11/26/2022 0 Comments Toy story 1 charactersThat shines through, but the sheer “we have to fix this now” desperation that resulted from the one-year-to-fix-this-movie timeline created a film that enriches and deepens the ideas introduced in the first Toy Story. Thus, Pixar went into Toy Story 2 with a chip on its shoulder. (It’s one ugly movie.) Still, at the time, Antz’s celebrity voice cast - including Woody Allen, Sylvester Stallone, and Sharon Stone - and its “what if a Woody Allen movie was about a bug?” premise made it seem like the more “adult” choice. Its 1998 release, A Bug’s Life, was warmly received, but nowhere near the level of Toy Story’s universal acclaim some critics compared it unfavorably to the competing computer-animated release Antz, which came out a couple of months earlier from Dreamworks and has aged atrociously. Yet there’s a wild creativity to Toy Story 2 that arises from Pixar’s desperate need to prove itself. And an awareness of that level of “crunch,” as well as Lasseter’s involvement, can make Toy Story 2 harder to revisit. That resulted in a production schedule that was decidedly worker-unfriendly (since the movie was in production basically around the clock for those nine months). Their bet was that they could make a movie that would live up to the legacy of the original and still hit the movie’s projected November 24, 1999, release date - leaving them a little more than nine months to lock the film. In late 1998, however, folks within Pixar (including Toy Story 2 co-director John Lasseter, who was booted from Pixar in 2018 after accusations of rampant sexual harassment) got a look at the then-current state of Toy Story 2 and feared it would compromise whatever love the American public had for Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and the rest of the toys. Consequently, Toy Story 2 was originally designed as a direct-to-video sequel to that film, before early work on the movie (initially by a very small team within Pixar) suggested it would play well in theaters. Naturally, Disney, who distributed the film, wanted a sequel. It changed the industry so much that American studios almost never produce hand-drawn animated films anymore (a travesty, but not really Pixar’s fault), and it was recognized for its achievements with not just a massive box office intake, but a handful of Oscar nominations too (as well as a special-achievement award for being the first “feature-length computer-animated film”). What’s more, Toy Story - which didn’t feature big musical numbers and focused on a buddy comedy between a cowboy and a space ranger, rather than an adolescent coming of age story - felt remarkably different from the other animated movies of the ’90s, its technology aside. It was the first animated feature entirely created with a computer, and even though it looks primitive by modern standards, Pixar’s choice to depict characters made out of plastic means that its artificiality has held up in a way that other computer-animated films from the ’90s just haven’t. The first Toy Story was released in 1995 and became the biggest hit movie of that year. Toy Story 2 delves into themes both the Toy Story franchise and Pixar itself would dissect over the next decade Buzz and Woody’s friendship drives all of the Toy Story movies. Toy Story 2 isn’t just the best Toy Story movie. There will be partisans of all four films until the end of time.īut I am here to tell you that people who don’t think 1999’s Toy Story 2 is the greatest Toy Story film or that the two films that follow it will forever live in its shadow are wrong. This is, of course, inevitable in a franchise where every movie is superbly designed, lovingly written, and wonderfully performed. But in recent years, I’ve begun to bristle a bit when Toy Story fans say the third is the greatest of the movies. I greatly love both Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4. That it finds a new angle on the themes of mortality that 2010’s Toy Story 3 already handled, but one that is bittersweet and wistful to the sheer bombast of Toy Story 3, is even more impressive. That it is able to find yet another new spin on the secret lives of toys is a testament to the studio’s continued strength of imagination. With Toy Story 4, Pixar has the unenviable task of following up what was already a perfect trio of films, charting themes of birth, life, and death with lovely grace, despite the fact that their main characters are just a bunch of toys.
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