Toy Story was released in 1995 as the first ever fully computer-animated feature film. Directed by John Lasseter and produced by Pixar Animation Studios, the film introduced audiences to Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and a bedroom full of toys with more personality than most human characters. Featuring the voices of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, it became one of the defining movies of the 1990s, launched Pixar into the stratosphere, and kicked off a franchise that is still going strong decades later. The behind the scenes story is full of surprises, happy accidents, and a few near-disasters. We’re telling that story now with 40 huge facts about Toy Story. You can hear us discuss the film on our podcast, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and on our website.

1. The roots of Pixar stretch back to a galaxy far, far away

Long before Woody and Buzz existed, the seeds of Toy Story were being planted inside George Lucas’s empire. The first film to feature a full computer-animated sequence was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), where a CGI simulation of the Genesis effect was created by Lucasfilm’s computer graphics division, called The Graphics Group. By 1985, that same team had produced the first ever fully CGI character in a feature film: the stained glass knight in Barry Levinson’s Young Sherlock Holmes (1985).

Then, when Steve Jobs left Apple in the mid-1980s, he saw CGI as the next frontier. Jobs bought The Graphics Group from Lucasfilm for $5 million, rebranded it Pixar Animation Studios, and set his sights on an audacious goal: creating the first fully computer-animated feature film.

2. A fired Disney animator became Pixar’s driving force

John Lasseter had been let go by Disney in 1983 after pushing too hard for the studio to embrace computer animation. He landed at The Graphics Group/Pixar, and it turned out to be the best career move he ever made. At Pixar, Lasseter directed a string of pioneering animated shorts, including Luxo Jr. (1986), the short that gave Pixar its famous hopping desk lamp logo (and also featured the yellow ball with the orange star that later shows up in Toy Story). In 1988, Lasseter directed Tin Toy, a short about a tin soldier trying to escape a destructive baby. It became the first CGI film to win an Academy Award, taking home Best Animated Short.

Suddenly, the wider industry was paying attention, and one of the companies most impressed was Disney, the very studio that had fired Lasseter five years earlier. They offered him his old job back to head up their CGI animation division. He turned them down. As Lasseter reportedly told Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull: “I can go to Disney and be a director, or stay here and make history.”

3. Disney came knocking with a three-picture deal

Unable to lure Lasseter back, Disney decided to work with Pixar instead. They offered a deal worth $26 million to produce three CGI-animated features. Before 1993, every Disney animated film had been produced entirely in-house, but the success of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) had opened the studio up to outside collaborations. Pixar, who were experiencing financial difficulties at the time, accepted the offer and immediately told Disney they wanted the first film in the deal to be based on an idea they had called Toy Story.

4. The budget had to double before a single frame was finished

Disney set the budget for Toy Story at $17 million. That figure didn’t last long. After Pixar produced a 30-second animation test as a proof of concept, they quickly realised they had massively underestimated the scale of what was involved. Steve Jobs and Ed Catmull went back to Disney and explained the budget needed to be $30 million. Disney agreed (presumably not without some gritted teeth) and Lasseter later recalled that Jobs told him: “Don’t hold back. You’ve got a chance to do something here that will last forever.”

5. Woody wasn’t always a cowboy

The main character in Toy Story is Woody, the rootin’-tootin’ cowboy doll. He went through several identity changes before becoming the pull-string cowboy we know. Originally, the lead was going to be Tinny, the tin drummer from Lasseter’s Oscar-winning short Tin Toy. The early story followed Tinny being left behind at a rest stop during a family vacation, escaping a junk dealer, and ending up at a children’s play home where he would never fall out of favour (a concept that would eventually resurface years later as the backbone of Toy Story 3, 2010). Lasseter decided Tinny was too old-fashioned to connect with 1990s audiences and replaced him with a space-themed action figure. The other lead was initially conceived as a ventriloquist’s dummy, and it was Pixar designer Bud Luckey who suggested changing the dummy into a cowboy doll, reasoning that a cowboy would contrast perfectly with a modern space figure.

6. Early concept art for Woody is hiding in the film

Even after Woody became a cowboy, his design continued to evolve. Early sketches still showed traces of the ventriloquist dummy origins, with a separated mouth that gradually softened into the more familiar look. If you pay close attention early in the film, when Woody is sitting on Andy’s bed chatting with Slinky Dog, there’s a drawing pinned to the wall behind them of a cowboy. That’s early concept art for Woody, snuck into the background by the animators. And while Woody’s surname is never mentioned on screen, editor Lee Unkrich later revealed it was Pride, inspired by Woody Strode, a real-life trailblazing African American NFL player turned actor who appeared in films like Spartacus (1960), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

7. Paul Newman and Jim Carrey were the dream pairing

Once the two leads were locked in as a cowboy and a space ranger, Pixar knew exactly who they wanted to voice them. The first choices were Paul Newman for Woody and Jim Carrey for Buzz Lightyear. The idea was to reflect old Hollywood being overtaken by newer Hollywood, a theme that mirrors the dynamic between the two characters perfectly. Neither could be afforded, though, and the search continued. Newman did eventually work with Pixar years later, voicing the lead in Cars (2006) in what would be one of his final roles before his death in 2008.

8. A scene from a dog movie convinced Tom Hanks to sign up

John Lasseter later said he only ever wanted Tom Hanks for Woody, but convincing one of the biggest movie stars in the world to make his voice acting debut wasn’t straightforward. Hanks had never worked in animation and wasn’t sure it would suit him. So Lasseter had a short proof of concept created: a brief animation of Woody, synced to some of Hanks’s dialogue from the comedy Turner & Hooch (1989), specifically the memorable “Don’t eat the caaarrr!” scene. When Hanks saw the test, he was convinced. The scheduling, however, was another challenge. Hanks was already committed to four films, and didn’t want to record a comedic role while in the headspace of playing Andrew Beckett in Philadelphia (1993). He decided to record Woody’s dialogue during breaks in filming on Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and A League of Their Own (1992) instead.

9. Buzz went through some terrible names

The space ranger character existed in Pixar’s plans before the cowboy did, but his identity went through some significant growing pains. He was originally called Lunar Larry. Then, briefly, Tempus From Morph. Neither exactly rolls off the tongue. Eventually, the team settled on Buzz Lightyear, naming him after Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. When they landed on that name, you can imagine the room knowing instantly that the search was over.

10. The coolest toy in cinema was designed using real action figures

Pixar production designer Bob Pauley was tasked with bringing Buzz to life visually. He drew on classic real-life action figures like GI Joe and Major Matt Mason for inspiration. In early designs, Buzz wore a red spacesuit and was considerably smaller than Woody. The colour scheme was eventually changed to white with green and purple trim, a combination chosen because those were the favourite colours of John Lasseter and his wife. And one of Pauley’s biggest challenges was Buzz’s face. After struggling with it for some time, he ended up basing Buzz’s features, including his eyebrows, cheekbones, and chin dimple, on John Lasseter himself.

11. A big comedic name turned down Buzz

Before Tim Allen landed the role, Buzz was voiced in early tests by Pixar animator Pete Docter, who helped develop the character by pulling Buzz-style heroic faces at himself in the mirror (Docter went on to direct Pixar classics Up, 2009, and Inside Out, 2015). Lasseter wanted an established actor, though, and after considering Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis, he set his sights on Billy Crystal. A proof of concept was created using Crystal’s dialogue from When Harry Met Sally (1989), but Crystal passed on the role. He later said turning down Buzz was the biggest mistake of his career. When Lasseter called him years later to offer the role of Mike Wazowski in Monsters, Inc. (2001), Crystal’s wife told him John Lasseter was on the phone. Crystal picked up and simply said: “Yes. I’ll do it.”

12. A hit sitcom led Lasseter to his Buzz Lightyear

At the time, Home Improvement was one of the biggest sitcoms in America, and John Lasseter was a fan. He saw in its star, Tim Allen, someone who could play a macho character with a soft underbelly, which was exactly what Buzz required. Allen said yes, and it wasn’t until the team heard his deadpan delivery in early recording sessions that they came up with one of the film’s most crucial story beats: the idea that Buzz genuinely believes he’s a real Space Ranger and not a toy. That single character choice, born from Allen’s performance, transformed the entire narrative.

13. Hanks and Allen broke with animation tradition

Voice actors in animation typically record their parts alone, performing opposite nothing but a microphone and a script. Because neither Hanks nor Allen had worked in animation before, they decided to record their parts together in the studio at the same time so they could bounce off each other in real time. There’s footage of them recording together, and even without the animation, the chemistry between them is obvious. That decision clearly paid off: the dynamic between Woody and Buzz remains one of the most compelling partnerships in animated film.

14. The supporting cast could have looked very different

John Ratzenberger, best known at the time as Cliff the mailman from the sitcom Cheers, voiced Hamm the piggy bank. It proved to be the start of a remarkable streak: Ratzenberger’s voice appeared in every Pixar film for the next 25 years, until Soul (2020) broke the run. Spotting his cameo became a kind of Easter egg tradition for fans.

Elsewhere in the cast, Wallace Shawn voiced Rex the dinosaur, a role Lasseter originally wanted Rick Moranis for. And Jim Varney, best known for playing Ernest P. Worrell in the Ernest comedy series, voiced Slinky Dog, a part Lasseter had initially envisioned for John Cleese.

15. A bag of falling toy parts sealed the deal for Mr Potato Head

Lasseter always wanted Mr Potato Head to be a toy with a chip on his shoulder, and he always had one actor in mind: legendary stand-up comic Don Rickles. That line where Potato Head snaps “What are you looking at, you hockey puck?” was lifted directly from Rickles’s live act, a putdown he used on hecklers for decades (the twist being that in Toy Story, he’s saying it to an actual hockey puck). To offer Rickles the role, Lasseter visited him at his home in Malibu, bringing a Mr Potato Head toy as a gift. When he went to hand it over, all the parts fell off. Lasseter looked at the pile of scattered features and told Rickles: “It looks just like you.”

16. An early screening nearly killed the entire project

After months of work, Pixar presented their first draft of Toy Story to Disney in November 1993. It went so badly that the date has become known within Pixar as ‘Black Friday’. Disney called the film unwatchable, said Woody was a sarcastic jerk, and announced they were shutting down production entirely. Footage of this early version has surfaced over the years, and it’s easy to see why Disney reacted the way they did: Woody looks noticeably different, and his treatment of the other toys comes across as mean-spirited (in one version, he deliberately pushes Buzz out the window).

Lasseter begged for time to rewrite the script before Disney made a final decision. Disney agreed, on the condition that Pixar paid for it themselves. Steve Jobs had to fund all the rewrites personally, and Lasseter and his team began putting in 100-hour work weeks, attending storytelling seminars run by screenwriting guru Robert McKee, redrawing storyboards, and overhauling the script almost entirely to make Woody more likeable.

17. Lasseter’s childhood toys shaped the film’s DNA

John Lasseter treated Toy Story as a deeply personal project, weaving in details from his own childhood. As a kid, he owned a Casper the Friendly Ghost doll with a pull-string talking feature, and that directly influenced the same mechanism on Woody. His love of Etch-A-Sketch is the reason we see the toy in Andy’s room. And the visual detail of Andy writing his name on the bottom of Woody and Buzz’s feet came from Lasseter’s own childhood habit of writing “Johnny” on all his toys.

18. The toys in Andy’s room were real brands

In building Andy’s bedroom, Pixar filled it with recognisable real-life toys to make the world feel authentic. The truck bearing a Little Tikes logo, the Tinkertoy container with the Playskool branding, the board games like Operation, Mousetrap, and Twister scattered around the room: none of it was product placement, and none of the companies paid for the inclusion. Pixar simply asked permission, and the brands agreed (free marketing in a Disney film being a fairly easy sell).

The only toys in the film actually invented by Pixar were the Troikas, the nesting eggs based on Russian matryoshka dolls, and they remain the only Toy Story toys never released as real products by a manufacturer.

19. Mattel’s refusal to lend Barbie gave us Bo Peep

In early drafts of the script, one of the supporting characters was Barbie. Mattel, however, wouldn’t allow their flagship doll to be used. The replacement was Bo Peep, voiced by Annie Potts, who was best known at the time for playing the wisecracking receptionist Janine Melnitz in Ghostbusters (1984).

Bo Peep also served as a subtle nod to one of Pixar’s literary inspirations: a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale from 1845 called The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep, about a porcelain shepherdess that comes to life when nobody is looking, a concept that sits right at the heart of Toy Story‘s premise.

20. Andy’s room is packed with hidden tributes to Pixar’s own people

If you look carefully at the shelves behind Woody during his opening speech to the toys, you’ll spot books titled Tin Toy, Knick Knack, Red’s Dream, and Luxo Jr., all named after the animated shorts Pixar made in the 1980s. Another book on the shelf is called Smyrl, Smyrl, Twist and Twirl, a reference to Eliot Smyrl from Pixar’s modelling team. And at the gas station later in the film, the Pizza Planet delivery boy asks for directions to West Cutting Boulevard, which was the actual street address of Pixar’s offices in Richmond, California at the time.

21. The Green Army Men were animated using a plank of wood

The leader of the Green Army Men is Sarge, a character inspired by Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, the terrifying drill instructor played by R. Lee Ermey in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987). Lasseter asked Ermey to voice the part, and he accepted (the dialogue was toned down considerably from Hartman’s barracks vocabulary).

The animation team, however, had a more practical problem: they couldn’t figure out how to make the Army Men move convincingly with their feet fused to their plastic bases. The solution was brilliantly low-tech. Animators nailed a pair of shoes to a sheet of wood and walked around the Pixar offices in them, studying the resulting stiff, hopping movement. Footage of them leaping around Point Richmond in those shoes is still available online.

22. A happy accident created one of the film’s funniest visual gags

There’s a moment in the film where Woody opens Buzz’s helmet and Buzz starts gasping and choking, believing he’s suffocating on an alien atmosphere. Originally, the plan was for Woody to react with concern, worried that Buzz might actually be dying. During an early test, though, Lasseter saw a version where Buzz was choking and Woody was simply standing there motionless, because his reaction hadn’t been animated yet. Lasseter thought the accidental deadpan was funnier than anything they had planned, so he told the team to keep Woody standing there doing nothing. It’s one of the film’s best visual comedy beats, and it happened by chance.

23. The pizza restaurant nearly had a very different name

Pizza Planet, the space-themed restaurant where Buzz and Woody’s misadventure takes a chaotic turn, was originally conceived as a pizza parlour and crazy golf course called Pizza Putt. It was changed to tie in more closely with Buzz and the space theme. The yellow Pizza Planet delivery truck went on to become another Pixar tradition, appearing in some form in almost every Pixar film that followed.

24. The film’s young villain was named after a punk icon

Sid Phillips, the toy-torturing neighbour whose backyard is a graveyard for broken playthings, was named after Sid Vicious, bassist of the Sex Pistols. He was voiced by 13-year-old Erik Von Detten, known to American audiences for playing Nicholas Alamain in the long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives. The idea for Sid’s character came from Pixar brainstorming sessions where some animators confessed to having destroyed their own toys as children. One admitted to melting Green Army Men with a magnifying glass, which is why we see Sid using one to torture Woody, a moment that climaxes with one of the film’s funniest sight gags as Woody leaps up with a burning dot on his forehead.

25. Sid’s house hides references to two horror classics

When Lasseter and his team were creating the dismembered, Frankenstein-style toys that Sid has reconstructed from parts of different playthings, they took visual inspiration from Tod Browning’s pre-Code horror film Freaks (1932), particularly in the way the mutilated toys crawl along the floor. And to signal that Sid’s home is a house of horrors, the animators gave his upstairs landing the same hexagonal carpet pattern as the one found in the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), one of the most celebrated Easter eggs in animated film.

Other references are scattered throughout Sid’s scenes too: the toolbox that Buzz pushes (which then lands on Woody) is branded Binford, the same fictional tool company from Tim Allen’s Home Improvement, and a can visible during Buzz’s rescue reads “Catmull Root Beer,” a nod to Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull.

26. A screenplay about a kid killing his family led to the writers

The number of credited writers on Toy Story is unusually large, and the reason traces back to the Black Friday disaster. The screenplay was originally written by Andrew Stanton, based on a story by Stanton, Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Joe Ranft, all Pixar employees. After Disney nearly shut the film down, Lasseter decided they needed experienced screenwriters. Joel Cohen and Alec Sokolow were a writing partnership who had sent a spec script to Disney called The Wooden Policeman. It was never produced, but what caught Pixar’s attention was a scene in it where a child opens a Christmas present, thinks it’s a toy gun, but it’s real, and he accidentally kills his entire family. On the strength of that, they were hired. Cohen and Sokolow wrote around six drafts, moving the script much closer to the film we know. Crucially, they created Buzz’s iconic catchphrase, “To infinity and beyond!”, which they derived from the third chapter of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), titled “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite.” But Pixar still felt their version was too dark: in one draft, after Buzz discovers he’s not a real Space Ranger, he threw himself off the bannister not to test his wings, but to try and end his life.

27. The creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer lightened the tone

Cohen and Sokolow eventually left the project, and Pixar brought in Joss Whedon, who had written the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) screenplay and done rewrites on Speed (1994) and Waterworld (1995). Whedon lightened the tone considerably and is credited with creating Rex the dinosaur. He also came up with an alternative ending for the film that Pixar loved but ultimately couldn’t use (something we’ll come to later).

28. Hundreds of alternative titles were considered

The working title was always Toy Story, but editor Lee Unkrich later revealed that around 200 other options were kicked around during development. Among the contenders: The Cowboy & The Spaceman, To Infinity and Beyond, Made in Taiwan, Bring Me the Arm of Buzz Lightyear, and, perhaps most brilliantly, Toyz n the Hood.

29. Dozens of hidden references pay tribute to Pixar’s unsung heroes

The Easter eggs in Andy’s room are just the beginning. Andy himself is named after Andries Van Dam, a computer graphics pioneer who taught many of the Pixar animators at Brown University. On the back of the Pizza Planet truck, a sticker reads “KRAT FM,” a reference to Tia W. Kratter, a Digital Painter on the film whose official job title was “Imperfectionist” because her role was to add scuff marks, scratches, and dirt to surfaces to make the digital world look more real, a technique that became industry standard almost immediately.

Sid’s backpack has the words “Julie Macbarfle has cooties!” scrawled on it, a reference to Julia McDonald, a camera manager who asked to be included in the film. The Davis family car’s licence plate reads A113, the number of a famous classroom at California Institute of the Arts where many Pixar animators studied (it recurs in Finding Nemo (2003), WALL-E (2008), Monsters University (2013), and numerous other Pixar films). The removal company helping the Davis family move is called Eggman Movers, named after art director Ralph Eggleston. And the removal van’s licence plate, MLY1K9, translates to “Molly, one canine,” a reference to the Pixar office dog at the time (Molly is also the name of Andy’s baby sister).

30. Lasseter fought to stop Toy Story from becoming a musical

Disney animations of the era were almost always musicals, and the plan early on was for Toy Story to follow suit. Lasseter pushed back hard against the idea. In the end, Pixar and Disney reached a compromise: the film wouldn’t be a musical, but music would play a major role in the storytelling. It’s a fine distinction, but an important one. The characters don’t break into song, but the score and songs carry huge emotional weight throughout.

31. The film’s signature song was written in a single day

John Lasseter wanted the music for Toy Story to be touching and witty, and he had a composer in mind. He admired the work Randy Newman had done on the score for The Natural (1984), a sports drama starring Robert Redford, and told Disney that Newman was the perfect choice. Newman wrote the score and three original songs: “Strange Things,” “I Will Go Sailing No More,” and, most memorably, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”

Newman said he never starts writing for a film until he has a clear brief from the director, and it took some effort to pin down what Lasseter actually wanted. Eventually, Lasseter told him the main theme should be about friendship, it should be witty, and it should probably be slow. Based on that, Newman wrote “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” in a single day. The version that plays over the end credits is a duet with country singer Lyle Lovett, a choice presumably made to reflect that the song now belongs to both Woody and Buzz.

32. The animators treated their computers like cameras

Despite working entirely in a digital environment, Lasseter insisted that the team storyboard and animate every scene as though it were being filmed by a real person holding a real camera. So the virtual “camera” moves at times like it’s mounted on a crane, at other times like it’s a Steadicam shot. It’s a subtle but effective trick that works on a subconscious level: the audience processes the visuals as if they were captured by a physical camera, adding a layer of cinematic texture to something that was, by definition, created entirely inside a computer.

33. Andy’s missing dad has a very practical explanation

Andy’s father is never seen or mentioned anywhere in Toy Story, and for years fans have speculated about what happened to him. Is he at work? Did he leave? Did he die? According to co-writer Andrew Stanton, the real answer is far more mundane: it would have taken too long and cost too much to animate another adult human character. For the same reason, every human in the film has short hair, and Andy’s mum wears hers in a ponytail, because flowing hair was too complex to render with 1995 technology. If you look carefully at the birthday party scene when viewed through Sarge’s binoculars, you’ll notice that all the children look strikingly similar to Andy, just with different hair colours and skin tones. That’s because Pixar used the same digital model for every child. Time was money, and they were running short of both.

34. The team was tiny but had an astonishing attention to detail

The crew that made Toy Story was remarkably small by animation standards – Pixar employed just 110 people on the film. For comparison, Disney had used a team of 800 to produce The Lion King (1994) the year before. Because the team was so small and this was before the internet as we know it today, Pixar didn’t have runners like a typical big-studio production. When an animator finished a shot, they would put it on a videotape, and someone would jump on a scooter and zip around the Pixar offices to deliver it to the editors.

Despite the lean operation, the attention to detail was extraordinary. The character of Woody alone had 723 individual motion controls, including 212 for his face and 58 just for his mouth. Every leaf and blade of grass in the outdoor scenes had to be created individually. Three hundred computers were used to render the final film, a process that took 800,000 machine-hours and produced 114,240 frames of animation. And if you watch closely, when the toys blink, their eyes always open and close one or two frames apart, to make the movement look more natural.

35. The animators had to learn the technology from scratch

Computer technology and traditional artistry may go hand in hand today, but in the mid-1990s they were different worlds. Lasseter said it was virtually impossible to find an animator who also knew how to use computers, so Pixar hired hand-drawn and stop-motion animators and taught them the technology on the job. Co-writer Andrew Stanton recalled regularly walking in on animators trying to draw directly on their computer screens or physically move the on-screen models by hand, because that was the only way they knew how to work. The learning curve was steep, but the standards Lasseter demanded never dropped. It was a team of people all figuring it out as they went, and they somehow ended up producing something that changed the industry permanently.

36. The original ending involved Barbie as an action star

Remember Joss Whedon’s unused ending we mentioned? Here it is.

When Whedon came on board for rewrites, he wrote Barbie into the film’s climax. In his version, as Woody and Buzz chase the moving van at the end, Barbie would have driven her Corvette off the back of the truck and rescued them from Sid’s bull terrier Scud. Whedon said the sequence was inspired by Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Mattel blocked it, however, saying they didn’t want to give Barbie a defined persona. The rescue was reworked using RC Car instead, and it works brilliantly, but you can’t help wondering what the Barbie version would have looked like.

37. Audiences expecting a Disney war comedy got a shock

Several months before release, Disney held secret test screenings while the film was still being worked on. Audiences were told they were going to see Operation Dumbo Drop, a Disney Vietnam War comedy. Once they were in their seats, they were informed it was actually an experimental animated film called Toy Story and had to sign non-disclosure agreements if they wanted to stay and watch. For Lasseter and the Pixar team, waiting for the reactions must have been nerve-wracking. These audiences were being asked to judge something they had never seen the like of before.

38. A toy shortage at Christmas happened because the big manufacturers said no

Disney offered both Hasbro and Mattel the chance to manufacture a Toy Story toy line to coincide with the film’s release. Both turned it down, saying the 11 months before the release date wasn’t enough time and that they needed at least 18. A Canadian company called Thinkway Toys picked up the licence instead, with just five months to spare. (Side note: The voice of the Woody pull-string doll was recorded by Tom Hanks’s brother, Jim Hanks).

Then, when the film became a phenomenon and demand for Buzz Lightyear toys exploded at Christmas, Thinkway simply couldn’t keep up. They weren’t one of the major manufacturers and didn’t have the production capacity. That shortage became big news at the time, and it’s also, indirectly, the reason the Arnold Schwarzenegger Christmas comedy Jingle All the Way (1996) exists.

Also, Pixar discussed whether the toy line should include the horrifying reconstructed toys from Sid’s room. Thinkway wisely said no.

39. Pixar’s secret weapon was a piece of software they built themselves

One of the tools that gave Pixar a decisive edge over any potential competition was RenderMan, animation software they had created in-house back in 1988. RenderMan allowed animators to render realistic textures, lighting, and fluid motion in ways that were unheard of on a computer at the time, and it was the engine that powered Toy Story. After the film’s release, RenderMan became the industry standard for CGI animation and was adopted by studios across Hollywood.

In those days, rendering a single frame of CGI to film took around seven hours, which puts those 800,000 total rendering hours into sharp perspective.

40. The film shattered records and earned a place in history

From its $30 million production budget, Toy Story grossed $394.4 million worldwide, making it the biggest global hit of 1995. At the Academy Awards, while it wasn’t eligible for Best Animated Feature (the category didn’t exist yet), John Lasseter was awarded a Special Achievement Academy Award and the film earned three nominations: Randy Newman for Best Score, Newman again for Best Original Song for “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” and Whedon, Stanton, Cohen, and Sokolow for Best Screenplay.

Today, on Rotten Tomatoes, Toy Story holds a perfect 100% approval rating from critics with 92% from audiences. On IMDb, it sits at 8.3 out of 10, placing it 75th on the all-time Top 250, one spot above Avengers: Endgame (2019) and one below Amadeus (1984). Not bad for a film that Disney once called unwatchable.

And you’ve reached the end, 40 huge facts about Toy Story, the film that changed animation forever. Please share on your social media channels, and subscribe to our YouTube channel for lots of great video content.