That notion, he says, is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in developing an original product. Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, couldn’t disagree more.
But what pleasures they are! Watching thefilm, I felt I was in at the dawn of a new era of movie animation, which drawson the best of cartoons and reality, creating a world somewhere in between,where space not only bends but snaps, crackles and pops.Many people believe that good ideas are rarer and more valuable than good people. "Toy Story" is not as inventive in its plotting or as clever inits wit as "Rabbit" or such Disney animated films as "Beauty andthe Beast" it's pretty much a buddy movie transplanted to new terrain.Its best pleasures are for the eyes. Seeing"Toy Story," I felt some of the same exhilaration I felt during" Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Both movies take apart the universe ofcinematic visuals, and put it back together again, allowing us to see in a newway. (His long suffering sister is forced to hold a teaparty for headless dolls.) (It puts awhole new spin on the situation when a toy itself says, "I'm a losttoy!") And later there's a terrifying interlude in the bedroom of Sid, thedreadful boy next door, who takes his toys apart and reassembles them likecreatures from a nightmare.
Theplot heats up when the human family decides to move, and Woody and Buzz findthemselves marooned in a gas station with no idea how to get home.
There's real poignancy later in the film when he seesa TV commercial for himself, and realizes he's only a toy. Hethinks he's a real space ranger, temporarily marooned during a crucial mission,and he goes desperately to work trying to repair his space ship - thecardboard box he came in. The most alarming: The arrival on the scene of Buzz Lightyear( Tim Allen), a space ranger.īuzzis the most endearing toy in the movie, because he's not in on the joke. Woody dispatches all of the troops in a Bucket of Soldiers to spyon developments downstairs, and they use a Playskool walkie-talkie to broadcastdevelopments. The toy owner, named Andy, hasa birthday.
Oneday there's a big shakeup in this little world. Potato Head, the message is "Hubba! Hubba!).
Potato Head finally achieveshis dream of Mrs. Potato Head ( Don Rickles), SlinkyDog ( Jim Varney), Hamm the Pig ( John Ratzenberger) and Bo Peep ( Annie Potts).The playroom ingeniously features famous toys from real life toys (which may beproduct placement, but who cares), including a spelling slate that does arunning commentary on key developments (when Mr.
Undisputed king of the toys is Woody, a cowboy with avoice by Tom Hanks. Lasseter andhis team open the film in a kid's bedroom, where the toys come to life whentheir owner is absent. Of course computers are asdumb as a box of bricks if they're not well-programmed, and director JohnLasseter, a pioneer in computer animation, has used offbeat imagination andhigh energy to program his.īutenough of this propeller-head stuff.
Each frame required as much as 300MBs of information, which means that on my one-gigabyte hard disk, I have roomfor about three frames, or an eighth of a second. Ilearn from the current Wiredmagazine that the movie occupied theattention of a bank of 300 powerful Sun microprocessors, the fastest modelsaround, which took about 800,000 hours of computing time to achieve this andother scenes - at 2 to 15 hours per frame.
Here, you donotice it, because you're careeningthrough space with a new sense of freedom.Ĭonsiderfor example a scene where Buzz Lightyear, the new space toy, jumps off a bed,bounces off a ball, careens off of the ceiling, spins around on a hanging toyhelicopter and zooms into a series of loop-the-loops on a model car race track.Watch Buzz, the background, and the perspective - which stretches andcontracts to manipulate the sense of speed. Computer animation has grown soskillful that sometimes you don't even notice it (the launching in "Apollo13" took place largely within a computer). The movie doesn't simplyanimate characters in front of painted backdrops it fully animates thecharacters andthe space they occupy, and allows itspoint of view to move freely around them. Imaginethe spectacular animation of the ballroom sequence in "Beauty and theBeast" at feature length and you'll get the idea. The more you know about how the movie wasmade, the more you respect it. Older viewers may beeven more absorbed, because "Toy Story," the first feature madeentirely by computer, achieves a three-dimensional reality and freedom ofmovement that is liberating and new. Forthe kids in the audience, a movie like this will work because it tells a funstory, contains a lot of humor, and is exciting to watch.