Emeryville, .- Almost 25 years ago, Pixar changed the history of animated films with “Toy Story”. Now, the company adds a fourth stage to that trip with “Toy Story 4”, a film that, with Woody and Buzz Lightyear at the forefront, is a new attempt to achieve maximum perfection in digital animation.
Pixar invited a group of media, including Efe, to its headquarters in Emeryville (California, USA) to learn more details of this film that will hit theaters on June 21 and that, first of all, must answer to a huge question: does it make sense a fourth installment of this saga after the brilliant, emotional and virtually insurmountable closure of “Toy Story 3” (2010)?
“That’s the mother of all questions,” admitted the director of the new film, Josh Cooley, at a press conference.
“We love the end of ‘Toy Story 3’: it ends the story of Woody and Andy perfectly, we realized that there was more story to tell to continue with Woody’s story, once we started to follow that path, we found something that deserved to be counted, “he added.
As a preview, the journalists could see about 40 minutes of “Toy Story 4”, which includes favorites from the public such as Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Jessie or Rex but also some news.
One of the most outstanding is the return of Bo Peep, the porcelain shepherd who was the romantic interest of Woody and who has now become an independent woman and very self-confident.
In addition, “Toy Story 4” will present new characters like Forky, which aims to be one of its great protagonists.
Forky is a toy built from scratch by the Bonnie girl from scraps like a plastic spoon-fork or play dough.
The surprise, almost worthy of an existentialist debate, comes when this fragile and bobo contraption becomes aware of itself and its own life as a toy.
Producer Jonas Rivera explained that Forky is a reflection of how unpredictable and imaginative children are when, for example, they “open a toy and play with the box.”
“We thought that, if you were a toy, that would be the worst insult,” he joked.
Another notable addition to “Toy Story 4” is that of Gabby Gabby, a chilling doll who lives in an antique shop and whose bodyguards are several ventriloquists of the most sinister.
Apart from the new characters, the advancement of the film drew attention to the extraordinary digital perfection achieved by Pixar.
For example, the initial sequence, with an exciting conversation between Woody and Bo Peep, is a technological prodigy when embroidering a rain so real that it almost does not reach to wet the spectators.
The dust and cobwebs of the corners, the much more advanced design of humans and animals, or the complexity of lighting and photography are other examples of the great development that Pixar has achieved since it launched its first film in 1995, “Toy Story”.
“It was an 81-minute film, Pixar’s longest production up until then lasted five minutes, in many ways, we did not really know what we were doing (…): we got into the pool and learned to swim as we went.” , recalled about “Toy Story” Bill Reeves, technological supervisor and one of the veterans who has worked on the four films of the saga.
Since then, Pixar, one of the jewels of the Disney crown, has chained masterpieces such as “Monsters, Inc.” (2001), “Finding Nemo” (2003), “Ratatouille” (2007), “WALL · E” (2008), “Inside Out” (2015) or “Coco” (2017), but their fans have always kept a very special corner for the locusts and endearing toys of “Toy Story”.
Not everything has been happy moments in Pixar, since in 2017 John Lasseter, the great brain of the company, left his position due to improper behavior and having gone overboard with his staff.
With the already assumed absence of Lasseter, the word that is constantly repeated in the team of “Toy Story 4” is “responsibility”: to be up to the gigantic expectations of his followers and even themselves.
“There are people working on this movie who has said: ‘The first film I saw was’ Toy Story ‘so I do not want to spoil it,'” Rivera said.
“It’s a real mix of veterans and new people with the same sense of responsibility, so we just do everything we can to have what we would like to see.” (EFEUSA)
