Animated Feature Was Four Years In The Making
A lot of playing around went into “Toy Story.”
It took four years, incalculable research and development and 1 terabyte (that’s 1 trillion bytes for us non-Ph.D.s) of data to bring the first all-computer animated feature to life.
“Disney asked us to come up with a story idea for a feature film,” said director John Lasseter, vice president of creative development for the Northern California-based computer graphics company Pixar. “We chose a buddy picture with toys. I won the Academy Award for a short animated film called ‘TinToy,’ I’m a toy lover and I thought there was a great potential there - beyond just for kids, but for adults as well.
“But we didn’t want to do (a typical Disney cartoon) story. They were doing these musicals, love stories, villains, all this stuff. We wanted to do something different.”
What Lasseter and a squad of co-writers came up with was a tale of two toys: traditional pull-string cowboy Woody (whose voice is provided by Tom Hanks) and space-ace action figure Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen), who comes equipped with flashy electronic bells and whistles.
Like all the other toys in 6-year-old Andy’s room, they come to life whenever humans aren’t around. But their rivalry for favorite plaything status eventually lands Woody and Buzz in the clutches of Sid, the kid next door who likes nothing better than torturing toys. If the rivals don’t work together, they’ll end up like the rest of Sid’s dismembered menagerie.
“No. 1, we wanted to do something with rich, great characters,” Lasseter explained. “I believe, in the end, that’s what audiences really love. Something new, visually, will entertain an audience for about five minutes. But from then on, you have to entertain them with the story and characters.”
Disney has been working with Pixar for some time; the two companies won a technical Oscar for their joint development of CAPS, a computer-assisted animation process tha has contributed dazzling sequences to the studio’s cartoon spectaculars since “Beauty and the Beast.” But what made “Toy Story” the first of three features Disney and Pixar intend to make together was its combination of both viewer- and computer-friendly elements.
“We wouldn’t have made this story in traditional animation,” said Thomas Schumacher, executive vice president of Disney feature animation. “It’s a story that needs this technology, this look, to put on the screen.
“This allows us to tell stories with a certain edge, but also with an almost inexplicable charm and appeal,” Schumacher said of the clean, three-dimensional, computer animation look. “When you see Etch-A-Sketch on the screen, looking like a real Etch-A-Sketch and yet having personality - that dimensional, textured feeling (of computer animation) really supports that storytelling.”