Post by Mr.Niikolaus on Jul 9, 2010 21:42:51 GMT 8
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When director Lee Unkrich started making Toy Story 3, he woke up every day feeling physically ill with anxiety. “I spent probably the first year,” he recalls, “feeling sick to my stomach every morning from the stress of the responsibility I had. Not only was I directing the next Pixar film after an unbroken series of 10 hits, but I was also directing a sequel to two of the most beloved films of all time. I didn’t want to disappoint anybody; I didn’t want to be seen as the person who made the bad sequel to the great Toy Story films.
“But, ultimately, I think pressure is a good thing. I call it fear-based filmmaking, and it drove me and everybody working on the movie to do their absolute best work.”
He began to realise he had not made the studio’s first dud during early screenings for Pixar employees. “People responded really well to it, and I think we knew even then that we were on to something. We still had our work cut out, but we knew we were on the right track.”
Now that Toy Story 3 has been released in America, the reaction confirms that it was worth enduring all those stomach-churning moments. The film has already made more than $300 million at the box office, the critics have been ecstatic, and there have been widespread reports of grown men being moved to tears by the emotional heft of the narrative.
It’s 11 years since the release of Toy Story 2, and time has also moved on in the playroom world of Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the rest of the gang. Their owner Andy, now 17, is heading off to college, and the toys end up in a nearby kindergarten. Their new home is not quite as sunny and welcoming as it first appears, and Lotso, the leader of the resident kindergarten toys, turns out to be rather less cuddly than your average big, purple teddy.
Toy Story 3 is utterly engaging and will appeal to five-year-olds as much as to their blubbing fiftysomething granddads. But, I suggest to Unkrich, perhaps the storytelling is more grown-up than in the previous two films. For instance, Lotso has a dark side, doesn’t he?
“I know,” says Unkrich, “but to have drama in a film you need characters whose interests are antithetical to your main characters; you need conflict. So we had fun with some of the characters in the film, but I don’t think we go over the top in any way.
“With Lotso, we tried to come up with a character who could be seen as very much like Woody, in that he’s the leader of this other group of toys in this other location. But maybe he’s made some choices in his past that Woody would have made had he been in the same situation; maybe Lotso made some wrong decisions.
“It’s kinda fun for everybody to see other characters being mischievous and devious, but it’s always from a toy’s perspective.”
It’s perhaps a measure of Unkrich’s dedication to his job that he talks about “a toy’s perspective”. It’s not quite that he regards them as real, but clearly he thinks of Woody and the gang as possessing human characteristics.
Thus, in describing the approach he took to creating TS3, he says: “Typically in animation, the characters exist in a kind of stasis. Look at The Simpsons – they never age, the baby never grows up; or Peanuts – the kids never grow up, they always stay the same age.
“But, as we considered the Toy Story world and its characters, we thought maybe something quite radical was in order. When you think about it, the most important thing to a toy is to be played with by a child, and anything that keeps them from being played with gives them stress – things like getting lost, getting broken. And we thought the worst possible thing for a toy is to be outgrown by a child.
“At the end of Toy Story 2 [which Unkrich co-directed], Woody acknowledges that Andy is going to grow up some day, and he seems to makes peace with that fact. But, as we all know, in real life, making peace with something that’s going to happen way off in the abstract future is quite different from finding yourself on that day having to deal with it.
“Frankly, we wanted to see how Woody and the others would deal with that inevitable day of Andy outgrowing them. That’s what started the journey that we went on in telling this story.” And that, it seems, is what makes watching the movie so affecting for so many grown-ups.
Now that Toy Story 3 is working its magic on audiences, you wonder why it took so long to arrive. Why wait more than a decade to follow up such a huge worldwide hit?
“We wanted to make Toy Story 3 right after Toy Story 2,” says Unkrich. “In fact, I even remember [Pixar co-founder] John Lasseter putting his arm around me and saying, 'Come on, let’s do Toy Story 3 right now while it’s all fresh.’ But all I wanted to do was go have a vacation: I couldn’t believe he wanted to make another movie right away.
“We all just loved the characters and wanted to do more with them. Then, of course, it ended up taking 11 years.”
One of the reasons for the delay was the troubled relationship Pixar had with Disney before a
$7.4 billion deal made them corporate cousins in 2006. “There was a lot of friction between the two companies that kept us from making the film. We had a five-picture deal with Disney at the time, and sequels to [earlier] films didn’t count towards that deal. So it was kind of a stalemate.
“Disney ended up using the idea of Toy Story 3 as kind of a bargaining chip, and, unfortunately, they started making their own version against our wishes.
“Pixar hasn’t really had many dark times in its history, but that was probably the darkest time when their version of Toy Story 3 was being made because these were our characters, these were our children and they had been kind of taken away from us. No one was happy about it.
“Fortunately, that alternate version of the future never came to be because [current Disney president] Bob Iger took over, and one of his first orders of business was to negotiate and ultimately purchase Pixar, which finally freed us up to make our own version of Toy Story 3.”
The delay meant that Unkrich and his colleagues at Pixar could take advantage of all the technological advances that had been made in the meantime.
“For many years,” he says, “we were limited in the kind of stories we could tell by the technology; lots of things were very hard to achieve using computer graphics.”
Which is why the first ever fully computer-generated film – Toy Story (1995) – was about toys. Unkrich, who also worked on that film, says: “Back then, hard, plastic, shiny toys were easy to do using computer graphics. But slowly, over the course of the different Pixar movies, we challenged ourselves to solve lots of problems.
“So we created fur for Monsters Inc, good-looking, believable humans for The Incredibles, and water in Finding Nemo.
“By the time we got to Toy Story 3, we had tackled just about everything there was, so now we could tell any story that we wanted to tell. That being said, we still had some challenges to overcome.
“The biggest one had to do with humans. We had done humans in The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Up, but in each case they were very stylised, kind of cartoony. We hadn’t done realistic, more believable humans. And I knew they needed to be fantastic in Toy Story 3.
“We had to be able to animate them so that they felt like flesh and blood, but most importantly you had to believe that they had souls behind their eyes.”
And that’s where the secret of Pixar’s success lies – in films that have heart and soul… and that can make grown men weep.
'Toy Story 3’ opens on July 19.
