ValleyWag points to a New York Post article on David Price’s book, The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, in which the article provides and excerpt from the book on why Steve Jobs didn’t want Toy Story 3 to go ahead, even under Pixar’s command.
Two years ago, Pixar was bought by Disney, following often unpleasant negotiations fueled by bad blood between Pixar’s Steve Jobs and Disney chief Michael Eisner. Price writes that as the deal finally was about to be green-lighted, Jobs hauled off with a slap at the company that Mickey Mouse built, saying he felt "sick about Disney doing sequels [to Pixar films], because if you look at the quality of their sequels, like ‘The Lion King 11/2’ and their ‘Peter Pan’ sequels and stuff, it’s pretty embarrassing."
says the article. The article also details how the stress of working on the original Toy Story led an animator to forget about his baby in the car. By the sound of this article, it’s going to be a good book. It’s due out in May.
Yikes! I’m glad Pixar now has really good working conditions.
I’m not sure about that new book because it seems that To Infinity and Beyond! would cover the story of Pixar. But I’ll probably still get it, just to read someone else’s point of view of the company.
I’m just glad that they didn’t mention that, during the complete overhaul of Toy Story 2 nine months before it’s release, one man had to leave the industry due to a serious repeditive-stress injury and that several other employees suffered through similar injuries.
It’s not as if Lasseter, Catmull and Jobs wanted to hurt their workers, and it’s not as if they didn’t feel awful about it afterwards and didn’t compensate the workers for what happened. They even vowed afterwards never to let something like that happen again.