Peter Docter says, “I'd always grown up thinking, ‘I'm going to work at Disney. Someday, I'm going to draw Mickey Mouse.’ Then instead, I went to this place that no one had heard of... literally no one.”
In 1979, George Lucas hired Ed Catmull to head Lucasfilm’s Computer Division, which in 1982 completed the first fully computer‑animated scene in a feature film for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
In 1986, Steve Jobs purchased the Computer Division from Lucas and officially founded Pixar as an independent company, made up of about 40 employees. In 1988, the short film Tin Toy was released and it became the first computer‑animated film to win an Oscar in 1989.
He began animating and directing adverts, including his work on Listerine’s “Boxer”. “Friends of mine from CalArts were working on The Little Mermaid and I was animating happy products bouncing, thinking, ‘This is a waste of time,’” Docter says, but it was good practice for what was to come.
“It's actually surprising how much story you can tell in 30 seconds, so it was very instructive. It was also fast, so if you hated one commercial, you’d wait a couple of weeks and be on to the next one.”
“Steve [Jobs] put up with us losing basically a million dollars a month before Toy Story. Frankly, I think he was distracted working on [computer company] NeXT, and then ultimately Apple, and he wasn't really paying attention that we were burning through his cash. The fact he stayed with it was pretty monumental.”
“I was surprised by how many people afterwards said, ‘I thought my toys came to life too when I wasn't in the room.’ I think the reason it worked was probably because it had that central conceit, and then it had fun, entertaining characters. Plus, the voice talent we had and the animators.”
Although in Toy Story 4, Woody became a “lost toy” living with Bo Peep and helping carnival toys find new homes, he’s summoned back for a toys vs tech face-off.
“It's rare that you get a character like Woody that does seem to unfold and reveal these different layers. Other characters don't seem to have that depth, and I don't know where that comes from.”
Pixar’s sophomore effort was 1998’s A Bug’s Life. “The fact that came out and did well is huge.” As well as skills and talent, the success also likely lies in how much heart is put into Pixar’s films in the first place.
“I used to be the star animator, then there were these young guys coming in, dethroning me, so that sense of jealousy I was able to tap into, like, ‘Oh, of course, I'm going to brush it off, pretend like it's no big deal,’ which is what I did. Even if the story is not about you in big or small ways, I think it’s the job of the artist to say, ‘This is coming from a place in my heart,’ and that shows up on the screen.”
“Growing up, Elie was goofy, funny, full of life, and then there was a parent-teacher conference at school and they said, ‘Elie’s a quiet child’ and we were like, ‘Who are you talking about?’ She had hit that age of being self-aware, and everything changes. I remembered that as myself growing up, and that really became the core of that movie: what happens to that childhood joy?”
Docter also voices the giant, flightless, quirky bird Kevin. “That was just out of desperation, because we couldn’t find the right sound in the bird library of sound effects, so I would make whatever noises!”
“People still want to see characters that seem reflective of their own lives and that experience things that we are all going through as human beings. Even though it's bugs or fish or cars or whatever, it's us up there, and that's continued to be the same.”
View Green Video on the source website“On a number of films, we’ve thought, ‘What if?’ Then you go in and you realise you’re retelling the same story or it's leading somewhere that just doesn't feel interesting, so we close the door on it. It's got to earn its keep.”
Interestingly, both Hoppers and Toy Story 5 deal with technology in different ways, and technology has changed drastically since the start of Pixar, even just in how computers have progressed. “We couldn’t have dreamed of doing the hair and the fur from Monsters, Inc, on Toy Story. Then, with Finding Nemo and the water. Today, we don't really consider the technical restrictions. We just know the wizards we work with can do anything we need.”
In 1995, it took an average frame of Toy Story seven hours to render, and in 2008, the average time it took to render a frame on faster machines was under one minute.” Now, Docter explains that they use AI to complete renders, but it saves time without robbing anyone of their creative abilities.
“AI is going to be disruptive in the way we work. The hope would be we can use it on background characters and sets that don’t matter as much so we can focus on the important stuff in the foreground. We can use it to do the boring stuff, so we can do the exciting stuff – to generate things that visually you've not ever seen before.
Pixar did it with Toy Story in 1995, and they’re sure to do it in 2026, and beyond.
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