I do know they had to build, basically, a virtual spider to design the webs realistically. I’m not exactly sure even how that works. How does your lighting interact with something as visually complex as spiderwebs? Talking to Pixar over the years about its evolving technology, we’ve heard a lot about your light renderers and how they change the textures of your world. Photo: Pixar Animation Studios Toy Story 4 lowers the stakes and ramps up the whimsy So we made it into a plaster statue that you can purchase at an antique store. I think they even used it in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan or something. Ed’s the president of the studio, and it was the very first computer model that was ever created. But my favorite thing is, in one shot, there’s a casting of a hand in the background. We do actually have to re-render everything, it’s not as easy as just clicking and dragging something from an old film. I should verify that it wasn’t out of laziness. What else should viewers watch out for on home video?
You’ve said you put a lot of visual Easter eggs in the antique store because you got “lazy,” so you put in renders of things like Bing Bong’s rocket from Inside Out. We did a test a couple summers earlier, and we were able to make it work, so it seemed like would be possible. The tone I really wanted was like a jungle, like a crammed city jungle, just a lot of stuff, how the stores are.
So at first, we weren’t even sure we would be able to fill a store that big with that much stuff. There’s also dust, and spiderwebs, and all this detail. And we knew we were going to be in that antique store for a big chunk of the film. We have about 10,000 items in that store, and each one had to be shaded and built and rendered, so there’s a lot of information for the computer to wrap its head around. Josh Cooley: It would definitely be the antique store.
What was your biggest challenge on Toy Story 4 from a technological perspective? With Toy Story 4 releasing digitally on October 1st, and coming to 4K UHD and Blu-ray October 8th, Cooley talked to The Verge about the biggest challenges on the film, from specific story beats to character design and making the perfect virtual spider. First-time feature director Josh Cooley is a Pixar vet who’s worked as a storyboard artist, writer, and shorts director on projects from Ratatouille and the Cars movies, to Up and Inside Out. It was a major legacy to live up to with a third sequel.
#Toy story 1 vs 4 graphics series#
Expectations for Toy Story 4 were outsized in part because Pixar has been such a powerful industry force over the last 25 years, and the Toy Story series in particular has been such a critical, aesthetic, narrative, and financial success. Expectations for the first Toy Story were modest. Toy Story was considered a huge success because it made more than $300 million at the box office the newest sequel was considered a mild disappointment because it didn’t meet the outstanding projections for its performance, meaning it only brought in $1 billion.īut more significantly, Toy Story dropped into a world where Pixar Animation Studios was still an unknown, rather than an industry-shaping inspiration. Toy Story was the first-ever entirely computer-animated film now CGI animation is common, and the hand-drawn cel animation it replaced is a shrinking rarity. Toy Story 4 debuted in a world that’s changed profoundly since the original Toy Story hit theaters nearly 25 years ago.