Last summer at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the first footage from “Toy Story 5” debuted. It was the opening of the new Pixar film, a cold open unlike any other installment in the franchise, that depicted a cargo container of next-generation Buzz Lightyears, which had washed ashore on a deserted island.
We watched as the Buzzes gained some awareness, aired by their high-tech upgrades, fashioning a raft and heading for parts unknown. Even in its unfinished form, it was really captivating and so, so different – announcing that, while this might be the fifth film in the mainline “Toy Story” franchise (and the sixth overall), there was still plenty of creative gas in the tank.
Now that we’ve seen the first half of “Toy Story 5,” we can confirm that the many Buzzes factor into the larger narrative in fun and surprising ways. (If you’ve seen some of the marketing materials, you know that, at some point, the Buzzes ride horses, because of course they do.)
“I will just fall on my sword and say it was just a random wacky idea that I just wanted to see,” said director and co-writer Andrew Stanton.
When Stanton, who has been involved in every preceding “Toy Story” film but never directed an installment in the franchise, was asked to do the movie, he said that he wasn’t sure he was up for it. “But I said I do care about it being done right, whether it’s me or somebody else,” Stanton explained.
Together, he and Pixar brass decided that Stanton would at least write the movie, before deciding whether or not he wanted to stay on to direct.
“I came down with a blank canvas of what do I want to see? It’s like having my own fan fiction, and one of them was just I wanted to see 50 high-tech Buzz Lightyears washed ashore,” Stanton said. He was inspired by a 1992 news story about 28,000 rubber ducks that had washed ashore after being freed from a shipping container that had fallen overboard. (It eventually inspired a nonfiction book called – what else? – “Moby-Duck.”)
Stanton said that the opening scene, the one screened at Annecy, “didn’t change one frame from the pages that I wrote” long ago. “There was something – just divine intervention, that just kind of came,” Stanton said.
Lindsey Collins, Stanton’s longtime producer, said she remembered getting the first draft of the script and reading it while she was walking down the path from Pixar’s red-bricked Emeryville, Campus, to her car. “I was reading I just started laughing. What is he doing with this? Because it didn’t change. It’s exactly as it is in the movie and it was all the 50 Buzzes,” said Collins.
“But it took years to earn its keep and to have a purpose,” Stanton said.
Instead of having to fight for the Buzzes, Stanton said, others on the team had patience. “It was like, We’ll eventually figure out why they have to be there,” Stanton said.
After some story changes, typically for animation and especially for movies in the franchise, they had found a good place for the 50 Buzzes.
“It just took a while to make it all seamless,” Stanton said.
Throughout the first half of “Toy Story 5,” the main storyline will be unfolding, involving Jesse (a returning Joan Cusack) and her attempts to divorce Bonnie from a new tablet called Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee), and then we will abruptly cut to wherever the Buzzes are on their separate journey. Stanton said that the way the two storylines reconcile is part of the thrill of the second half of “Toy Story 5.”
“I call it getting my ‘Breaking Bad’ on,” said Stanton. “I love Vince Gilligan’s writing, where he just plants something right in the prologue, and you just trust as the storyteller that’s going to mean something later. And I just kind of took from that playbook.” Stanton is intimately familiar with this playbook, having directed a 2018 episode of Gilligan’s “Breaking Bad” spinoff “Better Call Saul.”
In terms of finding the story for “Toy Story 5,” Stanton said that there were not any huge breakdowns (famously, the first “Toy Story” film was nearly canceled after a disastrous screening, a day that was remembered by longtime Pixar veterans as Black Friday). “Toy Story 5” just faced the usual process of refinement and distillation. This process was aided greatly by the addition of Kenna Harris, who would join the production about a year in and eventually serve as the movie’s co-director and co-writer.
“There was always tech, there was always Jesse, there was always 50 Buzzes,” Harris said.
“I feel like I always start out with a bunch of grocery ingredients that thinks there’s a meal there, but there’s a lot of cooking and recooking in the kitchen for years to figure out the ideal meal,” Stanton said.
“Toy Story 5” production designer Bob Pauley said that, from a production standpoint, having 50 Buzz Lightyears running around was “freaking cool.”
“I loved it, because it’s a weird opening, it catches you,” said Pauley. “Also it introduces right away, boom, What is Buzz…? That’s not Buzz, what’s going on? There’s tech there and it’s just mysterious. And where are we going? It’s very cinematic. There’s two separate movies for a little bit, where we’re coming back to those guys, and then you’ve got the rest of the movie.
Still, Pauley promised, “They merge and stuff happens.”
Thomas Jordan, the visual effects supervisor for “Toy Story 5,” said that when he was first presented with the 50 Buzzes, “it gets everyone excited, and then they usually say, But then how are we going to do that?”
Jordan said that the first time they startled tackling the project, they had a single animator attempting to animated all 50 Buzz Lightyears, which led to the animator’s computer crashing “immediately.”
“Because one Buzz Lightyear has an insane amount of animation controls and detail,” Jordan explained.
Jordan and his team realized that “we didn’t need to have all of that detail ready all of the time.” Instead, they invented a new workflow that allowed the animators to pick and choose the Buzzes they were working on at a given time and “have lower-resolutions of the others.”
“We call them stand-ins, almost like an seat filler at the Oscars,” Jordan explained. “It’s a different, lower-res version of Buzz, so you know where he is, but you’re not actively working on him.”
According to Jordan, “That allowed them to manage the complexity of the scene, and then we also worked on these libraries of 50 different Buzz animation loops, so that they could create different walk cycles and run cycles, or just like sitting around campfire cycles that they could share amongst each other’s and across shots.”
Having these libraries allowed the workload to spread across all of the animators working on the multiple Buzzes and to build up crowd shots using different pieces of the shared animation library. “That turned into what looked like 50 Buzzes, all being very unique from one another,” Jordan said.
When the Buzzes would all sync up, you’ll see the little LED screen on their chests light up (Jordan calls it “synchronized hive-mind mode”). “That’s fun, because then they’re all animating in unison, so that’s a little bit easier, but as soon as those lights turn off, they go back to all being individual Buzzes again,” said Jordan.
Or as individual as they can be without crashing every computer at Pixar.
“Toy Story 5” gallops into theaters on June 19.
The post How ‘Toy Story 5’ Ended Up With 50 Buzz Lightyears appeared first on TheWrap.
