by Paul Heaney

Toy Story 3, the latest Pixar animation release, has opened nationwide in Irish cinemas this week after breaking box office records in the US. To promote the film and as part of a special screening for the 2010 Galway Film Fleadh, the film’s director Lee Unkrich and producer Darla K Anderson flew into Galway for a series of interviews.

The pair are between them responsible for almost three billion dollars of tickets sold worldwide, with Unkrich's having worked on the Toy Story trilogy (he was editor on Toy Story and Toy Story 2, and co-directed '2', TS3 is his sole directing debut) and Anderson’s having produced A Bug’s Life, Cars and TS3.

Easily Pixar’s best film, both emotionally and creatively to date, Toy Story 3 has been met with well-deserved critical and commercial success worldwide. Pixar first introduced the CG-animated feature with Toy Story in '95, creating a blueprint for what animation should be and revolutionizing the industry overnight.

Then, four years later, Pixar soared to even greater heights with Toy Story 2, laying the foundation for subsequent ambition and innovation. Fifteen years after Buzz and Woody first met, the studio bids a bittersweet farewell to Woody and Buzz’s adventures in Toy Story 3 which opened nationwide with a rare start-of-week debut on Monday.
 

A question that has intrigued me is why, after Pixar’s still unbroken string of creative and commercial successes, animation is still somehow seen as only for kids, or at worst, secondary to live-action films? Unkrich has a readymade answer. “Well, you know, there’s this weird bias, in the United States especially – that animation is just for kids. We’ve done our best over the years to try to break that. I think we’ve made slow progress, but we’ve made progress.

“From the beginning, we tried to make movies for everybody. They’ve never been targeted to kids. I think the moment you try to make something for kids, you are making something really cruddy that even kids don’t want to watch most of the time. These movies are for everybody, and we want everybody to relate to them on different levels.

“There are mature ideas and themes and feelings in this film that I think are going to affect many grownups, but kids are at a different stage in their life. They don’t experience things the same way adults do. They don’t have the same feelings, and they’re going to have a very different experience of the film. Hopefully they’re still entertained, but it’ll be in a very different way from adults,” he says.

Things have not always been smoothly planned at the studio, as the near-calamity with Toy Story 2’s production suddenly unfolded. “With Toy Story 2, it was more a realization that when we were all together, we could do amazing work, because we had to redo that whole film in only nine months. We basically shut down the studio and it was all hands on deck to get the movie made.”

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.