As evidenced by the latest Toy Story film, technology is here to stay in toys and beyond.
For producer Lindsey Collins, whose credits also include Disney/Pixar‘s A Bug’s Life, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo and Turning Red, the key is balancing not overdeveloping the looks of animations in the films with moving them forward to suit advancements humanity has made and better capture certain details.
“[We] try to keep it so we’re not evolving it so fast or so much that people are like, ‘This doesn’t feel like the Toy Story I recognize or I know,’ but also make sure that we’re keeping it so that we’re taking advantage of all the things we can do,” Collins said on a panel at Deadline’s Contenders Film Los Angeles event. “The technology just lets us do anything now. At the time, it was so restricted, like no hair or fur on the dog, or you couldn’t have you have tight clothing on everybody. One of the things that we’re really proud of is the character Blaze, who we all love, who’s the friend that ultimately comes as the gift at the end of the film. Curly hair is really hard.
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“We’ve done curly hair before,” she added. “We’ve done it on Brave, but it is a technology that’s really hard to make look right. So we wrote a whole tool for the first time on this film to really capture the beauty and the gorgeousness of Blaze’s hair, and it took a ton of consultants internally to make sure: ‘Does it feel right? Does that look right? Does that feel like it looks natural to her?’ Those are the kinds of things that we try to do to take advantage of all this technology now to go, ‘Oh my gosh, we can now actually start to deliver a real sense of texture and softness,’ and that’s the kind of stuff that we would have cheated on all the other films.”
Collins also marveled at the ability to create 50 Buzz Lightyears on 50 horses in the fifth film versus the possibility of rendering one in the 1999 original.
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“The level of complexity [of things] we can now do is pretty amazing,” she said.
There was a version of the film’s ending where star character Jessie (voiced by Joan Cusack) meets an older version of her previous owner, Emily.
“Because it was Jessie’s story, we knew we wanted her to reckon with the past with Emily, and there was a version at one point where she actually meets Emily, all grown up and old, and and we were like, “That’s a trip. OK, does that feel satisfying?’ As an audience, there was a lot of conversation around what’s going to be the satisfying gift for Jesse at the end,” Collins said. “Is it seeing Emily? Is it kind of understanding, getting the chance to kind of play with her again? These toys are like vampires; they don’t age. The rest of the world ages around them. We knew it had to be something that felt like it was the gift for her that she needed, the closure, and so that last scene with the buried treasure under the tree was the thing that probably took the longest to land.”
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Collins closed the panel with reluctance that the films could eventually center AI, but she also didn’t rule out a next film to complete the “Bonnie years” trilogy just as Andy got three films.
Check back Monday for the full video.
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