The lunch between Pixar directors that resulted in four hits

What could possibly come from a meeting between four animation legends? Of course, the answer could be none other than four great successes! That’s what happened in 1994, when the late filmmaker Joe Ranft; the former creative director of Pixar, John Lasseter; the animator Andrew Stanton; and the filmmaker Pete Doctermet at the Hidden City Café in Point Richmond, California, United States, as, while discussing ideas and sharing a good lunch, they conceived the first drafts for the major projects that would receive the Pixar seal after ‘Toy Story’ (1995).

There was something special that happened when John, Joe, Pete and I walked into a room. Whether it was promoting an idea or coming up with something, we just brought out the best in each other,” Stanton explained to The Post and Courier (via Collider).

But what were the titles created at this meeting? RECREIO has gathered the main information about them below; check it out!

Insect’s life

At that moment, the film about dolls that come to life when humans are not around was almost finished and, with it, Pixar was able to understand the strengths and those that could still be improved, since that was the first animated film through a computer. With this, the conclusion was that human characters were difficult to animate at this early stage, and that they would not be in the studio’s next animation.

Like this, Lasseter suggested creating a story starring insects and, inspired by ‘The Grasshopper and the Ant’, one of the tales of Aesop‘A Bug’s Life’ appeared, a film released in 1998 that stars Flik, ​​an ant full of ideas who tries to recruit soldiers from other species after his colony is threatened by hungry grasshoppers led by Hopper.

Monsters Inc

Also inspired by ‘Toy Story’, Pete Docter wanted to bring a narrative that again addressed beliefs that children developed in childhood, and analyzing his past, he remembered that he used to believe that there were monsters in his closet that wanted to scare him — giving rise to the premise of ‘Monsters Inc.’ (2001), a film in which a monster factory is responsible for the portals between the city where the monsters live and the human world.

These portals give access to closets in children’s rooms, and crossing them, the creatures scare children, because, although considered toxic by the monsters, their frightened screams are responsible for supplying energy to the place that houses the monsters: Monstropolis.

However, the idea took a surprising turn, since when the small, green Mike and the big, furry Sully meet the girl Boo, who accidentally ends up in the monster world, all the monsters’ beliefs are reformulated, and even a new and more powerful energy source is discovered to power Monstropolis.

Looking for Nemo

In case of Stantonthe idea didn’t come from Pixar’s first feature film, but rather from a trip. That’s because, after observing the sharks at Marine World (now known as Six Flags Discovery Kingdom), Andrew He remembered that, when he was little, he wondered whether fish might want to leave their aquariums and return to the sea.

More than that, when he became a father, as he revealed in a commentary on the DVD ‘Finding Nemo’, he felt his overprotective nature come to the surface, which was the inspiration behind the relationship between Marlin and Nemo seen in the animation that hit theaters in 2003 to tell the story of the clownfish who, after ignoring his father’s advice, is captured by a diver and ends up in a dentist’s aquarium, causing father and son to go on dangerous adventures to return home.

Wall-E

Another idea that came up at Hidden City Café was ‘Wall-E’. Although Stanton It is Doctor began working on the plot in 1995, the animation was released 14 years after it was conceived, since, initially, they were unable to evolve the premise beyond the question discussed at that lunch: “What if humanity had to leave Earth and someone forgot to turn off the last robot, and it didn’t know it could stop doing what it was doing?”, as recalled by Stanton in one of the notes attached to the animation, causing other productions that were more forwarded to be prioritized.

However, the wait was rewarded, since, when it was released in June 2008, following Wall-e, a robot that compacts garbage abandoned on Earth by humans after the planet became uninhabitable due to atmospheric pollution, gaining a new purpose with the arrival of a new and more modern robot that makes it cross the entire galaxy, the title received the Oscar for Best Animation.