When Disney and Pixar’s Toy Story opened on November 22, 1995, critic Roger Ebert wrote in his review: “Watching the film, I felt like I was in at the dawn of a new era of movie animation, which draws on the best of cartoons and reality, creating a world somewhere in between, where space not only bends but snaps, crackles, and pops.”
When Toy Story made its debut and astonished audiences, this sums up the consensus. Hard as it is to believe, the first computer-animated feature film that would usher in a new age for the medium is celebrating its 30th anniversary this month.
As everyone knows, the film tells the tale of two toys, Woody, the pull-string cowboy doll, and Buzz Lightyear, the sleek action figure, who both belong to young Andy. They start as adversaries, but when they find themselves in the grips of Sid, the toy-torturing kid, they must work together to rejoin Andy and all the other toys, like Mr. Potato Head, Bo Peep, Slinky Dog, Rex, and Hamm.
With that “buddy movie” story filled with humor and heart, Disney and Pixar’s relationship began, giving the world some of the most beloved animated characters and a film franchise that’s still going strong (Toy Story 5 hits theaters next year and its teaser trailer debuted this week.
To celebrate Toy Story’s thirtieth anniversary, what follows is insight from several of the artists who worked on the film:
The road to Toy Story was paved by Pixar’s Academy Award-winning short, Tin Toy (1988), which caught Disney’s attention. That short and, eventually, Toy Story grew out of director John Lasseter’s love of toys and collecting them. “I believe there is a connection between a love of toys and animation,” said Lasseter in a 1997 interview. “I found, at many animation studios, there are toys all over animators’ desks. To be an animator, a good character animator, I believe, there is a quality that can best be described as a child who’s never grown up. Because I think to be a good animator, you need a good child-like take on things. So much of animation is through observation and capturing the certain essences of things that people find familiar and showing it to them in ways that they’ve never seen before. There’s sort of this wide-eyed wonderment to things. I think, along with that, we all have this love of toys.”
Like many animated films, the plot of Toy Story evolved and looked quite different in its early stages, as Lee Unkrich, an editor on the film who would go on to direct such blockbusters as Toy Story 3 (2010) and Coco (2017), told The Telegraph in a 2015 interview, discussing how different the initial story was: “This little, tiny toy gets left on the side of the road at a rest stop and goes on a road trip to find his owners, and he bumps into this hand-me-down ventriloquist doll who tries to help him. It was very convoluted, but we thought it was great at the time.”
Also in that same article in The Telegraph, Pixar’s Senior Historian, Christine Freeman discussed how much the characters evolved during those early days of production: “There are so many different iterations of what Buzz and Woody might have looked like. In the archive, we have boxes of ‘Pointy Nose Woody,’ ‘Big Hair Buzz,’ ‘Scary Woody’…We have lots of artists’ good taste to thank for the film we saw.”
The voice cast for the film was, and is, stellar: Tom Hanks as Woody, Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear, Annie Potts as Bo Peep, Wallace Shawn as Rex, John Ratzenberger (Pixar’s eventual “good luck charm”), as Hamm, Jim Varney, as Slinky Dog and Don Rickles, as Mr. Potato Head.
In a 1995 interview, Toy Story producer Bonnie Arnold discussed how much the actors informed the characters’ personalities. “A lot of what was read and how they read it helped the characters to evolve,” said Arnold of the voice cast. “Jim Varney, for instance, who’s doing the role of Slinky, initially, the character of Slinky was a little bit different, but as soon as we decided on Jim and we had Jim do a recording, Slinky became more of a hound dog, which of course fits Jim’s voice.”
In a 1999 interview, Unkrich discussed how the emotions and compelling plot found in Toy Story are the priority for Pixar over the technology: “We like to think of ourselves as storytellers and artists and not computer ‘techies.’ Story and character are really number one to us, and we’ve always tried to tailor the computer tools to aid in that process.”
Glenn McQueen, an animator on Toy Story, who sadly passed away in 2002 (and would be the namesake for Cars’ Lightning McQueen) noted that the focus on story influenced how they train the team at Pixar: “If we hire an animator, the last thing I want is for that person to be spending their time worrying about technical issues,” said McQueen, in ’99. “They should only be worrying about the performance of their characters.”
This, alongside the computer-generated wonder, is what has allowed Toy Story not just to endure, but to increase in popularity over the past thirty years, now passed on to others from that first generation who experienced the film in theaters.
Just before the film opened in 1995, producer Arnold noted: “The technology is amazing, absolutely amazing; I don’t think anyone can deny that. But that’s interesting for all of about five minutes. What will keep moviegoers in their seats is a good story – interesting characters, witty dialogue, and coming out of the picture learning something about yourself.”
Michael Lyons is a freelance writer, specializing in film, television, and pop culture. He is the author of the book, Drawn to Greatness: Disney’s Animation Renaissance, which chronicles the amazing growth at the Disney animation studio in the 1990s. In addition to Animation Scoop and Cartoon Research, he has contributed to Remind Magazine, Cinefantastique, Animation World Network and Disney Magazine. He also writes a blog, Screen Saver: A Retro Review of TV Shows and Movies of Yesteryear and his interviews with a number of animation legends have been featured in several volumes of the books, Walt’s People. You can visit Michael’s web site Words From Lyons at: 
There was certainly a lot of “buzz” when Toy Story debuted. It was hailed as a breakthrough in animation. Shortly thereafter, Walt Disney World unveiled its Toy Story parade and the characters eased their way into the Disney pantheon.
Not only was it a move “forward” but also “backward” as it revived interest in old childhood toys that hadn’t seen much press in the years leading up to Toy Story’s release, such as Slinky and Mr. Potato Head. I’m sure it was a nostalgic revival of sorts for toys that otherwise might have been on the verge of being forgotten. Now, with the Toy Story franchise still firmly in place, these toys seem poised to go on forever.
Diehard animation purists like me will probably always prefer the old school hand-drawn animation, which is not to say that CGI animation doesn’t have its place. When done well, it can accomplish feats of semi-realism that traditional animation would be hard pressed to capture. But there is something about the bringing to life of pen and pencil drawings that can’t be duplicated on computer–namely, the human element. In fact, some of the flaws that exist in human-generated animation offer proof that a machine cannot truly take the place of a person.
In my day, in terms of animation, Woody and Buzz meant Woody Woodpecker and Buzz Buzzard. Andy was Andy Panda. I have often wondered whether the choice to use those particular names was a deliberate tribute to the Walter Lantz studio which had ultimately owned the copyright to Walt Disney’s creation Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (the earliest incarnation of which character has in recent years matriculated back to Disney). A bit of a rivalry had existed between the two studios for decades. Several animators had trekked over from Disney to Lantz, especially in light of the fact that Lantz continued to produce theatrical short subjects (I know, I know, not masterpieces) for years after Disney had reduced its shorts output to the occasional special.
I’m sure much of the staying power of Toy Story has had to do with its two leads, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. Their performances are nothing short of stellar in making the characters convincing and believable. Thankfully, voices don’t age as fast as people do, so hopefully this new Woody and Buzz can continue to delight audiences for more years to come.
I vividly recall sitting through a 3D double-feature re-release of ‘Toy Story’ and ‘Toy Story 2’ in October of 2009, back when anticipation for a third installment immediately kicked into high gear.
Even if I was used to watching both on my portable DVD player, the theatrical experience only enhanced my appreciation of what Pixar’s crew of visual storytellers, artists, and animators was able to achieve in spite of the technological limitations they had to face.
My jaw dropped when I saw the above trailer for the first time before a screening of Pocahontas. Had the same reaction to the preview of Arabian Knight that was shown afterward, but for a different reason.
Can’t express how refreshing it is to see the promotional materials for the original film with nary a mention of its two voiceover leads, which sadly wouldn’t be the case with the subsequent sequels. To my thinking, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are not the nominal featured performers; the “stars” are Woody and Buzz Lightyear, and should be publicized as such.
One of my all-time favorite movies, and the one that sparked my interest in animation and made me want to be an animator. I loved watching the “behind-the-scenes” features on the Toy Story DVD and seeing how the animators actually made the movie.
Everything about it was excellent: the story, the animation, the characters, the voices, and of course the music. It demonstrated the potential of CGI, and was visually stunning for its time. The scene where Woody and Buzz are gliding through the sky is, in my opinion, one of the most iconic scenes in animation history!
Happy 30th anniversary to Toy Story!
Indeed! Toy Story was truly groundbreaking when it was released and I’m glad I got to see it in theaters when it first came out. That scene when Buzz and Woody are gliding is not only iconic, but was pure cinematic magic!
A big step forward. Who could have imagined that all that expenditure on pencils and paper could be replaced by a simple machine? The passage of time would prove that the animator was not really necessary either, not to mention the director and even the critic who writes about the final product. The last step is the audience, and we are finally getting there.
Anyway, there will always be a refuge for the human touch in this comments section. All flaws are permitted!
That’s funny. Just yesterday, Steve Stanchfield posted a 108-year-old film about toys that come to life when nobody’s around, and now here we are, looking at a thirty-year-old one. Really makes you appreciate how far animation has come.
This was one of those movies that had everyone saying “You gotta see it!” A friend who had taken his children to see it gave me an enthusiastic recommendation, saying it was the best movie he had seen all year. While I had probably been more impressed by the CGI in “Jurassic Park” two years earlier, I was very impressed and entertained by “Toy Story”. Lasseter and company got everything right; even Randy Newman’s songs didn’t annoy the hell out of me as they usually do. This 30th anniversary is the perfect time for me to revisit it; as much as I enjoyed “Toy Story” in 1995, I’ve never owned it on home video, and I don’t think I’ve seen it in twenty years.
I recall reading at the time that toy retailers were inundated with requests, not only for Woody and Buzz Lightyear, but also for Sid’s monstrous creations. Nobody at Disney thought there’d be any demand for them. I suppose the film must have inspired a lot of do-it-yourselfers in the audience, and I shudder to think of the results.
The oxymoron “To infinity and beyond!” always brings a smile to my face, as it had been anticipated, after a fashion, some years earlier by a schlocky science fiction skin flick titled “Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity”. The faux buckskin bikini-clad heroines, having escaped from an interstellar slave transport, land on a planet that turns out to be a private hunting reserve, and from that point onward the movie is essentially a retelling of “The Most Dangerous Game”. It’s good clean fun if you enjoy ’80s camp. To this day, Buzz Lightyear’s catchphrase calls to mind, not “Toy Story”, but the slave girls from beyond infinity, and it will probably continue to do so for all eternity. And beyond!
I don’t know if you still have a chance, but last month at my local multiplex there was a limited theatrical re-release of ‘Toy Story’ for the anniversary. I hadn’t watched it myself in probably 10+ years, but sitting in the theater marveling at was once cutting-edge and still laughing with and enjoying the performances, I was instantly back in 1995, seeing this for the first, second and third times with my Dad and little sister. To this day, this was the only movie our family went to see more than once during its original theatrical engagement, and rightly so.
IMO, Pixar’s Toy Story outshined the Renaissance era of Disney.
IMO, I disagree as I feel like all those films deserve their place in the history of animation. Also, I’m still trying to get one last tier of the Renaissance to get into The Library of Congress’ National Film Registry.
The reason why I place Toy Story above the heap is because those 90’s Disney features were a return to a territory they already conquered. Toy Story felt far more refreshing, it was not the Disney formula. Of course, it is all subjective.
To quote Maltin, “It’s a formula that works.”
A rather big millstone in the art of animation. I recall my parents took me and my brother to the film twice in the same year (the second time right around New Year’s Eve).
A truly groundbreaking movie. I saw it on first release and was amazed.
So did I.,:) And so was I.