More on Toy Story

In creating the main characters for Toy Story, the animators were interested in relating the characters to current pop-culture icons such as the cowboy, the astronaut and the American idea of the frontier.  Lasseter noted "because of the popularity of Jurassic Park, we knew we had to have a dinosaur." Lasseter also explained that, originally, Buzz was supposed to be named Lunar Larry and was supposed to be more of a silly character.  With Tim Allen's vocal performance, they then decided to switch Buzz to a more bossy type character.  This was when it first became the typical trend for Pixar to use TV stars, movie stars and singers as lead roles in their animated films.  This offered familiar voices to the audience, and made the films even more lovable for fans.  This is shown when Tom Hanks played the voice of Woody, and brought warmth and sincerity to the character.  This is probably because he had stared as classic, lovable roles such as in Forest Gump, Splash, Big and Sleepless in Seattle.























https://media.giphy.com/media/UeQRyYEGLtvrO/giphy.gif


As the character of Woody was being developed, the animator Jeff Pidgeon originally designed and sketched him to be more troubled looking and comical than the final draft.  Interestingly enough, Pixar used more famous actors as their voice actors in their earlier films than they do now.  Now, their name has become more famous and more popular and use of famous actors in their movies is not as necessarily important.

 Works Cited:

Clarke, James. The Films of Pixar Animation Studio. Kamera Books, 2013.