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Pixar’s founders, Ed and Alvy, had hired people who were very much in their own image: brilliant people who were nonetheless sweet, gentle, and considerate rather than arrogant and competitive. John Lasseter was a huggy guy who exuded warmth and affection for his colleagues. Ralph Guggenheim was a New York Jewish intellectual and a real mensch. Pam Kerwin, a former schoolteacher, was a cross between a loving, supportive mother figure and a long-haired Marin County hippie chick. They played with each other’s kids and felt like a family. Pam’s husband was astonished that Steve Jobs didn’t have “his own man” at Pixar, watching over the investment and running the place.

The Pixar people had harmonious relationships from years of working together. What they didn’t have was experience making a full-length feature movie. Luckily they knew what they didn’t know. Telling a compelling story on screen for seventy-five minutes is much harder than sustaining a single gag for two or three minutes. To learn more about narrative, John flew to Los Angeles to take a weekend-long crash course on story structure that was advertised in Variety. The teacher, Robert McKee, was something of a cult figure in Hollywood, more for his famous course than for his own screenwriting (he had sold many scripts but none had ever been made into a feature film). McKee was a former stage actor, and he could deliver a marathon twenty hours of lectures and make it seem enthralling and inspiring rather than tiresome. His course served as continuing education for up-and-coming Hollywood types and the younger agents and directors. Well-known actresses who wanted to write would sit next to waitresses and video-store clerks who were furtively working on spec scripts. When the weekend was over, they would emerge fluent in the cryptic language of Hollywood insiders, talking about the “arc of a character” or the “inciting incident” or the problem with the “second act” of a screenplay. John Lasseter was so enthused with the course that he sent a half-dozen colleagues to L.A. to take it.

For nearly a year, John and his team worked on the story for Toy Story. They put together production schedules and budgets and created a thirty-second example of what the film would look like. It was just a gag involving the two main characters—Woody, a ventriloquist’s dummy, and Lunar Larry, an astronaut figurine—but it showed off the kind of astonishingly hyperrealistic and luminous three-dimensional look that John envisioned.

John presented the clip to Peter Schneider, Disney’s head of feature animation, the man who had opposed the film originally. (Since then Jeffrey Katzenberg had co-opted Peter by putting the production under Peter’s fiefdom, even though Jeffrey retained the ultimate power.)

Peter wasn’t normally an effusive personality, but when he saw the thirty-second demo clip, he said that he was “astounded.” What Pixar could do was breathtaking.

Disney’s honchos approved the start of production, but they were nervous about entrusting the film solely to Ralph Guggenheim, who had never worked on a full-length feature. So they brought in a Hollywood veteran, Bonnie Arnold, to serve as the coproducer. Bonnie had earned associate-producer credits on a number of live-action films—Dances with Wolves, The Addams Family, The Last of the Mohicans—and she was ambitious to move up to full producer.

Ralph wanted to show Bonnie that the Pixar crew was as highly respected in its own world as the Disney people were in theirs, that Pixar was the very best at what it did. So that summer he took her to the Siggraph conference, where Pixar was adulated.

Almost everyone here is a Ph.D., he said.

Bonnie said that she was used to managing people who weren’t so well schooled.

“What’s the difference between a gaffer and a grip?” she asked, setting up the punch line: “A high school education.”

Bonnie was an expert at dealing with tough crew members and solving gritty crises. When the latrine wasn’t working on one of the western