10 Ridiculously Good Decisions Which Saved Your Favourite Movies
6. Toy Story 2 - Deleted Film Saved By A Working Mum
In 1998 an animator accidentally deleted over 90% of Toy Story 2's assets. That's right, 90%. A complete accident during routine maintenance, it was looking like one of the most beloved sequels of our childhood was to be lost forever. It takes many hundreds of man hours to create the models and animations for animated films, and many thousands more for each fame to render.
Pixar is well known for its exceptional creativity, a very forward thinking company with ahead of its time attitudes to working life. They think outside the box and with excellent results. Today maternity leave is considered a normal right, but in the nineties it most certainly was not.
Very fortunately for Pixar they were an early adopter of generous maternity leave; Technical director Galyn Susman was working from home at the time with her new baby and had a backup copy. She was able to restore data to only a few days work lost, rather years of work.
Losing so much data would have killed the project immediately, and we never would have the near perfect trilogy and surprisingly beloved fourth entry.