Pixar Just Had Its Biggest Round of Layoffs in 10 Years

The Pixar employee who famously saved Toy Story 2 back in 1998 has lost her job as part of the animation studio's first large-scale layoffs in a decade. Galyn Susman had been working from home after giving birth to her son when almost 90% of the film was accidentally deleted and the backup tapes turned out to be unusable, Kotaku reports. The studio feared that almost two years of work had been lost, but Susman, the supervising technical director, remembered that she had her own backup at home. Susman and Oren Jacob, then the company's chief technical officer, brought her workstation to the studio in her Volvo, which had became a "$100 million machine," per TheNextWeb.

Much of the movie was later redone anyway, but Susman's files "undoubtedly saved them a lot of time/work/money," TMZ notes. Susman, who had been with Pixar since 1995, was among 75 people let go late last month, reports Reuters. Lightyear director Angus MacLane, who had been with the company since 1997, was also laid off. Susman was a producer on Lightyear, which brought in a disappointing $226.7 million in worldwide ticket sales on a budget of $200 million, per Reuters. The job cuts at Pixar come amid thousands of layoffs at Disney, which bought the studio in 2006. The last time the studio cut dozens of jobs was in 2013, when the release of The Good Dinosaur was delayed. (More Pixar stories.)