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The Films of Pixar Animation Studio
By James Clarke Oldcastle Books
Copyright © 2013 James Clarke
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84243-939-5
CHAPTER 1
THE FILMS
Toy Story (1995)
Directed by: John Lasseter
Written by: John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Joe Ranft (story and screenplay), Joss Whedon, Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow (screenplay)
Produced by: Bonnie Arnold, Ralph Guggenheim
Music by: Randy Newman
Edited by: Robert Gordon, Lee Unkrich
Art Direction: Ralph Eggleston
Cast: Tom Hanks (Woody), Tim Allen (Buzz Lightyear), Don Rickles (Mr Potato head), Jim Varney (Slinky Dog), Wallace Shawn (Rex), John Ratzenberger (Hamm), Annie Potts (Bo Peep), Wayne Knight (Al), John Morris (Andy Davis), Laurie Metcalf (Andy's Mom), Estelle Harris (Mrs Potato Head)
Human culture is rich with stories charting our long-running fascination with automata and other artificial figures (notably, sculpture) that seek to replicate the appearance and movements of people and animals. Martin Scorsese's beautifully realised, and rather delicate, adaptation of Brian Selznick's book The Invention of Hugo Cabret was a very recent explicit example and we can also look to Pinocchio and also the Olympia sequence in the fantasy movie The Tales of Hoffmann (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1952). Intriguingly, Powell had long wanted to make an animated film at some point in his career. Alas, that fantasy never became real. So the idea that a kind of enchantment might allow an otherwise motionless and lifeless object to 'come alive' underpins the animation aesthetic in a vivid way. The prospect of toys coming to life is not a new instance of wish-fulfilment. We can trace the tradition back to a number of stories in print and moving pictures, titles such as The Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Andersen. Of Andersen, Alison Lurie has written, in a way that rhymes with the Pixar vibe, that 'like a child, Andersen saw everything in the world as alive and conscious. In his stories not only animals and birds, but also bugs and toys and flowers and even household objects have complete human personalities.'
In a rather matter-of-fact way, the following note appeared in a 1993 edition of Cinefex, a visual effects magazine, which was profiling a relatively little-known studio of the time, named Pixar. The piece focused on the studio's commercials work but also noted that Pixar was working on its first feature-length project, described only as 'a seventy-five-minute, action adventure story to be done completely with 3D graphics'. Ultimately, this unspecified project would become known to audiences, just over two years later, as Toy Story, a film that would vividly confirm that computer animation had reached a watershed moment, with cinema beginning to shift away from being only about photographing the real world. At the time, cinema was announcing a new iteration of itself: virtual cinema with more in common perhaps with painting than with photography.
It's fascinating to go back and read material published just before the original theatrical release of Toy Story. In the 1993 Cinefex magazine article mentioned a moment ago, the writer Estelle Shay begins her profile of Pixar by placing it in the following context: 'With the unveiling of Steven Spielberg's current blockbuster, Jurassic Park (1993), computer-generated imaging has taken a quantum leap that may forever change the way effects movies are made. Although an appreciation of CGI and its vast potential has been steadily growing, most people, including many in the effects industry, were wholly unprepared for the astonishing realism of Jurassic Park's digital dinosaurs. Most, but not all.' This excerpt marks the moment when producers and audiences were recognising a new technology and, in Jurassic Park, the scene in which the scientists first sight a living, breathing, stomping dinosaur is visually stunning and emotionally spectacular; characters and audiences perfectly matched as both the story world and the world of the cinema witness new technology. Spielberg achieved this elusive fusion, and so have Pixar.
And so to the origins of Pixar's watershed moment in feature film production. Toy Story can be said to have had a partial beginning in a decision made at Pixar (following the awards success and industry recognition accorded the Luxo Jr and Tin Toy shorts) that the company should progress from its established work in short films and commercials to producing a 30-minute TV special. Surprisingly, Disney's then-vice president of animation, Peter Schneider, suggested that Pixar move straight into producing a feature project. As such, Pixar signed a three-picture deal with Disney, setting in motion what has become a major partnership, not only in terms of the dynamics of film economics and the industrial processes aspect, but also in terms of how the storytelling example of one studio (Disney) has influenced that of another. Of the Disney name, brand and style, it has been described by Eric Smoodin thus: 'With the release of Fantasia ... Disney came to be perceived as the consummate artist, the perfect combination of the corporate and the creative.'
Certainly, Pixar's own short film, Tin Toy, contained the germ of what became the more expansive Toy Story concept, namely the emotional secret life of a toy. Broadly speaking, it's a scenario that we might recognise from the work of other, older fabulists. John Lasseter has explained that 'I always thought there was a lot of potential in a story about toys that are alive. We started to explore that idea in Tin Toy – but it really came together in Toy Story.' Lasseter's comment rather understates the challenge involved in making the leap from short to feature.
Speaking about the challenges of computer imaging, visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund (who was pivotal to the age of both optical and digital effects, his credits embracing the optical-age wonders of Poltergeist [Tobe Hooper, 1982] and The Empire Strikes Back [Irvin Kershner, 1980] and the digital-age awe of the films Spiderman [Sam Raimi, 2002] and Spiderman 2 [Sam Raimi, 2004]) once made a critical observation that's relevant to us here. He said that 'the thing about computer animation is that you have to intellectualise the serendipitous blip'. Although Edlund is making a general statement about the visual-effects production process and its various aesthetic challenges, it's an understanding that's fully applicable to the world of Pixar's movies and computer-animated or computer-generated films more broadly.
For all its digital allure, Toy Story's narrative is steeped in old-world traditions of narrative structure, character and animation technique. As with many films that impact vividly on us, Toy Story centres around a simple plot which allows real breathing space for the development of atmosphere and of character. In a sense, we might say that the images have space to linger.
The events of Toy Story, then, follow a proven and powerful narrative line. As such, it's a film that well understands genre traditions.
In 1993, two years before the release of Toy Story, Ralph Guggenheim, vice president of the nascent animation division at Pixar, explained that 'ten or fifteen years ago you would not have considered making a feature-length film of this nature because the "ink and paint" portion, or the rendering part of the process, would have taken too long.' Guggenheim's reality check now seems like a relic from ancient history, but it illustrates well the evolutionary leap that Toy Story represented, and its subsequent commercial success then validated the possibility of CGI as a format worth investing in.
Almost two decades since its original release, Toy Story continues to stand as a landmark movie and as a touchstone for producers of computer-animated feature films. It's a film that symbolises what constitutes a financially well-resourced American film industry operating at its storytelling best.
Having been crucial to the evolution of the computer-animated short film, John Lasseter applied this experience to Toy Story, his feature-film directing and screenwriting debut, and the project's four-year production period inevitably confronted Lasseter and his colleagues with the challenges arising from how best to craft coherent and engaging characters and narrative mechanics whilst also making the wisest and most aesthetically dynamic use of the available technology. In terms of what we sometimes expect of popular American cinema. Toy Story offers us both something novel and something familiar in artful combination. In 1987, Lasseter published an article entitled 'Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Animation' in the journal Computer Animation. Lasseter stated that many established rules of animation could be applied to the aesthetics of the brave new world of computer animation. Certainly, Toy Story makes real Lasseter's 'prophecy'. Of the fluidity between approaches, both traditional and contemporary, Pixar's picture editor Ken Schretzman commented about the dynamic of the studio's typical production process that 'at one point in the film, part of it's in storyboard, part of it's in layout, some of it is animated, some of it's being rendered, while some of the scenes are being rewritten.'
An additional challenge in the production of Toy Story, and one which served to extend and deepen the creative palette of Pixar, was the creation of believably illuminated and shaded surface, applied to the illusion of everything from animal fur, to bedclothes, to the surface textures of toys. In effect, the studio was grappling with visual realism in a way that Renaissance painters had done.
Toy Story's characters all have very shiny surfaces that reflect light – a smart, common-sense decision by the production in that, at the time, plastic-looking surfaces were 'easily' achievable on the computer. The believable illusion of human skin would require the seasoning of a little more time and, hence, it was not until 2004 that The Incredibles, Pixar's first human-centred movie, was released.
In tandem with the refinement of various technical tools, the production of Toy Story moved forward with script development. In 1989, Disney had released its hugely popular adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid (1989). Produced under the supervision of then-studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, the project's production was notable for being based around a fully realised screenplay, just as a live-action feature would be. Prior to this there had been a tendency in animation production to develop feature films from storyboarding only.
For Toy Story, the writing team, which comprised Joss Whedon, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, Alex Sokolow and Joe Ranft, developed the film's storyline and from there wrote a number of full screenplay drafts. The screenplay's development happened in tandem with the generation of conceptual artwork for the characters, and eventually the storyboard of the film. This ongoing dialogue engaged the team in how best to create a dynamic between words and pictures. Typical of the long-established production pipeline convention for animated films, once the screenplay for Toy Story began to narrow in focus, the process began of mapping out the entire story using hand-drawn storyboards. At this point, drawings and painted character designs were also used as the basis for maquettes of the characters which were then scanned into the computer, just as Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith had done at the University of Utah in 1972.
Typical of the screenplay's development phase was the emergence and subsequent abandonment of various story elements, some of which would be rebooted for use in later Pixar films. Certainly, there's a good lesson here for aspiring writers: in writing, nothing's ever really wasted. Perhaps the best example of this healthy recycling of story, and its renewable energy, is that Toy Story was supposed to have opened with a Buzz Lightyear cartoon. Whilst this 'prologue' was abandoned, it was essentially revisited at the beginning of Toy Story 2.
One of the key aesthetic choices made in developing Toy Story, and it was a choice that ran counter to the established narrative (and plot) tradition of Disney animated features, was the absence of any ambition to make it an animated musical. Somewhat amusingly, during Toy Story's production an executive at Disney questioned Pixar about where they would be putting the eight songs through which the characters would express their hopes and fears. Pixar explained that they would be using dialogue alone to communicate these things. In designing Toy Story's narrative and visual palette, one of the key aesthetic impulses for John Lasseter was that 'we wanted to create a sense of nostalgia for the adults in the audience'. For sure, this declaration of a nostalgic spirit provides an insight into not just Toy Story's allure, but also the studio's subsequent output.
Certainly, Pixar's films are bound together by an essentially bright and radiant visual style. A key influence on the Pixar look for Toy Story was the artwork of American painter Maxfield Parrish. Parrish was noted for his hyperreal paintings, which included pieces such as Riverbank Autumn (1938), an image that appears to shine with some inner glow. It's a visual style that has even more of an impact on A Bug's Life, the film Pixar made after Toy Story. Parrish was also noted for his paintings of fairies and other larger-than-life scenarios.
In concocting the principal characters for Toy Story, each of which related to and reinforced an established pop-culture icon (the cowboy, the astronaut and the powerful American idea of the frontier), John Lasseter noted that 'because of the popularity of Jurassic Park, we knew we had to have a dinosaur'. John Lasseter has explained how, initially, Buzz, whose original name was Lunar Larry, was conceived as more of a Dudley Do-Right kind of figure. However, through Tim Allen's vocal performance, he became imbued with something more bossy and authoritarian.
With the screenplay and storyboard context defined and approved, the production turned to recording the vocal performances of the characters.
Critical to the sonic storytelling appeal of Pixar's feature films has been their use of established film and TV stars as vocal performers for the characters – and, intriguingly, these animated characters have become as important to the perception of the film's stars as any other non-animated film roles they may have essayed.
It's an established and understandable way of producing an expensive animated film to place recognisable, familiar voice-talent in key roles. At the time of taking on the role of Woody Pride for the original Toy Story, Tom Hanks had established himself as a major Hollywood star, having appeared in films such as Splash (Ron Howard, 1984), Big (Penny Marshall, 1988), Sleepless in Seattle (Nora Ephron, 1993), Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993), Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) and Apollo 13 (Ron Howard, 1995). To the character of Woody, Hanks brought an expected warmth and sincerity, and also a necessarily strong comic sensibility. Of comedy, Hanks has made the point that 'I guess the comic is something of a solitary figure ...'
In looking at development art for the character of Woody, it's intriguing to see the various possible choices that could have been made for the character. Jeff Pidgeon's early pencil drawing of Woody makes him look very vexed and more comical than in his final form, whilst Bud Luckey's illustration of the character has him sitting down, as if he's just dropped down by intention or accident, and he just looks wistful, an expression he often displays in the movies. Indeed, as a reference for the character of Woody, a doll was made up out of parts of other toys to allow the animators a better sense of scale and movement in service of the film's guiding realistic sensibility.
Alongside Hanks, the other star name showcased in Toy Story was the comic actor Tim Allen who voiced the character of Buzz Lightyear. By late 1995, Allen was known to many TV viewers as the star of the American sitcom Home Improvement (made by Disney), in which he played a regional TV star and presenter of a home improvement show, who was also shown navigating a family life he was never able to fix. Buzz Lightyear's bravado echoes that of Allen's character in Home Improvement, and of his role as a space ranger, and Buzz's relationship to Woody, Allen noted that 'they accept each other's limitations.'
It's interesting to note that the earlier Pixar films arguably used more famous actors in lead roles than they do now. As the studio's own name as a trusted brand has become increasingly strong, star names have become less prominent in lead roles. The Pixar story style stands on its own two feet.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Films of Pixar Animation Studio by James Clarke. Copyright © 2013 James Clarke. Excerpted by permission of Oldcastle Books.
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