Disney’s Pixar Layoffs Include Producer Who ‘Saved’ Toy Story 2 and Lightyear Director

Walt Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios has laid off 75 employees including a producer who was considered the saviour of Toy Story 2.

Galyn Susman, who originally worked as a lighting supervisor on Toy Story and became known for saving Toy Story 2 after it was accidentally deleted from Disney’s servers, was one of the several employees laid-off.

Also included in the Pixar casualties was Lightyear director Angus MacLane as well as Pixar’s vice president of worldwide publicity, Michael Agulnek.

The job cuts are a part of Walt Disney’s plans under CEO Bob Iger to cut 7,000 jobs and save $5.5 billion in costs, meaning the seemingly small 75 person number is part of a much bigger wave of lay-offs.

Susman had been at Pixar since the early days, and became known as the Toy Story 2 saviour after a Pixar staff member accidentally ran a command deleting the files for the entire film.

Using files from Susman’s home computer they were able to retrieve the lost work, but that being said, the entire film was scrapped just months later anyway. Toy Story 2 was then completely remade from the ground up just months before its release date.

Want to read more about Pixar? Check out our rankings of every Pixar movie from worst to best and find out which Pixar movies have sequels in the works.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.