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Steve and Todd flew to Los Angeles for a meeting with Disney’s No. 2 executive, Frank Wells, and its head of feature films, Jeffrey Katzenberg. The chief executive officer, Michael Eisner, stepped in for a few minutes to listen as Steve Jobs made his presentation.

Steve’s people had set up two Next machines on a table. One had a black-and-white monitor for running utilitarian business software. The other had a color monitor for showing off the latest in computer graphics.

Steve performed with his usual dazzling eloquence and enthusiasm for an hour and a half. His sales spiel was compelling, but then he veered way off topic and began describing his grand vision: he wanted to give millions of ordinary people the ability to create incredible pictures and even animated characters on their computers. He would make it possible for regular folks to express themselves with the artistry of Disney’s animators.

Jeffrey Katzenberg held up his hand, signaling that Steve should stop.

The room fell silent. Jeffrey let the sense of anticipation build as he walked over to the two computers.

He pointed to the black-and-white computer.

“This is commerce,” he said. “Maybe we’ll buy a thousand of these.”

Then he gestured toward the color monitor, which was showing a demonstration of Pixar’s graphics software, the magical tool that Steve wanted to give to the world.

“This is art,” Jeffrey said. “I own animation, and nobody’s going to get it.” His voice was fierce and intimidating and commanding. “It’s as if someone comes to date my daughter. I have a shotgun. If someone tries to take this away, I’ll blow his balls off.”

• • •

JEFFREY KATZENBERG WAS RIGHT: he dominated the animation business. And his formidable power was indeed threatened, but not in the way implied by Steve’s implausible vision.

The real danger was that many of Disney’s most promising talents had left during the studio’s dismal years in the 1970s and early 1980s, when it turned out a series of embarrassingly mediocre movies. Disney hadn’t been able to hold on to rising young stars like Tim Burton, an animator who quit in 1985, at age twenty-six, and quickly became famous for directing three live-action hits (Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Batman) all for a rival studio, Warner Bros.

Tim had studied at the traditional feeder school for Disney animators, “Cal Arts” (the California Institute of the Arts), where he was a contemporary of another young genius, John Lasseter. Now Tim was a cult hero and John had an Oscar. That sent a clear message to Cal Arts students that you could achieve great success away from Disney.

When Jeffrey came to Disney in the fall of 1984, he resolved to lure back some of the talent that the studio had so foolishly squandered. He talked with Tim, who agreed to make The Nightmare Before Christmas, and he kept trying to rehire John, who resisted the overtures.

I want to do computer animation, John said.

You can do it at Disney, Jeffrey countered.

But John explained that he couldn’t do it on his own. He didn’t know how to program computers. He needed to work together with the engineers at Pixar, who were constantly writing software and inventing technology so he could realize his creative ideas.

If you want me, John said, you have to hire my whole team.

• • •

AS THE SUMMER OF 1990 ENDED, the Disney executives told their Pixar colleagues that they were finally willing to talk about making a feature film with 3-D computer animation.

John Lasseter, Alvy Ray Smith, and Ed Catmull went together to Disney’s headquarters in Burbank for a meeting with Jeffrey Katzenberg. They arrived at the Team Disney building, a postmodern temple lined with huge fanciful sculptures of the Seven Dwarfs in the place of columns.

Alvy was strongly impressed by his first encounter with the movie mogul.

“Jeffrey was charming, persuasive, and highly articulate,” Alvy recalls. “I was really taken by how much like Steve Jobs he was. They were like the same guy.”

Jeffrey was open and forthright as he warned the Pixar people about