After we finished 'Toy Story 2,' we talked about going right into making 'Toy Story 3,' because we had an idea that we thought had some promise. But there were a bunch of boring contractual problems going on between Disney and Pixar at the time that kept us from making the movie.
We got together as a group to come up with the idea for 'Toy Story 3' in the same cabin where we dreamed up 'Toy Story.'
For me, the work we did to turn around 'Toy Story 2' was the defining moment in Pixar's history.
At Pixar, I don't have to compromise at all. When I look at the finished "Toy Story 3," I don't sit and constantly think, oh, the actor was having a bad day, or oh, it rained and we couldn't use that set. The story that I wanted to tell is what is on screen, and I haven't had to compromise it one iota.
Every Pixar movie has its own rules that viewers have to accept, understand, and enjoy understanding. The voices of the toys in the 'Toy Story' films, for example, are never audible to humans.
Well, we try to - we definitely try to have a balance. And I think things have gotten a lot better at Pixar. When we did "Toy Story," that was an all hands on deck situation that really was time intensive.
We've always had ups and downs at Pixar, starting with the high we felt doing something we'd never done - 'Toy Story' - and the low we felt right after when we realized we'd messed a bunch of things up along the way.
Toy Story 1, 2, and 3, to us, are some of the greatest films ever made, and each is better than the one before it. But if you go to Toy Story 6, they all end up decomposing in a trash heap somewhere.
Those were the places where many people mixed if they wanted to mix, which was against the law [Immorality Act of 1927]. My mother was part of that group. My father was part of that group. People who were black and whites and Indian and Asian - and you came together and said, we choose to mix at the risk of being arrested. And so they did.
I will tell you that the ego in me would love to play the lead. I would have loved to have been Buzz Lightyear, or Woody in "Toy Story," "Toy Story 2" but they hire celebrities for that, well-known people.
Our earliest poets were shamans. Today, as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal.
If you look through all the different cultures. Right from the earliest, earliest days with the animistic religions, we have sought to have some kind of explanation for our life, for our being, that is outside of our humanity.
Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.
Animation is very singular. Like, even the 'Toy Story' movies. People will go, 'Oh, gosh, you're so lucky, getting to play opposite Tom Hanks!' And it's, like, 'It may have appeared to be that, but we were never in the room together.'
To a child, often the box a toy came in is more appealing than the toy itself.
Janet Landis came to work in my group in the summer of 1957 when our first bubble-chamber was churning out its earliest pictures.