Last month, Collider and a few other journalists trecked to Pixar Studio's San Francisco campus to learn about the ins and outs of making the highly-anticipated Toy Story 4. In addition to being the most Silicon Valley-esque ode to film tech you can imagine—there's a case of Oscars when you walk in the door, which is quite the flex—the place is just an absolute dream for animation lovers. Spend a few hours at Pixar and you'll quickly realize that, in addition to director Josh Cooley and writers Stephany Folsom and Andrew Stanton, the latest chapter is being crafted by a veritable army of animators, storytellers, artists, designers, photographers, and craftspeople larger than you can possibly imagine.
We got the opportunity to chat with a bunch of them, as well as screen a portion of the film's gorgeous opening half. Here are 35 plot details, story specifics, and behind-the-scenes facts we learned.
The Story
- The film opens with a prologue set between the first Toy Story and Toy Story 2. It's a dark and stormy night—with Pixar's state-of-the-art rendering power, that rain looks nearly photorealistic—and Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the rest of the toys have to save RC Car, who was left outside in the flood.
- After the rescue, a friend of the Davis' comes to collect Andy's sister's sheep nightlight and with it, Bo Peep (Annie Potts). This explains the character's absence from every Toy Story between the original and Toy Story 4.
- Back in present day, Woody accompanies his new owner, Bonnie Anderson, to her first day of kindergarten, where she constructs a Frankenstein's monster-like "toy" made of a spork, some googly-eyes, and popsicle sticks. With her name slapped on the bottom, "Forky" comes to life, voiced by Veep star Tony Hale.
- If you're wondering what constitutes a "toy" that can be brought to life, director Josh Cooley isn't up to ruin the magic. He compares the process (with a laugh) to George Lucas' overly-scientific Star Wars prequels. "I almost feel like it's a bit of a Midachlorian question," he told us. "Like 'Explain why that happened!' 'Eh, just because.'"
- Forky was a favorite of the animation department because of how gorgeously minimalistic his design is. "Forky is kind of like the punk rock character for me," said supervising animator Scott Clark. "He's the opposite of Buzz. He is literally not manufactured, he's hand-made. There are so many realistic computer graphics out there...We wanted to animate him in a primitive way that felt almost hand-made and that a kid could've animated it."
- Cooley and producers Mark Nielsen and Jonas Rivera shied away from the romantic-comedy label that had been used to describe the film several years ago, comparing it more to an animated Indiana Jones film. "I kind of think of like, Raiders of the Lost Ark isn't a love story but it has that great romantic element in it," Cooley said.
- Bo Peep's return is a huge aspect of the film. Since we last saw her, she's become a "lost toy", plaything without an actual kid or a place to call home, which essentially makes her "the thing that Woody is ultimately most afraid of", says Cooley.
- Once the toys lose Forky on a road-trip—the furthest the franchise has ever traveled from the neighborhood—the film's first half takes place primarily in two massive, incredibly-detailed locations: A carnival and the antique shop right next door.
The Carnival
- The carnival is where we meet stuffed animals Ducky and Bunny, voiced by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. Both are prizes hung up to be won at a carnival game.
- Key and Peele's sessions were some of the first recordings on the film, finished several years ago, before Get Out turned Peele into a bonafide horror maestro.
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- The carnival and antique store pairing was inspired by, of all things, a story that producer Jonas Rivera heard on the tour of Alcatraz Prison:
If you've ever been to Alcatraz in San Francisco, part of the tour is, they say the prisoners were going crazy because they could hear people having parties and laughing across the way, it was like 1,000 miles away from them. That's really emotional and interesting, and we thought the toy version of that is right outside this antique store. Right there is kids having fun and trying to win toys.
The Antique Store
- The antique store, which Bo Peep spent time in before becoming a rogue toy, is where we meet the dead-eyed babydoll named Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks), the first female villain in a Toy Story movie.
- Cooley told us this A+ exchange between him and Hendricks that took place after the director first pitched the story to the actress:
Hendricks: "This is really great, I actually didn't want Barbie dolls as a kid, I used to play with ventriloquist dummies."
Cooley: "What?"
Hendricks: "Yeah, I actually have a lot of doll heads in the house right now."
Cooley: "Just the heads?"
- Speaking of: Gabby Gabby has henchman in the form of a few ventriloquist dummies. Yes, the creative team is aware that the doll, named Benson, looks a whole lot like Slappy from Goosebumps, but that's only because they're both based on a pretty classic doll design.
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- The ventriloquist dummies are also your rare Toy Story toys that don't have any lines. "We also thought it was funny that the one toy that is actually supposed to talk, they don't," Rivera said.
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- Inside the pinball machine is where we meet by far my favorite new character, Duke Kaboom, a Canadian action-figure stunt hero voiced by Keanu Reeves. Please read Cooley's story about pitching the character to Reeves, which I must point out takes place in the community cafeteria area at Pixar:
"[Reeves] completely won me over, to the point where...at one point he just got up on the table, like imagine sitting down there eating lunch with everybody, and he gets up on the table and goes 'Hoo! Ha! Huh!' Doing poses. I was like 'This is it, it's incredible.'"
- Duke Kaboom's introduction features a great "Boxing Day" shout-out, to all my Toy Story fans out there in Canada and the United Kingdom.
- To get a sense of the complex layout for the antique store, the team took trips to real-life shops and strapped a camera to, essentially, an RC car, running it through the labyrinth of old items at a toys-eye level.
The New Bo Peep
- To get a grasp of what it meant to have a "New Bo Peep", the team behind the character began by basically throwing any idea out there that came to mind. We got a glimpse at a few early concepts, including a highly intriguing bionic Bo, a Robin Hood-looking Bo, and what definitely appeared to be a post-apocalyptic Bo. But probably my favorite of the scrapped concepts was a Bo who had one of her limbs replaced by a muscular action-figure arm that I believe had a mind of its own.
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- For her life as a "lost toy", Bo has a vehicle that looks like a squirrel. The Bo Team assured us that it's something Bo constructed from parts on her own, and that the character isn't just riding around in an animal carcass.
- Bo also has a tiny, Polly Pocket-esque side-kick named Giggle McDimples. She's voiced by Ally Maki, and she rules.
Small Details
- To construct the late Don Rickles' voice-performance as Mr. Potato Head, the creative team dug into not only the past three movies, but also the Toy Story shorts, theme park attractions, toys, and even Disney on Ice. "Obviously, he can't say anything specific to the plot, but we found enough that it felt natural," Cooley said.
- The photography team designed specific lighting rigs for each character, which couldn't be as large as you'd typically make it for a person. "Plastic comes to life with all the specular displacement and sheen," director of photography and lighting Jean-Claude Kalache told us. "If you put a human-sized light, it's just a wash. But if you put a miniature light you get all the details on Woody's face, or Buzz, or Bo Peep."
- It takes about 100 takes to get every shot of the movie from the storyboard phase to the finished product.
- To get a sense of the incredible rendering that Pixar has these days compared to its first years, we were told that the studio could currently render the entirety of the original Toy Story faster than you could watch the original Toy Story.
- Toy Story 4 is the first in the franchise to have an aspect ratio of 1.239:1. The previous three films were shot in 1.85:1.
- The aspect ratio was a specific storytelling choice. "This movie marks a transition," Kalache said. "We actually asked the question, 'What if we were in 239? And what if at the beginning of the movie we pose, by putting elements in the screen, to squeeze the aspect ratio and make it give the illusion that it's 185. Eventually, as Woody starts to transition, we open up.'"
- Be on the look-out for a very specific license plate Easter Egg reference to a disastrous day at Pixar. "Toy Story 2, there is somebody that worked on the movie that accidentally deleted the movie from the render farm," Nielsen said. [The Easter Egg] is the command on the computer that they pressed that deleted the film."