Every film starts out bad — that's not failure, that's the process

Catmull's most quoted claim is that early versions of every Pixar film are, in his blunt word, ugly — the story doesn't work, the characters are flat, the plot has holes. He insists this isn't a sign of a troubled production; it's simply what a first pass at something original always looks like, because nobody, however talented, gets a complex creative work right the first time.

The dangerous move, in his account, is denial — pretending an early cut is closer to good than it is, either out of ego or fear of delivering bad news up the chain. Studios that can't tolerate an honest "this isn't working yet" end up polishing a flawed structure instead of fixing it, which produces expensive, glossy mediocrity.

Pixar's whole development process, in his telling, is built around normalizing this ugly phase and getting from it to something good through relentless, honest iteration — not around somehow skipping it by hiring people talented enough to get it right immediately.

Takeaway: don't panic when the first draft is bad — panic if nobody's allowed to say so.