It seems like yesterday that computer-generated imagery took animation by storm. But 25 years have passed since a family-friendly saga about a cowboy and a spaceman changedthe visual landscape. In this Christmas special feature, Cinema Paradiso celebrates this momentous anniversary by recommending 10 titles you are bound to enjoy if you liked Toy Story (1995).
Pixar has made 23 full-length animations since John Lasseter's Toy Story (1995) became the first all-digital feature to have been produced entirely inside a computer. The joke at the time was that it had been made on location - cyberspace. Four years in the making and running for 77 minutes, it was composed of 1560 shots across 114,240 frames that required 117 computers to process for 800,000 machine-hours in order to reunite young Andy Davis with two toys he didn't even know had gone missing.A quarter of a century ago, this achievement was regarded as something of a cinematic marvel. No wonder Toy Story could boast to having more PhDs in its credit crawl than any other Hollywood movie. It takes something more than numbers to impress audiences in the2020s. But what Pixar did in recounting the story of Woody Pride and Buzz Light year ranks alongside such key moments in screen history as the coming of colour, sound,widescreen and 3-D, as it changed the way an entire art form operates.
From Pencils to Pixels
Born in Hollywood six minutes after his twin sister, John Lasseter was the son of an art teacher who encouraged him to watch cartoons. He credits two Disney films, Sleeping Beauty (1959) and The Sword in the Stone (1963), with convincing him to become an animator and he joined the nascent character animation programme at the California Institute of the Arts in 1975. Among his classmates were Tim Burton, Brad Bird, JerryRees, John Musker, Henry Selick and Chris Buck, each of whom has gone on to make a major contribution to American animation.
Having won the Student Oscars for Lady and the Lamp (1979) and Nitemare (1980), Lasseter joined Walt Disney Productions and started working on a project that would eventually evolve into Fantasia 2000 (1999). Certain that the studio had been marking time stylistically since producing 101 Dalmatians (1961), Lasseter became intrigued by the possibilities of computer-generated imagery after Jerry Rees showed him special effects footage for Steven Lisberger's forthcoming sci-fi adventure, Tron (1982). Enthused, Lasseter produced some test scenes taken from Maurice Sendak's book, Where the Wild Things Are (which would eventually be filmed by Spike Jonze in 2009) prior top itching an adaptation of Thomas Disch's novel, The Brave Little Toaster (which Rees would make in 1987). Unfortunately, Lasseter's initiative got him fired. But, in 1983, he was hired by Lucasfilm, where he hooked up with Ed Catmull, the high-tech computer graphics pioneer responsible for such game-changing software as RenderMan and Modeling Environment (or Menv), which respectively allowed animators to render images in record time and design 3-D character models with built-in articulation controls. Despite such advances and amusing shorts like The Adventures of André and Wally B (1984), George Lucas decided to sell the computer wing of Industrial Light & Magic and The Graphics Group was purchased by Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple who was so memorably played by Ashton Kutcher in Joshua Michael Stern's Jobs (2013) and Michael Fassbender in Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs (2015).
Under the new umbrella of Pixar, Lasseter was reunited with Catmull and the 3-D graphics system operated by his Pixar Image Computer. This enabled him to produce some groundbreaking commercials, as well as shorts like Luxo Jr (1986), which not only won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, but also became the first 3-D computer-animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award, Lasseter went one better with Tin Toy (1988), which used RenderMan and Menv software in winning the Oscar for BestAnimated Short. Both films, along with André & Wally B., can be found on the first of the three-volume Pixar Short Film Collection. Indeed, such was Lasseter's reputation that even Disney sat up and took notice.
Deal or No Deal?
Disney and Pixar had first collaborated when the former used the latter's cost-cutting colouring system (CAPS) on The Rescuers Down Under (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991), which became the first animation to be nominated for Best Picture at theAcademy Awards. But, while the film division was keen to work with Lasseter, CEO Michael Eisner and chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg insisted that all Disney movies had to be made in-house. This situation changed, however, when Tim Burton threatened to buy backthe rights to Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and he secured a deal to make the film outside the studio. Unsure the Pixar technology was ready to complete a full feature, Lasseter proposed A TinToy Christmas, as a half-hour TV special. However, he was also mulling an idea about a toy soldier who makes his way home after being forgotten by his owner at a diner. Despite internal wranglings within Disney and Pixar's precarious financial position complicating matters, there was relief on both sides when a contract was signed in May 1991, which gave Disney the rights to any picture and its characters and the potential to make any sequels without Pixar's involvement. But the Mousedom also proposed to produce the next two Pixar pictures and this proved to be an offer they couldn't refuse.
The core idea of Toy Story was always that 'toys deeply want children to play with them,and that this desire drives their hopes, fears, and actions'. However, the first draft written by Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and Pete Docter focused on the rivalry between Tinny theTin Toy and Woody, a ventriloquist's dummy who turned the rest of the toys against the new comer. Katzenberg wasn't enamoured of the concept, however, and urged the team to watch buddy pictures like Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958), Gene Saks's The Odd Couple (1968), Walter Hill's 48 Hrs. (1982) and Martin Brest's Midnight Run (1988). These are all available from Cinema Paradiso, as is another key influence on the project, Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli anime, Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986).
In shifting the emphasis, Lasseter decided that Tinny was too old-fashioned and replaced him with an astronaut who was known as Lunar Larry and Tempus from Morph before he being dubbed Buzz Lightyear in honour of Apollo 11's Buzz Aldrin. While his features were modelled on G.I. Joe, Hasbro refused to licence the character for inclusion in the film and Mattel similarly rejected approaches to use Barbie. However, both would eventually headline features of their own, with Barbie; In The Nutcracker (2001), Barbie: The Princess and the Pauper (2004) and Barbie: Fairytopia (2005) being followed by G.I.Joe: Rise of the Cobra (2009) and G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013). By contrast, Woody resembled the friendly ghost whom Brad Silberling would digitise in Casper (1995), At the suggestion of character designer Bud Luckey, however, the vent dummy became a cowboy with a drawstring, who retained his name as a nod to WoodyStrode, whose credits in a distinguished career included John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
As a new scenario started to take shape, Joe Ranft, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow and Joss Whedon made valuable contributions, with the latter devising the notion that Buzz has no idea he's a toy, In seeking to follow Katzenberg's instructions that the action should be edgier and should appeal to adults as well as children, however, the writers succeeded only in making Woody mean. Following a disastrous screening of the first half of the film on 19 November 1993, Peter Schneider urged the studio to abandon the project. However, Katzenberg held his nerve and Lasseter and his inner circle spent the weeks following the'Black Friday Incident' reworking the script and updating their storyboards.Disney approved the changes in February 1994 and work began on animating a story that relates what happens when birthday present Buzz Lightyear meets the rest of Andy Davis's toys and looks down on them until he realises that he is one of them following close encounters with some Pizza Planet crane game aliens and neighbour Sid Phillips and his snarling dog, Scud.
Putting the Pieces Together
Long before the screenplay had been signed off, the voice artists had started recording the dialogue track. Paul Newman was briefly considered for the role of Woody, but Lasseter had set his heart on Tom Hanks, who came aboard after seeing test footage fitted around his lines from Roger Spottiswoode's canine comedy, Turner & Hooch (1990). Billy Crystal was the first choice for Buzz, but he turned the role down in what he later conceded was the biggest mistake of his career. Crystal and Newman would get their Pixar moments, however, as Sully in Monsters. Inc. (2001) and as Doc Hudson in Cars (2006).
Bill Murray, Chevy Chase and Jim Carrey were also considered for Buzz before Lasseter saw Tim Allen play Tim Taylor in the Disney sitcom, Home Improvement (1991-99). Along the way, Hanks and Allen were joined by Don Rickles as Mr Potato Head, Jim Varney as Slinky Dog, Wallace Shawn as Rex, John Ratzenberger as Hamm, Annie Potts as Bo Peep and R. Lee Ermey as Sarge. They would be joined in Toy Story 2 (1999) by Joan Cusack as Jessie the cowgirl, Estelle Harris as Mrs Potato Head and Kelsey Grammer as Stinky Pete the prospector, while Toy Story 3 (2010) would see the addition of Whoopi Goldberg as Stretch, Ned Beatty as Lotso, Timothy Dalton as Mr Prickle pants and Jodi Benson and Michael Keaton as Barbie and Ken. Among the new faces in Toy Story 4 (2019) were Keanu Reeves as Duke Caboom and Christina Hendricks as Gabby Gabby, while there was also room for some choice cameos by comedy stalwarts Mel Brooks, Carol Burnett, Betty White and Carl Reiner.
With the voice talent settled, Lasseter started supervising a unit that included 27 animators, 22 technical directors and 61 artists and engineers. Each character was created from clay or computer modelled before they were handed over to the programmers to be coded so that the animators could move them in any way they wanted. The most complex figure was Woody, whose 723 motion controls included 212 for his facial expressions and 58 for his mouth. To show off the kit at his disposal, Lasseter also gave his yellow shirt a red check pattern that would have been impossibly time-consuming for a traditional hand-drawn cartoon.
Eight different teams worked on each shot, starting with art director Ralph Eggleston, who cleverly created the contrasts between Andy and Sid's bedrooms, as well as the wider world into the toys would have to stray. Craig Good's layout department placed the characters in the scenes and programmed the camera moves. In order to help the character animators, Pixar developed Unwrap, a programme that allowed artists to flatten 3-D images to make them easier to paint. Then, having used Avid Media Composer to transfer outline sketches on to video story reels, directing animators Rich Quade and Ash Brannon determined the key movements required for each piece of action and used the Menv software to fill in the gaps between these keyframes. A huge amount of time was devoted to lip synching the dialogue, with each eight seconds of speech requiring a week of painstaking computer animation. Tom Porter's shading team used RenderMan to set the tone for the model surfaces and the backgrounds, while Galyn Susman and Sharon Calahan's crew perfected the lighting of each shot.
With frames requiring between 45 minutes and 30 hours to render, 117 Sun Microsystems computers had to run around the clock to produce the digital frames that were transferred to 35mm celluloid by David Di Francesco. No wonder the initial $17 million outlay ran out and Steve Jobs was forced to ask Disney for further funding to take the budget up to $30 million. But even before the Avid-edited footage was sent to Skywalker Sound for Gary Rydstrom's audio design to be mixed with the score, it was clear that history was being made. From the outset, Lasseter had been adamant that his characters weren't going to burst into song every 10 minutes. But Disney knew the value of a good song track and persuaded him hire Randy Newman to follow the example of Mike Nichols's The Graduate (1967), which had used non-diegetic tunes by Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel to comment on the action.
To Multiplexes and Beyond
As nothing like Toy Story had been attempted before, no one was entirely sure how the pieces would slot together. Editor Lee Unrich was concerned about the scene in which Sid tortures Woody and Buzz and removed some of the more sadistic images. Further tucks and tweaks were made to sustain the brisk pace after the cowboy and the space ranger leave the safety of Andy's room. But any initial optimism was somewhat dashed by the failure to wow a test audience at Anaheim in July 1995. Rather than demand wholesale revisions, however, Eisner requested the odd change and a closing shot of Woody and Buzz shooting each other a nervous glance when they clap eyes on Andy's new puppy.
There were still tensions behind the scenes, however, with Jobs snubbing the Disney premiere at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on 19 November before hosting his own at the Regency Theatre in San Francisco the following evening. The word of mouth was positive, however, and the film topped the Thanksgiving weekend charts with opening takings of $39,071,176. Bolstered by admiring reviews, it went on to top the annual rankings ahead of Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever, Ron Howard's Apollo 13, Disney's Pocahontas, the aforementioned Casper, Kevin Reynolds's Waterworld and Martin Campell's GoldenEye, which saw Pierce Brosnan make his debut as James Bond. Why not treat yourself to a 1995 double bill, as all of these films are available on high-quality DVD and Blu-ray from Cinema Paradiso to watch and return at your leisure.
Ultimately, would rack up $373.6 million worldwide and it invariably figures on lists of the all-time greatest animated movies. In the spring of 1996, it became the first animated feature to be nominated for Best Original Screenplay, while Randy Newman's citations for Best Score and Song ('You've Got a Friend in Me') were only surpassed by John Lasseter's Special Achievement Award 'for the development and inspired application of techniques that have made possible the first feature-length computer-animated film'.
The picture made more history in 2009 when Lasseter conducted an experiment in 'digital archaeology' to transform the imagery into 3-D. It took Bob Whitehill and his team four months to achieve, with the effects being deftly used to make the outside world seem all the more threatening. The same process was applied to Toy Story 2 after the pair had broken home entertainment records with the sales of videos, laser discs and DVDs. Cinema Paradiso offers users the chance to see all four features in a range of formats, including Blu-ray 3-D and 4K. No streaming service can provide such choice or such exceptional quality for your viewing pleasure.
Obviously, this critical and commercial success was the making of Pixar, which has gone on to produce 22 further films up to Pete Docter's Soul, which will be released on Christmas Day. In all, the company has racked up 16 Academy Awards from 47 nominations in recognition of the increasing visual and narrative sophistication of its wondrously inventive and entertaining films. So you don't miss out on any of them, here are the titles we haven't mentioned so far: A Bug's Life (1998); Finding Nemo (2003); The Incredibles (2004); Ratatouille (2007); WALL-E (2008); Up (2009); Cars 2 (2011); Brave (2012); Monsters University (2013); Inside Out; The Good Dinosaur (both 2015); Finding Dory (2016); Cars 3; Coco (both 2017); Incredibles 2 (2018) and Onward (2020).
Of course, Toy Story changed the approach to animation in Hollywood and elsewhere, as over 250 computer-animated features have followed in its wake. But that's another story for another day.
