To Pixar and Beyond: My Unlikely Journey with Steve Jobs to Make Entertainment History

by Lawrence Levy

“Animation is really all about acting,” Ed explained. “Before the animators animate a character on screen, they will often act out the part in front of a mirror so they fully understand the movements they need to create on screen.”

“Luxo Jr. was the first time Pixar demonstrated how computer animation could successfully convey story, character, and emotion,” Ed told me. “It was a huge breakthrough, for Pixar and the industry, a jaw-dropping hit wherever we showed it.”

I began to fathom how these technical challenges imposed enormous constraints on the film. I learned that there was a reason the film was specifically about toys, and not about animals or people. Toys are made of plastic. They have uniform surfaces. No variation. No skin. No clothing that needs to wrinkle with every movement. Toys have geometries that are much easier to create with computers. For similar reasons, the opening scenes of the film take place inside Andy’s bedroom. The bedroom is a square box. Its features—bed, dresser, fan, window, door—are more geometric than outdoor features. Easier to draw. Much easier to light.

Pixar did computer animation. There were no cameras. No film. Just images on computer screens. But the only way to watch a film in a movie theater was to play it on a film projector. Pixar’s computer images had to find their way onto celluloid if they were to be seen by the public.

Making Toy Story was not just finishing another film. It was more like climbing Everest or landing on the moon for the first time. Computers had never been pushed to this level of artistry before. Pixar had more than one hundred of the most powerful computer workstations available just to draw the final images that would appear in the film. Each frame of the film took anything from forty-five minutes to thirty hours to draw, and there were around 114,000 of them. Pixar was embarked on a lonely, courageous quest through terrain into which neither it nor anyone else had ever ventured. The summit was just beginning to poke out from behind the distant clouds, and no one was certain how thin the air would get.

Taking a company public meant selling its stock to investors through the public stock exchanges. It served the twin purposes of raising capital to finance a company’s business and enabling anyone, including the company’s founders, to freely sell their stock. In Silicon Valley this was an imprimatur of success like no other.

In 1928 Disney released a short black-and-white cartoon that changed the course of animation. Called Steamboat Willie, it ushered in breakthroughs on two fronts. It introduced the world to the most fully formed cartoon personality audiences had ever seen: Mickey Mouse. It was also the first cartoon to use synchronized sound, meaning that the sounds were timed to the action, making the overall audience experience far more immersive than ever before.

After the success of Mickey Mouse, Disney set his sights on the first animated feature film. It took him until 1937 to release Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a virtuoso accomplishment that ushered in many more breakthroughs in story, character, color, sound, and the way animation displayed depth. The film also introduced the world to the Seven Dwarfs and quickly sealed their place as icons of American culture.

Only three non-Disney animated feature films had achieved a domestic box office at or around $50 million: Universal’s An American Tail in 1986 and The Land Before Time in 1988, and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993.

Toy Story went on to become the biggest film of 1995, clocking in a total domestic box office of just under $192 million by the end of its run. At the time, it was the third-biggest animated feature film ever released, behind only Disney’s Aladdin and The Lion King.