How Getting Fired, a Divorce, and a $5 Million Check Created Pixar

John Lasseter walked into his first big directing pitch at Disney Animation in the early 1980s determined to try something new. For Brave Little Toaster, about household appliances on an adventure, he wanted to use computer animation.

The technology was primitive, and the executives asked the practical question. Would it be faster and cheaper than drawing by hand? Lasseter said it would be neither faster nor cheaper. He simply thought computers could tell the story better.

He was let go that same day. The message was blunt: the project was not going forward, and without a project he had no reason to stay.

That firing matters because it set in motion the accidental founding of Pixar, the computer animation studio that would decades later take over Disney Animation itself. Lasseter had dreamed of working for Disney all his life, steered Jungle Cruise boats at Disneyland, and studied animation at CalArts in classes taught by Disney veterans.

He landed a Disney job when the animation department was in a creative slump. His interest in computers had no support there, even as other parts of the company experimented with films like Tron.

Unemployed, Lasseter ran into Ed Catmull at an industry conference aboard the Queen Mary, the retired ocean liner docked in Southern California. Catmull, who had turned to computers because he felt he lacked drawing skill, was running a small graphics group for filmmaker George Lucas at Lucasfilm.

Catmull had the opposite problem from Disney. His team could make striking images, including a swooping sequence of a planet being transformed for Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, but no one knew how to create characters or tell a story. He begged Lasseter to come north and help with short films.

The group needed a reason to leave Lucasfilm, and Lucas supplied it at home. Going through a divorce, Lucas did not want to give up ownership in Lucasfilm, so he needed cash to pay his former wife. Selling the graphics group, which was building hardware called the Pixar Image Computer and doing work from medical scans to satellite analysis, could raise it.

That private decision had public consequences. Freed from Lucasfilm, the tiny graphics team became available just as an ousted Apple founder was looking for a new start.

The buyer was Steve Jobs, recently pushed out of Apple. Introduced by computer scientist Alan Kay, a former classmate of Catmull, Jobs first wanted the team as the seed for a rival computer company to take on Apple. The group had no interest, so Jobs started a separate computer company called NeXT on his own.

He stayed in touch and returned in 1986 with a simpler offer. He paid Lucas $5 million to buy the group and put another $5 million into the new company to fund it. Formally named Pixar, it was 70 percent owned by Jobs and 30 percent by employees. That was Pixar.