With 'Toy Story 2,' Pixar Proved It Was Here To Stay

(Infinity and Beyond is a regular bi-weekly column documenting the 25-year filmography of Pixar Animation Studios, film by film. In today's column, writer Josh Spiegel highlights Toy Story 2.)The 1990s were a decade of change for the Walt Disney Company. Executive shakeups, outside acquisitions, and more made the company much more massive by the close of the 1990s than they were at the start. In 1990, Pixar Animation Studios was able to see its computer technology on display for a brief minute or two in the hand-drawn animated film The Rescuers Down Under. By 1999, Pixar had proven that it just might be the powerful new kid in town in the animation industry.And it was all thanks to a sequel that nearly got trapped on the small screen.

In March of 1997, Disney announced that it was producing a sequel to Toy Story, even though the story elements were just coming together. Some of the aspects of the story were cobbled together from earlier versions of the original film, dating back to when Pixar simply had aspirations of making a 30-minute TV special called A Tin Toy Christmas, not a feature film about toys. Where Toy Story was all about Woody having to rescue Buzz, the latter of whom needs to appreciate that he's just a toy, Toy Story 2 flipped the script. Woody (still voiced, of course, by the incomparable Hanks) learns that back in the 1950s, he was one of the biggest stars in all of entertainment, on the same level as Howdy Doody. Yet in the modern era, the toy is so rare that a nefarious toy-store owner (Wayne Knight) steals him from a yard sale and tries to sell him along with the other characters from the 50s-era show Woody starred in, to a toy museum in Japan. It's up to Buzz and the other toys from Andy's room to rescue their friend.Knight's character, Al McWhiggin, was also taken from an early version of Toy Story; Lasseter would later say that the slovenly character was based on...him and his extreme love of toys to the point where he would sometimes get bothered when his own kids tried to play with them. (It's not the most flattering comparison, since Al isn't a very complex character.) Bits and pieces throughout the film would be stitched together – even the opening scene, which is eventually revealed to be a video game within the movie itself, starring Buzz Lightyear at his most comically heroic, was a riff on an idea from the original film and how the audience would first be introduced to Buzz.In the period when Toy Story 2 was still headed for video first, it was being handled by the previous Interactive Products Group at Pixar, which had handled computer games for the studio based on Toy Story. Midway through production, Steve Jobs nixed that division, folding them into the proper production of the sequel; Disney had requested that a new producer be installed on the film, at the same time that everyone began to mull whether Toy Story 2 was more appropriate for the big screen. Part of the reason was that the story reels were impressive to Joe Roth and fellow Disney exec Peter Schneider. But part of the shift was cost. Where the DisneyToon Studios films could be made cheaply, the same wasn't exactly true of Toy Story 2. Since the sequel was still being made by Pixar, and not farmed out to another studio, the salaries for the people on the latter project were already higher than Disney would've otherwise wanted. More importantly, Pixar wasn't interested in cutting corners visually or technologically.

Before you marvel at the fact that a film often held up as one of the best Pixar ever made was essentially made in just nine months, consider the harsh reality of how that had to happen. At the time, Pixar wasn't quite a fledgling start-up, but it also wasn't the unstoppably dominant studio we now consider it. There were only so many people working on the production, and only so much time in the day. David Price's book recounts a horrifying anecdote: one unnamed animator, on a day during the ramped-up production, was tasked by his wife to drop their infant child off at daycare. He assented, only to realize hours later in the office that he had forgotten to drop their child off, and the infant was still in the car. Fortunately, the infant was fine. But it was a sign that Pixar's workers were overstressed, overtired, and pushed to impossible limits. On a larger level, roughly a third of the animators on the project were eventually felled by carpal tunnel syndrome or repetitive stress injuries due to their workloads and compressed schedules.The workloads were larger because the canvas for the story was larger, too. Toy Story mostly took place in just a few locations: Andy's bedroom, the bedroom of his toy-destroying neighbor Sid, a local restaurant called Pizza Planet, and a few vehicles. Toy Story 2 would incorporate Andy's bedroom once more, but the action was bigger: it would climax with a car chase that begins at an apartment building and ends on the runway of a tri-county airport. Some of the setpieces were visual proof of how far technology had come. The manic car chase of the first film's finale was echoed in a clever, sharply witty action sequence in which Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex, and Slinky Dog try to cross the street to enter Al's Toy Barn, without realizing that by doing so, they're causing a multi-car pileup that causes a light pole to fall from its foundation and land on the road. As Lasseter described in the film's commentary track, though, some of the seemingly simplest details were hardest to accomplish. In the early going, when Woody is placed on the top shelf in Andy's room because his arm has been torn from some roughhousing, he's shocked to see an old penguin squeaker toy, Wheezy, who's been up on the shelf for much longer. The dust particles ended up being a Herculean task for the animators, especially since there were two million particles to animate.

Hyperbolic though it may seem, "When She Loved Me" is one of the most important sequences in Pixar's filmography. In some ways, it seems like a bit of a double-down on the emotionally tinged song from Toy Story, "I Will Go Sailing No More". That song, performed and written by Randy Newman, plays as Buzz Lightyear sees a TV commercial for himself, realizes that Woody has been right about his toy identity, and attempts and fails to fly for real. With just a few words of dialogue, Buzz goes through an existential identity crisis. It's a sweet moment, but not exactly gut-wrenching."When She Loved Me" is different. The song, written by Newman but performed by Sarah McLachlan, accompanies a wordless flashback that explains what it is that's made Jessie such a bitter toy. She, like Woody, was once loved by a child, a girl named Emily. But unlike Woody, she had to experience what happened when her child grew out of playing with toys, relegated to being underneath Emily's bed for years...until an older Emily picks her up, takes her on a drive, and promptly donates her to a goodwill organization, abandoning her forever. As performed wistfully by McLachlan seven years before any of her music was used in those twinkly, heartbreaking ads for the ASPCA, "When She Loved Me" is nothing short of emotional terrorism. You can (and should) consider that to be a high compliment. "When She Loved Me" is a beautiful, achingly sad song accompanying animation that managed to hit hard with a lot of adults because it moved beyond the existential reality of a toy who thinks it's a space ranger. In that moment, some parents could see themselves as Jessie, being abandoned by their children as they grow up. And other adults could be guilted into seeing themselves as Emily, dropping off a toy after years of companionship. It's a brilliant sequence that serves as a template for future gut-wrenching sequences in Pixar's filmography.

Toy Story 2 was, like many Pixar films, not the kind of film to gradually get an audience. As with the original, audiences and critics knew instantly that this was something special. Not only was it a third solid film from Pixar, but it was that rarest of sequels: something as good as the original, if not better. Among critics, it's widely beloved, being one of the truly unique movies of the modern era: it has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, something few other films can claim. The film was also a big hit at the box office, outgrossing the two previous Pixar films with $245 million domestically and just under $500 million worldwide. Though Toy Story 2 couldn't claim to be the highest-grossing film of the year, it was one of Disney's biggest success stories. (As luck would have it, it wasn't even Disney's biggest hit in 1999: that was The Sixth Sense.)Pixar's animators had somehow pulled off the impossible. They had been tasked with overhauling a feature film with just nine months to go, a big cast, overworked schedules...and they managed to do it all. Pixar was now three for three — not all of their first few films were perfect, but they were consistently impressing critics and audiences the world over. They still had some new stories to tell, original ideas to push forward. Pixar's next film would hopefully push them further creatively.That is, if they were legally allowed to release it.

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Next Time: Learn about how the world of Monstropolis was nearly held up by a lawsuit.