In the summer of 1998, four months before Toy Story 2 was scheduled for release, Pixar screened an early cut for the leadership team. The room went quiet in the wrong way. The story was flat. The characters felt lifeless. The jokes weren’t landing. Ed Catmull, the company’s co-founder and president, had a $90 million production headed for disaster.
What happened next became the template for how Pixar would save almost every film it ever made.
Catmull convened the Braintrust — a small group of Pixar’s sharpest storytellers — and they tore the movie apart over several intense days. John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft sat with the director and examined every scene. They identified that the emotional stakes were missing. The film was rebuilt from the ground up in a sprint that should have been impossible.
Toy Story 2 earned a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes and grossed $511 million worldwide. It became one of the most acclaimed animated sequels ever made. And the process that saved it — the Braintrust — became Pixar’s secret weapon for the next three decades.
The rule that made it work
The Braintrust wasn’t a committee. It wasn’t a review board. It had no authority. And that distinction, Catmull insisted, was everything.
“The Braintrust has no authority,” Catmull wrote in his 2014 book Creativity, Inc. “This is crucial: the director does not have to follow any of the specific suggestions given. After a Braintrust meeting, it is up to him or her to figure out how to address the feedback.”
This solved a problem that kills creative collaboration at most organizations. When feedback comes attached to power — from a boss who can greenlight or kill a project — the conversation stops being about making the work better and starts being about managing the relationship. People hedge. They perform. They protect themselves instead of protecting the work.
By stripping the Braintrust of formal authority, Catmull created a space where candor was possible because it was safe. The only currency was the quality of the observation, not the rank of the person making it.
Ugly babies and the courage to show them
Catmull had a phrase for early creative work that became famous inside Pixar: “ugly babies.”
“Early on, all of our movies suck,” he wrote. “They are not beautiful, miniature versions of the adults they will grow up to be. They are truly ugly: awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete. They need nurturing — in the form of time and patience — in order to grow.”
This wasn’t false modesty. Finding Nemo started as a scattered mess. Ratatouille was overhauled so completely that the director was replaced partway through. Inside Out went through at least five fundamentally different versions of the story before it worked. WALL-E’s first drafts bore almost no resemblance to the final film.
The Braintrust worked because directors were expected to show their ugly babies early, before they had the chance to fall in love with something broken. Andrew Stanton, who directed Finding Nemo and WALL-E, described it this way: “Be wrong as fast as you can. Mistakes are the fastest route to getting it right.”
Most corporate environments do the exact opposite. People polish their work in private, present it when it’s “ready,” and then defend it against feedback. The result is that problems get discovered late, when they’re expensive and emotionally difficult to fix. Catmull saw this pattern and built a system designed to defeat it.
Why most companies get this wrong
The Braintrust concept sounds simple enough that dozens of companies have tried to copy it. Most fail. Catmull identified the reason with characteristic precision: they copy the structure without understanding the culture.
“If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up,” Catmull wrote. “If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”
The Braintrust required three things that are genuinely rare in corporate settings. First, psychological safety — the real kind, not the kind proclaimed in values statements and violated in practice. People had to be willing to say “this isn’t working” without fear of political consequences. Second, shared expertise. The Braintrust members weren’t random stakeholders; they were people who deeply understood storytelling and had personally directed or written films. Their feedback was specific and technical, not vague and managerial. Third, a culture that genuinely valued the process of iteration over the illusion of getting it right the first time.
Dr. Amy Edmondson, the Harvard Business School professor who coined the term “psychological safety,” has pointed to Pixar as one of the clearest examples of the concept in action. “What Catmull built was a system where interpersonal risk-taking was not just tolerated but expected,” she’s written. “That’s extraordinarily rare.”
The results speak in billions
Between 1995 and 2023, Pixar released 27 feature films that grossed a combined $15 billion at the global box office. They won 23 Academy Awards. Fifteen of those films earned over $500 million each. No other animation studio comes close to that consistency.
And the consistency is the point. Any studio can get lucky once. What Catmull built was a system that produced excellence repeatedly, across different directors, different stories, and different decades. The Braintrust was the engine of that system — a mechanism for catching problems early, when they were still fixable, and creating the conditions for honest conversation about creative work.
Catmull retired from Pixar in 2019 after more than 30 years. In his final interviews, he returned to the same theme he’d been talking about since the beginning. The goal was never to prevent failure. The goal was to create an environment where failure could be identified and addressed before it became catastrophic.
“Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right,” he wrote. Most organizations invest heavily in ideas and processes. Pixar invested in the conditions that allowed imperfect ideas to become great ones. The Braintrust was where that transformation happened — in a room where it was safe to say the ugly truth about beautiful work, and where the only thing that mattered was making the story better.
Thirty years and $15 billion later, the lesson still hasn’t fully landed in most boardrooms. The competitive advantage wasn’t talent, though Pixar had that. It wasn’t technology, though they pioneered that too. It was a meeting structure built on one counterintuitive principle: the best creative work comes from making it safe to show the worst version first.