The “pandemic era” was a struggle for every movie studio, but Pixar perhaps more than most. The animation house in Emeryville, CA, saw its films shifted away from theaters, and after they returned, the first couple of attempts struggled to find their audience. Following Inside Out 2's blockbuster success, Pixar seems to be back on top, but getting there clearly wasn’t easy.
Pixar’s Mike Jones led the team that produced Dream Productions, the upcoming Disney+ series spinoff of Inside Out. Speaking with IndieWire, Jones said making the new series was complicated, and more than once he was afraid the entire project would collapse because members of the team would regularly get pulled away to work on feature films that suddenly needed extra help. Jones explained…
That happened a bunch of times. And so we would let all of our people go on some other films that were in trouble and just pray and hope that we would get them back. And we would eventually, and then we quickly scramble and try to produce.
While Dream Productions and the forthcoming Pixar series Win Or Lose are fairly new endeavors for the studio, the structure of losing animators to feature projects is nothing new. Back when the studio used to produce more animated shorts, the same thing used to happen there. People working on shorts would get pulled away to fix features, causing the shorts to stop happening until enough people came back.
While the particular projects that people got pulled away to work on in this case were Elemental and Inside Out 2, one should not take this as any indication that there was anything particularly wrong with those projects. Inside Out 2 would go on to become the highest-grossing animated film of all time. Elemental had some early struggles but was well-reviewed and eventually found success.
It seems that even great Pixar movies end up in desperate need of help at some point. Jones says that “every Pixar movie is on fire” at one point or another, and there’s always a time where the studio pulls together to fix major problems. He continued...
Everybody felt that — we felt that — but also like, every Pixar movie is on fire, every single one that I’ve been involved with — every single one that I’m even not involved — will get to a point where we have been producing this thing for two or three years and suddenly [the story] is not fucking working. You go, how is it not working? Like how are we in such trouble here?
We certainly know about some of the cases where Pixar movies went all pear-shaped. The Good Dinosaur ended up replacing its entire voice cast when it rebuilt the entire movie. Toy Story 4 also went through a lot of changes during its multiple years of production.
By and large Pixar’s track record is solid, so movies catching fire doesn’t seem to be an indication of the end result. In the end, they usually figure out how to fix the problem and make it all work. We can guess that all the upcoming Pixar movies will end up on fire at some point, but they'll probably be fine.
