If it were, there would be no hesitation to put The Incredibles 2 into production. Toy Story 3, Monsters University, and Finding Dory wouldn’t have been such a long time coming. This isn’t a case of Pixar biding their time so as not to look money hungry. Rather, it shows how much time and effort they’ve put behind each of them. Even before a Pixar film goes into production, it often spends additional years in development. Each film is like a child to them, meaning there’s no knowing when it’ll decide it’s ready and wants out. Sometimes the water breaks when you least expect it.
And sometimes there are complications, a fact Pixar is well aware of. Back in their early days, not satisfied with Toy Story 2 as it was, they re-did it entirely in the span of about a year. What resulted was what I, and a number of others, think of as the best film in the trilogy. During the production of Ratatouille, Cars 2, and Brave, circumstances called for a change in leadership, Jan Pinkava, Brad Lewis, and Brenda Chapman each being dropped from their respective movies in favor of other directors (Brad Bird, John Lasseter, and Mark Andrews). The end results had varying levels of success, but all three made it through to completion and none of them were complete failures.
Reading about these sorts of things only strengthens my faith in Pixar that much more. Were this any other animation studio, these four films would’ve either become mired in developmental hell, not seeing the light of day until years down the line, if ever, or the results would’ve been even more disastrous. Pixar, on the other hand, took it all in stride and, in a couple cases, the resulting movies were the better for it.
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