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A Look Back at Pixar: Toy Story
How does a twenty-six-year-old film that pioneered technology and advanced animation stay fresh? An examination of the film that started it all.
Pixar premiered Toy Story in 1995, the first 3D computer animated, feature-length film. Toy Story performed better at the box office than Pocahontas or A Goofy Movie, traditionally animated features Disney released that same year. Despite technological advances made in 3D animation in recent years, Toy Story rarely feels or looks dated, even for modern audiences. This is due to the careful thoughtfulness of the creative team.
So what was going on in their heads? What details make Toy Story live on as one of the best animated films of all time? What lessons can be learned from the creative process, or from the finished product? Let’s take a look.
Before Toy Story
Before Toy Story, 3D effects animation was largely used to supplement live action, or for short films. Tron (1982) placed real people in 3D animated backgrounds. Jurassic Park (1993) utilized 3D animation to create living, breathing dinosaurs that could run across the screen. VeggieTales: Where’s God When I’m S-Scared (1993), a cartoon whose characters have no hair or arms, became the first 3D animated, direct to video special. And long before these, in 1972, Ed Catmull was working on a graduate project for school.
Catmull created software as a student that allowed him to map his left hand and then animate it on a computer screen. The hand could make a fist and point its fingers. While groundbreaking, the field of animation was not quite ready to take the leap to 3D, and Catmull wasn’t offered the animation job of his dreams. He would take a job as a programmer after graduation. However, he would later go on to work for Lucasfilm, and then co-found Pixar with Steve Jobs.
Software advances, along with a desire to create compelling stories and images, led the team at Lucasfilm, and later Pixar, to learn and push boundaries while they created art. For instance, Lucasfilm’s The Adventures of André & Wally B. (1984), saw the first use in computer animation of motion blur and of squash and stretch techniques. These techniques had long been used by 2D animators to make their characters look more like they were moving and interacting with…
