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They had a deal.

The new company needed a name. The gang went out to brainstorm at a burger joint near the office. They wanted a word like “laser,” something that seemed high-tech. Alvy proposed “Pixer,” which sounded like an infinitive verb, “to pix,” to make pictures. Almost there. Spanish verbs often ended in “-ar,” so they tried “Pixar.” That was it. Pixar.

• • •

THE NOMADIC TRIBE of artists and computer wizards had finally found a new patron. They joked about how they had gone from one millionaire to another and now to yet another.

Ed and Alvy ran the company together as equals, and from the beginning they guarded their independence from their new owner. They kept their old space in the unmarked Lucas complex in San Rafael, hard by the roach coaches and the loitering day laborers. The office was shabby and cruddy, with a Ping-Pong table and kitschy toys festooned all over, like an undergraduate dorm. Eccentricity abounded. There were outrageous hippies who walked around barefoot and took their dogs to work. A few people truly never bathed. Hardly anyone showed up before noon, though they often stayed as late as midnight. No one expected to make much money. They were there because it was artsy and cool and it was in the bohemian refuge of Marin County.

Steve wanted Alvy and Ed to move the company. For him to get up to Pixar, he had to drive north to San Francisco, plod from traffic light to traffic light on the slow-moving surface streets, then fight the tourists and commuters who crowded the Golden Gate Bridge on the way into Marin. The trip could easily take an hour and a half. Steve told Alvy and Ed to relocate their operation to San Francisco, so with luck he could get up there in only forty-five minutes. But they resisted. They wanted to make it hard for Steve to drop by. And they succeeded. Steve rarely appeared in person. Ralph Guggenheim recalls that Steve visited Pixar’s offices “no more than five times between 1986 and 1992, no exaggeration.”

“Pixar was geographically inconvenient,” recalls Andy Cunningham, Steve’s public relations consultant. “We referred to it as ’the hobby.’ When Steve ended up buying Pixar, people thought he was crazy. The Pixar crowd was always a very tightly knit group, and Steve didn’t mess with them because graphics wasn’t his expertise. These guys were doing something highly technical, and frankly I didn’t think that Steve understood it. When we did the p.r. for Pixar, Steve wasn’t even involved. With Next, he would review every word, every picture. But Pixar was completely run by Ed and Alvy Ray. These guys were adults already. They were self-confident in who they were. Nobody at Next was an adult.”

• • •

THIS ADULT CONFIDENCE AT PIXAR was coupled with swift action that hadn’t been seen at Next. In May 1986, only three months after the company spun out from Lucasfilm, they began selling the Pixar Image Computer, a box for storing full-color digital images. The machine was shockingly expensive and extremely esoteric. The price was $135,000 for the box alone, and if you wanted to communicate with it, you needed to plug it into a $35,000 workstation from Sun Microsystems or Silicon Graphics.

But what could it do? The best way to show it off was to make an animated film with the contraption. That role fell to John Lasseter. He still had little experience working with computer animation, but he was learning rapidly. When he was at Lucasfilm he had directed an experimental sixty-second short, The Adventures of Wally and André B, with Alvy Ray Smith as producer. (The title was an homage to Louis Malle’s My Dinner with André.) Alvy conceived of the story as a way to entertain his son, Sam, who was one year old. He described the premise as “a huge bumblebee scares the shit out of a little kid.”

John’s storyboards had a violence that might appeal to teenagers or immature adults but not to young children. He wanted to explicitly portray the bee biting the child’s butt. In the final cut, the actual sting occurred offscreen.