Woody: There's no place like home!
[Narrator] This is a dog
in 1995's "Toy Story."
It was a staggering
achievement at the time,
but the detail in the
fur just isn't there.
Compare that to this cat in "Toy Story 4."
The difference is clear.
But getting from that dog
to this cat
required a lot of innovation in between.
Pixar forever changed animation
in 1995 with "Toy Story,"
the first full-length
computer-animated movie.
With "Toy Story 4," it's proving
that it's far from done changing the game.
Between 1995 and 2019,
Pixar has made 21 feature-length films,
four of those being "Toy Story" movies.
When "Toy Story" was
first released in 1995,
nobody had ever seen
anything like it before.
And in order to bring it to life,
the animators had to do
some unbelievable things.
And one of the most important factors
in how Pixar makes its magic
happen involves rendering.
Rendering saves the computer image
to the perfect finished
image or video frame,
with lighting and motion effects.
In order to render "Toy
Story," the animators
had 117 computers running 24 hours a day.
Each individual frame
could take from 45 minutes
to 30 hours to render,
depending on how complex.
There were a total of
114,240 frames to render.
Throughout the movie, there are
over 77 minutes of animation
spread across 1,561 shots.
They had to invent a new
software, called Renderman,
to handle all this footage.
Woody: These guys are professionals.
They're the best!
[Narrator] According to
producer Jonas Rivera,
if they had to today, they
could render "Toy Story"
faster than you could
watch the entire movie.
However, the complexity of "Toy Story 4"
means it can take 60 to 160
hours to render one frame.
And there were a lot of limitations.
For instance, at this time,
Pixar hadn't quite figured out
how to fully animate human characters.
Animating clothes was time-consuming,
so you'll notice a lot of
shots of hands and feet
in the movie from a toy's perspective.
Additionally, they would sometimes choose
not to fully light characters,
so you wouldn't see any missing details.
More on lighting characters
and fully clothing them later.
When "Toy Story 2" came around in 1999,
they'd had some time to
work out some of the kinks,
especially with 1998's "A Bug's Life"
in between the two movies.
In this sequel, you'll be
able to see more visible,
fully formed human characters.
One key thing the animators
were starting to figure out here
to help them tackle humans: smoothness,
which they got practice
on in "A Bug's Life."
Here, you can see the
improvement in just a few years.
They wouldn't be ready to
have a fully human cast
until 2004's "The Incredibles."
But before mastering humans,
they stepped into fantasy
with 2001's "Monsters, Inc."
Worker: Ooh, they're so awesome!
[Narrator] In "Monsters, Inc."
they tackled fur head-on.
Fur is hard to animate,
whether computer-generated or stop-motion.
This is because it involves
animating thousands,
or even millions, of individual
parts of a character's body.
In the VFX world, characters are designed
then rigged by adding points of movement,
which can then be manually manipulated.
While limbs are typically
manual based on the scene,
something like fur needed to be automated,
since it would take a
lot more time to move
each individual strand of hair.
"A Bug's Life," which centers on insects,
didn't have a need for fur.
And there is a dog in "Toy
Story," but as you'll notice,
it's pretty smooth, as is
the dog in "Toy Story 2."
Sully, who's tall and
covered head to toe in fur,
has over 1 million hairs on his body.
But it's not just how it looks;
the animators had to get
all of those hairs to move.
To do this, they created a
program called Simulation,
in which certain elements
that are too difficult
to hand-animate are motion-simulated.
See, instead of looking at
Sully's hair as a whole,
they looked at each strand
as a distinct particle.
They had to look at every kind of force
that would act on those particles,
and thus how each one would
move in reaction to them.
So if you want to work at Pixar,
you might need to know physics.
They also found real-world
fur on different animals,
like llamas, for reference.
By doing this, they found
the best way to make hair
look and move realistically
is to clump it together.
"Monsters, Inc." laid down
the technical foundation,
which allowed Pixar to have
over 250 furry monsters
in the sequel, "Monsters University."
The tools at their
disposal also helped them
create fur on animals seen
in "Ratatouille" and "Up,"
the moss on the submarine from
this scene in "Finding Nemo,"
and the grass on the ground in "Cars."
Pixar's next movie, 2003's "Finding Nemo,"
also required the
animators to create things
they'd never put on screen before.
This time, they had to figure
out how to make a movie
set largely underwater.
Once again, science and
real-world references
would help them out.
Just as they did with hair,
they broke down the water
as much as they could to get it right.
According to director of
photography Danielle Feinberg,
they started with a
real-life underwater clip,
re-created it in the computer,
and broke it down to find
the most essential elements.
The biggest one? Light, and
how it travels through water.
The light they created
affected both the visibility
and the color of the film's
elaborate underwater world.
And while they need science
to animate certain elements of a movie,
there are times where they
can use artistic license.
For instance, they made
the water in Sydney Harbour
look fairly green to fit
the mood of the scene.
In reality, it would not be that color.
Once the environment was created,
they had to populate the world.
Perhaps the most challenging
sea creature they had to create
was Hank the octopus from the
2016 sequel, "Finding Dory."
It was literally impossible
for them to put Hank in "Nemo,"
and you can see why.
Creating just one scene with him
supposedly took about two years.
Character supervisor
Jeremy Talbot explained
that they had to break down an octopus
and piece it back together again,
which sounds a lot like how
Pixar mastered fur and water.
One thing they discovered
was that octopus tentacles
don't bend but almost unfurl.
An engineer spent six months just getting
the curve of one of his tentacles right,
and this was even before
they mastered his camouflage.
And as Pixar got better at
developing the natural world,
it also improved on the man-made world.
By the time 2006's "Cars" came around,
Pixar had about 1,000
times the computing power
it did on "Toy Story."
"Cars" gave the animators a
chance to hone their skills
creating metal surfaces.
As they did with the
water in "Finding Nemo,"
they took time to make the light reflect
off Lightning McQueen.
Those metal surfaces
would then be rusted up
and seen in 2008's
"Wall-E," often considered
one of Pixar's most
visually stunning works.
Then when "Ratatouille"
rolled around in 2007,
Pixar combined its ability
to work with fur from "Monsters, Inc."
and with water in "Finding
Nemo" to display wet fur.
Lighting is one of the
most important factors
in making CG animation look real.
It takes a lot of rendering
time to get it right.
And it's not just one or two
lights we're talking about.
This one shot alone in
"Ratatouille" contained 230 lights.
But that's nothing.
Jump ahead to 2017's "Coco."
When Miguel enters the Land of the Dead,
he's laying his eyes on
about 8 million lights.
And even with a movie as
visually ambitious as this one,
something as simple as clothes
can be the biggest challenge.
A lot of the characters
that wore clothes in "Coco"
were actually skeletons.
The animators found that
while simulating clothing,
the cloth would often get
caught between individual bones,
creating a wedgie of sorts.
For this, it implemented a technique
called continuous collision detection,
which allowed the animators to spot
the clothes getting caught,
even at moments where it
was difficult to notice.
A year later, when the long-awaited
"Incredibles 2" came out
they were back to working with
humans: skin, bones, and all.
There was a 14-year gap between
the two "Incredibles" movies
and the benefits of improved technology
actually allowed them to make Jack-Jack
look even cuter than he
did in the first movie.
All of these movies would
eventually lead to "Toy Story 4."
Twenty-four years after
the original was released,
it seems like this sequel is
trying to do a lot of things
the original just couldn't.
The differences couldn't be more stark.
While "Toy Story" used
a 1.85:1 aspect ratio,
"Toy Story 4" expanded to 2.39:1,
so what you saw went from this
to this.
Now that Pixar had figured out
how to put fur on one character
and then hundreds more,
it could make the animals
in this movie eye-popping.
Fans pointed out that a
cat in a clip for the movie
looked 100% real.
Compare that with Sid's
dog in the original
if you really want to know
how far Pixar has come.
Even just compare how
much different it looks
from the cat in "Coco."
In the same vein, creating
stuffed animals covered in fur
was not the challenge it once was,
and it allowed Pixar to give
Ducky and Bunny starring roles.
In addition, rain scenes
are not easy to animate.
Just like with the
water in "Finding Nemo,"
the animators did a physics-centered,
frame-by-frame analysis of raindrops.
Luckily, they'd done
enough creating rivers
in "The Good Dinosaur" that
bringing a torrential downpour
to life was a little less challenging.
Like with Jack-Jack in "Incredibles 2,"
the animators use sequels as an excuse
to improve upon their classics.
They didn't just give
Bo Peep a new outfit;
they were also able to make her look
like a much more convincing doll.
Years of perfecting shiny surfaces
allowed them to really bring
out Bo's porcelain skin.
To effectively light this material,
the director of photography referenced
lighting of female characters in movies
made from the 1930s through the 1960s.
The team also realized they couldn't use
square lights on Bo.
Only circular lights without sharp edges
would reflect well on porcelain.
"Toy Story 4" also gave Pixar a chance
to do something surprising:
go back to basics.
Look no further than Forky.
Forky: I don't belong here!
[Narrator] There are no tentacles, no fur,
no shiny surfaces here,
just a plastic fork.
But he couldn't be more real.
And Pixar isn't slowing down anytime soon.
In fact, they're moving
"Onward," literally.
