YMMV / The Pixar Story

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The ending of the documentary briefly mentions John Lasseter's determination to keep hand-drawn animation alive at Disney following his promotion to CCO of Walt Disney Animation... an effort which would fail due to The Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh (2011) making mediocre profits despite excellent reviews and which he refused to talk about for the remainder of his employment there. Pixar themselves would eventually make the leap to experimenting with hand-drawn animation... but only after Lasseter was fired for sexual misconduct.
  • The documentary depicts Disney's administration circa the early 1980s, the one which fired John Lasseter, as a creatively stifling environment that's only interested in safe, familiar, and cost-effective projects that wouldn't hurt their image. After John Lasseter was fired from Pixar and Disney in 2017 for sexual misconduct, many stories began piling up against him (mostly from female and non-white employees) about how, by that point, the studio he'd co-founded was becoming a creatively stifling environment only interested in safe, familiar projects that wouldn't hurt their image. Tellingly, the more progressive, experimental SparkShorts series wouldn't debut until three years after his firing and he no longer had any influence over Pixar projects.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Included in the documentary is home video footage of Lasseter reading the box office numbers for Monsters, Inc. which at that point was Pixar’s highest-grossing feature, to the rest of the company. Lasseter then jokes that there’s now “no pressure” on Andrew Stanton and his upcoming picture, Finding Nemo. Finding Nemo went on to outgross Monsters, Inc., and became Pixar’s highest-grossing movie until Toy Story 3.
  • At the end of the movie, Tom Hanks states that he feels like he's in Pinocchio. Hanks would later star as Geppetto in the film's Live-Action Adaptation.

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