During the production of Toy Story 2, someone at Pixar ran a command on the servers that held the film. Files began to vanish. Characters disappeared, then whole sequences. By the time the command was stopped, roughly 90 percent of two years of work was gone, according to the most common accounts. Then the team discovered that the backup system had not been working properly for about a month. A film already promised to theaters existed, for practical purposes, nowhere.
It survived because of one person's situation at home. Galyn Susman, the film's supervising technical director, had been working remotely after the birth of her child, and the studio had set her up with a computer at her house that held a copy of the project. She and Oren Jacob, a technical director who later became Pixar's chief technology officer, drove to her home, wrapped the machine in blankets, belted it into the back seat of her Volvo, and drove it back to the studio. That copy became the foundation the team rebuilt from.
Ed Catmull had co-founded Pixar in 1986 and served as its president. He was a computer scientist who had spent most of his career trying to make a feature film entirely with computers, and Toy Story had finally done it in 1995. Now the sequel was in danger again, and the bigger danger was not the servers. The film had started as a direct-to-video sequel for Disney and was upgraded to a theatrical release after early story reels looked promising. As the work went on, people inside Pixar grew convinced it simply was not good. When director John Lasseter returned from promoting A Bug's Life, he agreed that the film was not working.
Pixar made a hard call. Disney objected, but Pixar insisted on rebuilding the story rather than shipping something it did not believe in. The release date did not move. Editor Lee Unkrich asked Steve Jobs whether it could, and was told there was no choice. Lasseter pulled the original Toy Story creative team together and reworked the story over a single weekend, and the studio then had roughly nine months to make essentially a new movie. Toy Story 2 opened on November 24, 1999, and earned more than $500 million worldwide.
The box office hid a real cost, and Catmull later chose to talk about it openly. The pace was brutal. He disclosed that about a third of the staff ended up with repetitive strain injuries. One exhausted animator forgot his infant in a car. Catmull wrote about these things years later in his memoir, Creativity, Inc., instead of letting the success story bury them. A leader who only tells the triumphant version of a story teaches people that the damage does not count.
Out of that period came a practice Pixar formalized and kept for decades: the Braintrust. It was a small group of the studio's most experienced directors and storytellers who would watch a film in progress, often months or years before release, and tell the director honestly what was not working. Catmull was blunt about why this mattered. In his view, every film starts out bad. "All movies suck at first," he said. The point of the Braintrust was not to avoid bad early versions. It was to find the problems while there was still time to fix them.
The rule that made it work was counterintuitive. The Braintrust had no authority. Its members could give notes, push back, and argue, but the director decided what to do with the feedback. Catmull understood that power changes what people are willing to say and hear. "That authority can screw up a room," he said. When a note is an order, people defend themselves. When a note is help offered by peers who have struggled with their own broken films, a director can actually listen. The notes were about the work, not the person, and everyone in the room had been on the receiving end.
Catmull tried to extend that safety beyond the screening room. In 2013, with Pixar grown to around 1,200 people and production costs climbing, the studio held what it called Notes Day. Regular work stopped for a day. Employees had sent in more than 4,000 emails raising over a thousand problems and ideas, and roughly a thousand people took part in about 170 sessions on topics they had chosen. Some ideas were put in place right away and others were set aside for further work. The message was that everyone in the building, not just the directors, was expected to tell leadership the truth.
Pixar's record also shows how hard that is. Candor about films did not automatically make it safe to speak about everything. In late 2017, Lasseter took a leave of absence after allegations from employees of unwanted touching and other misconduct, and he left the company at the end of 2018. Catmull himself was named in an industry wage-fixing case in which studios were accused of agreeing not to recruit each other's employees. A culture of honesty about the work is a real achievement. It has to cover the truth about powerful people too, or it is not finished.
Your team already knows where the problems are. They know which project is drifting, which process is broken, and which deadline is going to hurt someone. The only question is whether they will tell you while there is still time to act. Most people stay quiet not because they lack courage but because they have watched what happens to people who speak up.
You can change that starting Monday. Show your own unfinished work early, and ask for real criticism of it. When you give feedback, make it clear when you are offering a note and when you are giving an order, and let people own the decision when it is theirs. Keep your comments on the work, not the person. Set up a regular, safe way for people to tell you what is broken, then visibly act on a few things so they know it was worth saying. And when a deadline is real, protect your people's health anyway, because a win that injures a third of the team is not the win it looks like.
Toy Story 2 survived because one person had a copy at home and because a room full of people were willing to say, out loud, that the film was not working. Neither one should depend on luck. Build backups for your files, and build safety for the people who tell you the truth. One day, either of them may be the only thing that saves you.