It’s been a while since “Toy Story 2” opened in theaters–eleven years to be exact.
The movie was a box-office hit for Disney and Pixar and since that time rumors have abounded about a possible third installment. With the third installment finally arriving this week, Hollywood is hoping the interest in the movie will kick the summer season of its box-office rut.
But what took so long for the film to get made?
There are a variety of factors, according to SciFi Wire.
One of them is that in order to animate the movie, all the characters had to be re-created. The original character models were no longer compatible with Pixar’s new software and technology that were used to create “Up” last year.
“It’s kind of like when you try to open an old file on your computer from 10 years ago. Good luck being able to do it,” director Lee Unkrich said. “Our software has advanced to the point now where all those old files cannot be opened and used anymore. So we had to completely reinvent every one of the characters and remodel them from scratch. It was interesting, because we wanted to keep them very much the same. We didn’t want them to look noticeably different, but it gave us the opportunity to correct a lot of little things that we wished we had done better way back when and kind of put more detail into Woody and Buzz and all the characters. We had to do it carefully, because I didn’t want the audience to feel like they were looking at characters that had had bad plastic surgery done on them.”
Unich said that the new technology has allowed the movie to create more detail for the characters, including more movement for series star Buzz Lightyear.
Another detail that took eleven years was getting back all the actors who worked on the first two films and to find a story that would give each character his or her moment on-screen.
“It’s not tough to give everyone something to do,” Unkrich explained. “It’s more tough to keep the focus on kind of the main characters. With so many characters, you can imagine the story could get really watered down and we’d have a hard time paying attention to the right characters. At the end of the day, we know that Woody’s the main character in the film and Buzz and Jessie close behind him. So they get the lion’s share of the lines and the moments in the film and then everybody else tapers off from there.”
For more on the process for creating “Toy Story 3” you can check out the full article at SciFi Wire.
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