Toy Story

• 1. Introduction

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  Toy Story arrived in theaters on the 22nd of November 1995, and nothing in cinema looked quite like it. For the first time, a feature film had been built entirely inside a computer. No hand-drawn cels, no painted backgrounds, no physical camera. Every frame was rendered by machines running around the clock at Pixar Animation Studios in California. The film told the story of a cowboy doll named Woody who fears being replaced by a new toy named Buzz Lightyear. But the making of that story is its own drama, one involving a near-catastrophic shutdown, a legendary Hollywood power struggle, and a decision by Steve Jobs to take Pixar public the week after the film opened. How did a short film about a tin toy spark a deal that changed the animated film industry? Why did Disney nearly kill the project before it could be finished? And how did a film that some animators feared would be a commercial failure go on to gross over $363 million worldwide?

• 2. The Short That Started Everything

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  In 1988, John Lasseter produced a short computer-animated film called Tin Toy, told from the perspective of a small toy hiding from a drooling infant. Lasseter had developed his passion for the medium years earlier at Walt Disney Feature Animation, where two colleagues showed him the light-cycle sequence from Tron. That moment persuaded him that computers could make films. Disney did not agree: when Lasseter pitched The Brave Little Toaster as a computer-animated feature, he was fired. He went to Lucasfilm, and in 1986 became a founding member of Pixar, the same year entrepreneur Steve Jobs purchased the studio. Tin Toy won the 1989 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, the first computer-generated film to win that award. Disney's new leadership, CEO Michael Eisner and film division chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, took notice. Katzenberg tried to lure Lasseter back to Disney, but Lasseter, grateful to Jobs for supporting him, told co-founder Ed Catmull: "I can go to Disney and be a director, or I can stay here and make history." Katzenberg, unable to bring Lasseter back, pivoted: he would bring a production deal to Pixar instead.

• 3. The Deal and Its Dangers

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  Catmull, fellow co-founder Alvy Ray Smith, and head of animation Ralph Guggenheim met Disney Feature Animation president Peter Schneider in the summer of 1990, but the meeting was tense. Schneider did not want to bring in a non-Disney studio. Katzenberg arranged a second meeting, this time including Lasseter and Jobs, and the Pixar team pitched three ideas: an original concept called Bob the Dinosaur, an adaptation of James and the Giant Peach, and a Christmas television special titled A Tin Toy Christmas. Disney greenlit the Christmas special, but Katzenberg pushed further, suggesting they make a feature-length film instead. The deal that followed was punishing for Pixar. As the studio neared bankruptcy and needed funds, it settled on terms giving Disney complete ownership and control of the films and characters, including the right to make sequels without Pixar's involvement. Pixar would receive approximately 12.5% of ticket sales. Disney had licensed Pixar's Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) and was the studio's largest customer for its computers, which gave Disney significant leverage in the negotiations. Jobs and Eisner clashed over these terms for many years afterward. Catmull and Smith had long wanted to make a computer-animated feature; by the early 1990s, machines had finally become cheap and powerful enough to make it feasible.

• 4. Black Friday

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  Writing the film was far from smooth. The original concept paired Tinny, the wind-up toy from Tin Toy, with a ventriloquist's dummy. Katzenberg rejected the treatment by Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, and Pete Docter, finding the two characters' motivations too similar. He pushed for a buddy film, with contrasting personalities and a forced partnership. A revised treatment delivered in September 1991 already closely resembled the final film: a child's favorite toy is displaced by a newcomer, the two are left behind at a gas station, nearly catch up at a pizza restaurant, and must escape a destructive kid before a climactic chase after the family's moving van. The character who would become Buzz Lightyear went through several names, including Lunar Larry and Tempus from Morph, before landing on Buzz Lightyear, named after astronaut Buzz Aldrin. Woody, initially a ventriloquist's dummy modeled on a Casper the Friendly Ghost doll Lasseter had as a child, became a cowboy after character designer Bud Luckey's suggestion. The name Woody was kept as a tribute to Western actor Woody Strode. Katzenberg kept pressing for "edginess," and the characters were gradually stripped of warmth. Tom Hanks, recording Woody's dialogue for story reels, pointed out that Woody had become a "real jerk." On the 19th of November 1993, Pixar screened the first half of the film for Disney executives. The event became known internally as the "Black Friday Incident." Peter Schneider halted production immediately. Katzenberg asked colleague Thomas Schumacher why the reels had failed. Schumacher's answer was precise: "Because it's not their movie anymore; it's completely not the movie that John set out to make."

• 5. Rescue and Rebuild

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  Lasseter later described the halted film as filled with "the most unhappy, mean characters that I've ever seen." Katzenberg allowed Pixar to take the script back and rewrite it. While the head writers worked, the production crew shifted to making television commercials. Jobs personally funded the studio during the gap until Disney resumed. Story department manager BZ Petroff called the shutdown "a very scary time." Schneider appealed directly to Eisner to cancel the project altogether. Stanton and the story team completed initial revisions in two weeks, aided by consultants including Joss Whedon. The full rewrite took three months. Woody was transformed from a tyrant into a wise leader. Buzz Lightyear's character was clarified so audiences would understand he genuinely believed he was a real Space Ranger, not a toy. Katzenberg and Schneider resumed production with the new script by February 1994, and voice actors returned a month later. The crew grew from 24 people to 110, including 27 animators and 22 technical directors. For comparison, The Lion King, released in 1994, required a staff of 800. The lean team was both a constraint and, in some ways, an advantage: the film's theme crystallized into something precise. As Pixar's own guiding principle put it, "toys deeply want children to play with them, and this desire drives their hopes, fears, and actions."

• 6. Building the World Frame by Frame

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  Woody was the most complex character the animators had ever constructed. He required 723 motion controls, including 212 for his face and 58 for his mouth alone. The 27 animators used 400 computer models to build and move every character. A 30-second test was delivered to Disney in June 1992, months before production was formally shut down, designed to demonstrate things impossible in hand-drawn animation: Woody's yellow plaid shirt with red stripes, the reflections inside Buzz's helmet, and the way Venetian blind shadows fell across Andy's room. The film ultimately required 800,000 machine hours and 114,240 frames of animation across 1,561 shots totaling over 77 minutes. Pixar could render less than 30 seconds of footage per day. Layout director Craig Good steered the team away from the sweeping camera moves common in computer animation at the time, favoring instead the kind of framing that would have been possible with real film cameras on a live set. To sync characters' mouths and faces to the recorded voices, animators spent a week on every eight seconds of animation; Lasseter felt that automatic lip-syncing failed to convey what a character was actually feeling. Skywalker Sound handled the final mix of dialogue, score, and sound effects. The "Render Farm", running Sun Microsystems computers around the clock, produced the finished frames at a resolution of 1536 by 922.

• 7. Casting, Songs, and the Deal Nearly Killed

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  Katzenberg formally approved the script on the 19th of January 1993, at which point Lasseter began pursuing his first choice for Woody: Tom Hanks. Paul Newman, Robin Williams, and Clint Eastwood were also considered. Lasseter tested Hanks' voice by animating a monologue from Turner & Hooch against the character, a technique borrowed from Disney. Hanks signed on. Billy Crystal was the first choice for Buzz and was given a monologue built from When Harry Met Sally, but he turned the role down, doubting the film would succeed. He later called it a mistake and accepted the role of Mike Wazowski in Monsters, Inc. in 2001. Among the many actors considered for Buzz were Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, Jason Alexander, Kevin Costner, Michael J. Fox, and John Travolta. Tim Allen, then appearing in Disney's Home Improvement, took the role. Randy Newman composed three original songs, including "You've Got a Friend in Me", written in a single day. Disney had pushed for a full musical; Lasseter resisted, and the compromise was non-diegetic songs rather than characters singing. The soundtrack was released on the 22nd of November 1995, the same week as the film. Meanwhile, toy licensing revealed how little the industry believed in the project. When Disney announced the Thanksgiving release date in January 1995, most toy companies passed, unwilling to compress their usual eighteen-to-twenty-four-month lead time. At the Toy Fair in February 1995, only one company expressed interest in licensing the Toy Story characters: the small Canadian firm Thinkway Toys.

• 8. Release and Aftermath

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  Disney held its premiere at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on the 19th of November 1995. Pixar held a separate premiere the following night at the Regency Center in San Francisco. The film opened on 2,281 screens on the 22nd of November and later expanded to 2,574. Its opening weekend earned $29.1 million, and the five-day holiday total reached $39.1 million domestically, part of a combined $158.6 million across that long weekend, which stood as the most successful box-office long weekend in history until Independence Day arrived in July 1996. Jobs had set $75 million as the breakeven figure. The film grossed more than $350 million worldwide. Jobs had also been exploring selling Pixar during production, with Hallmark Cards and Microsoft among the companies he approached. As the film neared completion, he grew increasingly confident and scheduled an initial public offering for Pixar just one week after the film's November release. The film received three Academy Award nominations: Best Original Screenplay, which made Toy Story the first animated film ever nominated in a writing category; Best Original Song for "You've Got a Friend in Me"; and Best Original Score. John Lasseter received a non-competitive Special Achievement Academy Award in 1996 specifically for developing the techniques that made the first computer-animated feature film possible. In 2005, the United States Library of Congress selected Toy Story for preservation in the National Film Registry as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The Debian computer operating system has named its releases after Toy Story characters since 1996, beginning with Debian 1.1 Buzz and continuing through Debian 14 Forky, the most recently announced future release.