Lasseter andhis team open the film in a kid's bedroom, where the toys come to life whentheir owner is absent. Of course computers are asdumb as a box of bricks if they're not well-programmed, and director JohnLasseter, a pioneer in computer animation, has used offbeat imagination andhigh energy to program his.īutenough of this propeller-head stuff. Each frame required as much as 300MBs of information, which means that on my one-gigabyte hard disk, I have roomfor about three frames, or an eighth of a second. Ilearn from the current Wiredmagazine that the movie occupied theattention of a bank of 300 powerful Sun microprocessors, the fastest modelsaround, which took about 800,000 hours of computing time to achieve this andother scenes - at 2 to 15 hours per frame. Here, you donotice it, because you're careeningthrough space with a new sense of freedom.Ĭonsiderfor example a scene where Buzz Lightyear, the new space toy, jumps off a bed,bounces off a ball, careens off of the ceiling, spins around on a hanging toyhelicopter and zooms into a series of loop-the-loops on a model car race track.Watch Buzz, the background, and the perspective - which stretches andcontracts to manipulate the sense of speed. Computer animation has grown soskillful that sometimes you don't even notice it (the launching in 'Apollo13' took place largely within a computer). The movie doesn't simplyanimate characters in front of painted backdrops it fully animates thecharacters andthe space they occupy, and allows itspoint of view to move freely around them. Imaginethe spectacular animation of the ballroom sequence in 'Beauty and theBeast' at feature length and you'll get the idea. The more you know about how the movie wasmade, the more you respect it. Older viewers may beeven more absorbed, because 'Toy Story,' the first feature madeentirely by computer, achieves a three-dimensional reality and freedom ofmovement that is liberating and new. Forthe kids in the audience, a movie like this will work because it tells a funstory, contains a lot of humor, and is exciting to watch.

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