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So the Pixar team "went back to what everybody wanted from the beginning," says Lasseter. "There was a way to get appealing characters with adult interests into the film without making them unlikable."

The filmmakers found the seeds of their answers in the voices of Hanks and Allen. "We originally thought Buzz was a heroic kind of super-space-hero Dudley Do-Right who always does the big gesture," says Guggenheim. "But that was a setup for a big fall. We listened to Tim's recordings and wound up with a self-confident but modest space cop, a Sgt. Joe Friday who does his job every day."

As for Woody, who had been conceived as a benevolent dictator, lording it over the other toys from the top of the bed, he was too sarcastic and authoritarian. "When we moved him down to the floor with the other toys who looked up to him as Andy's favorite," says Guggenheim, "he became one of the guys, more likable."

By March, the team was back on track. Then, as Hanks remembers too well, "we had to go back and rerecord every single line of dialogue."

From there on, the Pixar crew--a motley Bay Area mix ranging from techno-geek geniuses in their 40s who created the computer tools to raw animation recruits in their early 20s who manipulated them--sat down at their monitors and began the task of making a movie entertaining enough to satisfy Disney. Whenever someone would finish something, Lasseter was able to check it out on the computer network. "You had to have blinders on through the whole thing, frame by frame," says supervising animator Docter. "I'd say, 'What small piece of the puzzle can I finish today?' Toward the end I'd look up and be amazed that we were almost finished."

Computer animation, known for its cold, clear, impersonal crispness, posed a special challenge. "It's easy to make things look perfect," says Lasseter. "We had to make things look more organic. Every leaf and blade of grass had to be created. We had to give the world a sense of history. So the doors are banged up, the floors have scuffs."

Lasseter's 27 animators were high-tech puppeteers who had to coax performances out of the programmers' 400 computer models. (The most complex of them--Woody--was operated by 723 motion controls, including 212 for his face and 58 for his mouth.) "We'd challenge the others to come up with technical innovations," says Docter. "We had to find ways to make the characters more lifelike and fluid. We had to break the angles along Woody's spine so he didn't look like he had a rod up his butt."

While the most time was spent on Woody and Buzz, Toy Story's humans--Andy, the little boy whose room is Buzz and Woody's universe, and Sid, his mean, toy-torturing neighbor--proved the toughest to create, because, says Docter, "everybody's an expert on human motion. They didn't have to act a lot. We weren't going for realism, but they had to work well enough so you believe that they are not toys."

Lasseter believed in the dazzling 3-D storytelling possible in this medium. More than Disney, he knew what the end results would be. Disney helped steer the course, but finally Lasseter and his crew delivered the film's look, style, and performances--from such details as Slinky Dog's foot twitching in his sleep to the emotional moments shared by Woody and Buzz while they face their unhappy future in the clutches of Sid. "When we started," says Schumacher, "we asked, 'Is anybody going to watch this?' John was great. He never said, 'You don't get it, just shut up and wait.'"


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