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Duke of Buckingham
11-22-13, 04:26 PM
Toy Story is released as the first feature-length film created completely using computer-generated imagery. - November 22, 1995

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Toy Story is a 1995 American computer-animated buddy-comedy adventure film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by John Lasseter, released by Walt Disney Pictures, Toy Story was the first feature-length computer-animated film and the first film produced by Pixar. Toy Story follows a group of anthropomorphic toys who pretend to be lifeless whenever humans are present, and focuses on the relationship between Woody, a pullstring cowboy doll (Tom Hanks), and Buzz Lightyear, an astronaut action figure (Tim Allen). The film was written by John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow, and Joss Whedon, and featured music by Randy Newman. Its executive producers were Steve Jobs and Edwin Catmull.

Pixar, which produced short animated films to promote their computers, was approached by Disney to produce a computer-animated feature after the success of the short Tin Toy (1988), which is told from a small toy's perspective. Lasseter, Stanton, and Pete Docter wrote early story treatments which were thrown out by Disney, who pushed for a more edgy film. After disastrous story reels, production was halted and the script was re-written, better reflecting the tone and theme Pixar desired: that "toys deeply want children to play with them, and that this desire drives their hopes, fears, and actions." The studio, then consisting of a relatively small number of employees, produced the film under minor financial constraints.

The top-grossing film on its opening weekend, Toy Story went on to earn over $361 million worldwide. Reviews were entirely positive, praising both the animation's technical innovation and the screenplay's wit and sophistication, and it is now widely considered by many critics to be one of the best animated films ever made. In addition to home media releases and theatrical re-releases, Toy Story-inspired material has run the gamut from toys, video games, theme park attractions, spin-offs, merchandise, and two sequels—Toy Story 2 (1999) and Toy Story 3 (2010)—both of which received massive commercial success and critical acclaim. Toy Story was inducted into the National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" in 2005, its first year of eligibility.

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Woody is a pull-string cowboy doll and leader of a group of toys that belong to a boy named Andy. With his family moving homes one week before his birthday, Andy is given a week early party to spend with his friends. The toys stage a reconnaissance mission to discover Andy's new presents. Andy receives a space ranger Buzz Lightyear action figure, whose impressive features see him replacing Woody as Andy's favorite toy. Woody is resentful, especially as Buzz also gets attention from the other toys. However, Buzz believes himself to be a real space ranger on a mission to return to his home planet, as Woody fails to convince him he is a toy.

Andy prepares for a family outing at the space themed Pizza Planet restaurant. His mother tells him he can only bring one toy. Woody attempts to be picked instead of Buzz by trapping Buzz in a gap behind Andy's desk, but the plan goes disastrously wrong when he accidentally knocks Buzz out the window, resulting in the other toys accusing him of murdering Buzz out of jealousy. With Buzz missing, Andy takes Woody to Pizza Planet, but Buzz climbs into the car and confronts Woody when they stop at a gas station. The two fight and fall out of the car, which drives off and leaves them behind. Woody spots a truck bound for Pizza Planet and plans to rendezvous with Andy there, convincing Buzz to come with him by telling him it will take him to his home planet. Once at Pizza Planet, Buzz makes his way into a claw game machine shaped like a spaceship, thinking it to be the ship Woody promised him. Inside, he finds squeaky aliens who revere the claw arm as their master. Woody clambers into the machine after Buzz, but they are interrupted when Andy's neighbor Sid Phillips, arrives and operates the machine. Spotting a Buzz Lightyear amidst the squeaky aliens, Sid maneuvers the claw to pick up Buzz. In the ensuing struggle the aliens force Buzz and Woody towards the claw, and they are captured. Woody is horrified because of Sid's reputation for torturing toys.

At Sid's house, the two attempt to escape before Andy's moving day, encountering Sid’s nightmarish toy creations and his vicious dog, Scud. Buzz sees a commercial for Buzz Lightyear action figures, and realizes that he really is a toy. Disbelieving, he attempts to prove he can fly, but instead he plummets down the stairs and loses his left arm. Buzz goes into deep depression as a result and cannot cooperate with Woody. Woody waves Buzz's arm from a window to seek help from the toys in Andy's room, but they are horrified thinking Woody had indeed murdered Buzz when they see Buzz's disconnected arm, while Woody realizes Sid's toys are friendly when they reconnect Buzz's arm. Sid prepares to destroy Buzz by strapping him to a rocket, but is delayed that evening by a thunderstorm. Woody convinces Buzz that life is worth living because of the joy he can bring to Andy, which helps Buzz regain his spirit. Cooperating with Sid's toys, Woody rescues Buzz and scares Sid away by 'breaking a few rules' and coming to life in front of him, warning him to never harm toys again. Woody and Buzz then wave goodbye to the mutant toys and return home through a fence, but miss Andy's car as it drives away to his new house.

Down the road, they climb onto the moving truck containing Andy's other toys, but Scud chases them, bites down on Woody's leg and tries to pull him off. Buzz tackles the dog to save Woody. Woody attempts to rescue Buzz with Andy's RC car but the other toys, who think Woody had now got rid of RC together with Buzz, attack Woody and toss him off onto the road. After Scud is trapped in a car pile up, Woody drives RC back with Buzz alive, and the other toys, who realize their mistake, try to help them get in the truck. However, they fail as RC's batteries become depleted, but Woody ignites the rocket on Buzz's back and manages to throw RC into the moving truck before they soar into the air. Buzz opens his wings to cut himself free before the rocket explodes, gliding with Woody to land safely into a box in Andy’s car. Andy looks into it and is elated to have found his two missing toys.

On Christmas Day at their new house, Buzz and Woody stage another reconnaissance mission to prepare for the new toy arrivals, one of which is a Mrs. Potato Head, much to the delight of Mr. Potato Head. As Woody jokingly asks what might be worse than Buzz, the two share a worried smile as they discover Andy's new gift is a puppy.

Toy Story was the first fully computer animated feature film. Recruiting animators for Toy Story was brisk; the magnet for talent was not the pay, generally mediocre, but rather the allure of taking part in the first computer-animated feature. Lasseter spoke on the challenges of the computer animation in the film: "We had to make things look more organic. Every leaf and blade of grass had to be created. We had to give the world a sense of history. So the doors are banged up, the floors have scuffs." The film began with animated storyboards to guide the animators in developing the characters. 27 animators worked on the film, using 400 computer models to animate the characters. Each character was either created out of clay or was first modeled off of a computer-drawn diagram before reaching the computer animated design. Once the animators had a model, articulation and motion controls were coded, allowing each character to move in a variety of ways, such as talking, walking, or jumping. Of all of the characters, Woody was the most complex as he required 723 motion controls, including 212 for his face and 58 for his mouth. The first piece of animation, a 30-second test, was delivered to Disney in June 1992 when the company requested a sample of what the film would look like. Lasseter wanted to impress Disney with a number of things in the test piece that could not be done in traditional, hand-drawn animation, such as Woody's plaid shirt or venetian blind shadows falling across the room.

Every shot in the film passed through the hands of eight different teams. The art department gave a shot its color scheme and general lighting. The layout department, under Craig Good, then placed the models in the shot, framed the shot by setting the location of the virtual camera, and programmed any camera moves. To make the medium feel as familiar as possible, they sought to stay within the limits of what might be done in a live-action film with real cameras, dollies, tripods and cranes. From layout, a shot went to the animation department, headed by directing animators Rich Quade and Ash Brannon. Lasseter opted against Disney's approach of assigning an animator to work on a character throughout a film, but made certain exceptions in scenes where he felt acting was particularly critical. The animators used the Menv program to set the character into a desired pose. Once a sequence of hand-built poses, or "keyframes", was created, the software would build the poses from the frames in-between. The animators studied videotapes of the actors for inspiration, and Lasseter rejected automatic lip-syncing. To sync the characters' mouths and facial expressions to the actors' voices, animators spent a week per 8 seconds of animation.

After this the animators would compile the scenes, and develop a new storyboard with the computer animated characters. Animators then added shading, lighting, visual effects, and finally used 300 computer processors to render the film to its final design. The shading team, under Tom Porter, used RenderMan's shader language to create shader programs for each of a model's surfaces. A few surfaces in Toy Story came from real objects: a shader for the curtain fabric in Andy's room used a scan of actual cloth. After animation and shading, the final lighting of the shot was orchestrated by the lighting team, under Galyn Susman and Sharon Calahan. The completed shot then went into rendering on a "render farm" of 117 Sun Microsystems computers that ran 24 hours a day. Finished animation emerged in a steady drip of around three minutes a week. Each frame took from 45 minutes up to 30 hours to render, depending on its complexity. In total, the film required 800,000 machine hours and 114,240 frames of animation. There is over 77 minutes of animation spread across 1,561 shots. A camera team, aided by David DiFrancesco, recorded the frames onto film stock. Toy Story was rendered at a mere 1,536 by 922 pixels, with each pixel corresponding to roughly a quarter inch of screen area on a typical cinema screen. During post-production, the film was sent to Skywalker Sound where sound effects were mixed with the music score.

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Disney was concerned with Lasseter's position on the use of music. Unlike other Disney films of the time, Lasseter did not want the film to be a musical, saying it was a buddy film featuring "real toys." Joss Whedon agreed saying, "It would have been a really bad musical, because it's a buddy movie. It's about people who won't admit what they want, much less sing about it. ... Buddy movies are about sublimating, punching an arm, 'I hate you.' It's not about open emotion." However, Disney favored the musical format, claiming "Musicals are our orientation. Characters breaking into song is a great shorthand. It takes some of the onus off what they're asking for." Disney and Pixar reached a compromise: the characters in Toy Story would not break into song, but the film would use songs over the action, as in The Graduate, to convey and amplify the emotions that Buzz and Woody were feeling. Disney tapped Randy Newman to compose the film. The edited Toy Story was due to Randy Newman and Gary Rydstrom in late September 1995 for their final work on the score and sound design, respectively.

Lasseter claimed "His songs are touching, witty, and satirical, and he would deliver the emotional underpinning for every scene." Newman developed the film's signature song "You've Got a Friend in Me" in one day.

It was difficult for crew members to perceive the film's quality during much of the production process, when the finished footage was in scattered pieces and lacked elements like music and sound design. Some animators felt the film would be a significant disappointment commercially, but felt animators and animation fans would find it interesting. According to Lee Unkrich, one of the original editors of Toy Story, a scene was cut out of the original final edit. The scene features Sid, after Pizza Planet, torturing Buzz and Woody violently. Unkrich decided to cut right into the scene where Sid is interrogating the toys because the creators of the movie thought the audience would be loving Buzz and Woody at that point. Another scene, where Woody was trying to get Buzz's attention when he was stuck in the box crate, was shortened because the creators felt it would lose the energy of the movie.[58] Peter Schneider had grown buoyant about the film as it neared completion, and announced a United States release date of November, coinciding with Thanksgiving weekend and the start of the winter holiday season.

Sources indicate that executive producer Steve Jobs lacked confidence in the film during its production, and he had been talking to various companies, ranging from Hallmark to Microsoft, about selling Pixar. However, as the film progressed, Jobs became ever more excited about it, feeling that he might be on the verge of transforming the movie industry. As scenes from the movie were finished, he watched them repeatedly and had friends come by his home to share his new passion. Jobs decided that the release of Toy Story that November would be the occasion to take Pixar public. A test audience near Anaheim in late July 1995 indicated the need for last-minute tweaks, which added further pressure to the already frenetic final weeks. Response cards from the audience were encouraging, but were not top of the scale, adding further question as to how audiences would respond. The film ended with a shot of Andy's house and the sound of a new puppy. Michael Eisner, who attended the screening, told Lasseter afterward that the film needed to end with a shot of Woody and Buzz together, reacting to the news of the puppy.

The soundtrack for Toy Story was produced by Walt Disney Records and was released on November 22, 1995, the week of the film's release. Scored and written by Randy Newman, the soundtrack has received praise for its "sprightly, stirring score". Despite the album's critical success, the soundtrack only peaked at number 94 on the Billboard 200 album chart. A cassette and CD single release of "You've Got a Friend in Me" was released on April 12, 1996, in order to promote the soundtrack's release. The soundtrack was remastered in 2006 and although it is no longer available physically, the album is available for purchase digitally in retailers such as iTunes.

There were two premieres of Toy Story in November 1995. Disney organized one at El Capitan in Los Angeles, and built a fun house next door featuring the characters. Jobs did not attend and instead rented the Regency, a similar theater in San Francisco, and held his own premiere the next night. Instead of Tom Hanks and Steve Martin, the guests were Silicon Valley celebrities, such as Larry Ellison and Andy Grove. The dueling premieres highlighted a festering issue between the companies: whether Toy Story was a Disney or a Pixar film. "The audience appeared to be captivated by the film," wrote David Price in his 2008 book The Pixar Touch. "Adult-voiced sobs could be heard during the quiet moments after Buzz Lightyear fell and lay broken on the stairway landing." Toy Story opened on 2,281 screens in the United States on November 22, 1995 (before later expanding to 2,574 screens). It was paired alongside a rerelease of a Roger Rabbit short called Rollercoaster Rabbit, while select prints contained The Adventures of André and Wally B..

The film was also shown at the Berlin Film Festival out of competition from February 15 to 26, 1996. Elsewhere, the film opened in March 1996.

On October 2, 2009, the film was re-released in Disney Digital 3-D. The film was also released with Toy Story 2 as a double feature for a two-week run which was extended due to its success. In addition, the film's second sequel, Toy Story 3, was also released in the 3-D format. Lasseter commented on the new 3-D re-release:

"The Toy Story films and characters will always hold a very special place in our hearts and we're so excited to be bringing this landmark film back for audiences to enjoy in a whole new way thanks to the latest in 3-D technology. With Toy Story 3 shaping up to be another great adventure for Buzz, Woody and the gang from Andy's room, we thought it would be great to let audiences experience the first two films all over again and in a brand new way."

Translating the film into 3-D involved revisiting the original computer data and virtually placing a second camera into each scene, creating left-eye and right-eye views needed to achieve the perception of depth. Unique to computer animation, Lasseter referred to this process as "digital archaeology." The process took four months, as well as an additional six months for the two films to add the 3-D. The lead stereographer Bob Whitehill oversaw this process and sought to achieve an effect that affected the emotional storytelling of the film:

"When I would look at the films as a whole, I would search for story reasons to use 3-D in different ways. In 'Toy Story, for instance, when the toys were alone in their world, I wanted it to feel consistent to a safer world. And when they went out to the human world, that's when I really blew out the 3-D to make it feel dangerous and deep and overwhelming."

Unlike other countries, the United Kingdom received the films in 3-D as separate releases. Toy Story was released on October 2, 2009. Toy Story 2 was instead released January 22, 2010. The re-release performed well at the box office, opening with $12,500,000 in its opening weekend, placing at the third position after Zombieland and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. The double feature grossed $30,714,027 in its five-week release.

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Toy Story's cast of characters forms the basis for the naming of the releases of the Debian computer operating system, from buzz in 1996 to jessie, the version currently (in 2013) being prepared for release.