I have a huge toy collection so I've-,
the hard thing is convincing my wife that it's part of the job.
If you've grown up loving Toy Story characters,
what do you think that says about you?
(laughter)
These films are all about Woody and his relationships
with what are essentially his family.
I think people relate to that
because they see themselves in these characters.
They're so clearly defined from the very beginning
and I think they're very universal in that sense.
Each film, you've had the advantage of better technology,
but tried to have little effect on the characters.
Why do you think it's important to keep them untouched?
Yeah, I mean, we want them to look untouched.
We want them to feel exactly like the characters that you remember
when you're picturing in your mind's eye
what the earlier films looked like,
but we also have this new technology that we had to use,
and in the last nine years, it's developed enough
that we had to go back in and recreate the characters.
We did need to re-shade them and rework some of their articulation,
so while they look the way they used to,
we did have to bring them into the new technology.
You had a special team redesign Bo Peep.
What difference did a whole team working on one character make?
Man, it made a massive difference with Bo Peep.
They called themselves Team Bo
and it was made up of story people and animators
and artists and character designers and cloth people.
They really invested a lot of time into her,
first of all, just wanting to be true to her materials, she's porcelain,
but also making her this adventurous spirit
that we were shaping her character into.
They were the ones that helped find a way to re-craft her look
where she's repurposing the outfit that we know her from
in the first films, and she's ripped it, torn it, made it into a cape,
and is now living this adventurous life and thriving out there.
I really think, from story all the way to her look,
there's a lot of influence from the crew and Team Bo.
The new character Forky is not manufactured but made out of junk.
(laughter)
Is the animation different to the other toys, was it harder?
Yeah, we wanted to make sure that he moved
differently from everybody else.
The other characters have very smooth movements to them
but his are very rigid, almost like a baby deer being born
or something that can't really get its balance yet,
so we made sure to make his animation kind of worse.
- As clumsy as a spork is? - Exactly, yeah.
The ventriloquist's dummies are terrifying in the film.
How did you make them so creepy?
It wasn't very hard to do.
People are scared of ventriloquist's dummies.
The reason they were in there is we went and did
so much research on this film.
We went to a lot of antique stores.
Every single one of them had a dummy in the corner
just kind of staring at you,
and I had a dummy when I was a kid
so it was like, 'We need to put him in there.'
If you were a kid and you were at Second Chance Antique Store
and you saw all of the Toy Story gang,
what would you spend your pocket money on?
All of it.
(laughter) I've done it many times.
I have a huge toy collection so I've-,
the hard thing is convincing my wife that it's part of the job.
It's finished now, you've got to make a fifth.
(he sighs)
No, it was just-,
it was all about figuring out number four
and making sure that it felt like this is a part of Woody's arc
and a way that concludes it in a way that's satisfying.
We learn in the film that there was over 30 years
of Woody's life before Andy.
Do you know what he was up to or if we'll ever see it?
Woody's never told us that.
Yeah, I've asked him before and he really doesn't like to talk about it.
No, you know, there's this great implied history to Woody.
He's from the 1950s, and the point of it story-wise
is that he's had this great tenure, he's done everything right,
and he's always been played with and cared for
and he's thrived all these years.
But yeah, it is a little bit of a mystery.
We're not really sure, we just know it's been good
and he was where he needed to be for Toy Story 1
and at a point in 4 where we could really change him.
One last question.
If you were a kid at the Second Hand Antique Store
and you saw all the Toy Story gang,
what would you spend your pocket money on?
Oh, good question.
- If they were all there? - Yeah.
Um-,
I've gotta go Duke Caboom.
I mean, I know he can't live up to the commercial,
but I would want to spend a lot of time trying to see
if I could get him to jump properly.
He's pretty cool.
If they were all there, I would see Woody-,
I think it would be Woody.
- I would spend my money on Woody. - He's a classic.
Yeah.