speaker 1: that you make everyone kind of squirm in their seats
Speaker 1: because something is almost but not quite perfect. It's just
Speaker 1: wrong enough to be not good right. It's you don't
Speaker 1: want to look at it. And if you've seen certain
Speaker 1: computer animated films that have pretty realistic depictions of humans
Speaker 1: where things are just slightly off, polar Express jumps to
Speaker 1: mind for me, you know what I'm talking about. It
Speaker 1: just something doesn't look right and it is unsettling. So
Speaker 1: they had to get that fixed for Toy Story three
Speaker 1: because the scene is the end of the movie. It's
Speaker 1: really important that they got the scene right. So it
Speaker 1: took them a lot of time to work on designs
Speaker 1: for the characters that would work and do the story
Speaker 1: justice without making the audience feel uneasy in the process.
Speaker 1: And capturing that moment of Andy coming to the realization
Speaker 1: that he needs to let go of his toys. That
Speaker 1: was a huge challenge too. That would be a tough
Speaker 1: acting gig to ask a human being. To ask a
Speaker 1: human I need you to show us that your character
Speaker 1: has realized it's time to let go of a beloved
Speaker 1: piece of childhood, because it's the right thing to do,
Speaker 1: both for the child you're giving the toy two and
Speaker 1: for the toy itself. I need to see that. That
Speaker 1: would be tough to ask a human actor to do.
Speaker 1: I mean, good human actors would be able to do it,
Speaker 1: but it's not easy. It's even harder when you're talking
Speaker 1: about animation, because that's a huge group of people all
Speaker 1: working together to try and make that happen, and getting
Speaker 1: all those little details right is enormously challenging from a
Speaker 1: technical standpoint. Now, behind the scenes footage for Toy Story three,
Speaker 1: they reveal that the entire movie has one hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty nine thousand, six hundred and eighty frames in it,
Speaker 1: and each object in the film, every single thing you
Speaker 1: see in the movie, had to be built in several
Speaker 1: stages by several teams of people, even if it only
Speaker 1: appeared in a second or two of on screen time.
Speaker 1: So every single this old individual component had to be designed,
Speaker 1: sketched out, modeled, lit, textured, colored. All of these things
Speaker 1: all had to happen for all of the different pieces,
Speaker 1: for all the frames of the movie. And then you
Speaker 1: start to understand, Oh, now, I see why making a
Speaker 1: movie like this takes five years. That same year that
Speaker 1: Toy Story three came out, they published a short called
Speaker 1: Day and Night. And that also that same year, John
Speaker 1: Laster would become the first producer of animated films to
Speaker 1: win the Producer's Guild of America David O. Selznik Achievement
Speaker 1: Award in Motion Pictures. So Pixar again becomes a pioneer
Speaker 1: in the animation industry, really helping gain more legitimacy in
Speaker 1: the eyes of other parts of the industry. For a
Speaker 1: long time, I would argue that animated films have been
Speaker 1: kind of looked down upon by certain certain other areas
Speaker 1: of the film industry. I think that both Disney in
Speaker 1: general and Pixar in particular have done a lot to
Speaker 1: turn that around. Other studios also have done great work,
Speaker 1: DreamWorks among them. It's not like Pixar and Disney are
Speaker 1: the only two entities out there, but they really did
Speaker 1: pave the way for a lot of other successes. In
Speaker 1: twenty eleven, Pixar turns twenty five and releases Cars Too. Also,
Speaker 1: they released the first toy story short cartoon, Hawaiian Vacation,
Speaker 1: and another short film called La Luna. That year, a
Speaker 1: Lassiter would direct Cars Too, which was the first time
Speaker 1: he had directed a film since the original Cars, which
Speaker 1: came out I think two thousand and six. He had
Speaker 1: directed some of the other shorter cartoons Pixar had produced
Speaker 1: between Cars and Cars Too, but he hadn't directed a
Speaker 1: feature length film since Cars. Out of the seventeen movies
Speaker 1: Pixar has made, Car, Ours ranks number fifteen at the
Speaker 1: box office in the United States, so it's not at
Speaker 1: the very bottom, but it's two up from the very bottom.
Speaker 1: It ranks number nine globally, however, so nine out of
Speaker 1: seventeen when you look at worldwide box office. So what
Speaker 1: two films actually got less at the box office than
Speaker 1: Cars Two? That would be A Bugs Life, which was
Speaker 1: Pixar's second film, which made a little less than Toy
Speaker 1: Story did, and The Good Dinosaur, which is at the
Speaker 1: bottom of both the US and the global box office lists.
Speaker 1: We'll get to The Good Dinosaur in just a little
Speaker 1: bit and talk about the problems that movie had. We're
Speaker 1: going to take a quick break, and then we'll be
Speaker 1: back with more about the Pixar story. In twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: Brave is released by Pixar along with La Luna, which
Speaker 1: had been premiered the year before, but officially released with
Speaker 1: a movie in twenty twelve. Brave also would win the
Speaker 1: Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Brave was co directed by
Speaker 1: Brenda Chapman, who was the first woman to direct a
Speaker 1: Pixar film. She had previously been the first woman to
Speaker 1: direct a major studio animated picture, but that was with DreamWorks.
Speaker 1: She was one of three directors for the Prince of Egypt,
Speaker 1: and she was the first woman director to win an
Speaker 1: Academy Award for Best Animated Feature with Brave. That being said,
Speaker 1: she was not director from start to finish. She had
Speaker 1: the idea for Brave. She based it off her own
Speaker 1: relationship with her daughter, but there were some real creative
Speaker 1: issues behind the scenes while they were working on the story,
Speaker 1: so during the production of the film, Chapman was essentially
Speaker 1: fired from the production. According to Chapman herself and Mark
Speaker 1: Andrews stepped in her place. They both got co direc
Speaker 1: director credit, but she was no longer part of the
Speaker 1: production and she stayed on with Pixar until the movie
Speaker 1: came out, and then she left and for a while
Speaker 1: she worked as a consultant with Lucasfilm. She went back
Speaker 1: to dream Works for a while. She's done some other
Speaker 1: stuff since then, but yeah, she was not on for
Speaker 1: the entire film. Still was the first female director of
Speaker 1: a Pixar movie. Now, for Brave, they actually had to
Speaker 1: go back and create a new hair simulator. They built
Speaker 1: one for Monsters Inc More than a know around a
Speaker 1: decade earlier, but they needed a new one. Why because
Speaker 1: Meredith's hair is curly, and curly hair moves in a
Speaker 1: different way than straight hair, and they could not get
Speaker 1: curly hair to work properly using the old simulator, so
Speaker 1: they had to make a new one. In fact, it
Speaker 1: was so hard for them to get the curly hair
Speaker 1: to behave the way they wanted it to. For a while,
Speaker 1: they actually talked about giving Merita a haircut, but that
Speaker 1: was met with an intense negative reaction for pretty much
Speaker 1: everyone else in the company, and they said, no, you
Speaker 1: got to get this right. So it took more than
Speaker 1: a year just to get the hair right, to build
Speaker 1: a computer simulation that could take curly hair and make
Speaker 1: it behave in a natural way. When you think about
Speaker 1: the nature of curly hair, you can understand why. It's
Speaker 1: not like it's just a wire that's got some weight
Speaker 1: to it that needs to move around. That curl is
Speaker 1: going to extend or contract based upon the various forces
Speaker 1: that are acting upon it. It's a complicated thing to simulate,
Speaker 1: and you have to do it for a character who's
Speaker 1: in nearly every frame of the movie, and so there's
Speaker 1: a lot of motion that goes into that. Even when
Speaker 1: she has to have her hair pulled back, she still
Speaker 1: has a little curl that gets loose in the Witch's workshop.
Speaker 1: By the way, if you pay attention, there's some easter
Speaker 1: eggs with references to other Pixar films, including If You
Speaker 1: look closely. A pizza Planet car is on the table
Speaker 1: in the Witch's workshop before she clears it just a
Speaker 1: Pixar loves to work in Little Easter Eggs and all
Speaker 1: their movies, and I was going to talk about more
Speaker 1: of those, but I realized that if I did that,
Speaker 1: I'd have to do a three year or four more parts,
Speaker 1: and that's stretching it even for you guys. Twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: Pixar releases Monsters University. Now. This is Pixar's first prequel film.
Speaker 1: Monsters University tells a story about how Mike and Sully
Speaker 1: met in college. The first pass at the story got
Speaker 1: a note that was a killer, which was, this story's
Speaker 1: too predictable. That's a hard, hard problem to overcome when
Speaker 1: you're talking about a prequel, because you already know where
Speaker 1: the characters end up. You've seen the original movie. In Monsters, Inc.
Speaker 1: They're working on the scare floor. So how do you
Speaker 1: create a movie where knowing how they end up is
Speaker 1: not leading to a predictable outcome. It also became a
Speaker 1: big challenge to define the character of Sully because in Monsters, Inc.
Speaker 1: The character of Sully really comes out because he's interacting
Speaker 1: with the human girl Boo. When he has Boo there,
Speaker 1: that's where you see Sullivan's personality come forward. But Boo
Speaker 1: is not in Monsters University. This is before Sullivan meets Boo.
Speaker 1: So for a while they were trying to make Sullivan
Speaker 1: the focus of the movie, but they couldn't figure out
Speaker 1: what character was there. And eventually they realized, hey, wait
Speaker 1: a minute, Mike Wazowski, maybe we focus on him instead.
Speaker 1: And once they did that, then they were able to
Speaker 1: really develop a story that they believed in. Now, in Monsters, Inc.
Speaker 1: There were five notable characters that had for in Monsters University,
Speaker 1: there were two hundred and fifty. So while they had
Speaker 1: created the simulator more than a decade earlier, they had
Speaker 1: to rely on it again, and they had to scale
Speaker 1: it up, which required way more computer power than what
Speaker 1: they were using ten years earlier. And like I said previously,
Speaker 1: Sullivan had about a million hairs just on his own,
Speaker 1: and animating all of those by hand is impossible. So
Speaker 1: the simulation guided the way each hair would move depending
Speaker 1: upon the forces acting on it, and it even included momentum,
Speaker 1: which meant that once a character stops moving, the hair
Speaker 1: would continue to move just a little bit because it
Speaker 1: still had some momentum, some inertia keeping it going, and
Speaker 1: or rather inertia would keep it still until it starts moving.
Speaker 1: But you get what I'm saying. Like it behaved according
Speaker 1: to physics. It wasn't just it moves when he moves
Speaker 1: and stops when he stops. There's a little bit of
Speaker 1: a lag there, which is realistic. It's kind of cool.
Speaker 1: One of the problems they noticed was whenever Sullivan would
Speaker 1: make really big fast movements, his hair would stretch out
Speaker 1: across the screen. It would be like a rubber band
Speaker 1: where it would extend all the way on to the
Speaker 1: other end of the screen. And this was a problem.
Speaker 1: It looked awful, you know. It wasn't like the hair
Speaker 1: just looked elongated. It was looking grotesque. They eventually figured
Speaker 1: out what the problem was. The simulation was calculating that
Speaker 1: those hairs were being subjected to forces of up to
Speaker 1: one hundred g's with Sullivan at the mass and speed
Speaker 1: he moved was creating forces of one hundred g's and
Speaker 1: so the hairs were stretching and deforming because of those
Speaker 1: massive forces acting on them in the simulation. So they
Speaker 1: came up with a way to solve this, they created
Speaker 1: little kind of force field areas that they called inertial
Speaker 1: field generators, which sounds like a Star Trek kind of
Speaker 1: thing to me. And these ended up creating new rules
Speaker 1: for those hairs, saying, even though Sullivan moves really fast
Speaker 1: and he's a big, big monster, you never really experienced
Speaker 1: more than ten g's of four, And that allowed the
Speaker 1: hair to behave itself and not stretch across the screen
Speaker 1: and ruin everything. In twenty thirteen, also Disney's film Planes
Speaker 1: comes out. Now Planes is tied to Pixar's Cars series,
Speaker 1: but Planes is not produced by Pixar, so instead the
Speaker 1: Plane series comes out of Disney Tones Studios. If you
Speaker 1: look at the movie Planes, it clearly is inspired by Cars.
Speaker 1: The animation style is very much in keeping with Cars.
Speaker 1: The character creation is unquestionably of that style, but it's
Speaker 1: not Pixar. So I wanted to point that out just
Speaker 1: because it was interesting to see that other elements of
Speaker 1: Disney started to create movies that were leveraging the property
Speaker 1: of Pixar but were not actually produced by Pixar itself.
Speaker 1: Fourteen it was a weird year for Pixar. That was
Speaker 1: the first year in a really long time that did
Speaker 1: not have a feature film debut from the studio. The
Speaker 1: reason why no movie came out in twenty fourteen was
Speaker 1: because of huge problems that were happening with the films
Speaker 1: that were currently in development at Pixar. There were some major,
Speaker 1: major story issues happening that were holding up the release
Speaker 1: of a couple of movies. In one case, the movie
Speaker 1: that came out ended up being a success despite those problems.
Speaker 1: In the other case, a movie came out and failed
Speaker 1: to find that level of success. But in twenty fourteen
Speaker 1: we did get some Pixar stuff. There was a TV
Speaker 1: special that came out for the holidays and it aired
Speaker 1: on ABC called Toy Story That Time Forgot. And also
Speaker 1: Pixar released a free, non commercial version of its in
Speaker 1: house renderings software called render Man. The company also licensed
Speaker 1: a commercial version of this software to other parties. And
Speaker 1: with render Man, you can create these virtual three dimensional
Speaker 1: camera placements, you can define geometry, you can place lights
Speaker 1: on lots of other stuff. Now, it's not a three
Speaker 1: D modeling suite, you would need other programs to do that.
Speaker 1: It's not an animating suite. You would need other programs
Speaker 1: to do that. But it can act as a liaison
Speaker 1: between those two types of softwarees modeling and animation, so
Speaker 1: very useful, and now people have access to a non
Speaker 1: commercial free version of it because of the release in
Speaker 1: twenty fourteen. Now twenty fifteen would be when those movies
Speaker 1: that had been in trouble during their development cycles finally
Speaker 1: come out. The first was Inside Out. Pixar story department
Speaker 1: had to research a lot of information in neuroscience and
Speaker 1: psychology to get this story right, because of course, it's
Speaker 1: all about how our brains process information and emotions. It's
Speaker 1: really about how emotions can guide our decisions and affect
Speaker 1: us and change over time. That's the heart of the story,
Speaker 1: and several emotions were workshopped in the development process but
Speaker 1: eventually dropped from the final version of the story. There
Speaker 1: were emotions like hope and envy, pride on we even
Speaker 1: Shotenfreude was part of the original story development, and at
Speaker 1: one point the story had twenty seven different emotions as characters,
Speaker 1: but that just wasn't manageable, so they had to figure
Speaker 1: out what were the most important ones, what could you
Speaker 1: peel away and have as your core of characters, And
Speaker 1: that story was really hard to get right. Pete Doctor,
Speaker 1: who was leading the project, even thought about giving up
Speaker 1: after three years of working on the story and not
Speaker 1: getting anywhere or feeling like it just wasn't heading in
Speaker 1: the right direction. Originally, the prime story was not going
Speaker 1: to be about an eleven year old girl's reaction when
Speaker 1: her family moves from one part of the country to another.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the event that precipitates all the action
Speaker 1: of the film as it stands, but that wasn't the
Speaker 1: original story. The original story was going to be that
Speaker 1: Joy the emotion. Joy decides she doesn't want the girl Riley,
Speaker 1: to grow up into an adult. She wants Riley to
Speaker 1: be a kid because kids experienced Joy on a level
Speaker 1: that is orders of magnitude greater than adults, and so
Speaker 1: Joy was going to take every opportunity to keep Riley
Speaker 1: from developing into an adult. But then they realize that
Speaker 1: it turned Joy into a really unlikable character, so they
Speaker 1: scrapped that. They had to go back to the drawing
Speaker 1: board and they had to re storyboard the entire movie.
Speaker 1: They had hit the point where they had storyboarded the film. Now,
Speaker 1: typically Pixar doesn't start storyboarding until they feel that the
Speaker 1: general story is pretty good. That the script is done,
Speaker 1: then they would storyboard a movie, and then the next
Speaker 1: step once the storyboard is approved is to go into animation,
Speaker 1: modeling and animation. But this one had been storyboarded and
Speaker 1: then they had to scrap it and redo it, so
Speaker 1: it really was a dramatic change, and they still had
Speaker 1: to try and get the movie out before it got
Speaker 1: too late. On top of that, Inside that was the
Speaker 1: first Pixar film made without the input of Steve Jobs.
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs had passed away in twenty eleven, and while
Speaker 1: Jobs hadn't really been in a real leadership role for
Speaker 1: many years, he was still active in the process of
Speaker 1: hearing story ideas and giving his input all the way
Speaker 1: up to his death, and John Lassiter was also largely absent.
Speaker 1: John Lassiter was over at Walt Disney Animation trying to
Speaker 1: get that department to turn around because they had had
Speaker 1: their own series of disappointing films, films that weren't necessarily
Speaker 1: bad but were not performing well at the box office,
Speaker 1: Movies like The Princess and the Frog, which is a
Speaker 1: perfectly fine film but failed to capture an audience. So
Speaker 1: Lassiter was trying to fix that and wasn't really around
Speaker 1: to help out with Inside Out. There are also big
Speaker 1: technical challenges with that movie. A big one being that
Speaker 1: the character of Joy has these little particles that radiate
Speaker 1: from her skin, and since Joy is the primary protagonist,
Speaker 1: that meant having to replicate that effect for hundreds of
Speaker 1: shots in the movie, and that took a lot of
Speaker 1: computer power as well. Ultimately, all that hard work paid off.
Speaker 1: The movie was a huge success. It was the third
Speaker 1: highest grossing Pixar film in both US and global box
Speaker 1: office numbers, so it worked. Also, it was released with
Speaker 1: the short film Lava. We've got a little bit more
Speaker 1: to say about Pixar circa twenty sixteen, but first let's
Speaker 1: take another quick break. Twenty fifteen also saw the other
Speaker 1: troubled movie come out, that is The Good Dinosaur, and
Speaker 1: The Good Dinosaur is a black sheep in Pixar. It's
Speaker 1: the movie that when I talked to my coworkers, they
Speaker 1: some of them didn't even realize that was a Pixar movie.
Speaker 1: Some of them hadn't even heard the movie at all.
Speaker 1: So twenty fifteen is the first year in which two
Speaker 1: different Pixar feature length films come out to theaters. But
Speaker 1: the Good Dinosaur does not perform the way Inside Out did.
Speaker 1: In the United States, it earned one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: three million. Now globally it earned almost three hundred and
Speaker 1: thirty two million dollars. That's not chump change. That's a
Speaker 1: lot of money, but it still makes the movie the
Speaker 1: lowest performing film in Pixar's history as an animation studio.
Speaker 1: That one hundred and twenty three million dollars, that's less
Speaker 1: than what Toy Story one made at the box office.
Speaker 1: If you adjust for inflation, it's much less than what
Speaker 1: Toy Story made. And if you you know, not just inflation,
Speaker 1: but the inflation of movie ticket prices much much less,
Speaker 1: it means way fewer people saw that movie. The story
Speaker 1: of the film, which if you haven't seen it, it's
Speaker 1: about a dinosaur. It's it's the takes the premise of
Speaker 1: what if the meteor that struck the Earth and helped
Speaker 1: precipitate the mass extinction that led to all the dinosaurs
Speaker 1: dying off? What if it never hit the Earth? What
Speaker 1: if it missed and dinosaurs continued to live on Earth
Speaker 1: and humans evolved least to caveman status, and you had
Speaker 1: both coexisting on the same planet. That's kind of the world,
Speaker 1: it said in and that's not the premise of the story,
Speaker 1: but it is the world that the characters exist within.
Speaker 1: That whole story was reworked several times. The idea of well,
Speaker 1: what is the actual point A to point B two
Speaker 1: point C storyline? We understand what the world is, but
Speaker 1: what are we trying to say? It was a huge problem,
Speaker 1: an enormous problem. It caused the film to miss its
Speaker 1: original release date. It was supposed to come out in
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen, It got pushed to twenty fourteen, and then
Speaker 1: pushed again to twenty fifteen. So when the story was
Speaker 1: not where it needed to be by twenty thirteen, when
Speaker 1: it was supposed to debut, and it hadn't even been
Speaker 1: finished or really gone beyond that story development stage, Bob
Speaker 1: Peterson and John Walker, who were leading the project at
Speaker 1: that time, were removed from the project. Peterson would remain
Speaker 1: with Pixar but work on other things, and Denise Reim,
Speaker 1: who was a producer in the film, would replace John Walker. Peterson,
Speaker 1: who had first worked on the story when Bob Peterson
Speaker 1: came up with the idea back in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: would become the director of the movie, and things got
Speaker 1: pretty dark for Pixar in twenty thirteen. It wasn't just
Speaker 1: that The Good Dinosaur was having problems. There were other
Speaker 1: issues as well. Pixar had closed down Pixar Canada in
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen and laid off eighty employees as a result.
Speaker 1: A few months later, the company laid off another sixty
Speaker 1: seven employees from its main office, and by then Pixar
Speaker 1: was up to more than twelve hundred employees. The movie
Speaker 1: was reworked, and reworked, and reworked, and even recast. They
Speaker 1: had cast the movie because they thought they were getting
Speaker 1: toward a complete story in twenty thirteen, but it didn't happen,
Speaker 1: so they had to recast it because when they came
Speaker 1: up with the finished story, they had dropped a lot
Speaker 1: of characters or replaced them with other characters. So there's
Speaker 1: I think. Francis McDorman, I think, was the only actress
Speaker 1: who was attached to the original film and remained on
Speaker 1: the cast for the reworked version. A Monsters University short
Speaker 1: called Party Central was supposed to premiere with The Good Dinosaur,
Speaker 1: but eventually Pixar shifted that to go in front of
Speaker 1: him up, it's most wanted. So instead, a different Pixar
Speaker 1: short called Sanjay's Super Team debuted with The Good Dinosaur.
Speaker 1: And I've seen The Good Dinosaur, but I haven't seen
Speaker 1: Sanjay's Super Team because I saw The Good Dinosaur on
Speaker 1: a plane and they didn't have the short film to
Speaker 1: go in front of it. So I'm curious how Sanjay's
Speaker 1: Superteam matches up. I've heard about it, I knew what
Speaker 1: it was, but I had not seen the actual shorts.
Speaker 1: I need to do that. Moving to twenty sixteen, wrapping
Speaker 1: up this epic series on Pixar, we get the release
Speaker 1: of Finding Dori, the sequel to Finding Nemo. Finding Dory
Speaker 1: was originally supposed to come out on November twenty fourth,
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen. That's when The Good Dinosaur actually premiered, so
Speaker 1: Finding Dory was pushed back to the summer of twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: And it's the only feature length Pixar film I have
Speaker 1: not seen yet. It's not because I didn't like Finding Nemo. Actually,
Speaker 1: Finding Nemo might be my favorite Pixar movie to date.
Speaker 1: I think it might be the top one for me.
Speaker 1: It's tough because there are a lot of Pixar movies
Speaker 1: I think are really really good, but Finding Nemo in
Speaker 1: particular speaks to me. Finding Dory I have not seen yet.
Speaker 1: It's only because I don't have a whole lot of times,
Speaker 1: so I haven't been to the theater in several months.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of movies that came out this
Speaker 1: year that I have not yet seen, but a lot
Speaker 1: of people did go see it. It had the largest
Speaker 1: opening for an animated film of our third largest opening
Speaker 1: I should say, third largest opening of an animated film
Speaker 1: of all time, and grossed four hundred and fifty one
Speaker 1: million dollars in North America alone to date as of
Speaker 1: July twenty second, twenty sixteen, and it's probably more than
Speaker 1: that at that point. And that's just North America, that's
Speaker 1: not globally. So it has done incredibly well and I
Speaker 1: can't wait to see it. I don't have any behind
Speaker 1: the scenes information about Finding Dory, other than the fact
Speaker 1: that it had been teased that there was going to
Speaker 1: be a Finding Nemo sequel for a while. In fact,
Speaker 1: there was originally going to be a Finding Nemo sequel
Speaker 1: produced by that Circle seven group that had been formed
Speaker 1: when Disney wanted to try and continue making films based
Speaker 1: off Pixar movies but not made by Pixar itself, but
Speaker 1: of course Circle seven had already been dissolved, and Finding
Speaker 1: Dorry is not based off anything that Circle seven came
Speaker 1: up with. Can't wait to see it. Future films that
Speaker 1: Pixar has planned include Toy Story four, which I don't
Speaker 1: think most people even thought was going to be a thing,
Speaker 1: Cars three, The Incredibles two, It's another SEQUEA was never expecting,
Speaker 1: and an original film that is not based off any
Speaker 1: former Pixar or are previous I should say previous Pixar
Speaker 1: movie called Coco, will come out in twenty seventeen. Coco
Speaker 1: being inspired by Dia de Muertos, the Mexican holiday, the
Speaker 1: Day of the Dead, the very colorful holiday, and in fact,
Speaker 1: there was some some controversy around that not having anything
Speaker 1: to do with Disney producing a Day of the Dead
Speaker 1: holiday themed movie, in particular, especially once they started bringing
Speaker 1: on cultural experts to make certain that the movie is
Speaker 1: respectful and reflects the cultural values of people of Mexico
Speaker 1: and not just exploit them, which would be horrible. But
Speaker 1: also there was an issue when Disney moved to trademark
Speaker 1: the phrase Dia de las Mortos, and a lot of people,
Speaker 1: myself included, felt that that move was perhaps a little dumb.
Speaker 1: Dumb is a fine word. It was a dumb move
Speaker 1: on Disney's part. It would be like trying to trademark
Speaker 1: Christmas or Halloween or Memorial Day, trademarking that so that
Speaker 1: you can use it and no one else can. That
Speaker 1: just it struck people as being incredibly shortsighted and insensitive.
Speaker 1: Don't know who had Disney filed for that trademark. I'm
Speaker 1: guessing it probably wasn't John Lassiter. It doesn't sound like
Speaker 1: something he would have done. But at any rate, that
Speaker 1: did not happen. Disney dropped it, and like I said,
Speaker 1: they brought on and some cultural consultants to make sure
Speaker 1: that the stuff that Pixar was developing was respectful while
Speaker 1: still being an entertaining movie. And I'm really looking forward
Speaker 1: to it. I love the artistic style of Dia de
Speaker 1: Muertos and sugar skulls and things of that nature, and
Speaker 1: I'm very curious to see what story they have. From
Speaker 1: my understand and this is from a friend of mine,
Speaker 1: so I apologize if I get this wrong. If I
Speaker 1: get it wrong, it's because of me, not because of
Speaker 1: my friend. It's because I misinterpreted. But as I understand it,
Speaker 1: Coco sort of refers to the concept of a boogeyman,
Speaker 1: so that's probably going to play some sort of role
Speaker 1: within the story, which follows a character named Miguel. And
Speaker 1: that's all I know about Coco, but I'm very much
Speaker 1: looking forward to it. There's some unannounced films that are
Speaker 1: on Pixar's slate. They have not publicly said what they
Speaker 1: will be, but they have said that those movies are
Speaker 1: original works. They are not sequels, which gave came as
Speaker 1: something of a relief to a lot of people because
Speaker 1: seeing Toy Story four, Cars three, and Incredibles two on
Speaker 1: the schedule, people begin to ask, well, this Pixar just
Speaker 1: going to be in the business of churning out sequels now,
Speaker 1: or are we going to get more original works? Because
Speaker 1: originally the idea was there would be an original movie
Speaker 1: pretty much every year and a sequel every other year,
Speaker 1: and that hasn't quite worked out, But maybe that will
Speaker 1: change after this upcoming slate of films that wraps up
Speaker 1: the Pixar Story Part three that catches us up to
Speaker 1: present day, and maybe we will have more to say
Speaker 1: about Pixar in the future. It is a fascinating company.
Speaker 1: It's history with other major companies Disney and Apple make
Speaker 1: it really fascinating from a technology standpoint. The business side
Speaker 1: of things incredible. Also the idea that the animator who
Speaker 1: was fired from Disney came on to Pixar became a
Speaker 1: public face of Pixar. Even though he was not the
Speaker 1: technical leader. He was the public face and a lot
Speaker 1: of people look at John Lassiter as being the leader
Speaker 1: of Pixar. Then going over to become a chief creative
Speaker 1: officer of Walt Disney Animation, becoming an important voice in
Speaker 1: the company that once fired him phenomenal. Also, never forget
Speaker 1: he started off as a skipper on the Jungle Cruise
Speaker 1: ride at Disneyland. We should all be so lucky. And
Speaker 1: that concludes our three part series about the Pixar story.
Speaker 1: As I have said a couple of times during these
Speaker 1: classic episodes, I could go back and do a follow
Speaker 1: up to talk about what Pixar has been doing since then.
Speaker 1: There's also some interesting stuff to talk about with the
Speaker 1: incorporation of Pixar into the various theme parks that Disney
Speaker 1: has notably over in Disneyland. They have Pixar pere, but
Speaker 1: their other wants to talk about as well, So maybe
Speaker 1: I'll do that because that's always fun to chat about
Speaker 1: as well. And let's just talk about some of the
Speaker 1: movies that Pixar has pushed out and some of the
Speaker 1: innovation the company has continued to pursue since twenty sixteen.
Speaker 1: But until then, I hope you are all well, and
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is
Speaker 1: an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.