Written by Brian Thomas
Written by Brian Thomas
TOY STORYPixar/Disney Bring Action Figures to LifeThe idea that their playthings have a life of their own has always fascinated children. After putting their dolls through whatever scenarios their lively imaginations can come up with, the natural next step is to imagine what adventures their friends are having while they're not around. How did Teddy get himself stuck under the bed? Was Mr. Machine in the shop for a tuneup? What did G.I. Joe® do with Barbie® on furlough? Writers were quick to adapt the idea. Witness: The Nutcracker, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Pinocchio, Raggedy Ann, Winnie the Pooh . . . and all these works were accompanied by available merchandise almost immediately after they were published. Motion picture adaptations, and more specifically animated movies aimed at children, were inevitable. The theme of living toys continued to proliferate through movies and television, perhaps most memorably on the Island of Misfit Toys featured in the classic Rankin/Bass animated Christmas special Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. As a side note, nastier versions of living toys have become popular in horror films, such as Dolls, the Child's Play series, and Full Moon's successful Puppetmaster, Dollman, and Demonic Toys movies. Toys continue to spawn movies, although now the toys are more likely to come from video games - Super Mario Brothers, Mortal Kombat, and every other big budget movie comes with its own line of toys - The Shadow, Waterworld, Demolition Man, until now it's become difficult for the average Joe Popcorn to tell where things came from originally. Was Earthworm Jim a video game before he was a TV cartoon? Was Casper a comic-book before he was a theatrical cartoon? Was Batman a serial before he was a cereal? It is this conflict between modern and traditional toys - which in turn represents modern and traditional values and attitudes - that is at the heart of Toy Story. Cowboy doll Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is little Andy's favorite among all the toys in his room. This position of authority also places him in the position of leadership over all the other toys, including a dimwit Slinky® Dog (Disney contract player Jim Varney), an insecure plastic dinosaur (Wallace Shawn), a bucket of plastic soldiers (led by R. Lee Ermey, the retired Marine whose hard-as- nails performance in Full Metal Jacket has led to a career providing easy shorthand in casting for military toughness), and a grouchy Mr. Potato Head® (Don Rickles). Woody's position as Top Toy is threatened with the arrival of Andy's birthday, which brings with it a bright, shiny newcomer: a flashy, hi-tech action figure named Buzz Lightyear, Space Ranger (Tim Allen). Unlike the traditional toys, Buzz comes complete with a fully detailed backstory and identity, carefully spelled out on the back of his box. With this evidence to back him up, Buzz refuses to believe that he is merely a toy - to him, he's the genuine article. What's more, Buzz's forthright personality and action-packed features impress not only Andy, but the other toys as well. It's not long before Buzz has quite unintentionally usurped Woody's honored place up on Andy's bed. In anguish, Woody struggles with his conscience - can he somehow get rid of his rival? As an indirect result of his schemes to regain Andy's affections, both Woody and Buzz become lost at a gas station miles from home. They make a wild-and-woolly trek back to the safety of Andy's neighborhood, but just as they reach their goal, they get themselves captured by the evil next-door neighbor, Sid. Sid is the terror of the toy world (and other kids, no doubt) that should be familiar to any child. Sid is a malicious torturer of all types of playthings. He's distracted from melting our boys slowly with a magnifying glass only by his acquisition of a huge rocket from an out-of-state fireworks store, with which he plans to blow them to smithereens in spectacular fashion. To escape their grisly fate, Buzz and Woody must somehow work out their differences and act as a team. Director John Lasseter was a former Disney animator who joined Pixar when he became interested in the possibilities to be explored with computer graphics. Pixar went on to create the groundbreaking shorts Tin Toy, Klik Klak, and a series of memorable Listerine commercials. Disney, anxious to bring back the talent exhibited by those shorts, was very interested when they showed up with the idea for a movie about toys. The combination of Pixar's talent for creating three-dimensional animation that is just as lively and personable as flat animation, with Disney's savvy for producing hits works like a charm. While Disney remained fixated on producing another musical, Pixar succeeded in talking them down to the unobtrusive Randy Newman songs used so thoughtfully. When the tone of the project became too dark, Disney had the vision to scrap months of work and retool the script, adding depth to the characters. The decision to reject a combination of live action and animation for a strictly digital world shows Toy Story's main weakness: the human characters look almost as puppetlike as the toys. To compensate, the human shown most fully is the intentionally creepy Sid, while the more sympathetic characters like Andy and his mom are mostly shown from toy's eye views. As an animator, I witnessed the dawning of computer's use in animation. Years ago, a leading system consisted of a computer controlled robot arm that would produce a series of mechanical drawings on paper (today's software can produce the same result in minutes). Since that time, mention of computers in animation has been the subject of hot debate. Some animators scoffed, saying that it could never produce a natural looking result. Others feared it would take over the industry, no matter whether it worked or not, due to the costs saved. Toy Story, a film as rich and beguiling in emotion and spectacular in visual poetry as any film, should end quite a few arguments immediately. After all, animation is mainly used as a fairly elaborate toy, and as Toy Story shows so well, the toys of the past can be made to work wonders alongside the toys of the future. , then come back to IDN. Copyright © 1994-1997 by Virtual Press/Global Internet Solutions. Internet Daily News and its respective columns are trademarks of Virtual Press/Global Internet Solutions. |