Hacker Cinema
Toy Story 2
1999 · Film · 92 min
Part of Toy Story Collection
Directed by John Lasseter
Andy heads off to Cowboy Camp, leaving his toys to their own devices. Things shift into high gear when an obsessive toy collector named Al McWhiggen, owner of Al's Toy Barn kidnaps Woody. Andy's toys mount a daring rescue mission, Buzz Lightyear meets his match and Woody has to decide where he and his heart truly belong.
11 positive1 negative37 neutralfrom 49 commenters
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50 comments on Hacker News
IIRC, the files for Toy Story 2 were accidentally deleted during production, and the film was only saved because someone on maternity leave had a backup at home.
Turns out you can fuck up self hosting too.
Took my kids to see Toy Story 5.
While watching it, I thought about AI generated content.
I have never personally met anyone who worked on any of the Toy Story movies. I know, from documentaries etc, who Brad Bird and John Lasseter are. I've also watched the video [0] about how Toy Story 2 almost got deleted (which I highly recommend if you are in storage, DevOps or SRE).
There are other movies like the Wild Robot that:
- had big emotional impact on me (b/c I'm a parent)
- are 100% animated
- I have zero idea who made them
I say all of this b/c at some point, most people don't care if the movie was hand painted cels, CGI done by humans or fully AI generated with human text prompting. If the feeling is strong, people will have a "bigger" reaction which in turn will make it more memorable. It's all basically on a spectrum of "humans using tools". They care about how the movie makes them feel. It started with humans spitting charcoal at a wall [1] and now it's linear algebra.
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhp_20j0Ys (Toy Story 2 almost lost)
1 - https://youtu.be/6tn3bMbm5uw (humans painting on walls0
It certainly should be possible but idk if its actually implemented; at the very least you should be able to implement it as a filter plugin for ffmpeg.
Some of the more advanced CRT shaders actually attempt to mathematically model how the video gets distorted by the CRT and even the component video. If the effects of converting to film are so well-understood that Pixar can adapt their film for the process then it out to be able to post-process the video in a way that reproduces those artifacts.
I don't think its possible for it ever to be exactly the same since the display technology of a monitor is fundamentally different from a film projector(or a CRT) but it should be possible to get it good enough that its indistinguishable from an photo of the film being displayed on a modern monitor (ie the colors aren't completely different like in the comparisons in the article.
BTW TFA didn't mention this but about 15 years ago they rerendered toy story and toy story 2 for a new theatrical run when those gimmicky 3d glasses were popular. If that's the version thats being distributed today on Disney plus and bluray (IDK but i feel like it probably is) then that could potentially be a more significant factor in ruining the color balance than not having been converted to film.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Pixar does not have a monopoly on attention to detail. They're flush with cash and their leadership has decent taste.
There are so many creators putting in intense work, and doing it on low budgets. You can't claim these folks don't have attention to detail. Check out A24, low and mid and low budget films, or independent films and you'll see a wide assortment of highly meticulous storytellers.
Pixar, on the other hand, isn't low or mid budget:
Toy Story - $30 Million A Bug’s Life - $120 Million Toy Story 2 - $90 Million Monsters, Inc. - $115 Million Finding Nemo - $94 Million The Incredibles - $92 Million Cars - $120 Million Ratatouille - $150 Million WALL-E - $180 Million Up - $175 Million Toy Story 3 - $200 Million Cars 2 - $200 Million Brave - $185 Million Monsters University - $200 Million Inside Out - $175 Million The Good Dinosaur - $200 Million Finding Dory - $200 Million Cars 3 - $175 Million Coco - $175 Million Incredibles 2 - $200 Million Toy Story 4 - $200 Million Onward - $175 Million Soul - $150 Million Luca - Unknown but probably around $150 Million Turning Red - $175 Million Lightyear - $200 Million For that amount of money, they had better pay attention to detail.
Miyazaki is doing way more with much less.
Voices of a Distant Star was one person -- Shinkai. That's the kind of thing we'll see more and more of. Small creators reaching audiences and building studios. Gooseworx, psychicpebbles, Vivienne Medrano. That's the algorithm of tomorrow.
AI, as a tool, makes this more possible. One of the first people to do it successfully was Joel Haver, and he's just the first of many to come.
I've been involved in identity and access control work for a long time. The problems with open by default include:
1. People are fallible. I'm fallible. Someone fat fingers rm -rf / home/user and boom. At best you have a lot of very expensive engineers now doing firefighting instead of work that makes the company money. See for example Toy Story 2[a]. At worst, the company goes out of business. I don't like to have more access than I need, because if I screw up, and I do, there's no guardrails. If there is some unknowable list of people who have access because everything is open, glitches become that much harder to diagnose.
No hiring process or onboarding system can fix human nature.
2. Firing someone. Everything's open, right? If that person is malicious and you leave even a sliver of access for them, they're in. They can kill the golden goose. It's happened.
3. One hack is all it takes. If a malicious party finds the keys to the castle gate, they also get into the treasury, the queen's bedroom, the armory, the food stores, everything.
> he lost productivity with closed by default
He's been lucky. The productivity lost is peanuts compared to the business itself. I used to say things about "the reputation of the company", but major breaches and IT failures don't seem to make a dent in any company's reputation any more.
a. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/lightyear-toy-story-2-deleted-b2017238.html
This article is pretty poorly written. Galyn was NOT an animator. Not everyone who works on an animated feature film is an animator, there's a whole cast of amazingly talented people in a range of disciplines that bring these films to life.
You can see this from her IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0839877/ She was on the development team on Toy Story 2 and then a Producer there after.
I do feel bad for her losing her job, but 23 years is a LONG time ago to have define your entire career and that story is somewhat apocryphal from all accounts internally.
If we're talking about loyalty, the rest of her career there after is actually much more interesting to talk about. I think its a disservice that a site like this boils her down to a role she didn't do and a singular event for clicks.
including two of the executives behind “Lightyear”: director Angus MacLane and producer Galyn Susman. MacLane had been at Pixar for more than two decades, serving as an animator on classics like “Toy Story 2,” “The Incredibles” and “Finding Nemo.” He co-directed the 2016 sequel “Finding Dory” before his first solo directorial feature film “Lightyear.” The spinoff of the “Toy Story” franchise, which featured Chris Evans as the voice of Buzz Lightyear, was a commercial dud; Deadline estimated the film lost the studio more than $100 million.
Susman, likewise, was a longtime Pixar employee. She is also the hero of one of the company’s most legendary stories. During the making of “Toy Story 2,” a Pixar employee accidentally wiped the servers of nearly the whole movie. Thankfully for the animators, Susman was working from home while taking care of her newborn child — her backup copy saved the film.
Having done great work in the past is not enough to incentivize others to keep you around.
Animated movies take years to make.
> The story likely takes place in 1998, though Jacob admits he’s foggy on the exact date.
In 1998 we were living in Internet Time. The amount of stuff that changed from '97 to '98 and from '98 to '99 made people's heads spin. Google incorporated in September of 1998. 56K modems were brand new that year. At the end of 1999 when Toy Story 2 came out, Napster had been out for 5 months, and Java 1.2 was just about to exit from beta into general availability.
People were still introducing each other to WinAmp when they started storyboarding this movie.
Considering how good Toy Story 2 was, "sad" is an odd way of putting it, unless you're talking about the ensuing crunch.
There are a few more details about that side of the story elsewhere:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/lightyear-toy-story-2-deleted-b2017238.html
https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/toy-story-2-disasters-almost-killed-movie/
this is insane to me because individual frames for a Pixar film are around 1GB in size.
recall how large laptop hard drives were before Toy Story 2 (2002)...
I have an extremely small amount of experience writing shaders for RenderMan (BMRT, actually), and those aren't large. animation data typically isn't HUGE, but models sure as heck are, and a frame you send to RenderMan is concrete (it used to be, maybe it isn't anymore?) meaning that all geometry was present in the file you gave to RenderMan, only the compiled shaders were referenced from it, because they were procedural and could not be statically included. so I guess the frames the renderer sees are sort of like the binaries of what I would now view as a software compilation process.
More details on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Pixar-company/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob
The ending is sad -- that intrepid recovery mostly didn't end up used:
And then, some months later, Pixar rewrote the film from almost the ground up, and we made Toy Story 2 again. That rewritten film was the one you saw in theatres and that you can watch now on Blu-Ray.
Yes, it was Toy Story 2.
https://screenrant.com/toy-story-2-movie-deleted-accident-recovered/
You seem right based on Oren's Quora answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30339069
And then, some months later, Pixar rewrote the film from almost the ground up, and we made Toy Story 2 again. That rewritten film was the one you saw in theatres and that you can watch now on Blu-Ray.
Home computers where pretty dinky and broadband slow at the time of Toy Story 2. I wonder how they'd get 90% of the movie transferred home and saved to disk/tape?
"Pixar Studio Stories: The Movie Vanishes", narrated by Oren Jacob and Galyn Susman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dhp_20j0Ys
"Did Pixar accidentally delete Toy Story 2 during production?", Quora answer by Oren Jacob: https://www.quora.com/Pixar-company/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob
Why this got downvoted a bit is beyond me, I’ll never understand hn.
Oren, who worked at Pixar recounts the story, and said “She has an SGI machine (Indigo? Indigo 2?) Those were the same machines we had at all our desktops to run the animation system and work on the film, which is what she was doing. Yes, it was against the rules, but we did it anyway, and it saved the movie in the end.”
https://www.quora.com/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob?ch=17&oid=1215894
The way I heard this story is that the movie being saved wasn't actually the theatrical Toy Story 2. Instead, it was Disney's version that was mostly scrapped when they resolved their dispute with Pixar.
This sounds like there's a whole other story in the aftremath, would be interesting to hear how they dealt with it (deciding between dropping scenes vs reproducing):
> Jacob admits that about 10% of the film’s files were never retrieved and are gone forever, but they were able to make the film work without the scenes.
Also, this seems to be a second hand rereporting, the linked article has a little more detail (https://thenextweb.com/news/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good)
It also has the real beef of the story:
> Pixar, at the time, did not continuously test their backups. This is where the trouble started, because the backups were stored on a tape drive and as the files hit 4 gigabytes in size, the maximum size of the file was met. The error log, which would have told the system administrators about the full drive, was also located on the full volume, and was zero bytes in size.
That's not really true historically. There's the whole Wild West ethos that still makes its way into pop culture (Star Wars, Breaking Bad, Clint Eastwood, Toy Story 2, Back to the Future Part 2, etc), which glorifies outlaw life and people making it through their wits rather than the support of authorities. There are cities like San Francisco and Las Vegas, basically built on criminals building a local civilization. Prison movies like Shawshank Redemption, the Green Mile, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest have us rooting for the inmates. We keep electing Kennedy clan members, even though the family fortune is built on Scottish distilleries and securities manipulation. American history includes bomb-throwing anarchists, 3 revolutions, massacres by private security forces, hippie communes, the KKK, police forces bombing their own citizens, and plenty of extrajudicial lynchings.
I think that the time period where this is true is the post-WW2 prosperity. There was a large premium on order and social stability here, along with creating institutions that kept (white, suburban, middle-class, male) Americans safe and gave them a stable upwards trajectory. Much of the support for law & order comes out of the demographic that grew up in this time period, with subsequent generations being much more skeptical of law enforcement and sympathetic to criminals. You don't see 20-somethings flying thin-blue-line flags, but you do see them calling to defund the police.
I still enjoy a lot of the movies—more especially since I can relive the 'first watch' experience with my kids. It's hard to make sure I don't reveal some of the fun plot twists in older movies but it pays off.
Sadly, since my kids saw Toy Story 2 before Star Wars Episode V, the whole 'I am your father' bit didn't land with the same impact it did on previous generations :(
I think it's interesting how the story can evolve and develop once the movie is already released. I think it's interesting how we perceive movies as being these immutable works, but they're actually being changed to better fit in with modern times (eg the removal of the bit in Toy Story 2 about Harvey Weinstein bit because jokes about his predations are less socially acceptable)
As the Disney+ versions gradually become the canonical releases of all Disney movies, I wouldn't be surprised if they retcon a number of their movies. There's already been blatant examples like adding Hayden Christensen to Return of the Jedi[1], but they've also changed movies like Lilo & Stitch, Toy Story 2, Splash, etc and I think it will only get more prevalent as time goes by (although I'm sure the changes will be similar to the ones mentioned in the article- removing some of the darker aspects of their stories, or ones that might offend more puritan viewers.)
[1]: I realize this change was pre-Disney+, but presumably Disney has the rights to previous cuts of Star Wars in addition to the "Special" ones
That reminds me of the Pixar incident where Toy Story 2 was accidentally deleted while in production and had no working backups.
Luckily one employee was working from home (rare at the time!) and had a copy of the entire movie on her desktop computer. Which they very carefully moved back to the office and were able to restore from that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MAedEXri7c
> But Hollywood have always done this - recycling old ideas in new wrapping. And Hollywood have always been criticized for being vapid entertainment, empty spectacle etc.
Not to this degree. The last good year for movies was 1999. This is the list of major releases that year:
The Matrix
Fight Club
The Sixth Sense
Toy Story 2
The Green Mile
American Beauty
Being John Malkovic
Office Space
The Iron Giant
Magnolia
Austin Powers
American Pie
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Eyes Wide Shut
Dogma
Galaxy Quest
The Insider
Notting Hill
Man on the Moon
Analyze This
Detroit Rock City
Mystery Men
Bicentennial Man
This is not even the entire list, just the ones I enjoyed and I'm bothering to type.
You can't look at that list and honestly say nothing has changed, because it's just not true. The energy and creativity has clearly moved somewhere else, to TV and streaming services.
This year alone there's two FANTASTIC shows, Chernobyl and Stranger Things S3 that definitely deserve praise.
Maybe domestically? Toy Story 2, Monsters University, and I'm sure others outperformed the original when you compare their global box office numbers. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=monstersinc2.htm (nb foreign BO is 64% of the haul).
Inb4 “darned execs”: Pixar did basically the same with Toy Story 2, throwing out 90% of the movie with barely a year to go before release date, and it worked out. Sometimes reworking it is the right thing to do.
> Finally, we must explore the lengthy crunches. Are they truly delivering productive value?
They're not. It's a huge waste of money. It's all poor planning. But each company has to learn that individually, over and over, before an industry figures it out. There's some quote about making movies (or art) that the hard part is making the movie the first time. Once they knew what they were making, doing it a second time would cost 1/10th as much.
A lot of the leadership at Pixar talk about how difficult Toy Story 2 was on the staff [1]. '"a full third of the staff" ended up with some form of RSI by the time the film was finished.' 'In one instance, an animator had forgotten to drop his child off at daycare one morning and, in a mental haze, forgot the baby in the back seat of his car in the parking lot.' Even though 'Pixar did not encourage long hours, and, in fact, set limits on how many hours employees could work by approving or disapproving overtime.'
It created a huge culture shift at Pixar. Luckily, they've in a comfortable enough position to carry out and keep up with those changes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Story_2#Controversy_and_troubled_production
I found this PDF[0] that purports to be the first draft of the script, but I can't vouch for its authenticity. It was linked from this summary on a Pixar fan wiki[1].
[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20121213100913/http://www.raindance.org/site/picture/upload//image/general/movies/toy_story_2.pdf
[1] http://pixar.wikia.com/wiki/Toy_Story_2_(original_storyline)
In the comments, Oren addressed exactly that particular question:
"We didn't scrap the models, but yes, we scrapped almost all the animation and almost all the layout and all the lighting. And it was worth it.
Changing the script saved the film, which in turn allowed Buzz and Woody to carry on for future generation (see ToyStory3 for how awesome that universe continues to be - well done to everyone who worked on the lastest installment!) and, in some ways, set a major cornerstone in the culture of Pixar. You may have heard John or Steve or Ed mention "Quality is a good business model" over the years. Well, that moment in Pixar's history was when we tested that, and it was hard, but thankfully I think we passed the test. Toy Story 2 went on to became one of the most successful films we ever made by almost any measure.
So, suffice it to say that yes, the 2nd version (which you saw in theatres and is now on the BluRay) is about a bagillion times better than the film we were working on. The story talent at the studio came together in a pretty incredible way and reworked everything. When they came back from the winter holidays in January '99, their pitch, and Steve Jobs's rallying cry that we could in fact get it done by the deadline later that year, are a few of the most vivid and moving memories I have of my 20 years at the studio."
https://www.quora.com/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob/comment/937024
There's a story that I love about Pixar, a Black Swan event, and Toy Story 2 [0]. The gist was, the movie's files were accidentally deleted while still in production, and the backup was corrupted.
Instead of blasting people for mistakes they set about fixing the immediate problem, and then instead of demanding "accountability" from those responsible, they set about fixing the root cause.
A few excerpts from the linked article:
"Aside from the fact that there was immediate chatter about who might have made such a dumb move, the discussion quickly moved right on to how to fix the problem."
"Instead of dwelling on pinning the blame or lamenting the loss of time and effort, the team made sure to alter the backup strategy so that something like that didn’t happen again, and it went about making up for lost time."
[0] http://thenextweb.com/media/2012/05/21/how-pixars-toy-story-2-was-deleted-twice-once-by-technology-and-again-for-its-own-good/
I haven't seen the movie, but what the article says resonated with the vibes I got from the trailers, so...
> The wonder of childhood is the opposite of the cozy vision of “Inside Out”
That may be a key quote. Kids movies, and Pixar movies (which often are, or used to be, for adults as much as for kids) don't need to contain simplistic world views; they need simple and layered presentation, but the world may be rich, and the characters and situations be driven by nuanced and sophisticated themes under the colourful hood. Toy Story 2, The Incredibles and Frozen, in my opinion, are shining examples.
That really spends on the movie. I don't feel like Ratatouille is really a kids movie nor is The Incredibles. I'd even argue Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are pretty adult. I could certainly relate to Woody's feeling scared of the shiny new hire (TS1) or his being lured to probably the wrong job (TS2). Up seems like an adult movie with stuff added for kids vs the opposite. So did Wall.E IMO. Lots of parents found Saving Nemo very close to their hearts (not a parent so not one of my favs).
Cars, on the other hand ......
You can make exceptions to all those rules though. Empire Strikes Back is probably the most obvious example of a sequel that was far and beyond the first and changed cinema.
If you're talking about money-making sequels than Toy Story 2 and 3 were memorable and interesting.
Phrases like, "The myth of burn out" and "Burn out is just a rationalization for giving up early" give me great pause.
Burn out is real. It is dangerous, and even an overwhelming, driving passion for your work, your creation, can lead to disaster.
Ed Catmull recounted this story about the production of Toy Story 2 [1]:
"So we came back, John [Lasseter] told the story crew to take a good rest over the holidays, and come back on January 2nd... we were re-boarding the movie.
We had 8 months left.
We then started this incredibly intense effort to get this movie out. It was boarded quickly, it was pitched to the company, it was an electrifying pitch.
We had a lot of over-achieving people working for over-achieving managers to get the movie out.
We worked brutal hours with this. When I say "brutal", we had a number of people that were injured with RSI [2], one of them permanently left the field.
We had, actually, a married couple that worked there. This was in June, so it's summer, and the father was supposed to drop the baby off at daycare, but forgot; don't know why... but came and left the baby in the car, and came into work. Again, as the heat was rising, the mother asked... they realized and they rushed out: the baby was unconscious. The right thing was done, they put ice-water on the baby. The baby ended up being fine in the end, but it was one of those traumatic things, like, 'Why did this happen, are they working too hard?'
So when I say it was intense, it really was intense."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc&t=1064
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury
That all the stories occur in the same universe is a given. Oddly, The Pixar Theory gives no reference (much less credit) to the long-running proliferation of Pixar characters appearing in other Pixar movies. This includes characters from future movies, like Wall-E seen in Toy Story. The Pixar Theory, in its long-history view, fails to address proof most of the movies occur within a narrow timeframe, via facts like Heimlich (from A Bug's Life) appearing in Toy Story 2, and the Pizza Planet truck appearing in every movie (partial exception for Brave, where it appears as a carved-wood toy alongside a bas-relief of Sully).
The Pixar Theory takes a vague notion and just, as noted "post hoc, ergo proter hoc", creates an elaborate and baseless theory to justify it a la most conspiracy theories. Alas, there is a great deal of facts available to both destroy the theory as presented, and at the same time prove the "one Pixar universe" premise to far more comprehensive and compelling effect. Instead of a few vapid paragraphs, the website should be a collection of the dozens (hundreds?) of images tying all the stories together.
It's "The Pixar Story"[1]. A great documentary, highly recommended.
But Pixar wasn't all roses either - during the tight production of Toy Story 2 (because they changed almost all of the story and had to rush it for christmas), a couple (who were both animators) forgot that their 1-year old was in the car (and not in the day care!), and the girl was there for almost 10 hours... She lived, but still a pretty horrible story.
The source for this unpleasant anecdote is [2]. It's a long talk by Ed Catmull, but I can't recommend it enough. It's really, really awesome.
Success hides problems (Ed Catmull)
Want to know why Pixar was awesome for soooo long? It wasn't luck, and it wasn't because they had great animators. It wasn't even (entirely) because they told terrific stories. It was because they constantly learned from their "successes"... Watch (or listen) to Catmull's talk. I guarantee that you won't regret the 55 minutes you spend on it...
[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059955/
[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2h2lvhzMDc
Playings devil's advocate: There are many ways to incentivise even complex, large scale investment absent copyright. From project finance to Kickstarter, it is well beyond self-evident. On the flip-side, the cost of supressing academic and sciendific knowledge through academic publishers dwarfs whatever entertainment value might come from their library (~12 films)[1]. I think your comments on this are too simplistic.
________
[1] Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Toy Story 3; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Ratatouille; WALL-E; Brave; A Bug's Life; Cars, Cars 2
"And then, some months later, Pixar rewrote the film from almost the ground up, and we made ToyStory2 again. That rewritten film was the one you saw in theatres and that you can watch now on BluRay."
http://www.quora.com/Pixar-Animation-Studios/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production
Hi, I'm the "Oren Jacob" from the video. Rendering at that time was distributed across hundreds of CPUs in hundreds of Sun boxes in a renderfarm. The authoritative version of the film's data (models, animation, lighting, sets, shaders, textures, etc..) which was where all rendering pulled data from or verified that it had the most up to date versions, was stored on a single machine.
There were several backup strategies for that machine, but they failed. A few reasons are outlined elsewhere in this thread (running past the 4gig limit on tapes) but, if memory serves, other errors were also occurring that involved drives being out of space so error logging wasn't working properly.
Making matters worse, after our initial restoral, the crew came back to start working on the show and then, a few days later, we discovered that the restoral we thought was good was, in fact, not. So we had, in effect, split the source tree and now had a bad branch with a week of the crew's work on it, including animation.
So we had to untangle the mess as best as we could, which was about 70% script based, and about 30% by hand. Further details are in my post on the Quora thread... (http://www.quora.com/Pixar-Animation-Studios/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Oren-Jacob)
The tech of 1999 is certainly underestimated today
Still, in 1999 I had a PII 333MHz and 10GB HD (and Windows 98, sigh)
But reading about the history of Pixar, the difficulties (in the first Toy Story) involved the workflow of creating a full-feature film (apart from all the other problems they had)
So I'm guessing, since Toy Story 2 was their 3rd feature film, things were still a bit raw (especially given their fast pace)
Obviously, Ms. Susman's circa-1998 home computer would in no way be able to replicate the level of storage provided by the Sun server cluster and its 4.5 TB disk array (http://www.hoise.com/primeur/99/articles/monthly/AE-PR-09-99-53.html).
What was deleted, per Loren Carpenter on Quora, was, "in effect the database(s) containing the master copies of characters, sets, animation, etc. The frames were to be computed from that. A few hundred MB, if I remember." (http://www.quora.com/Pixar-Animation-Studios/Did-Pixar-accidentally-delete-Toy-Story-2-during-production/answer/Loren-Carpenter)
A little more detail than provided in the video, where they just called it, "the film", as if the movie's entirety of data were both deleted and duplicated on that home PC.
It's sad that "Toy Story 2" didn't make the cut. I think it's a stronger movie than the original with a better villain, a bit of Shakespearean mistaken identity, new characters that you care about, and foreshadowing for the final movie (Stinky Pete asks "Is Andy going to take you to college?" and claims they'll all end up in a landfill.) The climatic scene at the Airport is almost as good as the "Bird Rescue" scene in "A Bug's Life" (which I contend is one of the best action scenes in any animated movie).
In fact, the only thing I don't like about it is how easy Woody gives up on Andy. Woody is, in my opinion, Andy's surrogate father and probably should have come up with "Come with me to Andy's House" much sooner.
(With all this obsession about Pixar movies, can anyone tell I have a three-year old?)
I just checked the actual list and Toy Story 3 is rank 34 and the original Toy Story is at 143. He probably stripped something like a [a-zA-Z] regex to improve misses that are actually hits because of slightly different punctuation or spacing.
Toy Story 2 isn't on the top 250 at all, nor any of the Die Hard sequels, and Terminator 2 is named "Terminator 2: Judgement Day" on IMDB so there the above explanation seems like the most plausible to me. Based on my cursory examination none of the other movies would have missed in that way if hes just ignoring digits.
>But according to the graph, Toy Story 3 was the least polarizing movie of 2010 and that seems like a prime example of a movie "safely" manufactured for an existing fanbase.
I think this is likely due to that fact that Toy Story 3 was superior to Toy Story 2, leaving people pleasantly surprised.
(It is actually unexpectedly complex. The first scene features the toys calmly discussing and preparing for their own deaths. It's quite stark.)
I think the key thing to note is that, even if you don't personally like some of Pixar's films you cannot deny the quality of filmmaking, which increases with each film in every quantifiable way.
There is a lot about film (as with any art) that is subjective but there are specific and measurable qualities of a film that can be measured and in each of these Pixar struggles (I say struggle because they set themselves a very high bar) to exceed the qualities of their previous work. In this way they are very different from the Disney of the 1980's/1990's where quality was liquidated as a way to increase the revenue of films who's value lies solely in brand and character recognition.
I agree that the level of merchandising associated with these films is absurd, but I don't know how much the filmmakers have to do with this and we could point to plenty of examples in the software sector who have a hard time saying no when a few million dollars are waved in front of their faces.
If you want to learn more about how Pixar will bleed for quality, research the story behind Toy Story 2; if you can find me another company willing to risk everything for the sake of preventing even one low-grade product from reaching the market, I'll be impressed.
The Story outline for cars might seem "terrible," but think about every Pixar movie's outline before you actually saw it? A movie about Toys? A Movie entirely about Rats--whose going to watch that? A Robot who doesn't talk, for how long?
And yet, each and everyone of those movies were astounding, at least in my opinion, but critics and box office receipts prove my point too.
Yes, sequels have a tendency to be purely money ploys, but luckily Pixar's sequels almost exceed the originals (Toy Story 2 and 3). I'd give the future films a chance before you even see a trailer for them.
I've watched most Pixar movies between 3 and 300 times (I have two small children) and I'm still catching bits and pieces of hidden detail that I missed on previous viewings.
One of the things that I love about their process is the way they essentially make the movie multiple times, script, storyboard, animated storyboard with stand-in voice talent, and so on, and how at each step of the way they aren't afraid to make changes to make the thing better.
If you haven't seen it lately, take another look at Toy Story 2. The characters feel real, every scene transition is perfect, and only one or two lines in the whole movie fall flat.
Have you seen Toy Story 2? It is actually a decent movie. It was originally slated to be a typical Disney direct-to-video sequel. But the Pixar guys didn't want to do substandard work, so they worked hard on the preproduction and managed to convince the Disney execs that it was worthy of a theatrical release.
Four years later, the story repeats itself: Disney's five-movie partnership with Pixar ends and Disney owns all the movie characters, so they decide to make a direct-to-video Toy Story 3 with their in-house studios. Then Eisner leaves, Disney buys Pixar, the Pixar guys are put in charge of Disney Animation Studios, and Toy Story 3 gets shelved so that it can be redone from scratch as a theatrical release by Pixar. Given the history, I expect that it, too, will be a decent film.
I'm curious which version of Toy Story 2 this was done too as the film was originally slated as a straight to DVD edition.
When it turned out Disney wanted to do a screen release, there was a mad rush as the first iteration of the movie wasn't that great and Pixar had to get John Lasseter off his break to "fix the film"
(there's an interesting story how they basically re storyboarded the film in a weekend with sharpies)
The rest as they say is history. The second film was more successful than the first at the box office.
EDIT - thought I'd share a source. The Pixar Story, you can watch the appropriate part here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjrPCIDqbwQ
Starts at 4:30 in
I'm sorry, but I have yet to hear a solid argument that ignoring easy-to-capture metrics is better business. I'm not talking about anything esoteric, I'm talking about core business metrics, like the number of people who sign up for your service.
That's because a lot of people, namely the intuitive sort, don't track that stuff enough for there to be a good counterargument.
That said: intuition has long been a part of design. Architects don't design buildings according to a numbers game: there's a part of the process that's wholly creative. Obviously, artists don't rely on metrics. They go with their gut. Numbers can show some things, but not always. Would you say that Rotten Tomatoes, by being fair and balanced, is really showing us the best movies? Is Toy Story 2 the best movie ever made? According to their reviews it is. According to ticket sales Titanic is the best movie ever. Are either of those metrics true? If I make a movie expressly intending to score better numbers than those movies, am I doing justice to a movie?
Get rid of this "right decision" argument. Past a very basic point, that's all subjective. There is certainly an objective layer design, but past that it's a matter of "like" and "don't like." The argument is like the Mac versus Linux argument, where one side says they "feel" better and the other side brings up numbers. The numbers are accurate, but to assume that the other side has no argument merely because they base opinions on intuition is stupid.
(By the way: there's more to a business than number of users. I'd rather have a site that had a very bright, small userbase than a site with a lot of users that I personally didn't like. Hacker News versus Digg, for instance.)