Two years ago, the question in Oscar and animation circles was, “When will a Pixar movie finally crack the list of Best Picture nominees?" Now that the roster of nominees has grown from five to 10, there’s a new question: “Will 'Toy Story 3' be the first animated winner?"
Certainly, Disney is hoping so -- and is prepping a massive marketing campaign to support it. The most successful Pixar film of all time, director Lee Unkrich’s final chapter in the saga that began with Pixar’s first movie in 1995 has garnered nearly unanimous raves and a $1 billion-plus box-office gross.
But the film, which came to DVD and Blu-ray on Tuesday, could easily have gone awry: At one point Disney, who owned the rights to the iconic characters, was moving ahead with a direct-to-video sequel without Pixar’s input.
It wasn’t until 2006, when Disney bought Pixar and put that company’s founder John Lasseter in charge of Disney animation, that the Disney version was killed and the “Toy Story” reins were handed to Unkrich and producer Darla K. Anderson.
When you make a movie like “Toy Story 3,” are you thinking of a specific audience that you want to reach?
ANDERSON: From the beginning, since the original “Toy Story,” it’s always been making movies for ourselves.
UNKRICH: We do make sure the movies are appropriate for kids. But I think the moment you try to make a movie for kids, you make garbage. Who are we to know what kids want to see? And if you try to target a movie at kids, you end up with something that makes parents take a nap. I’ve been to a lot of those with my kids over the years.
Some people have said that the ending, in which the toys are nearly sucked into a giant incinerator, might be too intense for kids.
UNKRICH: We talked about that. But it tested fine, and we ultimately decided that it is fine.
In our quest to protect kids, we’ve watered a lot of entertainment down to the point where it doesn’t have bite anymore, and it doesn’t teach anything. Kids’ entertainment, from its inception, from the beginnings of Victorian children’s literature, was about teaching kids about the evils of the world, and that there are bad people in the world, and bad things can happen. Cautionary tales.
What we’ve found is that kids don’t experience that scene in the same way that adults do. Kids don’t have the same sense of their own mortality as adults – and while the kids know that the toys are in danger, they’re not feeling the heaviness that many of us feel when we watch that scene.
Animated films are extremely time-consuming. When did you start on the project?
ANDERSON: It really started pretty much at the moment that Disney bought Pixar.
