Seen today, ‘Toy Story’ It remains as fresh, fun and surprising as it was in its day. That the later films of Pixar have drawn, to a greater or lesser extent, from its aesthetics, its plot structure and its characters, demonstrates the extent to which the company’s first film was influential and foundational in many ways. And that is taking into account that, technologically, its creative process has lost all traces of sophistication, and today it is a relic of the past like the first attempts at other techniques such as the rotoscope or the stop motion.
As an example, this video that dates back to the time of filming but which had not been seen much until recently, and in which Pete Docter, the film’s animation supervisor, describes the rudimentary techniques with which the characters in the film were brought to life, based on the recording of the original voice. Their explanations and images attest to the way almost intuitive that they had to animate, and how perhaps the image that many people have of computer animation as something completely automated and where there is no human participation is absolutely wrong.
We must add to this that Docter, in addition to being an animator in ‘Toy Story’, would write the basic story of almost all Pixar moviesthe script for ‘Delverso’ and ‘Up’ and he would direct those same ones and ‘Monstruos SA’. That is to say, apart from knowledge about the creative procedure in the technical part, he is also a key name in the most primitive section of the genesis of the film, where the ideas, the design of the characters and the very threads of the story emerge.
In the video he explains how, based on sound, they sketch a series of movements on paper, a procedure that obviously has much more to do with traditional animation than with nothing programmatic. From there they go to a stand-in of Woody, that is, a character “made only with geometric shapes”, to save time on technical issues. In those days it was unthinkable to animate in real time with finished characters.
From there, and with extreme precision, it moves the elbow, wrist, fingers… and finally, separately, all the facial animations. The interesting thing is what Docter adds later and that makes clear his interest not only in the technical section of this type of animation, but also in its creative and expressive twists and turns: “If you can make this model act, function and communicate without any type of facial expressions, then you have done a good job.”
It’s a perfect example of why ‘Toy Story’ still works and exciting: because it does not remain a technical exhibition in which it was a pioneer, becoming the first computer-animated feature film, but there is a traditional creative work supporting it all.
The rendering that gave life to the toys
The key to Toy Story’s animation is RenderMan, Pixar’s proprietary 3D rendering software that it developed since the mid-1980s. In addition to using it in its own films, the company makes it available to third parties, as it did, with the software still in its infancy, in films such as ‘The Abyss’ in 1989 (in the scene of the water tentacle that gave the film an Oscar) or ‘Terminator 2’ in 1991 and its liquid metal effects.
What RenderMan does It is managing issues such as lighting and volumes realistically, even on computers as primitive as those available in the early 1990s. The success of ‘Toy Story’ made the tool ubiquitous in productions that played a historic part in the birth of computer special effects in cinema. Even today, ‘Toy Story 4’ has been made with an updated version of RenderMan which, of course, manages aspects such as light and shadow projections in an infinitely more realistic way than in the first film.
The importance of RenderMan is essential to understand even the origin of the company, because Pixar was born as a division of Lucasfilm that ended up becoming a software company that made short films to advertise the power of its products.
After winning an Oscar with the short ‘Tin Toy‘ -shot with the Menv software, also from Pixar-, the decision made by the co-founder of the company Ed Catmull – the original core along with John Lasseter and the screenwriters Andrew Stanton and the aforementioned Docter -, who always had the ambition to make the leap to the feature film, was to make a half-hour Christmas special. In it, a ventriloquist doll made an unlikely couple with the metal ‘Tin Toy’ doll.
‘Tin Toy’ was not short on ambition (things appeared in it that had literally never been seen on that scale, such as textures of different materials such as wood or fabric, or shadows of different intensity), and part of that ambition would be transferred to ‘Toy Story’. For example, Catmull – like the rest of the animators – would provide a character to the dolls that appear hidden under the sofa. It was an elephant, which he designed by introducing Bézier curves by hand, as coordinates, into the programming language.
The primitive concept of the metal dummies and the ventriloquist did not prosper, but Pixar ended up with a contract with Disney for 26 million dollars to make three feature films. They decided to extend the story of the toys that come to life from the short, and once again we can see Pixar’s desire for technology and ingenious concepts to come together in the same way: since visually they could not afford sophisticated and realistic animations with the software they used, they would animate toys, which would intuitively have robotic and rigid gestures and behaviors if they came to life.
The ventriloquist dummy became Woody because the CEO of Disney at the time, Michael Eisner, had a bad feeling for puppets.
Small calculation errors
The first problem that Pixar encountered after starting production in 1993 was the equipment they believed was necessary to complete the film. They estimated eight animators, and ended up needing 33. They also underestimated the computing power needed: they estimated they could render the film in 20 months using 53 processors. They ended up needing no less than 300, which is still a modest amount compared to the current 23,000 processors that render animations in real time.
These blindfolds were understandable because, as Carmell tells TIME“nobody knew what we were doing. We didn’t have any kind of production experience beyond shorts and documentaries. We were all rookies.” That lack of experience It also led to some enthusiasm: “I was always like, ‘Can we do this?’ And they’d say, ‘No, but let’s try it,’ and they’d work to get there, and all that work would inspire new ideas. And then they’d say, ‘Oh, can we do such and such with all of this?’ and ideas arose that would never have occurred to us.
Even so, they knew that the technology that supported the film would inevitably become old, and they decided, upon receiving the green light from Disney, to review films that continued to work even though the special effects had become outdated, such as ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, ‘The Wizard of Oz’ or the first ‘Star Wars’. In all cases, Stanton says, they realized that if the story was compelling enough, the effects lasted even if the technology had been surpassed.
Among the screenwriters of these first drafts were top authors Joss Whedon and Joel Coen. And among the decisions they made, that of remove musical numbers to give the film a more adult tone. However, the clash with Disney was inevitable: the production company believed that Woody was too cynical, and they were on the verge of canceling the film’s development. Steve Jobs himself, the main shareholder since 1986, had to finance the film for a few months while Disney considered whether to return to production, so that the project did not fall apart.
But finally, clearing up the conflict between Woody and Buzz, the project went ahead, largely due to the tremendous success of ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’, the first animated film in which Disney collaborated with a studio. external. They have not lost the philosophy of taking care of the stories to date, and it has made us remember Pixar for its revolutionary technology, yes, but above all for its incredible plots and the daring of its starting points in each film.
The result is known to everyone: Oscar recognition of merit, and nominations for ‘Toy Story’ for Best Screenplay, Soundtrack and Song. It grossed 361 million dollars, far exceeding its initial budget of thirty, and made clear what the secret is to injecting genuine soul into the characters of an animated film. The fact that it was filmed with the assistance of computers ended up being revealed as a purely circumstantial issue.
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