Chapter 33 Section 4 Toy Breakout

Lasseter's favorite animation theme is to reflect the love and help between family or friends, and to show the protagonist's entire growth process from immaturity to maturity.This has also become Pixar's consistent thinking in choosing the theme of each film.Lasseter later said: "Like Pixar's own growth process, Pixar's films have always pursued the same theme: self-growth. With the help of friends or family members, the protagonist of the story has adventures in the real world and learns how to get along with friends and family. .The most important thing is that the movie story is always about the growth and transformation of this protagonist."

Since I have made a short film with toys as the theme like "Little Tin Soldier" before, why can't I use toys as the protagonists to tell the growth story of mutual love and mutual help among toy friends? In 1991, Lasseter wrote the screenplay for Toy Story. Adults and children who have watched "Toy Story", no one can forget the cowboy Woody and Buzz Lightyear.The story of two toys helping each other and growing together shocked the world when it was released in 1995.Of course, in addition to the good-looking stories, the real three-dimensional computer animation is also a feast for the eyes of everyone.

Just the 3D modeling of Cowboy Woody has 723 movable joints, which can freely simulate various actions under the command of the program.This was unimaginable before.With its excellent story and superb craftsmanship, "Toy Story" won the 1996 Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature Film and the Oscar Special Achievement Award (Special Achievement Award). Seeing the success of "Toy Story", outsiders would not have imagined that behind the film was five years of hard work.From 1991 to 1995, Jobs struggled in the abyss of NeXT and Pixar, seeing the investment come to naught little by little, and the only hope was to look forward to the early release of this animated feature film in cooperation with Disney.

In 1991, a 30-second sample shot and first draft of the script for "Toy Story" received approval from Disney executives.In order to ensure the quality of the film, Disney specially sent senior filmmakers to participate in the film production.But after all, this is the first time to shoot a 3D computer-animated feature film, and Pixar has encountered many difficulties in both technical and artistic aspects.While Catmull focused on refining the software and special effects techniques, Russell spent days and nights hammering out the characters, the plot, and every frame. Lasseter had no previous screenwriting experience.Therefore, it takes too much time to repeatedly revise the story alone.No matter how much Lasseter improved the storyline, Disney pundits just weren't satisfied.The longer the time dragged on, the more desperate Jobs became. He seemed to see the cycle that Apple and NeXT had repeatedly seen, where products were too advanced to be released.

The script for Toy Story wasn't finalized until July 1993.Lasseter's group began drawing animations on a computer.The film used the most powerful Sun and SGI graphics workstations.Even so, each frame can take hours to render.The entire film has hundreds of thousands of frames to render.In order to speed up the rendering process, we cluster many workstations to work in parallel. Just 10 months into filming, Disney once again took issue with the script.Katzenberg even threatened Lasseter with terminating the contract if he didn't fix the script. In April 1994, under heavy pressure, Lasseter finally came up with a script that Disney was satisfied with, and the filming continued.

While spending little time with Pixar, Jobs cared deeply about the production of Toy Story.He was always pointing fingers and constantly making suggestions to the staff.Every time he watched a sample, Jobs would say to Lasseter: "It's not engaging enough here, it needs to be cut. It needs to be accelerated there." Since Jobs is the boss, Lasseter had no choice but to perfunctory.But in fact, he felt that Jobs's suggestions were too laymen, and none of them were reliable. Pixar animators, including Lasseter, later concluded: "Jobs really has no film appreciation."

The finished "Toy Story" is composed of about 110,000 frames of three-dimensional images all rendered by computer, and these images fill up 1,000 discs.Even so, the production cost of the film is much cheaper than Disney's traditional two-dimensional animation.You know, Disney has hundreds of animators, and an average of 75 animators are needed to complete a film.Pixar, on the other hand, has only 27 animators, and computers do most of the work. Although he can't get in the way of movie creation, Jobs can still use his excellent marketing talent when the movie is approaching its premiere.Just like Apple was deliberating all the details of the Macintosh conference, he carefully considered the design of movie posters, movie trailers and billboards, the release date of the movie, the sales plan of toys, records and other movie peripheral products, and cooperated with Pixar and Disney of marketers go back and forth.

Later, almost every time a new Pixar film was released, Jobs would personally participate in the film's marketing plan.The depth of its involvement left a deep impression on a Time magazine reporter. "He scrutinized the schedule," the reporter recalled, "like a lawyer poring over a code." On November 22, 1995, the long-awaited "Toy Story" was officially released, and successfully harvested a global box office of about 350 million US dollars. With the strong momentum of "Toy Story", Pixar officially went public on November 29, 1995.Jobs' investment finally paid off.Within a few days, Pixar's stock price rose rapidly from $22 at the opening to $50, and Jobs himself became a billionaire from near bankruptcy.

Jobs himself commented on "Toy Story" in this way: "We believe that this movie is the longest progress in the field of animation since Disney made the world's first animated feature film "Snow White" 60 years ago." After "Toy Story", Pixar's creative potential in the field of 3D animation was fully released. Since then, it has been unstoppable. At the rate of one blockbuster every two years, it has shot more than a dozen popular animation feasts.Among them, the films that have won Oscars (excluding nominations and special achievement awards) include "Monsters, Inc", "Finding Nemo", "The Incredibles", "Ratatouille", "WALL-E", "Flying House" Around the World" and "Toy Story 3".