When this story originally started making the rounds, one of the other big questions was ‘how did this happen?’.
OPENING TO TOY STORY 2 MOVIE
When a size command was run on the Toy Story 2 directory, it was only 10% of the size it should have been.ĩ0% of the movie had been deleted by the stray command. The machine was eventually brought up a few hours later and they took a poll of the damage. “Eventually every animator and, every TD, everyone working on the show goes, “Oh, all machines down. “Some people are animating a shot and they can work for like a minute or five minutes, but eventually you’ll have to pull data from the master machine for some reason or another, which your machine will freeze.” “The master machine goes down,” says Jacob.
This is simply not done in environments with hundreds of clients connected to the machine, it’s as if someone asked you to throw your main breaker to shut off your blender. That’s when the panicked call was made to the machine room where the main server was located and the instruction given to just yank the power and network connection of the server. Unfortunately, someone on the system had run the command at the root level of the Toy Story 2 project and the system was recursively tracking down through the file structure and deleting its way out like a worm eating its way out from the core of an apple. This is commonly used to clear out a subset of unwanted files. The command that had been run was most likely ‘rm -r -f *’, which-roughly speaking-commands the system to begin removing every file below the current directory. Then we looked at it again and there was just Hamm and then nothing.” Then he thought to walk up and he walked back up and then we saw Hamm, Potato Head, and Rex. It was like, “Directory no longer valid,” because he’s in a place that had just been deleted. In what is a crazy stroke of luck, they happened to be looking at a directory in which the assets for the character Woody were stored, when they noticed, on a refresh, that there were suddenly less and less files. One day, Jacob (pictured right) was in the office of Larry Cutler-along with Larry Aupperle, who was also an associate Technical Director working under Susman. Simultaneously another 200-250 people were at work finishing up Bug’s Life, which would be released that Fall. The Toy Story 2 crew, about 150 people in the animation, lighting and modeling departments of Pixar, had been hard at work for some time on the movie. The story likely takes place in 1998, though Jacob admits he’s foggy on the exact date. The story that Jacob shared with me ended up containing some interesting lessons for people working with large amounts of technical data, but more than that, it has a lot to say about just how much of what makes Pixar’s movies so great has to do with the people who work there and their insane dedication to making things great.
It was then completely remade with mere months to go before a release date that was set in stone, cementing Pixar’s legacy as a crucible of commitment to quality. As you can hear in the video, Jacob has a hyperkinetic conversational patois and, despite what he says, a great memory for the details of the situation.Ī huge chunk of Toy Story 2 was indeed deleted and was only recovered by a stroke of luck and the intense efforts of the Pixar staff.īut what most people don’t know is that the whole movie was actually tossed out again, not by the computers, but by the filmmakers themselves. I wanted to get the story right from the horse’s mouth, to see if the situation was really as dramatic as it had sounded, how the staff coped, and whether or not they ever discovered exactly who deleted the files in the first place. The story struck me as interesting, so I reached out to Jacob, who is now the CEO of ToyTalk, a digital entertainment startup that is in the process of readying its first project for launch. It’s narrated by Jacob himself, and the movie’s Supervising Technical Director Galyn Susman. You might have heard something about this lately, as a clip from the special features of the movie has been making the rounds after being posted on Tested. That’s Oren Jacob, former Chief Technical Officer of Pixar-then an associate technical director for Toy Story 2-recounting the moment they discovered that the movie was being deleted off of the company’s servers after an erroneous command was executed, erasing two months and hundreds of man-hours worth of work. “I grabbed the phone…unplug the machine!””