Why ‘Embracing Time’ Is Pixar’s Secret to ‘Toy Story’ — WSJ

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: "I've been stuck in Arrested Development my whole life by choice. It's just kind of my immature nature and that's why we've all found each other and started this place." [00:00:11] Speaker 2: Andrew Stanton has been at Pixar since 1990, when he was hired as the studio's second animator. He's written or directed 10 of Pixar's most beloved movies, and he's probably made you cry a few… "WALL-E!" [00:00:24] Speaker ?: …dozen… [00:00:25] Speaker 3: "Kid, he has to go." …times. "I'm going home now." [00:00:29] Speaker 1: "We weren't known for that in our first four movies. We were known for being funny and having some heartfelt moments. But it wasn't until Nemo came in and we had a darker tone and we got more intense at the end, that we got people bawling." [00:00:41] Speaker 2: His latest film, Toy Story 5, is the culmination of 36 years crafting one of the most commercially and critically successful animated franchises of all time. [00:00:51] Speaker 1: I was in my early 20s when I worked on it. I don't even know if I could draw this now. But everything was analog, so we wrote all the dialogue right below our storyboards. It's weird. I forget what I did. You actually remember drawing these pages? Once I'm looking at it, but man, it's just gone. Yeah. I do miss being stuck in a room together like jury duty. And there's just a gallows humor and a camaraderie that only comes from being stuck in a room all day together. [00:01:17] Speaker 2: When you look back over 30 years and five Toy Story movies, are there any moments that really stand out that will always be in your memory? [00:01:24] Speaker 1: When I think of Toy Story, I just think of what a discovery it was to figure out how to write a movie and how to write for a character. And I was always called in to write for Woody. I ended up putting a lot of myself into that character and a lot of his voice. [00:01:41] Speaker 3: Hey, nice teeth. And yet, still a good looking guy. [00:01:45] Speaker 1: My son was about to go to college. The speech he gives to Forky was something I was having a feel for at the time in my life with an empty nest. [00:01:54] Speaker 3: Who's Andy? Andy was my other kid. You had another kid? Yeah, yeah. For a long time. It was pretty great. [00:02:07] Speaker 2: Are there elements of Woody's personality that people who know you would recognize in him? [00:02:14] Speaker 1: My outer sarcasm, yeah. [00:02:16] Speaker ?: Wow! [00:02:17] Speaker 3: Hey, what's this thing do? I get it. There's a snake in my boot. [00:02:24] Speaker 1: I hide the gooey part of me. Yeah, yeah. Cool. But it's pretty obvious once you know it's there. [00:02:31] Speaker ?: To infinity and beyond! [00:02:35] Speaker 2: Tell me what stands out most in your memory about the first one, and like, what appealed to you and the team about making your very first movie be about talking toys? [00:02:44] Speaker 1: I still pine for the days of making that movie because we were so young and stupid, we didn't know you couldn't do it. It was like the guys that put the man on the moon, they were too young and hungry to understand engineering wasn't possible, but they looked past it. So we were never feeling the pain, even though it was really hard. [00:03:05] Speaker 2: You waited more than a decade to make the third one, right? Yeah. Almost a decade to make the fourth one. Was that intentional? And why such a long wait in a business so obsessed with franchises? [00:03:14] Speaker 1: There's an assumption in that question that we were planning ahead for all these things. And all I remember for the first, I'd say seven movies, which would be the first 10 years, we were just trying to make sure the next train track movie in front was as good as the last movie. And it took a village and it took all our attention. I felt like we were doctors with too many patients all the time. And so when somebody just put the next patient in front of you and said, what if we did a Toy Story 3? We said, okay, what if? And we start talking about it. And then what if we did a 4? Like they just kind of came up when they came up. [00:03:50] Speaker 3: When the kids get old, new ones come in. When they get old, new ones replace them. [00:03:56] Speaker 2: Are there non-obvious elements that are important for a good Toy Story movie that you've learned? [00:04:02] Speaker 1: It's embracing time. It's one of the wonderful gifts this franchise allows you is to, you can let kids grow up. That was the big epiphany from two to three. And that blew my brain. I was like, oh, we can end the Andy years and we can start the Bonnie years. You think you can take care of him for me? Okay then. [00:04:27] Speaker 2: 3 obviously had an ending that was very iconic to people and could have certainly been the ending of the whole series. And it was. And it was, right. And then 4 also had an ending that felt like this could have been a place where you left Woody and it would have been very satisfying to people, right? Sure. [00:04:44] Speaker 1: I treat these more like good television or good seasons. Like there's no guarantee we'll get picked up. So you want to land the plane, but you want to leave it so that if it does get picked up, it feels worthy of continuing. [00:05:00] Speaker 4: Hi! What the? Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you. Sleep mode, you know? [00:05:05] Speaker 2: For number 5, do you remember the moment when whoever it was suggested or came up with the idea of building it around a tablet? [00:05:12] Speaker 4: Hi there, I'm Lily Pat. Let's play! [00:05:15] Speaker 1: I was literally presented how about a 5 and I kind of laughed over dinner. So I said let me just write a bad first draft this summer and see as a fan what I wish I would see. And if it matches what you guys would like, then we can probably continue from there and I can take it more seriously. But I knew from having lived it with Nemo and Wally and Bugs Life and Toy Story that you got to like the idea so much that you still want to get out of bed and face it. So when I started writing, three things came to mind. One was Jesse. I knew there was so much to be had. Woody had needed a break. Hi! [00:05:52] Speaker ?: Come on! [00:05:53] Speaker 1: Tech had been around for quite a few years and only gotten cemented over the pandemic. [00:05:57] Speaker 4: Bonnie needs help from someone at least from the same century. So long toys! [00:06:02] Speaker 1: And third was just this impish, surface, fun idea of 50 Buzz Light Years. We're gonna need backup. And so I started out with those ingredients, knowing that it would take a while to cook it in the kitchen. We did this movie in three and a half years, which for us is huge. [00:06:19] Speaker 2: What do you have to do to make a good movie in three and a half years at a place that often takes five or six years? [00:06:24] Speaker 1: Well, I learned through doing a lot of television how fast you can really work. And it's faster than anybody would want to work by choice. The nice thing about animation is you can make a lot of quick decisions and be wrong on half of them and still have means to correct it. [00:06:40] Speaker 4: You want some coffee? It's good for you, but don't drink too much. Or you'll have to, have to be right back! [00:06:51] Speaker 2: Obviously, compared to the 2000s and 2010s, it's like a tougher market for you and all your competitors for original films, right? Yeah. Just to get people into theaters. Yeah. Does that change the pressure or the importance on doing the sequels? [00:07:05] Speaker 1: All I've ever known is pressure. There's never been a film that we've worked on that didn't have some pressure on it. And I learned a long time ago from a simple suggestion from Steve Jobs on, I think, our second or third film when we were struggling. He said, "Just make a great movie." [00:07:22] Speaker 4: You are a toy! [00:07:26] Speaker 2: You are a sad, strange little man. If the film is everything you hope to be, what are sort of like the core feelings you're hoping that the audience is going to be feeling when they finish? [00:07:34] Speaker 1: Well, it's always some sense of the truth of childhood. We've always tried to be very respectful and honest about it in how we represent it. And sometimes it's messy, sometimes it's controversial, sometimes it's a little dark, but so is childhood. And so we've tried to just capture that in whatever we're saying about it on each movie. [00:07:56] Speaker 3: Well, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.