Problem Child

Pixar was, for years, near bulletproof. It’s not a studio most have associated with crisis—even though it has courted disaster, only to come out on top in the end, numerous times throughout its forty-year history. Toy Story 2, arguably its best film, had a legendarily terrible production cycle, crowned by an incident in which the film was deleted from the studio’s servers and was only salvaged because a technical director happened to have a copy on her home computer. In cofounder Ed Catmull’s book about the company, Creativity, Inc., crisis seems to be something of a good-luck charm. Indeed, he writes that Pixar’s first film without a major one—Toy Story 3—made everyone nervous: staff bristled, interpreting comments about the calm atmosphere to mean “that they hadn’t tried as hard as their colleagues . . . that they hadn’t pushed themselves enough.”