Following the movie’s success, Disney, then the distributor for Pixar, pushed for the production of a quickly made, direct-to-video sequel. And its creators seemed to appreciate what a rich emotional and dramatic vein they had tapped into. Toy Story thrilled adults and kids alike with this canny and moving portrayal of the parent–child bond. (An astute bit of psychological realism: Andy, like most kids, uses them to pantomime adulthood.) So even as, on one level, Woody and Buzz act as children to Andy’s parent, on another they act as parents to Andy’s child: His happiness is their responsibility, and they will resort to the most-extreme measures imaginable to ensure it. He’s a child, and it’s the toys that are mostly accorded the role of grown-ups. In their desire for the attention of 6-year-old Andy, the toys-particularly Woody the cowboy and Buzz Lightyear the spaceman-mirror children’s eagerness to capture their parents’ attention. That inversion complicates and intensifies the film’s emotional power.
#When was toy story 1 made movie
(Disney was to co-finance it.) But the film’s creative premise is precisely-and crucially-the reverse: Toy Story is a movie about dolls who want to be played with by a little boy. “Who would want to see a movie about a little boy who plays with dolls?,” Michael Eisner, then the CEO of Disney, obtusely asked when told of plans for the Pixar debut. Pixar’s distinctive insight into parent–child relations stood out from the start, in Toy Story, and lost none of its power in two innovative and unified sequels. The theme that the studio mined with greatest success during its first decade and a half was parenthood, whether real ( Finding Nemo, The Incredibles) or implicit ( Monsters, Inc., Up). Up, for example, took a relatively conventional boy’s adventure tale and harnessed it to a moving, thoroughly grown-up story of loss, grief, and renewal. The key was managing to tell two stories at once, constructing a straightforward children’s story atop a more complex moral and narrative architecture. Pixar’s signature achievement was to perfect a kind of crossover animated cinema that appealed equally to kids and adults. to capturing the wondrous interplay between light and water in 2003’s Finding Nemo.Įven as others gradually caught up with Pixar’s visual artistry, the studio continued to tell stories of unparalleled depth and sophistication. Each subsequent Pixar release offered new feats of technical wizardry, from engineering the delicate trajectories of millions of individual strands of fur in 2001’s Monsters, Inc. The studio literally reinvented the genre with Toy Story, the first computer-generated 3-D-animated feature film. This thriving expansion of high-quality animated storytelling would not have been possible without Pixar. Pixar perfected a kind of crossover cinema that appealed equally to kids and adults. Pixar’s Finding Dory was shut out altogether.
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One need only look at this year’s Oscars: Two Disney movies, Zootopia and Moana, were nominated for Best Animated Feature, and Zootopia won. And, in a stunning reversal, Walt Disney Animation Studios-adrift at the time of its 2006 acquisition of the then-untouchable Pixar-has rebounded with such successes as Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, and Big Hero 6. The stop-motion magicians at Laika have supplied such gems as Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. Since then, other animation studios have made consistently better films. It was a 15-year run of unmatched commercial and creative excellence, beginning with Toy Story in 1995 and culminating with the extraordinary trifecta of wall-e in 2008, Up in 2009, and Toy Story 3 (yes, a sequel, but a great one) in 2010.
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The painful verdict is all but indisputable: The golden era of Pixar is over. And if Cars 3 isn’t disheartening enough, two of the three Pixar films in line after it are also sequels: The Incredibles 2 and (say it isn’t so!) Toy Story 4. Cars 2, which followed five years later, was panned as even worse. You may recall that the original Cars, released back in 2006, was widely judged to be the studio’s worst film to date. Yet here comes Cars 3, rolling into a theater near you this month.
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But it is surely relevant that these observations were made by Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, in his best-selling 2014 business-leadership book. More pointedly, he argued that if Pixar were only to make sequels, it would “wither and die.” Now, all kinds of industry experts say all kinds of things.
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A well-regarded Hollywood insider recently suggested that sequels can represent “a sort of creative bankruptcy.” He was discussing Pixar, the legendary animation studio, and its avowed distaste for cheap spin-offs.