The original Woody (pictured) got his name because he was a ventriloquist dummy. They wanted to tell the kind of story that had never been told in a cartoon before: a mismatched-buddy comedy, à la "48 Hrs." or "Midnight Run."Ħ. They didn't want a fairy tale, they didn't want a musical, and they didn't want a story where the side characters were more colorful than the protagonists.
Still, the Pixar team ran into frequent opposition with Disney because they wanted to make a movie that was not at all a typical Disney cartoon. The success of that 1993 stop-motion film was the final straw that convinced Disney that it could make a feature with the independent Bay Area team at Pixar, Lasseter has said.ĥ. Lasseter's Cal Arts classmate Tim Burton - another former Disney animator - returned to the Disney fold with the release of "The Nightmare Before Christmas." Made by animators independent of Disney, working at a studio in San Francisco, "Nightmare" was the first animated feature made by outsiders to bear the Disney brand. Before "Toy Story," Disney had a relationship with Pixar as a user of its computer-assisted production system ("CAPS"), which Disney animators used on the wedding sequence in "The Little Mermaid" and the ballroom sequence during the title number in "Beauty and the Beast." Critics singled out that scene with praise, helping persuade Disney to expand its collaboration with Pixar.Ĥ. In 1988, to show off what Pixar's machines could do, Lasseter directed a short all-CGI cartoon called "Tin Toy." The film won an Oscar, starting Lasseter back on the path toward making a full-length computer-animated film - and toward negotiating with his old employers to distribute it.ģ. Lasseter soon found himself at Pixar, then a computer graphics company owned by Steve Jobs and best known for its hardware. When he suggested to Disney brass that the studio make a computer-animated feature, they fired him.Ģ. Future Pixar chief and "Toy Story" co-writer/director J ohn Lasseter (pictured) was a junior animator at Disney in 1982 when he saw the studio's groundbreaking "Tron" and first recognized the potential of computer animation. Here's the behind-the-scenes story you don't know, about the daunting obstacles that Woody and Buzz and the rest of Andy's toys had to overcome in order to travel to infinity and beyond. Still, "Toy Story" almost never got off the ground. After all, when " Toy Story" arrived 20 years ago this week (on November 22, 1995) as the first feature-length computer-animated movie, it was hailed as an instant classic and was a huge hit, launching Pixar as a reliable entertainment brand and creating a new industry of digital filmmakers.
These days, when a Pixar movie is as close to a sure thing as films get, it's hard to remember what a risky venture the first one was.