It's a tough job...
When RT was offered exclusive access to Pixar Animation Studios and a glimpse into the making of Toy Story 5, superfan Laura Rutkowski was eager to play ball
Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for Disney/Pixar
- Laura Rutkowski
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Like so many people, I grew up loving Pixar’s films, and have continued to enjoy them and revisit them as an adult – A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, WALL-E, Up, Inside Out and, my all-time favourite franchise, Toy Story. But there is no way I thought I would ever get to visit the actual location where they make these magical movies. Yet here I am, in Emeryville, California, about 20 minutes from San Francisco. It’s a closed 20-acre campus and not open to the public, so for RT to be invited to Pixar Animation Studios for the launch of Toy Story 5 is pretty special.
Outside, there’s a 17-foot tall version of Luxo Jr. (the desk lamp from Pixar’s very first computer-animated short film in 1986) and a huge yellow, blue and red Pixar Ball. They have both become mascots of the company, with Luxo Jr. appearing in the Pixar logo animation at the beginning of every film.
I enter the Steve Jobs Building, the central hub of Pixar, that Jobs designed. It was in 1986 that he purchased Lucasfilm’s Computer Division, spinning it off as its own independent company – Pixar. He wanted the big, open atrium to be like a town square where you have conversations with your colleagues while waiting in line for lunch or a cup of coffee.
At Café Luxo, I pick up a hot chocolate, and dusted elaborately on top in cocoa powder is Toy Story 5’s villain, Lilypad. Other drinks are artistically decorated with Forky or Jessie. I’m also told that Pixar has its very own pastry chef, who is serving up delicious Woody (with a star), Jessie (cow print) and Buzz (buttons and all) themed donuts today (pictured below). I think I’d be feeling very inspired if I had these to fuel my creativity!
Laura reads some of Woody’s lines in the recording studio. Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for Disney/Pixar
Old arcade games line the halls, there’s even a pool and a tennis court, and employees design their own offices. To travel between meeting rooms, they use scooters. Everywhere you look, there are images and sculptures of Pixar’s film characters. The cinema room is where they hold eight screenings for all of their films as they are works in progress. The following day they were going to be watching the very first screening of Coco 2! I also see the story room for Pixar’s next film, Gatto, which is, fittingly, decorated with cats.
Thirty years after Toy Story’s release, 24 Pixar employees are still working at the animation studio – six of them who worked on the original also worked on Toy Story 5. One of them is production designer Bob Pauley. He was responsible for creating Buzz Lightyear and now he’s giving me a masterclass on how to draw him.
“The basic idea is: start with a circle and a very fat ice cream cone. Add massive ball joints on his shoulder, and his rubber six-pack. His eyes are way at the top of his head. It’s kind of freakish. He’s got these weird ‘L’ shaped eyebrows, so we’re going to surround his eyes with these big, giant caterpillars, and he’s got a goofy smile.” How is my Buzz looking? “Love it! The face is great… he might need to work out a little.”
For the introduction of the 50 hi-tech Buzz Lightyears in Toy Story 5, Pauley was able to revamp the character. “I get to be like a toy designer. I’m back to the same thing I was doing 30 years ago, playing with buttons. I take that old guy and give him an upgrade, a clean-up, and make him more contemporary.”
Visual effects supervisor Thomas Jordan had to figure out how to animate all 50 of them, but they also needed to be riding 50 toy horses, owned by Blaze (Mykal-Michelle Harris). The nine-year-old is a new character and lives in Jessie’s former home from her previous stint as Emily’s toy. She owns a horse called Daffodil, so not only was research done online, but two real horses were brought to Pixar so that Jordan could study their anatomy. “They loved the grass here!” he laughs.
Co-directors Andrew Stanton and Kenna Harris wanted Blaze to have long hair with tight curls. “Because of the complex shape and intricate detail, curly hair is very hard to do in computer animation,” says Jordan. “We developed a system for creating and animating these fine-detail curls. They can bounce and collide off each other, as well as interact with Blaze’s shoulders and clothing. Future Pixar films will be able to have a greater variety of hairstyles and diversity because of this new hair system.”
Imagination is happening less with kids – it's a tragedy
Andrew Stanton
Next up, I get to experience being a voice actor. A red hallway leading to a recording studio is scribbled on by people who have recorded there previously, including Jeff Pidgeon (the Aliens in Toy Story), Tim Allen (Buzz Lightyear) and Anthony Gonzalez (Miguel in Coco). Inside, I wait for three beeps in my headphones and then speak my lines as Woody on the fourth imaginary beep while watching the scene from Toy Story 5 where Woody and Buzz reunite as Harris directs me. “You’re hired, you could be Woody! You sounded so sweet, Woody’s gonna be so cute!”
I then pay a visit to the Pixar Living Archives, which anyone at the studio can use. It stores millions of items in its collection from every single Pixar film, including original art created during the design phase of the film-making process, notes from the art department, art from the story department, scripts, sculptures, digital versions of the items, and even table scraps and scribbles.
Senior historian Christine Freeman shows me drawings and paintings from the first Toy Story (Woody started as a “stern ventriloquist dummy and was kind of a jerk” and Buzz Lightyear was originally called Lunar Larry and had a “more squat body”) all the way to the latest. The most recent ones are drawings of Jessie by Harris and of new character, tech toilet trainer Smarty Pants (voiced by Conan O’Brien) by Pauley. “Once they knew he was the voice, I think they were experimenting with adding Conan hair to this character… or maybe it was just Bob messing around. It’s so beautiful, Bob’s art is just tremendous.”
Production designer Bob Pauley. Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for Disney/Pixar
Upstairs at Pixar, there are art galleries currently devoted to Toy Story and Pixar’s recent film Hoppers. I’m starstruck when I see real versions of Forky (Tony Hale) and Karen Beverly (also known as Knifey, voiced by Melissa Villaseñor). Toy Story 5 begins with Bonnie marrying them, and at Pixar, they held an actual ceremony. Pauley asked senior production coordinator Kimmy Birdsell to come up with how Bonnie might do the wedding and dress the pair. “At the end of an art meeting, the doors burst open and Kimmy rolled in this trolley cart with them on it. There was confetti and music. So it’s official, and I officiated,” says Stanton.
Everything I see in my visit sums up Toy Story 5’s message of retaining that sense of play, even as we age, something that probably comes naturally to Pixar’s employees. “Yeah, the imagination muscle is strong at the studio,” says Stanton. “People have no problem living in their head and coming up with stuff, and so it’s hard to realise that’s happening less and less with kids outside. It brought such joy in my childhood and none of us wanted to give it up, so we’re now making a profession of it where we can keep doing that. To think that you’ve been denied that or overlooked that is a tragedy.”
I think back to all the fun I had playing with my toys as a kid, all the dress-up, all the make-believe worlds, my dad putting on his Ken (and Barbie) voice, my mum gently fixing my broken toys at the “hospital” because I believed they were real and did come out when I wasn’t around… I remember it all and it all mattered. Can the age of toys really be over for so-called “iPad kids”? “I don’t want to believe it,” says Stanton. “It’d be nice if it became cool to play with your toys.”
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With that, it’s time to leave California, return to London, take my head out of my screens and leave space for play (and perhaps retrieve some of my old toys out of storage). Woody, I’m coming home, partner!
Authors
Laura Rutkowski
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