MakingOf recently paid a visit to the Pixar Studios in Emeryville, CA and sat down with "Toy Story 3" supervising animators Bobby Podesta and Mike Venturini and story supervisor Jason Katz. Below is the full transcript of our roundtable interview.
Q: What was it like to revisit these characters? Especially in terms of the animation.
Bobby: For animation it was a really interesting process, because we had to figure out how we were going to animate these characters and move them around and everything. Also, there’s a large contingent of animators in our department that actually had never worked on “Toy Story” or “Toy Story 2” and grew up and were kind of fans of “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2” and were scared to animate “Toy Story 3.” So what we did is we actually collected what we thought was like, here’s the best of shots, the work that really stands out, that holds up, that tells us who these characters are. So we distilled it and we studied, we studied what was done, we figured it out, why they did things and what not. And then we had to, kind of, throw that away. Because it’s very much like someone who has played a part in the theater, on stage, they have accolades, everyone loves them, they love what they’re doing, and then they’re going to leave the role and you’re going to step in and you’re going to play it. You can’t just do what they did, you can’t do your best version of them, because you’ll fail, you’ll fail as an actor. You have to look and respect and see what they’ve done and try to embrace it and make it your own. So we first had to educate the animators, teach them to not be scared of it and then shake them up and say, “You have to own this!” So making the performances their own and making the characters evolve was one of the difficult things we had to tackle.
Mike: The minority of the crew was made up of animators that had worked on “Toy Story” or “Toy Story 2,” and the majority had no experience at all, so it wasn’t really revisiting as much as it was introducing that world to them. The interesting dynamic was when you had people that had never worked on these characters in this world working along side people who had played a large role in defining this world and so you had to kind of create this idea that, well let’s not live in the past. If you’re someone who has worked on these films before, the choices you made then may not be the same choices we have to make now. We don’t have to be stuck there because when you worked on “Toy Story 2,” you took the world that was left behind in “Toy Story 1” and brought it into the future. And we have to allow the same opportunity for growth in this film from where we left off in “Toy Story 2” and take that world into the future. And we wanted to let some of the newer animators who had no experience and were intimidated by the legacy to say, don’t let this intimidate you, take ownership over this world and progress it forward, don’t sit at your desk in awe of this opportunity, embrace it and let’s take this forward.
Q: Can you talk about the opportunities that you were able to create for these characters in pushing forward to a culmination of the legacy?
Mike: Probably, as we introduce new characters, new personality dynamics, new emotions come up that we may not have experienced in the past. Obviously, this new idea of them coming to the end of the road with Andy brought new emotions that we hadn’t experienced before. So there was going to be new acting choices to make as so not to be stuck back in this world we had left behind. And then there’s obvious stuff with our skill set as animators as we’ve grown and things that we’ve been able to accomplish technically, so maybe there are new choices to make in how we’re physically animating the characters as well as new characters entirely and how do we take a new character like “Lotso” and his entire gang of characters and make choices on how they move as toys so that they exist in the same world as all these other toys that we know. We don’t want to move a new character in a way that’s not toy-like, we don’t want to start shattering a reality that we’ve created.
Jason: I think a huge success in the animation world as far as stepping back as just a fan, is embracing this feeling of “Toy Story,” what does it feel like to be a “Toy Story” movie? But respecting the ability to do more; to do more with emotion, to do more with the dynamics, do more with the variety, do more with the amount, just having more characters on screen. And that’s what I really appreciate about these guys and their teams is that they are able to basically take the best of the first two movies, the best scenes, the best animation, the best four or five moments and use those now throughout the movie. So you feel like the skill set of the film has jumped, there’s so much more skill, but it’s not front and center where you’re noticing it, it’s still feels organic to the story and it still feels like they’ve improved on the past, they’ve respected the past, but they haven’t set out and made a whole brand new movie. It still feels like a “Toy Story” movie, it still feels like Woody and Buzz. Lotso and Twitch and Stretch and all the other new characters feel like they could have existed in “Toy Story” absolutely and that’s a pretty impressive thing. There’s a lot of work put into that, there’s a lot of study. I remember when we were just working on the story and Bobby was just starting and you guys were like a skeleton crew, there was a lot of work put into how they were going to attack their job. It wasn’t, let’s just animate the best scene we can, it was, how do we educate, how do we respectfully improve on what was established. And that should be noted. There was a lot of work put into how they approached it.
Bobby: One thing we did early on is, you know, a lot of the resources that we wanted to go to, to ask about the first couple of films were here at the studio, but they just didn’t happen to be working on “Toy Story 3.” Pete Doctor, who directed “Up” and who directed “Monsters Inc.” was the supervising animator of “Toy Story.” So we sat down and we recorded an interview with him and we talked about why were you guys doing this? Why did you make Woody move like this and do that? And he pulled out this old rag doll that they built for Woody to show how he was supposed to move around. Before there was an actual Woody doll, today you can go to the store and buy it and, oh, Woody moves like this! But it has this old Fred Flinstone head and it’s signed by Tom Hanks on the foot, which is funny. I show it to animators and they go “I can’t touch this!” and, no, play with it, move it around, it’s what you’re supposed to do with it. And we recorded Pete and we’re talking about this and what they went through on the first film. We recorded John and he’s pulling toys off of his shelf and saying, this is why we did this and blah blah blah and this is what we were going for. We recorded Doug Sweetland, who did some of the best animation on the first couple of films and we talked about his process and what he did. We also recorded people that had worked on “Toy Story 2” but not “Toy Story 1” to see, what that was like. Dillon Brown was the directing animator on “Toy Story 2,” didn’t work on the first film, what did he learn about that? Angus MacLane did this amazing animation on “Toy Story 2” of Buzz Lightyear, but hadn’t done anything on “Toy Story.” We wanted to know, what was it like to take that and evolve that and define something. We recorded Brad Bird and he didn’t work on either of these movies! [laughs] But, what are the impressions you have? What are the things that stand out to you as a third party that you don’t know? And so we took all of this stuff and we had it there for the animators so they had it when they came in. They had this, we put it online, they could watch it and we said, here, this is your homework, this is your library, go to this. Because we don’t all get to sit down for two hours with Pete Doctor and say, “Listen, we have Woody and wanted to know what you think about this.” But we wanted to take advantage of the research that we did have, so the animators could have the best education we had, the best starting point. Our goal as animation supervisors is to get all the animators that came on to the best jumping off point that we could, so that they were well prepared. Then they get a story from Jason and Lee and the story team and everything’s there and you say, “Ok, are you ready? Jump.” Take it, go perform, do what you do. You’ll do amazing work, you’ve got everything, you’ve got the resources, the history, you’ve got the knowledge, make it your own, evolve it from there.
Q: It seems like, in this film, there’s a lot more interaction and exploration with human characters.
Mike: And it didn’t stop there. We did the best we could to educate them going in, then the rest of the process was through the execution of shots. You had animators that are incredibly skilled at doing high polished work and they would be in our review sessions showing their shot of Buzz and Buzz would come in and he’d be all nice and polished and his movements would be all clean and we would have to say, ok, simplify that. He’s plastic, he moves like he’s made of plastic.
Bobby: He looks too much like Mr. Incredible. He’s this big and he’s made of plastic and he weighs nothin’! [laughs]
Mike: So you have to think about that, you know, his joins are solid, he’s plastic, there’s dirt in there. You have to take the polish out. So we had to train ourselves to really simplify a lot of the work that we had been used to doing in the past. That was a big thing: exercising restraint and that was a challenge for a lot of our animators.
Bobby: One of the scariest moments for me was, one of our animators, Dave DeVan, who came on to do some early test animation, and he did this amazing animation on “Toy Story 2” of Woody, some really great shots. And he came on and he was doing some test animation of Woody for “Toy Story 3” and the characters are built much simpler than we’re used to, like with Russell or Carl (from “Up”) and all these things. And I asked Dave how his test was coming along and he said, “Oh man, this is hard! I’m having a really hard time with the limited controls, getting the emotion, the acting I want.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?! You did some of the best animation on the first one! If you’re having a problem, we’re screwed! Because if you can’t get this, I don’t know what we’re going to do.” [laughs] But it was just that thing of having to train your mind to think, ok, Woody has three controls in his lids and you have to still be able to get the full range of motion. It was something we all had to reeducate ourselves on and go back to it and say, ok now I remember this, great, you remember this, let’s pull that out, lets spread it out to all the animators and let them know how they can do this.
Mike: And part of it is, you remember, I mean, when I saw “Toy Story 2,” it blew me away, what they were able to do with animation. At the time, it was groundbreaking, and so part of it is, we remembered this world being so rich and lush and as we went back and started to see what our rules were, we started realizing that in our progressions as a studio, this is a really crude film by today’s standards. But in remembering it as being so rich and lush, what we really did with this film is just recreate the world we remember having and we’re filling in all the details that we thought we had at the time that now we actually have the opportunity to put into the film.
Q: What did the other animators tell you about the working conditions during “Toy Story 2,” because it was made in such a short amount of time and everything must have been very rushed.
Bobby: I was there! [laughs]
Jason: Show ‘em the scar!
Bobby: [holds up bottle] This isn’t juice! No. [laughs] “Toy Story 2” was one of those things where it really tested us as a studio. We got to this point a year out and we thought, this film isn’t working, and that was the first time we really had to define ourselves and say, we can’t put a bad film out, we can’t put out a film that we know isn’t working just because it’s due. And so we said, we’re going to do everything we can. That’s our own personal, artistic pride as artists, we need to leave it all out on the field, we need to do the best we can. And we don’t want to put ourselves in that situation, flopped over on the ground, exhausted. But it was indicative of something that we do for all of our work. And I hope that it’s indicative for us that we’re not just here cranking out something, with any of these films, that we’re trying to make a dollar or anything like that. We actually believe that we’re creating something artistic, we’re creating a story that people can relate to, we’re creating an experience so that people, who are going to take time out of their day and are going to sit down and watch our films, think that it’s important and it’s worth it. That means a lot to us. I mean, to go to the movies these days, I’ve got two kids! That’s not cheap! I don’t want to go and have something be, not only a waste of money, but a waste of time. You want to go to the movies and have people say, “That was great, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that as a parent, you enjoyed that as a child, we enjoyed this experience.” That’s what we’re trying to do, we don’t want to do anything less at the end of the day.
Mike: That experience on “Toy Story 2,” was largely, I think it’s been more attributed to the process of making a great movie and the lengths the studio will go to to make a great movie. Not what it’s like to make a “Toy Story” film. So it happened to be on that “Toy Story” film that we had to go to an extreme to make a great movie. When we started to make this film, it was never headed down this path, it never hit that crisis. So we were never concerned that making “Toy Story 3” would be like reliving the conditions we were under during “Toy Story 2.” So, it wasn’t really a factor.
Q: Were there any particular personality traits that you had to carry over from the previous two films?
Bobby: There’s a lot. Woody is a goofball, first off. He’s a little awkward. There’s a great scene in the first “Toy Story,” after they freak out Sid, and he does this dance and it is the dorkiest dance you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s exactly the kind of dance that you didn’t want your dad to do in front of your 7th grade friends. So when you animate Woody, he thinks he’s cool, but he’s really not that cool and that’s important, he’s a little awkward. And Buzz is, you still want to remember that he is composed, he is structured, he’s not the strict cop that he was in the first one, but he’s an athlete, he holds himself well, but just in their movements, they should convey that, they should come across like that. And it should be like that with any situation that they’re in. If they’re running, the more frantic Woody is, the more rag-doll he gets. And Buzz has his head down, he knows he’s going to make some decisions. But Woody is just all over the place.
Q: Did you have fun exploring Buzz’s romantic side?
Bobby: No. [laughs]
Q: What was the most improved thing from the other two films to this one?
Bobby: I think if anything was the most improved, the biggest jump on this film would have to be the humans. The humans, Andy and Andy’s mom in “Toy Story”…[grimaces] “Toy Story 2,” eh. “Toy Story 3,” they look alright! We’ll take that! There’s a whole lot of technical know-how and brains that, I don’t know how they do it, that go into achieving that. And everything we’ve learned in animation: articulation, and controls and shading, and subsurface scattering and simulation in the hair and the trees and everything that goes into the illusion of making something more appealing, but it still has to feel like it’s part of the world, but doesn’t make you somewhat repulsed. In the first film, the toys and humans almost look somewhat similar and here we really wanted to exploit the differences. These are toys, those are people.
Mike: The other thing is, pliable objects, we have the technology to do objects colliding with each other and reacting off of each other. Lotso is a character that we probably couldn’t have pulled off in the other two films, but with the technology that we have now there’s a whole other type of toy that we can do. He has soft fur and that cuddly, squishy feel to him, and so technology really allowed us to do that. And then I would say, not on an animation level, but the progressions we’ve made in lighting just make this movie stunning to look at.
