If you’re like me, you left “Toy Story 2” convinced that it surpassed its predecessor visually (as well as emotionally) even if you couldn’t pinpoint exactly how.
It certainly seemed packed with more eye-grabbing details, such as all of those criss-crossing airport conveyor belts. But even if you watched the two movies back to back, you might not catch all the ways “Toy Story 2” is a technological leap over its predecessor — as well as over “A Bug’s Life,” Pixar’s computer-animated movie released by Disney last year.
Galyan Susman knows all too well. As its supervising technical director, she tried to make sure “Toy Story 2” pulled off a tricky balancing act: wowing an audience that has become accustomed to sophisticated computer animation (thanks largely to the other two Pixar features) without making the movie seem like it inhabits a different galaxy from the original.
So the carryover characters — Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the other toys plus human Andy and his mom — look pretty much the same, but their movements are more fluid and everything has more texture. Did you notice that the “Toy Story 2” cast is having a much better collective hair day than they did in the 1995 movie?
“The hair in `Toy Story’ was really just a collection of basic patches with something that looks like hair painted onto them,” Susman said. “What we decided was that really the only way to make convincing-looking hair was to model (that is, replicate) hairs, so mom’s head has something like 300,000 hairs on her head. Buster the little dog has 4 million hairs all over his body.
“They’re actual — I won’t say actual hairs because obviously nobody ripped their hair out of their head and shoved it into a computer — but they’re designed like hairs. They’re like little tapered cylinders.”
Another improvement: cloth.
“Our surface technology in general is a lot better,” she said. “I think in `Toy Story’ things felt very much like painted plastic. On this movie I feel that we’ve come a lot farther. Cloth has a weave to it and a fibrous feeling to it that we weren’t able to achieve the first time around. And so our materials, I think, are much truer to what the materials actually look like.”
Susman said one reason the surfaces look so much better this time is that the artists are working with more sophisticated systems.
“Right now we have a paint system that allows traditional painters to paint on our 3-D objects as if they were sitting in front of them,” she said. “What that has allowed them to do is paint in all kinds of textures — scuffs, scratches, markings, all those kinds of things — but also all of the stuff that would make the human skin look so much better. So (evil toy store owner) Al’s face has pores and 5 o’clock shadow and zits and all this kind of stuff that you now put on by having traditionally trained painters — really good artists — sit down and paint onto these surfaces.”
Of course, the painting, like everything else, takes place inside computers. “Toy Story 2,” like a conventional film, is the product of various departments’ work. But in this case the art department builds airport conveyor belts using what’s basically a computerized Lego set, the modeling department provides curves and otherwise manipulates these building blocks into the appropriate shapes, the shading department applies the various textures, and the set-dressing department adds the final touches based on what’s happening in the story, Susman said.
“Toy Story 2” also was able to take advantage of general computer advancements such as faster speeds and larger memory capacities that enabled the designers to fill the frames with more objects, many in motion. And if the movie seems more cinematic than its predecessor, that’s no accident either.
“In the `Toy Story’ world everything was really crisp, and it was too much detail in that everything was sort of in focus, and as a result it didn’t feel very natural,” Susman said. “One of the things that we had to do in `Bug’s Life’ was get this feeling that you were like an itty-bitty minicam down at the ant level, and the way to do that was really to throw everything very rapidly out of focus.
“We took that (technology) back to the `Toy Story 2′ world and said, OK, knowing what we know, we can really take more of the traditional principles of live-action cinematography and apply them to the work that we were doing in `Toy Story 2.’ “
Susman said if you want a good point of contrast between the two “Toy Story” movies, look at the dogs.
“If you compare Scud, which is Sid’s dog in the first movie, to Buster in this movie, you can see a real advancement in our technologies in regards to hair and surfaces in general,” she said. “And also I think in animation controls. Scud was a much stiffer moving dog, and if you look at Buster, he’s just very fluid. His whole body moves. He pants and he stretches and he does all of the things that you would expect a dog to do. You feel that sense of skin moving over bone.”
Given what a critical and record-breaking box-office smash “Toy Story 2” has proven to be, it’s hard to fathom that when work began on it, it was supposed to go straight to video. Someone eventually made the no-brainer decision to redirect it to the big screen.
“When you’re designing for a direct-to-video release, you’re doing things low-detailed and much more graphic so that things can be seen on a small screen,” Susman said. “So you’re doing things that are very high contrast, lower detail, very graphic lines. That’s the antithesis of what you want to do when you’re putting something up on a big screen. You want a lot more of that subtle detail. You don’t want to push that contrast that high. You want to have a full palette, very visually rich. So a lot of the work that we had done initially for the video release had to be redone.”
As for the most technically challenging sequence in “Toy Story 2,” Susman said one contender is the establishing shot of the airport, which shows about 50 people moving around plus baggage carts, luggage, cars and an airplane — all while the “camera” moves. But to her the biggest achievement is a less frenetic moment.
“There’s a scene with Al on the sofa that just really I think represents a lot of the best of our technologies coming to bear,” Susman said. “It’s the one where he spills the bowl of Chee-tos. I don’t know whether it was necessarily the most difficult, but he looks really good. The shading of him is really lovely. The animation is just outstanding. It really tells the story.”
Can you digit — no we can’t: As great as “Toy Story 2” looks, word is it looks even better when projected digitally instead of shown on traditional film. Jeffrey Wells, who writes the “Showbiz Confidential” column for Reel.com, saw the movie in Los Angeles at one of six theaters equipped to project it digitally, and he reported on-line:
“I have never seen an animated film (let alone computer-generated one) look quite this awesome. The glowing, radiant colors. The smoothness of the images. And those textures! Those surfaces! The hair, the fabrics — there’s a huge close-up of a cotton swab that takes your breath away.”
So when is the digital “Toy Story 2” set to open in Chicago?
It isn’t.
But, hey, you can always trek out to Southern California, San Francisco, Orlando or Plano, Texas, for a peek.
Still, Disney is throwing us a digital bone of sorts. When the new Robin Williams comedy “Bicentennial Man” opens Dec. 17, it will play digitally at theaters in Toronto, Vancouver, Cleveland, Phoenix, Kansas City and, yes, Barrington. Whether there’s actually any advantage to seeing a digital projection of a movie shot on film remains to be seen.
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E-mail: mcaro@tribune.com
