Twenty Years of Toy Story: How One Film Rewrote Movie History | QDaily Business History

Toy Story pushed animation, and film itself, into an era completely unlike the one before it.

"You're not going to make me sing, are you?" Tom Hanks asked when he was invited to voice Woody, the cowboy doll in Toy Story.

The question was a fair one at the time. The early 1990s were Disney animation's most glorious years. The world's largest animation studio was turning out one fairy-tale musical after another — Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King told the stories of princes and princesses through beautiful music, and won both praise and ticket sales.

The Pixar directors who had invited Hanks said no. These "rebellious young people" had no wish to repeat Disney. They wanted to make their own kind of animation.

On November 22, 1995, the cowboy sheriff and his fellow toys appeared on screen together. These toys had life in them and felt real — not only because they had become three-dimensional, but because they could be jealous, could quarrel, and now and then worried about being abandoned by their owner.

Toy Story took in nearly $192 million at the North American box office, first among all films that year. More important than the money, it rewrote film history on the technical side. It was the world's first feature-length film made entirely with computer animation, and director John Lasseter received a Special Achievement Academy Award for it.

The film's birth was not as smooth as you might imagine. The tangled business story behind it runs through the relationship between Pixar and Disney, and it is also the best illustration of the PC era's boom.

On its 20th birthday, let's look at why Toy Story was able to rewrite the history of film.

Some of the most memorable characters from the Toy Story films

Until then, computers in animation were only about speed. This film proved they could make art

In 1995, Variety reviewed the film with Buzz Lightyear's catchphrase from it: "'To infinity and beyond!' ... Toy Story already represents an entirely new form of entertainment, risen to new heights."

Most of what that "entirely new form of entertainment" meant is that Toy Story was a feature-length 3D animated film made on computers.

Through the mid-1990s and before, animated film was defined by Disney's hand-drawn two-dimensional work. Animators then had little appetite for computer animation, and some objected even to drawing and editing on a computer. When Disney turned down John Lasseter's computer-animated short The Brave Little Toaster, it dismissed him this way: "The only reason to use computer animation is that it can help us make things faster or cheaper."

No matter how conservative the climate, there are always "open-minded" people. Ed Catmull, who ran technology at Pixar, had been obsessed with animation since childhood. Computer animation was his long-standing dream, and it was why he studied computer graphics in college.

So was John Lasseter. Disney fired him precisely because it treated the idea of making computer-animated films as heresy.

Pixar at the time was mainly a company that sold technology. It developed graphics computer software that helped the medical industry and government agencies with imaging, and that also gave its animated films their technical footing. The business was so hard to run that its owner — Steve Jobs, founder of Apple and NeXT — tried again and again to sell it. As for why it went into animated films at all, one account holds that Jobs thought it would help sell computers.

But as you would later see, this seller of technology upended the way traditional hand-drawn 2D animation was made.

During the making of Toy Story, once the core creative team had settled the basic story, separate teams began designing characters, sets and props, and then built three-dimensional models of them on computers (the characters were later given skeletons, muscles and skin).

Animators used control points on the models to make the characters' movements and expressions finer-grained — Woody's face alone had about 100 control points. They then placed the characters and props into the sets, shot different angles with a virtual camera to catch the mood and the emphasis of the story, and used software to drive the characters' faces and movements. The last stages were coloring, lighting, rendering and a final polish.

The official 1995 poster for Toy Story

"The more you know about how it was made, the more you admire it." The famed critic Roger Ebert praised the vivid, three-dimensional look of Toy Story. He singled out Buzz Lightyear: the space ranger is as brave and as nimble as a live actor.

When Buzz leaps off Andy's bed to show off his "flying ability," he loops all the way around a toy roller-coaster track, shouting "To infinity and beyond," then rockets skyward and spins in mid-air. The camera takes Buzz's point of view through a full 360-degree turn. The shot leaves the viewer a little dizzy.

"That was so cool." The toys in the movie were not the only ones saying it.

Without Toy Story's success, would there be a Pixar today?

We all know that playful little desk lamp now; we see it and we think of Pixar. But go back 20 years: if Toy Story had failed, the studio might look nothing like it does, and we might not remember the lamp's little hop so clearly either.

Rewind two full years from the film's release. Pixar's creative team came to Disney's headquarters with a story reel and presented the complete story to the head of Disney animation.

"Why is this movie so ugly?" Jeffrey Katzenberg, then the number three at Disney animation, was very unhappy with the reel.

Disney told Pixar to submit a new script. If that one still fell short, Disney would shut the production unit down, and Pixar would lose control of the film.

The Toy Story team was anxious, not only because the pitch and its outcome had been a disaster, but because the studio had taken a hard road just to get this far —

In its early days, "Pixar" was only the computer graphics division of Lucasfilm. Lucasfilm ran into money trouble and had to sell the division off. Luckily Steve Jobs was interested in the technology and bought it. Jobs saw Pixar as a place to sell computers, but the graphics computers sold poorly. Revenue from Pixar's advertising work and Jobs's own money could not cover the deficit, and the company had to keep cutting staff. During those years Jobs thought about giving up on it too: at least three times he tried to pass Pixar on to someone else.

John Lasseter's animation unit, by contrast, was doing well. Its shorts, Luxo Jr. and Tin Toy, were both well received.

Animated film was an expensive business: long production cycles, high costs, and once you were unhappy with a finished cut, changing it was a great deal of trouble. An animated film is a textbook "high-investment" product — yet before Toy Story, no one could imagine it being "high-return" as well.

In 1991, Disney and Pixar signed a deal to make three animated films together. Disney then invested $26 million in Pixar, and the Toy Story project formally began. Had it failed, this film might have been the only one they ever made, and Pixar would have closed its doors.

Luckily the rewrite went smoothly. The creative team stripped Woody of his overbearing streak and repaired his relations with the other toys. Disney was pleased with the new script, and Toy Story escaped being killed.

After it opened, Toy Story took in more than $29 million at home in its first weekend and $192 million for the year, first among all films that year.

"Toy Story is animation's charming first step into bright new territory," Kenneth Turan, film critic at the Los Angeles Times, wrote. "Children will delight in its visuals, but adults will appreciate its wit even more."

The critics sang in one voice: Metacritic carries 16 reviews of Toy Story from 1995, half of them perfect scores, for an average of 92; on Rotten Tomatoes, its freshness rating is still 100% today.

Pixar came "alive," and it stepped into public view in a way no one could miss.

Pixar's three founders: Ed Catmull, Steve Jobs and John Lasseter

The success of Toy Story led Jobs to take Pixar public. The company needed money, and its survival could not rest on the box office of each film alone.

Thanks to the attention Toy Story brought, Pixar's IPO was the largest of 1995, raising nearly $140 million.

Disney came to Pixar too, hoping to redraw the terms of their contract, and willing to give Pixar a larger share of film revenue and more say over the company and its film projects.

Toy Story 2 followed and was just as popular, earning $246 million at home, third for the year. Two Toy Story films in a row pushed Pixar's production standards and its standing very high, and the hits kept coming.

In 2002, Sulley and Mike Wazowski became the year's most profitable animated characters. At a company meeting, John Lasseter read out the opening numbers for Monsters, Inc. and joked, "$62,577,067. Andrew, no pressure." Under the crowd's whooping and stares, Andrew Stanton — about to direct on his own for the first time — turned a little shy, raised his champagne and shouted, "I'm fine, I'm fine!"

After that he made Finding Nemo and WALL-E.

The princess vanished, and animated film found a completely new way to tell a story

At bottom, the stories in Pixar's films still carry the same sunny, upbeat American values, but they go further. After Toy Story, animated film found a way of telling stories unlike anything before. These stories were not like most cartoons of the day: they were grown-up, funny, entertaining.

"A mistake everyone makes is assuming animation is for kids. It isn't. It's a medium, a way of telling stories. We don't make movies specifically for children — we make movies for ourselves, and we hope that children, teenagers and other adults share our taste," said Brad Bird, director of The Incredibles.

There is a scene in the film, for instance, where Mr. Potato Head rearranges his own features and says, "Look, I'm Picasso." At that moment he really does look a little Cubist. A small joke from John Lasseter.

Compared with the classic Disney cartoon, Pixar films usually do not open with "Once upon a time…" or close with "the prince and princess lived happily ever after."

Nor are their plots simple binaries — a flawless hero who must face a villain rotten to the core. There is no single truth in a Pixar story, and it never draws a clean line between so-called right and wrong.

The classic The Lion King, which tells a typical Disney story

The themes of Toy Story — growing up, friendship, family — became the spiritual core of every Pixar story. Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and this year's Inside Out all turn on growing up. Through the voices of the boy Andy, Mike Wazowski, Joy and Sadness, Pixar says that in a process bound to hold both bitterness and sweetness, perhaps only learning to accept failure will make you grow up.

Pixar's films mirror our real lives. They can set you thinking, remind you suddenly of someone who matters, or make you feel loved. Audiences can find themselves in these characters, and that is what makes movies so appealing.

Hollywood has no shortage of examples like this, but few companies can tolerate that degree of "crossing the line." DreamWorks manages it now and then — Shrek, say: an eyeball-eating green ogre who blunders his way into marrying Sleeping Beauty. Kung Fu Panda probably counts too: a chubby, not-very-bright panda who turns out to be a kung fu master. And a look like Tim Burton's (Corpse Bride) has ended up relatively niche. It draws a specific audience, whereas DreamWorks and Disney both want their products to reach as many people as possible.

Popular without being mediocre has never been an easy thing to be.

Pixar's Inside Out, which makes a complex, fascinating inner world look effortless

After the acquisition, Pixar helped Disney move audiences again

In the decade after Toy Story opened, Disney animation kept sliding downhill.

Competition had something to do with it. From the mid-1990s on, several animation studios were born in Hollywood, most of them working in 3D. Jeffrey Katzenberg, squeezed out of Disney, founded DreamWorks Animation. Its films Antz and Shrek were a real threat to Disney.

Chris Wedge, who had done visual effects for Disney's live-action films, founded Blue Sky Studios. In 2002, it made its name with Ice Age.

The Shrek films are still the highest-grossing animated franchise in movie history

Disney, meanwhile, had no new work to surprise anyone. Its princesses had aged, and Mickey Mouse no longer belonged on the big screen. Think about it now: how many Disney films from that stretch can you name? The best known are only Tarzan and Lilo & Stitch.

After the Oscars created the Best Animated Feature award in 2002, Disney went a long time without winning a thing, and the prize went instead to Pixar, DreamWorks, Warner Bros., Studio Ghibli and others.

In 2005, at the opening ceremony of Hong Kong Disneyland, as a line of animated characters — Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Ariel, Woody, Buzz Lightyear — filed past Disney CEO Bob Iger, he suddenly realized that every classic character Disney animation had produced in the previous 10 years came from Pixar.

That is what led Iger to spend $7.4 billion buying Pixar in 2006, hoping to rescue Disney, the oldest animation studio in the world. Quite a few people mourned for Pixar at the time, but what followed proved that Pixar, without losing itself, helped this bloated, sprawling empire find a vitality it had long gone without (this has always been a contested subject; many believe Pixar's creative powers have not been what they were since Up).

Frozen, the princess movie that feels familiar and a little unfamiliar at once, brought Disney unprecedented success

Once the deal closed, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter became president and chief creative officer of Disney Animation, and set about remaking it. They brought Pixar's technology and, more important, Pixar's way of working and its culture. They threw out the layers of hierarchy inside Disney that strangled ideas, and pushed staff to speak their minds.

Most notable of all: Disney, like Pixar, now had its own Brain Trust.

The Brain Trust is a creative group that took shape during the making of Toy Story. Whenever John Lasseter and other Pixar directors mention it, they do so with pride. In Ed Catmull's words, it is thanks to the Brain Trust's push that Pixar has been spared mediocrity.

The group gathers Pixar's core creative people, who meet at intervals to judge films in progress. Because Pixar demands frankness, honesty and the removal of authority, the Brain Trust can find a film's problems and offer ideas worth having.

With that mechanism in place, Disney animation slowly grew young again. You can see it in a film like Wreck-It Ralph, with its distinctive, playful world-building; the princess story started over as well, and Frozen dropped the old formula of a prince rescuing a princess, so much so that many take it for a feminist film (and musical animation came back into the bargain). Frozen is now the highest-grossing animated film ever made, and it won Disney Animation Studios its first Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Twenty years after Toy Story opened: in the first 10, the company that made it watched Disney animation decline; in the second 10, Pixar, together with Marvel, another company Disney bought, helped lead Disney onto the road back.

Image credits:

Official Pixar stills, official Disney stills, PixarTimes, Martincuff, Apocaflixmovies