Toy Story 3

[Ravi]

I love the Toy Story films but does anyone else kind of not want to see a Toy Story 3?

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well its got a bad taste in my mouth already because of disney trying to make it without pixar.  so i hope that if it IS made and lassetter is involved it can be more Toy Story II and less Cars.  we'll see, originally II was going to be straight to video and it was completely retooled for a theatrical, so lets hope they can rekindle that magic if this does indeed go forward.

[MacGuffin]

'Toy Story' sequel set
Unkrich to direct upcoming feature
Source: Variety

"Toy Story 3" is coming in 2009, but John Lasseter won't be the director.

In an unusually candid presentation from the typically tight-lipped execs, Lasseter and Disney Animation prexy Ed Catmull provided extensive details on their upcoming slate at the Mouse House's investor conference Thursday.

In addition to confirming for the first time that a third "Toy Story" is in the works, most likely for 2009 release, Lasseter said Lee Unkrich will helm it.

Unkrich co-directed "Toy Story 2," "Monsters, Inc." and "Finding Nemo" but has never before been sole helmer on a Pixar pic.

Lasseter directed the first two "Toy Story" pics but is presumably too busy in his new post as chief creative officer of Disney Animation to work on individual films.

Michael Arndt, Oscar-nominated scribe of "Little Miss Sunshine," is penning the script.

Lasseter said, "The greatest thing about the merger of the two companies is that the creators of 'Toy Story' 1 and 2 can make 3 with the story that we wanted."

Comment was a not-too-subtle swipe at Disney's former plan to develop a third "Toy Story," without Pixar input, before Disney decided to buy the toon studio in late 2005.

Lasseter also revealed a behind-the-scenes shift at Walt Disney Feature Animation -- which is separate from Pixar but also under the control of Lasseter and Catmull -- by announcing that Chris Williams, a vet story artist at the Mouse, is now directing 2008 release "American Dog." Pic was developed and previously under the control of "Lilo & Stitch" helmer Chris Sanders, who recently left Disney.

Catmull denied speculation that Walt Disney Feature Animation may become a 2-D-only studio, with Pixar handling CGI, though he did confirm the Mouse will bring back hand-drawn pics.

"We're really excited about that and have brought back some great directors to work on that," he said, presumably referring to "The Frog Princess," a 2-D pic being developed by "Aladdin" and "Treasure Planet" helmers Ron Clements and John Musker, whom Lasseter brought back to Disney last year. That pic is believed to be on the fast track and may be the division's next release after "American Dog."

Catmull admitted there were problems at Disney Feature Animation when he and Lasseter took over.

"At Disney we have these remarkable artists who were there, but in all candor (they) were not kneaded together in the right way," he stated. "The whole wasn't greater than the sum of its parts, but there were some great parts there."

He said that he and Lasseter are trying to make Disney Feature Animation's pics more director-driven, as at Pixar, and that members of the two units are giving each other notes and sharing technology.

He didn't mention December's layoff of 160 animators, about 20% of the WDFA staff.

[MacGuffin]

Benson, Keaton Voicing Toy Story 3
Source: IESB.net

While promoting The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Beginning (on DVD August 26), Jodi Benson, who has voiced Ariel since 1989's hit feature, revealed that she is returning as the voice of Barbie in Disney/Pixar's Toy Story 3 and will be joined by Michael Keaton as the voice of Ken, reports IESB.net.

Keaton worked with Pixar previously voicing Chick Hicks in 2006's Cars. Benson played Tour Guide Barbie and Barbie on Backpack for Toy Story 2.

The duo join voice cast members Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, Estelle Harris, John Ratzenberger and Ned Beatty. The third installment is scheduled for a June 18, 2010 release.

[MacGuffin]

Disney screens 'Toy' teaser at NAB
Studio offers sneak of upcoming toon
Source: Variety

LAS VEGAS -- For their presentation to the Digital Cinema Summit at NAB, Disney went to infinity ... and beyond.

Walt Disney Studios Motion Picture Group prexy offered up the first-ever public screening of the teaser trailer for "Toy Story 3." Custom-animated short shows Woody supervising the Toy Story characters as they improvise a sign for the pic, only to have Buzz upstage them all with a high-tech version.

The Mouse House will re-release 3-D versions of "Toy Story" and "Toy Story 2" in a double feature. "Toy Story 3" bows June 18, 2010.

Zoradi, whose polished presentations in support of the 3-D format and Disney's stereo slate have become a regular feature at 3-D conferences, also showed the entire first song, "Belle," from the "Beauty and the Beast," converted to 3-D.

"Think of the potential of what could follow if this is successful," he said. Pic will be released on Feb. 12.

Zoradi thanked the engineers of SMPTE, which organized the confab, and the other orgs and technologists who made 3-D movies possible, but he also offered up a request.

"We know product replacement cycles are shorter than ever before," he said. "We need 3-D standards to be somewhat flexible so they can be updated."

[MacGuffin]

Playthings face mortality in `Toy Story 3'

CANNES, France - Woody, Buzz Lightyear and their plaything pals are coping with abandonment issues in the new "Toy Story" sequel.

Next year's "Toy Story 3" has the gang learning they have reached their shelf life as the young boy who owns them grows up and goes off to college.

"Toys are put on this Earth to be played with by a child," said John Lasseter, director of the first two "Toy Story" movies and chief creative officer for Pixar and Disney animation. "The thing they worry about the most is all the things in life that prevent them from being played with, and probably the thing they fear the most is being outgrown."

Lasseter and his Pixar colleagues talked up the "Toy Story" sequel at the Cannes Film Festival, where their latest animation adventure, "Up," was the opening-night entry.

"Up" director Pete Docter, who helped develop the stories for the "Toy Story" flicks and was an animator on the first, said the creative minds behind the original movies holed up in a cabin for two days to brainstorm ideas for the third.

"For a while, we were worried that we didn't have the story. We were like, `Oh, nothing's coming,'" Docter said. "Then something clicked on the second day, and it just, like, flooded."

Tom Hanks and Tim Allen return as the main mouthpieces, providing the voices of toy buddies Woody and Buzz. Lee Unkrich, one of Lasseter's co-directors on "Toy Story 2," is directing the new sequel.

"Toy Story" was the first computer-animated feature-length movie, launching Hollywood into an era of digital cartoons that have superseded hand-drawn animation. Pixar movies, including "Finding Nemo," "Ratatouille" and "WALL-E," have won four of the eight Academy Awards for feature animation since the category was added in 2001.

Ed Catmull, president of Pixar and Disney's animation studios, said Pixar only does sequels if there is fresh ground to cover, and the "Toy Story" characters lent themselves to a whole new adventure.

"It feels like the summation of a trilogy," said Catmull, adding that the filmmakers had hit on a big emotional finish to "Toy Story 3."

He would not elaborate.

"I'm going to wait on that one. That's got to be the surprise of the film."

[MacGuffin]

Teaser Trailer here.

[MacGuffin]

What to expect in Toy Story 3 (hints: new characters, adult themes!)
Source: SciFi Wire

You know animator Angus MacLane's work even though he's not one of the Pixar marquee stars like John Lasseter or Brad Bird: MacLane lent his talents to WALL-E, for which he accepted the film's Saturn Award on Wednesday. He also directed the short BURN-E, which appears on the DVD. He got his start at Pixar while Toy Story 2 was in the pipeline, and he's currently working on Toy Story 3 animation. Since he and Pixar got their start with the franchise, he says the third film represents their adulthood.

"I feel like we've grown up making these movies, and each of the films represents where the filmmakers were at the time of making the films," MacLane said in an exclusive interview in Burbank, Calif. "Certainly we're approaching this film 10 years later, so I think we're sort of coming at it from the standpoint of [Andy] has grown up, and we've grown up with these toys, and we have a reverence for them, but we also have different things as a priority."

Lee Unkrich takes the directing lead on a story dealing with Andy's going off to college. The prospect of Andy's outgrowing Buzz Lightyear and Sheriff Woody was first raised in Toy Story 2. So what is a Toy Story with Andy basically grown up?

"I think that's a question we've tried to figure out ourselves," MacLane said. "I can tell you Andy's room is in the movie. That's about all I can say." Whether it's the Andy's room we know or Andy's teenage room, MacLane would not tell.

With a specialty in character movement and motion, which brought many of WALL-E's silent sequences to life, MacLane has had a chance to introduce new toys into the Toy Story world. "Oh, I've had a lot of fun with new characters," he said. "I've spent a lot of the time on the show on new characters. That's one of the things I did work on on this film, was a lot of preproduction and developing on the new characters, just help out getting them ready to go for the film." On Toy Story 2, MacLane was in charge of the "crazy" Buzz Lightyear, fresh out of the box at the toy store, still thinking he's a real space ranger.

MacLane assured fans that he and his Pixar colleagues take Toy Story 3 seriously. They would not make a cheap knock-off sequel (ahem, Disney). And he said the new installment will mark the true conclusion of a trilogy.

"Toy Story 2 was one of the first films I did starting at Pixar, so I feel a real kinship with the characters, specifically Buzz Lightyear," MacLane said. "So I really wanted to get back in there and animate. To give you a sense of the responsibility they feel, there was a T-shirt made in the story department. The back of the T-shirt said, 'Franchise Guardian.' It's not something we do lightly. We go back into that mythology with the intent to continue a story that needs to be told, a story that we believe in and a story that, to be really honest, having seen the movie, is amazing. I'm not worried about it, but in finishing it, we want to make sure it's the best film it can be, and it's fit to stand alongside the other films on the shelf."

Toy Story 3 is due in theaters in 2010.

[MacGuffin]

SDCC: What's new, what's familiar in Toy Story 3

Grown men watching Toy Story 2 still burst into tears when Sarah McLachlan's "When She Loved Me" plays during Jessie's memory. That hit sequel ended on a bittersweet note, with the toys deciding to stay with Andy even though they knew he would eventually outgrow them. Now the upcoming 3-D Toy Story 3 will fulfill that theme, with Andy at 18 going off to college.

"Well, in that song, we took a character who we didn't really know yet in Toy Story 2, and we put her through that, and we saw what she'd been through emotionally," said Lee Unkrich, the director of Toy Story 3, in a group interview at Comic-Con in San Diego over the weekend. "Now we're going to see how it affects our main characters to be in a similar situation. It's really fun to take them and put them in a situation where we don't necessarily know how they're going to react. Each character is going to react in a different way to the situation. So that's exactly what happens. Everybody deals with it differently, and that's what drives a lot of the conflict."

Toy Story was Pixar's first feature-length animated film, and since then many Pixar artists who had been with the company before then have grown up, had children, won Oscars and more. It's been 11 years since Toy Story 2.

"A lot of that is informing, just emotionally, what we're doing in Toy Story 3," Unkrich continued. "The last thing we wanted to do was make a movie about these characters going off and having a wacky adventure somewhere. When we arrived at the notion of having Andy grown up and about to head off to college, that seemed like the perfect life event to place our story at, to provide that rich, deep emotion."

Pixar may have been picky about what would justify making Toy Story 3, but the voice actors were just waiting for the call. "Every time we would bump into Tom Hanks or Tim Allen or anyone, they would always ask, 'When? When is Toy Story 3?'" Unkrich recalls. "They all wanted to do it, and they were all instantly on board and excited to be a part of it."

Hanks, Allen, Joan Cusack et al. will welcome even more new toys into Andy's room. Unkrich announced that a Ken doll, to be voiced by Michael Keaton, will join the Barbie who joined the gang when they infiltrated Al's Toy Barn in Toy Story 2.

"I mean, we actually have more characters in Toy Story 3 than any film that we've made at Pixar," Unkrich said. "When we decided to have Ken in the film, I had a very specific vision of which Ken I wanted to have in the film, because there've been a lot of Kens over the years. Sometimes he has real hair, sometimes he has molded hair, but there was a Ken kind of from the late '80s that's my personal version of Ken, that kind of really smarmy, molded plastic feathered hair. I knew from the get-go that that's the one that we had to go with. Michael Keaton came to us very early on, when we started to think about who would be the perfect voice of Ken."

Pixar continues to push visual boundaries with their films. The fur in Monsters, Inc. was a breakthrough, as was the water in Finding Nemo and the post-apocalyptic Earth and deep space in WALL-E. Even though Toy Story 3 returns to familiar territory, animators are still pushing it further.

"If you've been watching our movies over the years, you know that each one has gotten more and more beautiful-looking, I think, than the last," Unkrich said. "They've gotten more sophisticated. It's not just the technology, it's also the artistry at the studio. So when we sat down to start working on Toy Story 3, we knew that we were capable of making a really, really rich, beautiful world, because we'd done it on Ratatouille and WALL-E. The decision we had to make was 'How much different do we want this film to look?' Just because we have the technology now to do so much more, do we really want to? Because we wanted Toy Story 3 to fit in the canon of Toy Story 1 and Toy Story 2 and feel of a piece. That being said, we wanted it to look really beautiful. It feels of the universe, of the world that we created, yet it's exponentially more rich and beautiful and detailed."

One obvious evolution will be Andy's room. The bedroom of a teenager will have to be updated from the blue wallpapered design we saw in the first two films. "You can use your imaginatiom," Unkrich said. "It would be kind of weird if an 18-year-old was still living in the room of Toy Story 2. We can use a lot of design, because a lot of that great design work had been done on the other movies. But we now had to fill in those ensuing six, seven years in Andy's life, from where we were in 2 to 3."

Toy Story 3 opens June 18, 2010.

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[Champion Souza]

New Trailer  http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/toy-story-3/trailer

[MacGuffin]

International Trailer

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New Trailer: http://www.moviefone.com/movie/toy-story-3/22984/main

The "Take My Breath Away" moment makes me extremely nervous because it just screams "Dreamworks".

[RegularKarate]

The "Take My Breath Away" moment makes me extremely nervous because it just screams "Dreamworks".

Yeah, hoping that music is just for the trailer.
"nice ascot" is Dreamworksy too.

[picolas]

for fuck's sake it's another one of those trailers that reveals every single thing that happens aside from the last ten minutes. could you warn us maybe?

trailer spoils
the mr. potato head thing is pretty unnerving too... so his body gets destroyed? and he survives using his body parts? i could totally have nightmares about that. as a child.