Toy Story

The Legacy of Toy Story

Toy Story has become the icon of 3D animation since its release in Thanksgiving 1995. Directed by John Lasseter, Toy Story was the first feature length 3D animated film. Being the first of its kind, Toy Story has set the standard of today’s computer graphic industry and given its influence of in many aspects including technical, storytelling, and cultural aspect in the society.

Toy Story was created in Pixar Animation Studio, located in Emeryville, California. The first installment of Toy Story series was released in 1995. The second movie was released in 1999, and the third movie is currently in production and is scheduled to be coming into the theaters in summer 2010. Disney was supporting Pixar financially for the production cost of the first Toy Story, and several of Disney’s story artists were involved in the making of the movie. However, Pixar is hypothetically independent from Disney as they are a separate company for them and Pixar do most of the production by themselves. They are considered as “outside collaborator” even though Disney gave the financial support. (Lasseter, 72).

Pixar was a young company, and creating the first feature length 3D animated movie was not an easy task. However, they were lead by a team of people who were determined to make a new kind of animated movie. John Lasseter and Ed Catmull lead the Pixar team to tackle all the technical challenges that they would face along the way in Toy Story production. In the following paragraph I am going to discuss about how the animators of Pixar brought Woody, Buzz, and the whole Andy’s room gang to life.

The technical aspect of Toy Story is divided roughly into concept art, modeling, and animating. There are more branches in the production of toy story which are related to story development and post production stage as well. However, these three aspects are the most important steps in the making of Toy Story.

The very first stage of the production is concept art. Concept artists were responsible to design how the whole movie would look, they also designed the characters to match with the story. They also act as architects, interior designer, product designer, as well as character designers. These artists would have to create an environment as well as a detailed description or “blue print” on how the the environment, characters, and properties would be built in 3D space. They also have to determine how the characters move, and interact with their surroundings.

The models of the characters and environment in the movie were hand sculpted and built digitally in the computer. The characters were mostly hand sculpted due to its organic shapes that would be more challenging to be modeled in the computer at that time. Therefore, the sculptors would make a clay model out of each of the characters and put points on the surface that would be scanned into the computer through Polhemus Digitizer (Lasseter and Daly 42). This is a device that allow to scan the points that were drawn on the model’s surface with a pen-like device that would produce the wireframe model in the computer. On the other hand, the modeling for the environment and properties were digitally built in the computer as it has more geometric shapes. These properties are individually modeled in virtual 3D space so it would be able to interact with the characters seamlessly (Lasseter and Daly 42).

After all the assets were built, the animation process started. This was the main step of creating the movie. The animators are responsible for creating believable characters in a believable environment even though these only exist in virtual world. Therefore, the animation technique played a significant role as it determined how the characters came to life and interact with each other. The interactions have to be animated in a way that the audience would feel as normal as watching live action movies. They can’t afford having awkward and unbalanced motion within the movie as we could spot them right away.

To speed up the process of animation, the animators used simplified geometric models for their animation programs. They were literally made of boxes and tubes. There’s not much of the character’s information presented in these models. However, the animators had to create a personality for these boxes through their motion. The body language of an animated object could show emotion and personality more than facial animation (Lasseter and Daly 61). We think about bigger picture in this movie, as the audience would not look at the fine detail of the face, but we would look at the whole scene, especially the body language of the characters as it would catch our attention right away.

The animation technique itself was done by using the information of the scanned model from the Polhemus Digitizer mentioned earlier. The model has to be rigged with animation control called “articulated variables” or “avars”, it represented places in the model that could be animated (Price 133-134). With these controls the animators could move around the joints and some part of the skin where it would normally move in reality.

According to John Lasseter, the three key things for making a great movie is excitement, appealing characters, and believable world. In relation to his statement, Pixar was committed to make a great animated movie. Story always comes first. Without a good story, however great the animation techniques are, people would not be able to remember it. The first thing we remember of a movie is the plot, the storyline and the techniques come second. Therefore, Toy Story went through a long and complicated paths to reach the story as it is now. The storytelling aspect of the movie could be divided into character development and story sessions.

Character development is the stage where the characters that would be appear in the movie are designed. It was essential for them to develop unique characteristics for each of the characters to match the story. Their looks were also developed at the same time. For example, Woody was not always a cowboy. He was a ventriloquist dummy who became friends with a tin toy (Lasseter and Daly 28). On the other hand, Buzz Lightyear was used to be called Lunar Larry. The story artists would have to figure out the relationship within the characters as the story developed at the continuously.

The other part of creating the story is story session itself. It is the session where the story artists, led by Andrew Stanton would come together with the director and discuss their plot. They would make storyboards and continuously pouring new ideas that could be included in the movie. It all started with a compelling idea of a buddy movie with two opposing main characters. Thus, they did a test on Woody, a creepy ventriloquist dummy and a space ranger called Tempus, which is the former name of Buzz Lightyear (Price 126).  Pixar pitched the idea to Disney executives and they also made suggestions on how the story could be improved. Therefore, the story continued to develop and tweaked along with the production stage, even there were some animations that got scraped or completely modified to fit with the story. Pixar wanted to make a believable story, and it was not an easy task to create a story that feels “normal”.

After going through the long and hard journey of creating the first animated feature film, Toy Story had become a huge success. From their initial release in 1995, to the sequel in 1999, and another installment is in production. Toy Story became the highest grossing film in 1995 with $195 million in US market only and $357 million globally (Price 154).  The sequel, Toy Story 2 doubled the amount of income in both domestic market and international market. Toy Story 2 received $245 million in the US and $486 million around the world (Price 186). Toy Story was the first animated film to be nominated in Academy Awards for Best Screenplay category and John Lasseter’s contribution to the animation world would be recognized with Special Achievement Award in 1996 Academy Awards (Price 154).

The success of Toy Story bought led Pixar to sell their stocks to public a week after its release and earned $190.7 million, enough to work as an equal partner to Disney as opposed working under them (Price 154). Moreover, Toy Story was well received by general audience across the generations, so Pixar seized this opportunity to mass produce Toy Story collectibles and merchandises. These collectibles and merchandises are even still in production until now, especially with the third installment coming out in Summer 2010. There are new line of Toy Story toys to be released from Lego and Thinkway Toys in the near future.

The most anticipated Pixar’s next installment of Toy Story is coming out in summer 2010, and the story picks up where it left in the sequel. Andy is leaving for college, his toys are left behind and going to be donated to a daycare. Pixar maintains the continuity of the story by bringing back the original cast of Toy Story, including John Morris who was the voice of Andy in 1995, he was 10 years old then, now he’s coming back to do 18 year old Andy in Toy Story 3.  The other original casts include Tom Hanks as Woody and Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear. The consistency of Pixar made people appreciate more of the movies and respect them.

Being a legendary movie, Toy Story fan would expect something more from their favorite characters. Pixar is going to release the first two Toy Story movies which were re-rendered in stereoscopic camera so it can be seen in 3D. These movies are going to be released in October 2009 in anticipation of Toy Story 3 that is coming out in June 2010. Pixar intended to re-introduce Toy Story to the younger generation who have not seen Toy Story and Toy Story 2 the way it was meant to be seen in the big screen. As we are getting closer to the release date, we can see the excitement of people from different generations anticipating these movies in the theaters.

Therefore, Pixar has given us a great legacy in creating a legendary story that also set a milestone in the animation industry. Toy Story has touched so many lives across the globe and through the generations that the audience appreciate the movie for its nostalgic value as well as the recognition of its technical achievement in 3D animation. Toy Story has become a part of the society and they also took part in today’s culture through the story that everybody could relate to.

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