Second, despite their frustrations, these production managers felt that they were making history and that John was an inspired leader. Toy Story was a meaningful project to work on. That they liked so much of what they were doing allowed them to put up with the parts of the job they came to resent. This was a revelation to me: The good stuff was hiding the bad stuff. I realized that this was something I needed to look out for: When downsides coexist with upsides, as they often do, people are reluctant to explore what’s bugging them, for fear of being labeled complainers. I also realized that this kind of thing, if left unaddressed, could fester and destroy Pixar.

1. RESEARCH TRIPS

I was once in a conference room at Disney in which two directors were pitching the latest version of a film they were developing. The walls of the room were covered with large corkboards, which were filled with illustrations of what happens in each act, as well as drawings of characters and collages of inspirational artwork. To give a sense of the overall flavor of the film, the directors had posted dozens of images from well-known movies that they felt were in a similar visual and contextual vein: panoramic shots they hoped to mimic, landscapes they found inspiring, character studies that showed costumes like the ones they planned to use. While they had hoped to convey the sense of their movie idea by displaying examples from other films, every single board was based on these iconic references, with the unintended result that everything presented felt terribly derivative. In one way, this made sense - every director gets into this business because they love movies; it is inevitable that references to other movies often pop up when talking about filmmaking. (At Pixar, we joke that only one mention of Star Wars is allowed per meeting.) References to movies, both good and bad, are part of the vocabulary of talking about filmmaking. And yet if you rely too much on the references to what came before, you doom your film to being derivative.

1. LEARNING TO SEE

In the year after Toy Story’s release, we introduced a ten-week program to teach every new hire how to use our proprietary software. We called this program Pixar University, and I hired a first-rate technical trainer to run it. At that point, the moniker university was a little misleading, though, as this was more of a training seminar than anything resembling an institution of higher learning. It is easy to justify a training program, but I had another agenda, and in trying to accomplish it, we would find surprising bonuses.

One thing that struck me about Bob was that he preferred asking questions to holding forth - and his queries were incisive and straightforward. Something unusual had been built at Pixar, he said, and he wanted to understand it. For the first time in all the years that Pixar and Disney had worked together, someone from Disney was asking what we were doing that made our company different.

John talked about his days working at Disney Animation more than two decades earlier, before the Michael era. (He was let go when the powers that be felt there wasn’t a future in computer animation!)