Pixar: Scrapped Film Ideas

Recently released video shows how far Pixar filmmakers are willing to go to find the right story… and we should, too.

This came out from Pixar Animation Studios just a few days ago.

Here are just a few of Pixar scrapped ideas:

• At one point during Inside Out development, Riley had 27 emotions with individual names. Sadness was Misty, Anger was Ira, Fear was Freddie.
• Up was initially about two brothers living in a mythical floating city. While the idea was ultimately scrapped, the filmmakers kept the “isolation” theme with an old man “alone” in a flying house.

• The inspiration for Cars came from an idea called “Yellow Car,” about a little electric car that lived in a small town. The character was disliked by the other cars due to its differences. What stuck? The small-town setting, Fillmore, and Sarge.

• Before coming up with the name Toy Story, some title suggestions were: Hand-Me-Down Hero, The Cowboy & the Spaceman, Spurs & Rockets, Plastic Buddies, Don’t Move, and Toys in the Hood.

An interview I conducted with Mary Coleman, head of creative development at Pixar, confirms how the filmmakers there are willing to do anything in service of the story:

We’ll take a whole year to get to a first draft… We put it up on reels an average of eight times and that’s eight visual rough drafts of the movie. But that means we’re writing more than eight drafts of the script, many more than that… We keep improving the story well into production which is hard in animation because it’s expensive and laborious. Making changes is really hard and frustrating. But we’ll keep at it if the story’s not right yet.

This is a good object lesson for writers: We need to be willing to brainstorm a whole range of ideas and test them out, all while having the willingness to fix what doesn’t work and look for solutions which are better than the ones we have. But always guided by this:

The Story.

Twitter: @DisneyPixar.