Last month, Collider and a few other journalists trecked to Pixar Studio’s San Francisco campus to learn about the ins and outs of making the highly-anticipatedToy Story 4. In addition to being the most Silicon Valley-esque ode to film tech you can imagine—there’s a case of Oscars when you walk in the door, which is quite the flex—the place is just an absolute dream for animation lovers. Spend a few hours at Pixar and you’ll quickly realize that, in addition to directorJosh Cooleyand writersStephanyFolsomandAndrew Stanton, the latest chapter is being crafted by a veritable army of animators, storytellers, artists, designers, photographers, and craftspeople larger than you can possibly imagine.
We got the opportunity to chat with a bunch of them, as well as screen a portion of the film’s gorgeous opening half. Here are 35 plot details, story specifics, and behind-the-scenes facts we learned.
The Carnival
If you’ve ever been to Alcatraz in San Francisco, part of the tour is, they say the prisoners were going crazy because they could hear people having parties and laughing across the way, it was like 1,000 miles away from them. That’s really emotional and interesting, and we thought the toy version of that is right outside this antique store. Right there is kids having fun and trying to win toys.
The Antique Store
Hendricks: “This is really great, I actually didn’t want Barbie dolls as a kid, I used to play with ventriloquist dummies.”
Cooley: “What?”
Hendricks: “Yeah, I actually have a lot of doll heads in the house right now.”
Cooley: “Just the heads?”
“[Reeves] completely won me over, to the point where…at one point he just got up on the table, like imagine sitting down there eating lunch with everybody, and he gets up on the table and goes ‘Hoo! Ha! Huh!’ Doing poses. I was like ‘This is it, it’s incredible.'”
The New Bo Peep
Small Details
