The Toys are back (From The Northern Echo)

The Toys are back

12:43pm Thursday 22nd July 2010 in

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Steve Pratt doesn’t mind holding the baby when it comes to discussing the success of Toy Story 3 with director Lee Unkrich.

DIRECTOR Lee Unkrich left me holding the baby. Big Baby, one of the new characters in the record-breaking animated movie Toy Story 3.

Except this was a miniature version of Big Baby, not unlike an overweight Jelly Baby. Unkrich’s latest directorial assignment is to take photographs of all the journalists he meets on his European promotional tour holding Big Baby and puts them on his Twitter site.

Toy Story 3 has received some of the best five star reviews of the year with box office success – $110m in the US opening weekend – matching the critics’ comments. Unkrich, who directs this third and final instalment about Andy and his toys, has been with Toy Story from the start as a film editor on Toy Story, codirector of the sequel and now director of the third. His other work at Pixar Animation Studios has included co-directing Monsters Inc and Finding Nemo.

“I guess we felt we had more to say,” is his reply about making Toy Story 3.

“We didn’t want to say goodbye to Woody and Buzz completely. They’re the flagship characters in the story of our studio and the more we started to talk about we realised that we hadn’t told the complete story in the first two films.

“We thought we’d ended Toy Story 2 in a way that ended the story – Woody’s made peace with the fact that Andy’s going to grow up one day and outgrow him.

“The more we talked about it we thought that’s kind of a naive sentiment. We think we know how we’re going to react to something in the future but it’s another thing entirely when you find yourself at that day. We thought it would be interesting to see how Woody, Buzz and the rest of the toys for that matter would deal with that inevitability of being outgrown and not being needed.”

He didn’t set out with the intention of topping Toy Story 1 and 2. The pressure was “not to screw it up and to make a film that was even remotely worthy of sitting beside the other two”.

What no one making the film predicted was just how much Toy Story 3 would make grown men cry. “When we were making the film we screened it a lot and people within Pixar would cry in the end and at different spots. At that point it just told me we were doing our job well, telling a story that people were getting invested in.

“It did surprise me how much it’s been talked about. I didn’t expect that at all. It’s due to a few things. In one regard it’s a pining for childhood, a loss of innocence of childhood.

“You continue to feel that all through life – that feeling of no longer being a kid. I remember when I was 18 and at college I saw the movie ET.

I’d seen it before and saw it again at that point in my life and I remember just crying unexpectedly. After the movie was over I couldn’t stop and I realised it was like I was mourning I wasn’t a kid any more.

“The toys spend most of this film not being appreciated, being abandoned and feeling forgotten. At the end, unexpectedly, they get this reaffirmation that Andy did actually care about them and he plays with them one last time. That touches something very deep in a lot of people, not because of the specifics of what’s happening on screen but because it’s tapping into something deeper.”

One moment in Toy Story 3 earned him a reproving look from his wife as it mirrored something in their life.

“Years ago she still had all her stuffed animals from when she was a kid. We were moving to a new apartment and she put them in a garbage bag to be moved. I thought it was trash and threw it out in the dumpster behind our building,” he admits.

“We didn’t discover that for about five weeks and she’s never let me forget it in all these years. But when we were cooking up what was happening in the beginning of the movie we wanted the toys to get thrown away accidentally so I immediately thought of that. We crafted a moment that was very similiar to that, so when my wife finally saw it I felt her turn to me in recognition.”

Having joined Pixar in 1994, after working in TV for several years as an editor and director, he’s able to describe the company’s success as due to “a ruthless devotion to telling the best stories we can – we stop at nothing to make sure they’re great and fix any little thing we think is less than great”.

“We never take it for granted that every movie we make is going to be big. We start each one just as nervous, just as unsure whether it’s a good idea and work on it for a long time to try to realise the full potential.”

He won’t pick a favourite character from Toy Story, but does own up to remembering fondly several toys he had as a child. One was a ventriloquist’s dummy called Willie Talk. “The funny thing with him is I loved him during the day and carried him around everywhere but I was afraid of him at night,”

he says. “So I had this weird love hate relationship with him. It kind of speaks to the fact that kids are afraid of toys sometimes.”

Which brings us to Toy Story 3’s Big Baby, a doll that is very spooky indeed. Even the miniature version Unkrich carries around can have that effect. “We put toys in like Big Baby that are speaking to that creepy factor that some toys have.”

Toy Story 4 has been ruled out – “from the very beginning we conceived Toy Story 3 as the end of the story of Andy and his toys” – but Pixar are finding ways to keep the characters alive, including a short film that will be shown with Cars 2 next year.

■ Toy Story 3 (U) is out now.