What if Toy Story 2 was never rescued by Galyn Susman?
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By Gary Oswald.
Toy Story 2 was the third feature film made by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures, a sequel to their first film Toy Story. It was an even bigger commercial and critical hit, one of the best selling and most praised animated films ever made and probably the film that truly made Pixar. Their ability to make not only multiple original films but to recapture that magic with sequels, made the studio both special for consumers and a reliable partner for Disney.
And famously Pixar accidentally deleted it.
Toy Story 2 was originally meant to be a direct-to-video cheap throwaway movie, in the same way Aladdin: The Return of Jafar was, not anything like as big as what it turned on be. The A-team for Pixar were still working on A Bugs Life at the time, while Toy Story 2 was given to the animators and writers lower down in the hierarchy and in smaller numbers. Around 150 people were working on it compared to 250 on A Bugs Life.
At some point in 1998 however, the animators are working on the assets for the character Woody and notice that many of the files they are looking at simply aren't there. Somebody had entered the command to remove every file below the current directory, a simple command regularly used to remove junk directories that aren't needed any more. The problem was someone on the system had run the command at the root level of the Toy Story 2 project and so every single file was being deleted.
Panicked, the developers simply shut down the power to the main server, but by the time they do so, the damage was already done. 90% of the project had been deleted.
This was the weakness of the way Pixar worked. Everybody on that project had to have access to the master file, because everybody on the project was working on it directly rather than through a manager, who'd receive work and then input it, because the latter was far too slow. As a result, over 400 computers had access to every terminal and all had pretty unlimited access because micro managing permissions was too slow for the work needed. This meant all of them had the ability to do massive damage to that project.
It shouldn't have been a big deal. After all, there were backups. Just a few months earlier, a similar (though much less extensive) deletion had happened on A Bugs Life and the backups were simply found on the tapes and then used.
The problem Pixar had was they were a relatively new company and as such weren't operating under best practice. No-one, it turns out, was checking or testing the backup. The backups were stored on a tape drive and it could only store 4 gigabytes worth of data. This should have meant that once that limit was reached, the file would record an error and the tapes would be changed.
But that wasn't working. Instead the same tapes were being overwritten with new data when the limit happened. 4 gigabytes of data was saved, and then rewritten with 4 more gigabytes and then with 4 more gigabytes. Of the 10 gigabytes of the entire film, only the last 40% of it had been saved by the Backups. Trying to work with that copy meant errors kept springing up as frames and linking shots weren't all available to access.
Pixar held a big meeting, essentially coming to the conclusion that they would have to reanimate the entire film again.
Enter Galyn Susman, the Supervising Technical Director of the film. She had given birth slightly before this meeting and so had been working from home. As she announced, she had copied the entire data tree to her home computer a few weeks back, so that she could supervise what was being made. From that backup the team was able to rebuild what they had lost. By December of 1998, they had something to show to John Lasseter when he wanted to check up on their next film.
But what if they hadn't? What if Susman had never got pregnant or had never returned to work or been assigned this project? What if she hadn't been allowed to work from home or had found another way of doing so? In that case, the film simply wouldn't be saved. How is that received? What if the Toy Story 2 team walked into that meeting with nothing to show Lasseter?
Well to answer that, we need to know what happened in that meeting in OTL. And the actual outcome of that meeting was that Lasseter hated the film. He thought it was an insult to the company, below standards, and could never be released.
Instead, despite the film due to come out in November 1999, he ordered an entirely new script to be written, new directors to be put on the project (himself among them), and all the existing film (painstakingly recovered from Susman's computer) to be deleted and remade with a different plot and different characters.
Disney refused to let Pixar just move the release date, given it was tied up with marketing and toys deals. They told them to just realise the film they had. After all, eleven months is not a reasonable amount of time to redo the entire project. But by this point, Pixar wanted this to be a cinema release and they wanted to be a good film.
Lasseter went ahead with his demands for the entire film to be remade. It was one of the greatest examples of crunch in any film and had an incredibly damaging effect, both mentally and physically, on the team doing it. Everybody working on that film worked 50 hundred-hour weeks in a row. A full third of the staff ended up with some form of repetitive strain injuries by the time the film was finished. One animator was so burned out by lack of sleep that he just left his baby in his car when he came to work, rather than dropping him off at day-care, resulting in a near tragedy.
The result was one of the best selling and most praised animated films ever made but also the crystallisation of the corporate crunch culture that made that possible.
So what happens if instead of showing Lasseter a film that he doesn't think is up to the studios' standard, they show him essentially nothing?
Under those circumstances, does Disney budge on the release date, allowing Pixar's full team to have more time to work on it, delaying both Toy Story 2 and Pixar's next film Monsters Inc? It feels unlikely given the reality of the marketing and toys deals. And if it does happen, that probably has a damaging effect on the Pixar-Disney relationship with Disney probably feeling disappointed in Pixar and wanting more control to prevent mistakes like this happening.
If the deadline remains in place then, there is another mad crunch to make the film as in OTL, this time probably even harder because of the lack of existing characters model to use.
Which begs the question, which script do they use? The existing script which Lasseter hated, or the new script that ended up making Toy Story 2 such a hit? Either is possible but with no film at all to view and judge, surely the easy option is to keep the existing script. And certainly by the time it is back to the condition Lasseter saw in OTL, then its far too late even by the standards of Pixar crunches.
What if that crunch still happens but the resulting product is just an okay film, rather than the classic it became?
One of the things you quickly realise when reading and listening to animators working on Toy Story 2 talk about it, is how much they bought into the project. They normally talk fondly about the community feeling and the teamwork, about the joint belief they all had that they were producing something special. That, as much as the direct corporate pressure, was why they all volunteered to wreck their mental and physical health to make this project happen.
And part of that feeling of togetherness was that the person who deleted the original Toy Story 2 with a bit of poorly placed code was never searched for. The team agreed that a witch hunt was not useful, that it would damage the team spirit which they relied on.
If Susman doesn't produce a backup version though, is that still true? If somebody has been found and punished and there's a script that people aren't that fond of, is the team spirit still there to let them do all those hours, at that cost?
What happens if Pixar can't force those hours on their people, if people quit? If they hand over a film to Disney that isn't of the quality that Disney have come to expect?
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Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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