Toy Story Commentary

Toy Story commentary with Director John Lasseter, Producers Ralph Guggenheim and Bonnie Arnold, Co-writer Andrew Stanton, Supervising animator Pete Docter, Art director Ralph Eggleston and Supervising technical director Bill Reeves.

Transcript

 * JOHN LASSETER: I'm John Lasseter. I co-wrote the original story and directed the film Toy Story.
 * RALPH GUGGENHEIM: I'm Ralph Guggenheim.
 * BONNIE ARNOLD: I'm Bonnie Arnold.
 * GUGGENHEIM: And Bonnie and I produced Toy Story.
 * ANDREW STANTON: And I'm Andrew Stanton. I'm one of the screenwriters and storyboard artists for the film.
 * PETE DOCTER: My name's Pete Docter. I worked on the story and was supervising animator.
 * RALPH EGGLESTON: My name's Ralph Eggleston. I was the art director on Toy Story.
 * BILL REEVES: And I'm Bill Reeves, supervising technical director on Toy Story.
 * LASSETER: And we're here to give you an audio commentary for the wonderful Toy Story.
 * Andy: Now empty that safe.
 * LASSETER: When we started this whole idea, it seemed to be very doable in the sense that, computer graphics tend to make things look kinda plastic-y anyway, so we might as well do a story about toys. And you and I, Bill, we did Tin Toy, that short film, which kind of introduced the whole notion about these toys being alive and stuff.
 * DOCTER: The first time we see Woody is a classic Western introduction.
 * LASSETER: We wanted to have it sort of a child's version of a Western movie, and as he starts playing, it gets into the sort of kid-like non-sequitur...
 * STANTON: Right.
 * LASSETER: ...sort of thing.
 * STANTON: Kid's logic. I mean, in a weird way, it's logical for the kid, but...
 * LASSETER: Right.
 * STANTON: ...that one was true...
 * DOCTER: He would have the playtime...
 * STANTON: Playtime.
 * DOCTER: ...the force field.
 * LASSETER: The force field, and then the...
 * GUGGENHEIM, DOCTER: The dinosaurs, and...
 * Andy: ...who eats force field dogs!
 * STANTON: Here's an interesting thing. So many people come up to us, and they didn't know that Molly was in the same room with Andy. It's like the crib's in there all the time.
 * LASSETER: Right.
 * STANTON: But people really, I guess we just didn't sell it enough, that, you know, Molly shares the room with. People would thought Bo Peep was Andy's toy.
 * Andy: You saved the day...
 * GUGGENHEIM: And here we have this, you know, amazing opening song by Randy Newman, who did the songs and the score.
 * LASSETER: Yeah.
 * ARNOLD: Right.
 * GUGGENHEIM: I started remember the first time that we sat down and listened to Randy... sing this song just on the piano.
 * ARNOLD: Yeah.
 * GUGGENHEIM: And, uh, we talked about the emotions, we talked about some of the feelings we wanted in the song.
 * ARNOLD: The things we likened to were Harold and Maude.
 * GUGGENHEIM: Yeah.
 * ARNOLD: And The Graduate, where songs actually told about an emotional moment in the film rather than the character singing about those things. It just made this seem more contemporary and realisitc, and I think that's what John was trying to go for.
 * STANTON: Right, right.
 * Andy: Hey, cowboy.
 * STANTON: In a short amount of time, we needed to show that Andy and Woody had this lifelong bond, but we don't have the whole movie. We wanna disrupt that as soon as we can, and it was great. From the minute when he heard Randy's song, we knew this did it, this made you feel like these guys were inseparable,
 * GUGGENHEIM: I think it did even more than that. It really defined so much of the theme of the whole movie for us.
 * LASSETER: And we used this, this song at the end, during the end credits. In the beginning, it's about Andy's relationship with Woody,...
 * STANTON: Right.
 * LASSETER: ...and at the end, it's Woody's relationship with Buzz.
 * STANTON: Right.
 * GUGGENHEIM: Mmm.
 * LASSETER: When Ralph and, and your crew... You designed all these sets. I mean, really, this world is a really three-dimensional world. It's something different than cell animation. I mean, these are truly dimensional sets.
 * EGGLESTON: And the living room is the first thing I think we really got into, and ahh, there's so much detail you never really get a close look at.
 * Andy's Mom: Yeah, I think that's gonna be enough.
 * LASSETER: I remember you said that you wanted to give a sense of history to this world so that when people looked at, it looks like people have lived in these houses. Bill, you would get the... all these designs. They were more or less like blueprints, you know.
 * REEVES: Yeah. You'd get this packet of information of what they call it, which was a specification of what they... What these things, objects really look like. It was as if we had to build them out of wood...
 * LASSETER: Yeah.
 * REEVES: ...or clay, or plastic, or whatever.
 * Andy: Come on, Molly. You're getting heavy. See ya later, Woody.
 * STANTON: And now Woody comes to life for the first time.
 * DOCTER: Slow track in.
 * STANTON: "Directed by John Lasseter."
 * LASSETER: Yeah, my credit's the longest one on the movie.
 * (GUGGENHEIM LAUGHS)
 * LASSETER: It's one frame longer than yours.
 * (STANTON LAUGHS)
 * DOCTER: There's the first line that Woody should say, we went through so many revisions.
 * LASSETER: So many.
 * GUGGENHEIM: Yeah.
 * DOCTER: We have pages and pages of Woody's first line.
 * GUGGENHEIM: Just about as many pages as we have titles.
 * STANTON: There's a lot of pessure on your main character. What's the first thing he says?
 * LASSETER: Right.
 * DOCTER: He should be... have an edge, but not too edgy, 'cause you know, it's for kids too.
 * Mr. Potato Head: Ages 3 and up, it's on my box. Ages 3 and up, I'm not supposed to be babysitting...
 * LASSETER: In casting the toys, we really looked at sort of, what kind of personality we wanted them to have, and a lot of it was drawn out of the type of toy it was. Mr. Potato Head's a classic example, 'cause one of the characteristics of the toy is that it's constantly losing its parts, and we thought it would have a chip on its shoulder. Don Rickles was the first, first actor that we thought for this.
 * STANTON: The only choice.
 * LASSETER: The only choice. Yeah, he was great.
 * Woody: Uh, Sarge, have you seen Slinky?
 * LASSETER: The definitive army man is the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, and so we casted him.
 * STANTON: Now Slinky is the last character to finally be cast. We actually...
 * LASSETER: Right.
 * STANTON: ...we actually remodeled him because of Jim Varney's voice.
 * LASSETER: That's right.
 * Slinky Dog: Bad news?!
 * ARNOLD: Well, I think Jim brought the hound dog sort of quality to it, but he was a person, and had that sort of kind of voice that just sort of more, I guess cartoon-y, for lack of a better word, without sort of putting on a voice.
 * LASSETER: Well, one of the things about Etch A Sketch is, in bringing these toys to life, we thought... Everybody draws on an Etch A Sketch so badly...
 * (STANTON LAUGHS): Yeah.
 * LASSETER: ...we wanted to have Etch A Sketch, if he was alive, be able to do crosshatching and absolutely...
 * DOCTER: Yeah.
 * LASSETER: ...exquisite circles.
 * STANTON: Well, he would naturally be the best at it.
 * Slinky Dog: Come on, let's go.
 * STANTON: Jurassic Park had just come out when we were designing Rex, and we decided would it be great to have a slant on T. rex and have him be insecure.
 * LASSETER: Well, first of all, it's sorta... like, any dinosaur, the coolest dinosaur there is, is a T. rex.
 * STANTON: Right.
 * LASSETER: So we had to have T. rex...
 * STANTON: Right.
 * LASSETER: ...and then we played him against type...
 * STANTON: Right.
 * LASSETER: ...and make him neurotic.
 * GUGGENHEIM: The most neurotic carnivore ever to walk the earth.
 * LASSETER: Right.
 * STANTON: Having these vestigial arms, not being able to touch their own nose.
 * LASSETER: Yeah, they are pathetic. I mean. they're like the most pathetic things on there... I mean, he's the most fearsome creature to walk the Earth, but he can't even scratch his own nose.
 * 'Woody: Uh, nothing.
 * LASSETER: You know, in designed the characters, we really studied real toys. Remember that? We would go to Toys R Us all the time?
 * EGGLESTON: Ohh.
 * LASSETER: I think I was in heaven.
 * EGGLESTON: Yeah.
 * (GUGGENHEIM LAUGHS)
 * LASSETER: Remember when we went to Toys R Us and bought toys with the company credit card during work hours?
 * EGGLESTON: Collected toys and...
 * LASSETER: Yeah.
 * EGGLESTON: ...of course, everybody had their own they would bring in.
 * LASSETER: Right. This kind of brings up the point that we wanted to in the... To mix toys that we made up along with existing toys that were out there. And we kept giving Ralph a list of... "Hey, Ralph, let's get Little Tikes.
 * STANTON: Uh.
 * LASSETER: "Hey, Ralph. let's get Tinkertoys." And...
 * GUGGENHEIM: The hours I spent on the phone with Mr. Potato Head's lawyer...
 * LASSETER: Yeah.
 * (STANTON LAUGHS)
 * LASSETER: It's true.
 * GUGGENHEIM: ...trying to work out the use of Mr. Potato Head in our movie.
 * LASSETER: It's true. "We gotta have him."
 * STANTON: But it's funny. We only picked existing toys that have withstood the test of time...
 * LASSETER: Yeah.
 * STANTON: ...that have gone through one or two generations and that hopefully would still be around even if this movie's watched 10, 20 years from now.
 * LASSETER: Right. In fact, a Slinky Dog was the only toy that we used that didn't... wasn't currently in production.
 * 'Woody: I don't want any toys left behind. A moving buddy. If you don't have one...
 * DOCTER: The books behind Woody are the old Pixar films.
 * STANTON: I'm sure that's like we're the most pauses are going to happen on this to read...
 * LASSETER, DOCTER: Reading the binding.
 * STANTON: ...the bindings on the books.
 * LASSETER: Well, the other thing to look at is in a lot of scenes we have funny little sayings across Mr. Spell's... readout. That's his dialogue.
 * DOCTER: "The staff meeting."
 * LASSETER: Well, we thought, in analyzing toys and the purpose of toys, they are manufactured to be played with by a child. And they have... but they could look at being played with by a child as their job. And so, if they all look at this as a job, this is their workplace when Andy leaves the room.
 * STANTON: Right.
 * LASSETER: So naturally, at every workplace you have staff meetings.
 * GUGGENHEIM: This is the scene that we probably storyboarded and re-storyboarded and wrote more often than any other movie.
 * ARNOLD: A zillion times.
 * STANTON: Kissing his butt right there was the definitive joke for the movie.
 * LASSETER: Right. It's funny to watch audience's faces when they see that. It's all of a sudden, "Did I see what I just saw?"
 * STANTON: Right.
 * (GUGGENHEIM LAUGHS)
 * LASSETER: "This is a Disney movie and he's..."
 * STANTON: And it kinda set the tone for the rest of the movie. It said...
 * LASSETER: There, there's...
 * STANTON: ..."We're reverent. Get ready for irreverence."
 * LASSTER: Yeah.
 * (STANTON LAUGHS)
 * LASSETER: And because there was a real attention to... to the... the adult audience and the teenage audience in Toy Story. We wanted to make this for kids, but also make it so the adults would enjoy it as well.
 * Hamm: I hate to break up the staff meeting...
 * LASSETER: One of the animators, Doug Sweetland, worked on these scenes that where Woody gets run over by all the toys, and he worked on them for such a long period of time that he actually had, when he finished that one scene, he had a wrap party.
 * STANTON: His own wrap party.
 * LASSETER: He had his own party for the one scene.
 * GUGGENHEIM: For the one shot of the movie.
 * DOCTER: It was good chocolate cake that he made for himself.
 * (STANTON AND GUGGENHEIM LAUGH)
 * LASSETER: Hamm the piggy bank we thought of as being a Mr. Know-It-All, 'cause he sits up on the shelf and he stares out the window all day. He knows more than the rest of the toys. So we cast John Ratzenberger, who played Cliff the mailman from Cheers. And this guy came in, and he was so amazing at ad-libs. 'Cause really the character of Hamm was just one-liners all the time.
 * Rex: Yes, yes! We promise!
 * LASSETER: So for every line he had, he gave us 10 hilarious alternatives, and he just kept ad-libbing. In fact, we found we just ran the tape and let him come up with all this...
 * STANTON: Keep going.
 * LASSETER: Keep going.
 * Woody: You know what to do.
 * Sarge: Yes, sir.
 * STANTON: And now comes probably everybody's favorite sequence.
 * ARNOLD: Well, this is of course the very first sequence that we... basically that we boarded and that we animated.
 * LASSETER: Right.
 * GUGGENHEIM: That's right. It got shown around quite a bit, and it also really epitomized the essence of the story. When these soldiers start walking, you know a lot about the world of toys that's going to be created in this movie.
 * ARNOLD: And I think there's not one guy out there that does not relate to those little green army men. I haven't met one yet.
 * LASSETER: In analyzing the green army men, we realized there were three basic things that we had to have in the model. One, they're badly molded, so they had all that extra plastic, the mold flashing that was sticking out of their heads. Their gun barrels are always bent, and their feet are always attached to those bases. And when the paratroopers go off, 'cause I love those... and they had to have them hooked with a big ring on their head. I love that.
 * GUGGENHEIM: But you know, we were always... I remember the first few times we showed it to audiences, we were always surprised because we always thought the paratroopers on the edge of the balcony was sort of a big, dramatic moment in the scene. And, instead, it always gets a huge laugh.
 * STANTON: Huge laugh.
 * LASSETER: A huge laugh, yeah.
 * Woody: ...find out what is in those presents.
 * LASSETER: We had to have them freeze in their classic army man poses. It was a must.
 * Andy's Mom: Here come the chips. I've got cool ranch...
 * LASSETER: You know, green army men. When their feet are attached to their bases, that's how they walk. And so we thought of when she actually steps on one of the guys, his base breaks off, and that's why he can't walk. But it's one of those definitive scenes that you have in all army pictures, is the injured soldier saying, "Go on. Go on without me."
 * STANTON: That's right. You had to put that in.
 * LASSETER: You had to put that in. The Sarge... one of the themes of this is teamwork, is working together. And so it kinda reinforced the theme of the whole movie for him to say... "No, you never..."
 * STANTON: "A good soldier never leaves a man behind."
 * LASSETER: Yeah. "A good soldier never leaves a man behind."
 * GUGGENHEIM: Right out of Sergeant Rock and all those movies.
 * LASSETER: Yeah. Pete, tell them about the way...
 * DOCTER: I took some old tennis shoes, and nailed them to a big board