John Lasseter and Co. Look Back at Pixar's First Feature
On the evening of Monday, October 26th, I attended a 20th anniversary screening of Toy Story at San Francisco's Castro Theatre. The event, put on by the San Francisco Film Society, included a lengthy discussion on stage with Pixar co-founder and Toy Story director John Lasseter, fellow co-founder Ed Catmull, and Pixar directors (and key Toy Story contributors) Pete Docter and Andrew Stanton before the screening began.
What I expected to be a straightforward discussion and Q&A turned out to be the main event, one that lasted about as long as Toy Story itself. Once brought on stage, Lasseter guided the conversation and, via calling to the projectionist, the accompanying slide show that told the story of his and Catmull's roots with computer animation and how it led them both to Pixar. As Catmull told the story, his studies and breakthroughs with the technology in college landed him a position running Lucasfilm's then-nascent digital branch. George Lucas tasked the team with creating non-linear digital editing and digital sound editing, among other things, while Catmull had Lucas add a goal of further developing computer animation. All of the team's technologies have become industry standards.
Catmull brought Lasseter into the Lucasfilm fold after the CalArts graduate had been fired by Disney for continually pushing the studio to embrace computer animation. Eventually, Catmull, Lasseter and the team wanted to create content (they had begun dabbling in shorts), but Lucas wasn't interested in pursuing that use for the technology. The person interested in supporting this new animation medium was Steve Jobs. He bought the digital division from Lucas and formed Pixar, which would soon thereafter become a software and hardware developer that also made commercials. The Pixar team, which had brought in Stanton and then Docter in these early, independent years, also made shorts, with an eye on building up to creating a feature film.
When the day finally came that the company had a deal in place with Disney, Lasseter and the team pitched a concept they'd been working on for a half-hour Christmas TV special. Based on an earlier Pixar short called Tin Toy, this feature film would focus on what toys would do if they came to life with no one around. One key reason for choosing this subject matter was not only their prior experience with it, but also the fact that plastic-looking geometric characters perfectly suited the capabilities of computer animation at the time.
Stanton and Docter along with Lasseter listed the elements they avoided while developing a story. Chief among them were songs and a, "happy village," as Stanton put it. What he and his cohorts described were the building blocks of a Disney Renaissance film, notably the Broadway-musical inspired fairytale adaptations that are The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. Lasseter noted they love those movies—he even attended CalArts with Mermaid director John Musker—but that it was terribly frustrating to tell people they were developing an animated movie, and the inevitable question would be, "Oh, what are the songs?"
But the most prevalent issue with those films Lasseter noted, is that the best characters where the comedic sidekicks, not the protagonists. "I mean, Aladdin?" Stanton half-jokingly said when describing these leads' blandness. In looking for a genre untouched by animation that would lend itself to a story with flawed characters, the Pixar group settled on the buddy picture. A writer worth their salt should be able to tell you that conflict needs to exist to make a story compelling (or to make a story, period), and the filmmakers looked to classics of the buddy genre—The Defiant Ones, The Odd Couple, and Midnight Run—for characters that butted heads.
And so the story of an old cowboy ventriloquist dummy (later a pull-string talking doll) being replaced by a new space-themed action figure was born. But it wasn't all smooth sailing for Toy Story once those initial pieces were put in place.
As Pixar's budget was at the mercy of the Disney executives placing trust in the fledgling studio, the creative team took every note they received. The Disney brass feared that a film about toys wouldn't appeal to college kids and adults, so they pushed Lasseter and his crew to make the film more edgy. This went on so long that more than half of the film was completed in storyboard form and edited together with Tom Hanks' dialogue. When this work-in-progress cut screened for the Disney executives, all in involved sat in horror as they watched the loathsome character they had created in Woody.
Lasseter screened about two and a half minutes of this cut of the film for the crowd in the Castro, and I can say that it was very funny, but only because it seemed like some twisted parody of a beloved classic. In the scene, Woody purposefully pushes Buzz Lightyear out of Andy's bedroom window, then yells at the rest of Andy's toys when they catch him red-handed. Woody's pal Slinky Dog gets a particularly harsh verbal beating in this scene before the toys gang up on Woody and toss him out the window themselves. Interestingly enough, the same scene in the final film features a lot of the same dialogue by all involved but Woody, yet the filmmakers had changed the circumstances of the scene and Woody's actions and motivations to such a degree that what he does plays more as misguided than malicious.
With the threat of halting production, laying off most of the staff, and moving the key members to Disney's Burbank facilities looming just three weeks before Christmas, Lasseter convinced Disney to give Pixar two weeks to present them with something new. Two weeks later, thanks to following their storytelling instincts—and using the fast and efficient non-linear digital editing developed at Lucasfilm—the Toy Story crew had roughly the whole first act reworked and ready to play for Disney. The screening went over very well, and, as Lasseter noted, that first section of the movie remained largely as it was into the finished film.
Upon its Thanksgiving release in 1995, Toy Story would become a hit, notable not just for its groundbreaking use of computer animation—now the industry standard form for animated films—but for a telling a unique story incredibly well. That knack for storytelling has itself set a new standard for animated films to such a degree that when Disney bought Pixar in 2006, Lasseter was named Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios, while Catmull was named President (both still hold these positions at Pixar and Disney). Lasseter returned home to the company that didn't believe him when he predicted the future of the craft, and in a funny development, Pixar and Lucasflim are now once again under the same corporate umbrella, as the latter joined the Mouse House in 2012.
For those that may not have revisited Toy Story in the 20 years since its initial release, the film holds up spectacularly well. The animation still looks good and doesn't distract, due largely to a story that continues to endure. The birth of the friendship between Tom Hanks' Woody and Tim Allen's Buzz remains a compelling adventure that takes me right back to the first time I saw it unfold as a kid. Like the classic animated films created by Walt Disney and his studio in the first half of the 20th century, Pixar's best work continues to enchant long past the time when it innovates.