On November 22, Toy Story turned 30 years old. It’s hard to overstate how important this film about toys coming to life is to the world of entertainment. From being the first fully computer-animated film ever to spawning a franchise that has earned over $3 billion at the global box office ahead of its fifth entry next year, Toy Story has become something that’s hard to imagine the world without.
To dig in on why Toy Story became what it is today, IGN spoke to Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer and Toy Story supervising animator Pete Docter, producer Bonnie Arnold, Andy voice actor John Morris, and Pixar’s founding historian Christine Freeman about the groundbreaking film. The backstory of the film is almost as fascinating as the one that appeared onscreen, especially considering the infamous event now known as “Black Friday” that almost stopped Woody and Buzz from ever waking up in Andy’s room and making their way into our hearts.
You’ve Got a Friend in Me to Infinity and Beyond
“I don't think I really understood it [initially],” Docter told me when I asked him what the heart of Toy Story was. “One of the first shots that I animated was when Woody gets shoved off the bed and Buzz Lightyear lands there, and then all the kids run out and Woody crawls out from under the bed, and he's like, ‘Uh.. uh… nothing… It was a mistake. Too much cake and ice cream.’ As I was analyzing it, I was like, ‘What is Woody thinking? What's he feeling right now?’ And it was jealousy. It was that sense of, I used to take it for granted that I was the top dog, and now there's some other guy, but I'm not going to show anybody that. And I realized there have been so many times in my life where I've felt the same thing.
“And so first of all, I put that into the shot, but I also realized that this is what this movie is about; it’s this emergence of jealousy that this toy feels, like he's the most important thing in the world. But in the long run, the sort of selflessness of that is recognizing that his jealousy is born of love, that his jealousy is born of really caring for this kid, and if that's really the ultimate goal, then self-sacrifice, whatever it takes… I just feel like that's a really beautiful arc, and it was very relatable.”
What Docter said next reinforced this story and brought it all home for me. It also echoed what the other three people I talked to said, the countless hours of research I’ve done watching the Toy Story films and documentaries, and, perhaps most importantly, why I sing “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” to my son and daughter most nights before they go to bed.
“I think that's ultimately what the Toy Story movies are about,” Docter said. “They look like toys, but they’re really stories about us as human beings, what it is to be alive, and the joys, threats, and difficulties of that.”
But Toy Story wasn’t always the tale we know and love today. Pixar’s earliest days were filled with short films and commercials, including “Luxo Jr.,” which was Toy Story director John Lasseter’s directorial debut and where the main lamp character came from that would become famous worldwide for jumping on the “I” in the Pixar logo.
Lasseter, who had previously worked at Disney and was inspired by Tron’s light cycle sequences to begin thinking about using computers to animate films, would also go on to direct a short in 1988 called “Tin Toy” that would not only win the Academy Award that year for Best Animated Short Film, but also be the foundation on which Toy Story would be built.
It Was All Started by a Tin Toy
“Tin Toy” starred a one-man-band toy named Tinny who was trying to escape from a human baby named Billy, and this toy would eventually become part of a pitch by Lasseter that led to Pixar signing a three-picture agreement with Disney. The “germ” of the initial idea that would eventually become Toy Story was, as Pixar’s production notes that they shared with us read, “a single visual image: a toy at a highway rest stop, its family unknowingly leaving it behind.”
“It’s such an emotional thing because everybody has lost a toy that they wanted so desperately to find, that they wished the toy was looking for them,” story co-creator Andrew Stanton said in those notes. “With this movie, we were finally telling a story where we could execute what we’ve always wished we could see our toys do. The motivating emotion was the desire to believe in your toys.”
In these early stages, however, there was no sign of Woody or Buzz. Instead, there was a Charlie McCarthy-type ventriloquist’s dummy and Tinny.
“We knew we wanted an old toy and a new toy,” Lasseter said in those notes. “The initial idea was that the dummy was a hand-me-down that Andy had gotten from his father, and then on his birthday, he gets Tinny as a new toy. But as the story evolved, it became clear that Tinny was too antiquated. So we started to analyze what a little boy would get these days that would make him so excited that he stopped playing with everything else.”
This led to Lasseter recalling his love for G.I. Joe and combining it with Star Wars to make a sort of space superhero to replace Tinny. We now know Tinny became Buzz Lightyear to honor astronaut Buzz Aldrin after almost being called Lunar Larry, Tempus, or Morph.
As for Woody, who was originally the ventriloquist’s dummy, he would evolve as well thanks to, in part, Lasseter’s own pull-string Casper doll that he cherished as a child, as well as an idea to make him the exact opposite of Buzz Lightyear. His name was inspired by Woody Strode, an actor best known for his appearances in John Ford Westerns.
“Buzz Lightyear represents whatever cool flashy toy you owned at one time. Woody represents whatever worn-out doll nobody else would want but you had an affection for,” Lasseter said.
“Since it was a buddy picture, we wanted the dummy to be the complete opposite of a space toy, so we made him a cowboy,” Stanton added. “They were a great complement to each other — the old frontier and the new frontier.”
Toy Story was beginning to come together, but there was still a big problem, and it all came to a head on November 19, 1993 – “Black Friday”!
A Black Friday No Toy Ever Wants to Be a Part Of
Lasseter and his team would often show Disney execs the progress they were making on the film, and the execs would reply with plenty of notes. At the time, The Walt Disney Company chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, Walt Disney Animation president Thomas Schumacher, and Disney’s head of feature animation, Peter Schneider, were some of the most vocal at the company and suggested, for example, that Pixar should make the characters a bit more edgy so they would appeal to both kids and adults.
This all led to this Black Friday incident, where roughly the first half of the film was shown at varying levels of completion, leading to Schneider stopping production of the film altogether.
You can check out one of the reels of this footage right here from the 2010 Blu-ray release of Toy Story, but it basically takes place before Andy heads to Pizza Planet and all of the toys are placing bets on if he’ll take Woody or Buzz with him. Woody throws Buzz out the window and all the toys witness it and confront him about it. Woody shows no remorse and yells at the other toys, calling them names and even insulting Slinky Dog.
After this disastrous showing, Katzenberg went to Schumacher and said, “Why is this so terrible?” Schumacher responded by saying, “It’s not their movie anymore. It’s completely not the movie John [Lasseter] set out to make.”
Lasseter reflected on this fateful day in Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, and said, “I sat there and was pretty much embarrassed with what was on the screen. It was a story filled with the most unhappy, mean characters that I’ve seen.”
Disney wanted to shut down the production at Pixar completely, lay off employees, and make the remaining crew finish the film back at Disney’s studios, but the team refused.
“[Pixar co-founder Ed] Catmull just didn't believe that that was the right solution,” Freeman told me. “So he asked them for another chance, and Disney graciously gave us two weeks. They shut down all but the story department, and some of the art department could continue because they had work to do on unrelated commercials. If you look at the credits, you'll actually see that Darla Anderson has a credit for Digital Angel on Toy Story, because she was running the commercials group at the time and kept people employed while they were revising the script and story.”
During those two weeks, Lasseter, Docter, Stanton, story supervisor Joe Ranft, and a few other members of the story team decided it was time to make the movie they wanted to make. They chose to make Woody much more likable and bring things closer to the original vision of their Toy Story.
“Woody's character was harsher and more bossy in the beginning, but we didn't take that away,” Arnold told me. “We dialed it down a bit, but the trick with him was understanding where he comes from and having empathy for him after being displaced. The fact that Andy comes into the room with the birthday present that would become Buzz and literally pushes Woody off the bed, you can empathize with that.”
They also doubled down on the beloved side characters, who are just as important in the film as Woody and Buzz.
“When I go back to Toy Story, I always look to the characters,” Docter told me. “What's happening is fun, but we also really allowed for reactions from Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, all these characters that you could have cut out of the film, but I think that's what makes it more fun and engaging, is how the characters react.”
Morris, who first voiced Andy at seven after winning the role by bringing his X-Men toys to the audition and playing with them exactly how the team envisioned Andy would, also hit on why this revised version of Toy Story finally made it to the finish line after almost crashing out and being lost to the attic, forgotten.
“The expression ‘you've got a friend in me’ really captures the essence of the films,” Morris told me. “That's what I usually sign when I'm signing things for fans because the films are about friendship. They're about caring for one another. They're about teamwork and togetherness. And even though at the beginning Buzz and Woody kind of get off on the wrong foot, they bridge the gap and come together. And I think that's a great sort of lesson in life too. They're in different kinds of places at the start and they have to find common ground.”
Disney was convinced to resume production, and the team, which grew from roughly 24 to over 100, worked tirelessly towards an internal release window of spring 1996. Things were progressing amid normal production challenges, and editing was underway by Lee Unkrich, who would later go on to co-direct Toy Story 2 and direct Toy Story 3, but the team was still unsure how the outside world would view the film. As it turns out, one of the most surprising boosts of confidence came from a very unlikely place.
“The people from Burger King came up to Pixar to watch a very early version because they were going to be involved in making the little toys for kids' meals,” Arnold recalled. “We'd never really shown anybody outside of us and Disney anything from the movie, and they went nuts over it. I think we were amazed, and more importantly, Disney was amazed.
“If I'm not mistaken, Disney accelerated our schedule so we would be out in time for Thanksgiving. They had that much confidence in Toy Story after that and said we need to get this out because holidays and summer time were the big release windows back then. That was another moment that sort of changed the course of the movie for us.”
And so the movie premiered on November 22, 1995, and was a bona fide success, earning more than $350 million worldwide and becoming the second-highest-grossing film of the year behind Die Hard With a Vengeance, which earned only $3 million more. It was also nominated for three Academy Awards – Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Song, and Best Original Score – alongside being honored with a non-competitive Special Achievement Academy Award.
Toy Story 5's ‘Toy Meets Tech’ Theme and Why the Franchise Is as Relevant As Ever Today
Since that fateful premiere 30 years ago, there have been three more feature-length films, three shorts, two television specials, a whole Toy Story land at Walt Disney World, multiple Toy Story attractions and restaurants at other Disney Parks around the globe, and so much more. And as we previously mentioned, Pixar is hard at work on Toy Story 5.
When Toy Story 5 is released in theaters on June 19, 2026, it will be all about “Toy meets Tech.” A new tablet called LilyPad has arrived and is an “all-new threat to playtime.” Docter wasn’t ready to reveal too much about the film when we spoke, but he did share some interesting insight into what fans can expect and why this franchise has withstood the test of time.
“I think [Toy Story 5] is especially relevant today because of the tech and how that's changed the world,” Docter told me. “I mean, we're late to the party as it's been a number of years since technology's kind of already beat toys. Look around you at a restaurant, kids are looking at their iPhones and not playing with plastic figures anymore. I'll refrain from commenting on how I feel about that, but it's definitely out there in the world and I think it's disturbing to a lot of people. And even in the last year, AI has brought up those same kind of fears in maybe even a larger way because it seems to threaten what makes us human.”
That human connection is everything, and Docter hopes Toy Story is remembered for that more than anything when people look back at the franchise at its 50th, 100th, or infinity-and-beyondth anniversary.
“I just want the world to remember it was made by people,” Docter said. “Every detail in the film has some meaning for someone, either because that's what the character's feeling, or even just personal stuff. Hannah was named after a family friend of ours, or when Buzz is drunk after losing his arm, he's talking about being Mrs. Nesbit. That was my sister's second-grade teacher! So everything is just connected to the people who made it. I think a lot of times people figure these things are… [Docter pretends to be a robot typing into a prompt] ‘Make… film… enter!’ It doesn't work that way. It's made using a computer, but not by computers.”
To end our story, I want to return to Andy, who has been a part of every film. While it hasn’t been confirmed if Andy will be in Toy Story 5, I had to ask Morris what “Andy story” he would love to see next. I thought his answer was very profound, and hit home considering we are roughly the same age and have both grown up with this franchise.
“There's a lot of nostalgia in adults,” Morris said. “And so if Andy did come back, it could be this sort of full circle, nostalgic moment that’s multi-generational. Then, if we see his kids or he has Andy Jr. or whatnot, it's like, ‘Wow, there's the next generation.’ It's just fun to think about and the possibilities are endless, which is exciting.
“And it’s timeless. When I was little, a lot of people talked about closing their door, but leaving just a crack to see if their toys were moving. I may have done that once or twice, and was like, I love this. Maybe there is some magic to this, and maybe it’s true.”
As someone who did the very same thing and believes this world could always use a little more magic, I couldn’t agree more and can’t wait to see what adventure our favorite pals are part of next. Happy 30 years, Toy Story!
Adam Bankhurst is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AdamBankhurst, Instagram, and TikTok, and listen to his show, Talking Disney Magic.
