Not only that, but the movie itself lived up to the hype, changing the face of animation from hand-drawn musicals to computer-generated comedies practically overnight. Within months, rival studios were in on the game, with the ripple effect still being felt today, some fifteen years after its debut. Naturally a sequel was ordered, and managing to overcome a particularly troublesome production, emerged as a genuinely superlative successor, with comparisons made to those other rare sequels that managed to eclipse their precursors, The Godfather Part II and The Empire Strikes Back. Rumors of a third film almost immediately surfaced, but the problem was that Disney wouldn’t accept a sequel project (and one that had started as a direct-to-video quickie) in the terms of their five original picture deal with Pixar, leading to almost ten years of wrangling before an agreement was made for Disney to buy the CG company out. Part of the bargaining tactics that Disney had put in play was the setting up of the Circle 7 Animation facility, at one time destined to produce sequels to Pixar’s pictures. The thought of the Toy Story characters being involved in nothing more than money-making movies (a plot that had defective Buzz Lightyears being recalled to Japan, only for Woody and the team to head out on a rescue mission) must have played no small part in Pixar’s returning to the negotiating table, after which Circle 7 was shuttered, and that version of Toy Story 3 scrapped. Original series creator and director John Lasseter envisioned a third chapter would end with the characters cared for and being played with by children – after all, that’s what toys are for – and as soon as the ink had dried on the Disney/Pixar contract, that third film was put in the capable hands of part one’s editor and part two’s co-director Lee Unkrich. I’m sure he and his story crew quickly found that threequels are notoriously hard things to pull off. There’s the pressure of matching up to a beloved or successful first film as well as not repeating the tricks that had already been played in overcoming the same problems with the difficult second outing.
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