Copyright 1995, Walt Disney Pictures"This isn't flying. It's falling...with style."-Buzz Lightyear (voice of Tim Allen)
On June 23rd, 1995, I paid witness to the continuation of the second Golden Age of American animation dominance. That was the opening day of 1995's tepid Disney entry Pocahontas. The romance about a Native American and one of the first English settlers is one we'll get to in months to come (and to tie in to recent news: Christian Bale co-starred!), but not what I'm talking about. No, on that day, at the Holiday 6 Theater in Buffalo, New York, I glimpsed the first look at a computer animated film. Having seen previous Disney films such as Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, I had seen some bits and pieces here and there, but nothing so thrilling or captivating as the quick scene portrayed in the teaser trailer for Toy Story, one depicting two soon-to-be classic characters, Woody and Buzz Lightyear, squaring off in their first meeting on their owner Andy's cowboy-festooned bedsheets. And so Disney dominance continued.
What's fascinating in watching Toy Story now, comparing its script, its direction and, most importantly, its animation style to Dreamworks' Kung Fu Panda or Pixar's most recent film, WALL-E, is how far Pixar has come and how far they'd come to begin with. Yes, there are certainly flaws. The design of the human characters in Toy Story is realistic, too much so. It's obvious that director John Lasseter and his crew wanted to make the real people as believable-looking as possible, since the toys wouldn't seem anatomically correct (and why should they?). However, by going down this path, they created characters like Molly, Andy's baby sister, who looks very much like a squishy-faced toddler; especially on an HDTV, this is not a pretty sight. Of course, it's clear that Lasseter and company didn't want the focus to be on the human characters; frankly, the villainous Sid gets more face time than Andy and, thus, looks more like an animated human than anyone else.
Still, the animation from over a decade ago looks crisp and clear, especially in outdoor scenes like the climax, which begins in Sid's backyard and ends high in the sky, as the two heroes soar up above suburbia, enjoying one second of strangely undeserved and unwelcome freedom. What's more, the Blu-ray player I own heightens the details in each shot, carefully and lovingly composed. How many hours did it take for the subservient toys in the Claw game to be given all-encompassing ridges? How long did it take to create the just-right reflections in the gleaming metal at Pizza Planet and in Sid's bedroom? Consider this and you will consider exactly how much craft and how many man-hours must go into the creation of a single minute of footage of any computer-animated film, Pixar or otherwise.
And yet, despite all of this, it's still shocking to know that there was a time when Toy Story was going to be scrapped by its distributor, Walt Disney Pictures. To go quickly into the behind-the-scenes story, early versions of the film had Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks, reliable yet a touch ornery) as far less likable, far more desperate in his attempt to stay in power as the top toy in Andy's bedroom. These traits are still present in Woody--it is he who knocks Buzz out of the bedroom and, though it wasn't exactly how he planned it, the local sheriff was hoping to put Buzz down a peg or two--but he's the character who anchors us in the story. Though he and Buzz both get chances to have story arcs, it's Woody who we see first and identify with until the last shot of two friends nervously chuckling. Woody's imperfection as the main character, though, is part of what makes this film last so well, still work after so long.
Pixar Animation Studios wasn't exactly the same in 1995. I was merely 11 when this first film of theirs came out and have found that, as I age, so does the studio. So it matures. How to explain the line from two (and soon to be three) stories about toys with lives of their own to a neurotic clownfish looking for his son in the ocean to a rat who wants to cook in Paris? The maturation of the story begins here and has stayed true. Though the screenplay here, by Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen & Alec Sokolow, and Joss Whedon (!), has its share of snappy lines, we're also given such moving scenes as when Woody bares his soul to Buzz, explaining that there is such a thing as being too good, and he's been the victim of that. And Buzz's arc, from cocky believer to humbled hero, is all the more impressive because of how quickly it happens. Toy Story is only 81 minutes long, and when you take away the opening sequence and final credits, that gives the audience only about an hour or so to become fully acquainted with Buzz Lightyear. Credit should go to Tim Allen here for pulling off both the arrogance and the modesty the character exudes. Even though his post-reaction moment of insanity with Woody, pretending to be a proper English lady at a tea party held by Sid's sister, is played for laughs, his initial act of shock, disappointment, and defiance is more powerful than you might expect, coming from a movie that begins with sheep being hoarded by an evil one-eyed potato.
Such, though, is the Pixar way. These are the people who are able to pull off ridiculous plots with aplomb, with humor, with emotion. And through all of this, they're able to thrill also. The climax, where crises upon crises upon crises are piled onto Buzz and Woody's shoulders, still has the power to make you gasp, when Scud the dog chases after Woody and the moving truck, when Buzz and Woody hang onto Slinky Dog for dear life as they sail down neighborhood roads to the tune of "Hakuna Matata," and, most of all, when Buzz and Woody soar up in the sky and the cowboy finally lets go for a second, marveling at what his friend has done.
Friendship, of course, is a universal principle of mankind. To see it so baldly represented as the main theme of this film is, still, a little surprising. Friendship is a common theme throughout most Pixar works, from the friendship of Buzz and Woody, to the duo of Marlin and Dory, or Mike and Sully, or even Remy and Linguine. To compare with previous Disney films, friendship is often not considered as important as relationships of love, from Snow White all the way to Simba and Nala. Pixar, though, chooses to focus on friendship as the driving force of life. It's friendship that saves Woody, friendship that saves Buzz, friendship that keeps them going. Hell, it's even the idea behind the Oscar-nominated song by Randy Newman (who does a fine job of the music here, quirks and all). That it took a computer-animated toy cowboy and spaceman to bring the idea of friendship up close in the mid-1990s is saying something. Pixar, I imagine, wouldn't have it any other way.
Next week, a look at the jumps made by this studio when they made a story of miniature proportions...A Bug's Life.
No comments:
Post a Comment