Toy story 3 how pixar changed animation | film | the guardian

Toy Story 3: How Pixar changed animation | Film | The Guardian 01/07/2010 09:54

Toy Story 3: How Pixar changed
animation
Where the Disney-owned studio leads, the rest of Hollywood
follows. And its latest film, Toy Story 3, is already a hit

Ryan Gilbey
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 30 June 2010 20.00 BST

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Toy Story 3 is Pixar's latest animated film. Photograph: Disney/Pixar

In the notoriously precarious film industry, where nothing is certain and no one knows
anything, there is one word that functions simultaneously as talisman, balm and
kitemark. That word is Pixar, and you don't have to be a shareholder in Disney, which
bought the computer animation studio in 2006, to feel reassured when you hear it.

Toy Story 3 3D
Production year: 2010
Country: USA
Directors: Lee Unkrich
Cast: Don Rickles, Joan Cusack, John Ratzenberger, Laurie Metcalf, Michael Keaton,
R Lee Ermey, Tim Allen, Timothy Dalton, Tom Hanks, Wallace Shawn
More on this film

With the imminent UK release of Toy Story 3, the apparently final instalment of the
groundbreaking series that began Pixar's reign in 1995, the question of how one studio
has maintained such incomparably high quality control remains intriguing. Among
Pixar's contemporaries, only Japan's Studio Ghibli (much beloved of the Pixar crowd,
who even pay tribute to the Ghibli classic My Neighbour Totoro in Toy Story 3) has
been more consistently groundbreaking in animation, and even it has floundered
somewhat with its last two films.

From the first frame of the original Toy Story, 15 years ago, the marriage of eerily
realistic computer animation and old-fashioned, emotionally plausible storytelling was
a bountiful one. Add to that the studio's sparkling wit, manifested in gags or allusions
often accessible only to older viewers, as well as a wealth of incidental detail that
positively demands repeated study, and it's no wonder that Pixar's movies can
withstand tens, even hundreds, of viewings by any age group. Take it from me: my
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withstand tens, even hundreds, of viewings by any age group. Take it from me: my
family's copies of titles by rival outfits such as DreamWorks Animation (Shrek,
Madagascar) or Blue Sky Studios (the Ice Age trilogy) have mysteriously vanished to
the back of the DVD collection, while The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Up remain on
constant rotation.

Toy Story 3 is the 11th feature from the studio, which began life in 1984 as the
computer graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm Ltd, before Steve Jobs bought
it for $10m two years later. It only opened in US cinemas a fortnight ago, but already
space ranger Buzz Lightyear and his ragtag assortment of toy pals have already trashed
box-office records in that seemingly effortless Pixar way. The film's initial $109m haul
was the biggest ever opening weekend for the company; two weeks on, its North
American takings stand at nearly $236m, and over $340m worldwide, with the film yet
to open across most of Europe. Toy Story 3's UK release later this month will have the
cinema chains prostrating themselves in gratitude.

That's before you take into account the colossal merchandising opportunities: the Buzz
Lightyear toy is tipped to be this year's "must-have" children's Christmas present – as
long as shops don't repeat the understocking error that followed the release of the first
film, which was cheekily referred to in Toy Story 2 when Barbie knowingly mentions
"short-sighted retailers who didn't stock enough toys to meet demand".

For Pixar, financial success must feel almost routine; how can it not when the
worldwide takings of its features to date, including Toy Story 3, amounts to more than
$5.5bn? Still, what really distinguishes it from other studios is the robustness and
longevity of its output. Breaking box-office records is, ultimately, for the birds; Pixar is
all about the long game.

Not that this should be confused with playing it safe. On the contrary, Pixar appears to
pride itself on spinning conceptual straw into cinematic gold. While Toy Story 3 is, by
the studio's own standards, a safe bet at the box office, the more commercially secure
Pixar has become, the more it has used its bankability as a springboard for innovation
and experimentation. Aside from Toy Story 3 and the forthcoming Cars 2 (a sequel to
the only film on its CV that dipped noticeably below the normally stratospheric
standards), nothing else in its recent output adheres to received wisdom about what
makes a hit.

Take the sumptuous 2007 comedy Ratatouille, in which a rodent chef prepares
nouvelle cuisine dishes in a Parisian restaurant. The picture's theme was the
provenance of great art – hardly box-office bait – while the title was feared so
offputting that a phonetic spelling was added to the poster. Or WALL-E, an attack on
consumerism; not only was this remarkable work soul-achingly bleak for its first,
dialogue-free 40 minutes, but it featured, as the critic Jonathan Romney observed, a
metal box for a hero and a steering-wheel for a villain.

Financial commentators in the US rashly predicted that the studio's fortunes would
decline with the release of Up, because of the uncommercial decision to have a 78-
year-old widower as its hero. But the film made nearly $300m (on a $175m budget)
during its US theatrical release alone. Future projects – including Newt, about an
attempt to mate the last remaining newts on earth, who unfortunately despise one
another – indicate a continuing aversion to formula.

That audiences have come to cherish Pixar, eccentricities and all, is testament to the
level of trust and goodwill the studio has generated. "That's part of what Steve Jobs
said early on," recalled Dylan Brown, a supervising animator at Pixar, when I spoke to
him in 2007. "He said he wanted to build Pixar into a brand so that when people go
see a Pixar film, there's a certain level of integrity they can trust, even without seeing


see a Pixar film, there's a certain level of integrity they can trust, even without seeing
anything in advance about the film. As artists working on a film, it's a big part of how
we can go home and feel good about what we've done. I don't want to put four years of
my life into something that doesn't have integrity, or a personal message."

A measure of the affection with which Pixar is regarded can be found in the online
outrage which greeted a venomous review of Toy Story 3 by the New York Press critic,
Armond White. "The Toy Story franchise isn't for children and adults," wrote White,
"it's for non-thinking children and adults. When a movie is this formulaic, it's no
longer a toy because it does all the work for you. It's a sap's story."

Even in an age when internet opprobrium can be generated simply by asking whether
Robert Pattinson is having a bad hair day, there was a fearsome response from Pixar
fans outraged that White's broadside was preventing the film from achieving a 100%
rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website, which assesses critical reaction. "You have no
soul, nor a heart," wrote one reader, while another declared: "I hate you. Toy Story 3 is
one of the most creative movies ever made."

Around the release of Ratatouille, though, Brown did sense the rumblings of a mini-
backlash. "It's a strange time at Pixar," he said. "People may not be rooting for us as
they once did. We've been very lucky: every film has made a profit, and after a while
some people seem to get angry about that. They seem annoyed, as if we had some
secret formula for our films that we're refusing to share with everyone."

Pixar's seeming ability to please all the people all of the time continues to raise some
critics' hackles. A recent story in Ms magazine went fishing for controversy by griping
about the seven-to-one ratio of male and female characters in Toy Story 3 – while
ignoring the importance that a young girl plays in the moving conclusion, or the
unexpected gumption shown by the film's Barbie doll, who gets the picture's funniest
scene when she tortures a narcissistic Ken doll by ripping her way gleefully through his
snazziest retro outfits.

Pixar has built its vast following through the simple but surprisingly rare tactic of
pursuing excellence. The studio spends many months mapping out its story structures
before characterisation or dialogue make an appearance. Making no distinction
between the demands of animation and live action, it draws its talent from across
cinema. Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, worked on the
screenplay for the original Toy Story. Tom McCarthy, writer-director of The Station
Agent and best known for playing a corrupt reporter in The Wire, worked on the script
of Up. Michael Arndt, Oscar-winning writer of Little Miss Sunshine, co-wrote Toy
Story 3.

The studio also learned from Disney's occasional example of using A-list actors in its
voice casts: by recruiting stars such as Tom Hanks (Toy Story 1–3), Holly Hunter (The
Incredibles), and Willem Dafoe (Finding Nemo), it effectively made voice-acting the
profitable Hollywood sideline it is today. The secret of Pixar, if there is one, seems
increasingly to be that they aren't interested in making great films for children – just
great films.

Brad Bird epitomises the studio's knack for attracting and then protecting talent; he
gravitated toward Pixar, where he directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille, following
an unhappy experience making The Iron Giant for Warner Bros. According to Bird,
who was recently announced as the director of Mission: Impossible 4: "The mistake
everyone makes is to assume animation is a children's medium. It's not. It's a medium,
a method of storytelling. We don't make these films for children, we make them for us
– and hope kids, teenagers, other adults, all have similar tastes to us. There's no
strategy to it."


strategy to it."

Strikingly, at Pixar there is also no room for the glut of modern references, the riffs on
celebrity and brands, that have dominated its competitors' animated films. The prime
offender in this respect has been DreamWorks, whose zany output often seems soulless
by comparison. Where Pixar uses pop-culture buffoonery as the icing on the cake, for
DreamWorks it is the cake: remove the in-jokes in Shark Tale or Bee Movie and there's
not much left, least of all the sense of enchantment that is the lifeblood of fantasy
storytelling. Specific references instantly carbon-date those films, rendering them ever
more unintelligible to future viewers.

"Pop-culture references are easy," Bird told me. "And they give the audience a cheap
thrill. But they don't last. Take Disney's 1992 version of Aladdin, which I like – when
that came out, and I saw the genie doing an impression of [US chatshow host] Arsenio
Hall, I thought: 'This is going to mean nothing in 10 years' time.' We try to avoid that."

An animation revolution

There are, though, signs that DreamWorks and other animators may at last be heeding
Pixar's lessons in making entertainment without a use-by date. The most recent
DreamWorks Animation film, an affectionate adaptation of Cressida Cowell's novel
How to Train Your Dragon, was easily its most charming and imaginative work. And
the forthcoming supervillain comedy Despicable Me, co-directed by Chris Renaud of
the Ice Age series, reportedly works faithfully from the Pixar cribsheet – the Hollywood
Reporter declared that it "captures much of what one likes about Pixar cartoons".
Despicable Me also marks the first release from Chris Meledandri's Illumination
Entertainment, whose enticing future projects include Dr Seuss's The Lorax and an
adaptation of Ricky Gervais's Flanimals.

It would not be far-fetched to suggest we may be on the cusp of an animation
revolution, with some of the world's finest film-makers choosing to work in what has
traditionally been considered a junior species of cinema. Wes Anderson's move into
stop-motion animation last year with Fantastic Mr Fox was well received, and the
stop-motion revival continues with the UK release this autumn of the anarchic and
celebrated French film A Town Called Panic, populated entirely by plastic toys with
immovable expressions. Also from France, but relocated to Edinburgh, is Sylvain
Chomet (director of Belleville Rendez-vous), who has attracted ecstatic reviews for The
Illusionist, a visually enchanting adaptation of an unfilmed Jacques Tati script, which
opened the Edinburgh film festival last month.

Chomet's film is an important reminder that old-school, hand-drawn animation still
has a place in the digitised, 3D age. Indeed, that's a point well-made by Pixar's co-
founder John Lasseter. Pixar has used 3D technology to bring subtle spatial depth to
the airborne Up, and to transform the kindergarten in Toy Story 3 into a vast and
hazardous arena, but Lasseter hasn't forgotten animation's roots. When he became
Disney and Pixar's chief creative officer in 2006, one of his first moves was to reverse
Disney's decision to put 2D cel animation on ice; hence The Princess and the Frog.

Suddenly the animation landscape has become a glorious mashup of old and new
techniques, with hand-drawn features jostling for screen space with faux-naif stop-
motion and gleaming computer animation. The form may change according to
technological trends, but the elements that make an enduring entertainment haven't
shifted since Disney's heyday, which lasted from the late 1930s to the 60s.

As the postmodern embellishments formerly favoured by DreamWorks and its ilk have
begun to fall away, animation has returned to the narrative rigour and emotional
underpinning that made classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi



underpinning that made classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi
impervious to the ravages of time. For all the eye-catching technological advances, the
best work still cleaves to a storytelling model established long before Pixar was a gleam
in a computer nerd's eye.

Toy Story 3 opens on 19 July, The Illusionist on 20 August

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2010


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Toy story 3 how pixar changed animation | film | the guardian