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Review:Toy Story 2
Ok Toy Story was good. From its ground breaking animation, to its story, it was quite simply a wonderful movie. Real solid funny jokes for adults. Great jokes for kids. A lesson worth teaching. And all the while it remained visually amazing: when we finally got to the breathtaking crescendo of the final sequence with the toys chasing the truck, not only was it the most beautiful CGI ever seen, but we believed in the little charachters. They weren't pixels dancing before our eyes, they were a talking dinosaur and a Mr. Potato Head. Woody and Buzz were real.
Its the goal of animation to take still objects and convince an audience that they think, breath and exist outside of the screen. And Toy Story did it as well as it had ever been done in the past.
So we've got a pair of big shoes to fill for Toy Story 2. Everyone knows that sequels traditionally suck, and this sequel was originally destined by Disney to be a straight-to-video release (Ala the Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin cheeseball videos designed to milk a few bucks out of a franchise by bastardizing the charachters that captured our hearts just a few years earlier.
But let me say that Toy Story 2 pulls it off. Its a wonderful movie. And it does what few sequels have done: it surpases its original. This is one of the most entertaining films I've seen this year.
The Plot? Turns out Woody is a rare collectible toy. He's stolen by a toy collector and whisked off to be sold to collectors in Japan. The gang must rescue our fearless cowpoke leader, all while Woody wrestles with his destiny: A few short years left with an aging Andy, or a lifetime of being admired by children throughout the world.
All the charachters are back, with a few new ones to boot. Among the best of the new toys are Zurg (a quite funny Darth Vader parody that the film wastes no chance to exploit) Woody's female toy counterpart (expertly voiced by Joan Cusack) and a pengiun named weezy (who really shines at the end with one of the films best gags).
And as pixar likes to do, this is a kids movies, with references for the adults to get a big grin from. Witness a surprise Pixar cameo, numerous hilarious Star Wars references, and even a shot lifted directly from Jurassic Park. Each time you feel Lassater winking at you.
My complaints? The film breaks a rule set forth in the first movie by showing the adults faces. Part of the magic of the original was that it followed the longstanding tradition of representing authority figures below the neck. Presumably this was because rendering a human face was a challange that the animators weren't up to last time around: the childrens faces were mostly pretty weak. But this time around we see everything. On one hand, seeing Al's face is pretty impressive, and probably quite necessary for the way the story is laid out, but I still miss just seeing a pair of feet.
So if you aren't to old and caloused to tolerate seeing a children's movie, or if you enjoy computer animation, or if you just want to see the original 'Luxo' on the big screen, or if you just want to sit back for an hour and a half and enjoy good entertaining story telling, go see this now.
...that Disney has for once made a sequel that didn't just shamelessly extract money from the parents who were unlucky enough to have children obsessed with the originals.
On an unrelated note, I think movies like Toy Story have an interesting significance: getting kids interested in computers. I mean, if you were four and you saw a CG movie as cool as Toy Story, wouldn't you want to figure out how they did all that with computers? (Actually, you can strike the "if you were four" part- I want to know too!) Furthermore, Toy Story (and Bug's Life, Antz, etc) don't strike me as being particularly "boy" movies, which means that they might have a hand in breaking the current gender imbalance that CS departments typically see these days. That would be good.
-jacob
And, to go offtopic, I read it using Sitescooper, a funky off-line web formatting thingy written in Perl, aimed at PalmPilot users.
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
This was a first post with info in it....
/. these days.
What the hell is happening to
Come on. We should go back to the old days, where people would print banal pointless drivel as the first post!
BTW Tip of the day:
do:-
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=x
where x=some string
to create a comments page all of your own!
The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake those, you've got it made. (Marx)
Its out of context, the quote is from the director of the movie, not Jobs.
You are right that penguins can just be pengiuns. We needn't get all corporate about the trademark please ("No, you cannot be called the clan McDonald of Scotland since 862 AD, that is a registered trademark").
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The tradition of not showing the faces of adults began with Charles M. Schultz, and his Peanuts cartoon strip. The strip has never showed an adult's face, or (in the animated cartoons) used an adult's voice. You only see the child's perspective.
Having seen the original Toy Story at least one hundred times I can
assure you that there is no "rule" about showing the face of on
adult. If you look at the film again, Andy's mom's face shows up
a bunch of times. Granted, the rendering of her features are pretty
poor, but you *do* see her.
I have to disagree with CmdrTaco's assertion that the children's' faces
were "weak" in the first film. View the video again and look at Sid and
Hanna's (Sid's sister) faces and I think you'll agree that the animation
and rendering are very good and more important very supportive of the story.
As for the new film, I *do* agree that it is great. After seeing it twice
I am ready to pack my bags and head to Burbank to see it at the "El
Capitan" (which is showing it digitally) for a third time.
Jessie, the cow girl, is IMHO the best character to come out of this new
film.
The technical advances made in this film are great but are not as big as a
jump from Toy Story to Bug's Life.
Lastly, Disney has missed the boat by not having the Toy Story DVD out buy
the time Toy Story 2 came out. This is similar to the merchandising screw
up Disney did with not having the toys ready when the first film came out.
Hey, has anyone here ever seen VeggieTales? Those things rock...They're Christian 30-minute videos aimed at younger kids (I'm not trying to start a religious war here; I just mean to say they're great animation) but they have lots of jokes aimed at adults...and the animation is absolutely beautiful. Quite witty. There's this cucumber named Larry, a tomato named Bob, an asparagus named Junior. All of them are voiced by the creator, Phil Vischer, or his wife, Amy. More information is probably here...
It's absolutely hilarious and very hip. If you like CG stuff, check out Veggietales--it's what really got me interested in computer generated animation.
Angry IT woman in big clompy boots. And talking lint!.
I just hope kids like this movie better than Pokemon. Some probably don't, and that's just sad. This movie is a work of art, and in some spots hysterically funny. I also think some teenagers should really give this movie a shot. A lot of people think it's a cartoon, it's from Disney, which = totally uncool. But this is fun for all ages.
All the Star Wars references near the end were really funny, as was the Jurassic Park T-Rex chase scene. Pixar is not just making a kids movie. Hell, a lot of kids probably wouldn't pick up on the joke.
Also, the short at the beginning is excellent. It's primitive compared to this or Bug's Life, but it had me laughing out loud. It's really funny to see how they can give emotions and almost facial expressions to something like a lamp.
There was a big "Powered by Sun" logo/statement in the closing credits. No mention of Linux, but it was funny to see the "network admin" list in movie credits! There were probably 50 of them...
Also, I happened to notice that Bruce Perens was in the list of software developers. I assume this is *the* Bruce Perens, but does anyone know for sure?
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
Did anyone else think the CGI in A Bugs Life was better than in Toy Story 2? To me it seemed that TS2 was made out to look a lot like the first one. While there were some spectacular parts of the movie (some of the Al shots were fab), other parts seemed lacking. For example, the cars in the street and some of the buildings just looked "fake". I mean those things are the easiest to render to look realistic. Was this intentional? After seeing The Phantom Menace and knowing the talent over at Pixar, I assumed they'd up the ante a bit. The other thing I noticed was the poor animation of the humans. It looked like they weren't even motion captured in parts. Perhaps this had something to do with the movie being a straingt-to-home release originally? Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movie, it was great, I was just hoping Pixar would give me more. Perhaps I'll just have to wait until Square releases Final Fantasy The Movie....
I'm always disheartened when I hear someone praise a wonderful movie like Toy Story solely for its technical merits. Toy Story was an astounding technical achievement, to be sure, but what really impressed me about it was that it was simply a great movie, period. I went in to the theater expecting forgettable eye candy, and I came out an hour and a half later having witnessed true movie magic. Toy Story manages to be both riotously funny and deeply moving, and is easily one of the best movies (if not the best movie) released by Disney in the 1990s.
Similarly, whenever I mention to someone how much I liked the movie Antz, the invariable response is to ask me what I thought of A Bug's Life. I bristle at the automatic lumping together of these two movies into some imagined category merely due to some unfortunate superficial similarities, namely that they're both computer-animated, and that they're both about insects.
It's a pity that Antz is doomed forever to be compared to the immeasurably inferior A Bug's Life (and let's not get into the infamous behind-the-scenes politics about the making of these two movies). While Antz was smart, relentlessly witty, and darkly funny, A Bug's Life was distressingly shallow, antiseptic, and soulless -- especially considering that many of the people behind it were responsible for the great Toy Story.
I went into Toy Story 2 on Thanksgiving Day with giddy anticipation tempered with a healthy measure of trepidation due to my previous disappointing experience with A Bug's Life.
I am happy to report that I needn't have worried. Toy Story 2 is a terrific movie. I sat through almost the entire film with a goofy grin that lasted well after I left the theater. While not as technically groundbreaking as the original Toy Story was (the improvements are more evolutionary than revolutionary), Toy Story 2 nevertheless packs quite a punch. It's certainly more ambitious in its story and action sequences -- almost to a fault (the action becomes perhaps a little too frenetic towards the end). It also manages to explore deep existential issues just like the first movie, although some of the emotional wallop has diminished and occasionally seems forced.
Which of the Toy Story movies did I prefer? It's a very tough call. While the sequel wildly exceeded my very high expectations -- which is saying quite a bit -- if forced to choose, I'd have to go with the original.
I believe that the greatness of a movie should be judged for the totality of the experience, and not merely a single facet. You may have noticed that in my evaluations of the various computer-animated movies of recent years, animation quality hardly figured in at all (especially since they were all excellently animated, albeit with different degrees of excellence).
Here's to great movies, computer-animated or not.
begin 644
See Sun press release. For Toy Story 2, they used 120 E4500 with 14 UltraSparc-II's each - total of 1680 CPUs, along with 4.5terabytes of storage. List price of around $30M I guess, though I presume they got some kind of discount ^-^. btw, one of the requirements was for the render-farm to be pretty compact. Performance Computing magazine have a review of the E4500 here. Pixar used Sun kit for their previous stuff too. If they do a Toy Story 3, by then the UltraSparc-IV should be out, which'll be about 5x faster in FP than current top-end UltraSparc-II's.
Toy Story 2 got a 9 out of 10 there. Hurrah!
Sreeram
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Seriously, the renderfarm this time around consisted of around eight dozen 14-processor Sun Ultra boxes each with 8 Gb of memory and about 36 Gb of disk. Rendering times (using Renderman) ranged from 2 to around 20 hours per frame.
Sorry, Linux was really not used at all on TS2. Pixar managers use Macs and animation/technical people use SGIs, mostly Octanes these days. Suns are used only for the fileservers and renderfarm.
BTW here are the theaters showing TS2 in digital projection. It looks absolutely stunning and, because of the digital transfer from the original image files, it blows away 35mm film. You owe it to yourself to make the trip.
AMC 1000- Theater 2
1000 Van Ness Avenue at O'Farrell
San Francisco, CA 94109
(415) 922-4262
El Capitan
6838 Hollywood Boulevard
Hollywood, CA 90028
(800) 347-6396 or www.elcapitantickets.com
Media Center North-AMC Burbank
201 East Magnolia Boulevard
Burbank, CA 91502
(818) 953-9800
Edwards Irvine Spectrum 21
65 Fortune Drive
Irvine, CA 32718
(949) 450-4900
Pleasure Island AMC 24
1500 Buena Vista Drive
Lake Buena Vista, FL 32830
(407) 298-4488
Legacy Cinemark 24
7201 Central Expressway
Plano, TX 75025
(972) 517-2444
well, I don't know but the Bruce Perns worked at Pixar for 12 years....
--
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Gah?! Um, no. Though rendering progs are up and coming under the Linux kernel, no one in his/her right mind would choose Linux+Intel for graphically-intensive jobs.
The CS department here at UNC-Chapel Hill uses SGIs and Suns.
I believe I remember correctly that in the credits to TS2 the renderfarm was comprised of Sun machines. I caught that the 3D animation software was Alias!/Wavefront, but I don't remember what the 2D software was...
Perhaps we should all choose a superior solution: 32 FreeBSD boxes (ala _The Matrix_)! =)
Check out the most recent issue of Computer Graphics World and read their cover story.
Here are a few choice quotes:
...and:
Loads more, and they talk with all the principles of the film, John Lasseter, Ed Catmull and the rest. Not too many spoilers, and the detail is great...for instance, the dust on the shelf Wheezy was on was NOT a particle system; it was actually discrete geometry. And the hairs on Al's arm were modeled as well.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
For back end rendering, they have a room full of MP sparc boxes. To my "SPARC? Why use the slowest of risc processors?" question, they replied that it isn't the speed of the individual processors that was important to them, but the speed PER CUBIC FOOT OF SPACE. Sun made quad pizza boxes, so it was computationally dense.
For modeling and development, they use a lot of SGI octanes. They also use linux + mesa for some internal tools.
John Carmack
Those are all clips from older Pixar shorts (which I'm sure are collected together on videotape somewhere). "Geri's Game", "Luxor Jr", and "Knickknack" are the ones you mentioned.
"It's overkill, of course. But you can never have too much overkill." - Anonymous Slashdot Coward
The Landover Baptist Church also has a review of this movie up. Very very amusing... not for the easily offended Christian crowd (not-so-easily-offended Christians should also be amused, though...).
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What's even cooler about VeggieTales (besides the hilarious clean humor and the great animation) is that it came out two years BEFORE Toy Story. According to IMDB (I never trust myself on dates), Toy Story came out in 1995 and the first VeggieTale video came out Christmas 1993. The animation of VeggieTales EASILY matches Toy Story and is created by a little Christian company with no big ties. I've always admired their success (at least in Christian circles) and more people interested in computer animation should check them out - I know they've inspired me to use my computer skills in a way that can help others (yeah, yeah - I'm a Christian and yes, I want to use my skills for God..).
Anyway.. I just thought it was cool that VeggieTales came out a couple of years before Toy Story, and is of excellent quality. It is too bad that they are hardly recoginized outside of Christian circles.
In Toy Story one (which I coincidentally just watched again about an hour ago), not only are many of the childrens' faces shown many times (andy, sid and his sister), but andy's mother's face is shown a few times too.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
The current issue of Computer Graphics World has an interesting article on Toy story 2 and the processes that went into making it. It seems that one of the concerns was losing the sense of continuity with the first movie because of the advances in the technology since then.
The movie was done using Renderman (as are all of Pixar's films). More info could probably be found on the comp.graphics.rendering.renderman newsgroup (although there's not much discusion of the movie going on today).
C.
Obscure Canadi_a_ns. They're based in Vancouver, BC, not in Quebec.
And obscure only to you, I'm sure. Why flaunt your ignorance?
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I worked at the World's Largest Theatre (30 screens, Ontario, CA) for about two years before leaving for school this fall. A few facts gleaned from the projection booth:
Theatres are nearly mandated to play the movie trailers (the previews that show before the movie) at a volume level about 25% louder than the actual movie, to (supposedly) draw attention in that first 12-15 minutes when latecomers are still finding seats. Add in the fact that many trailers include action scenes that are normally loud anyway and there are not a small number of complaints. The invariable response is "Has the movie started yet? No? Well then don't worry, it'll be at a normal volume when the movie starts." And over 90% of the time, it is.
Trailers, promo clips, theatre snipes, and the film itself are invariably at different volume levels. It is impossible to adjust for all of them and most of the time the volume level is just at a certain level and only gets changed if someone asks. Bear in mind the people in the projection booth cannot hear the movie at all and have no idea if they've accidentally knocked the volume control while moving platters or performing routine maintenance.
If, once the movie has started, it still seems a little loud, make a trip outside. Talk to somebody and it will get taken care of and you'll most likely walk off with some popcorn coupons for your trouble. Just remember the fact that you're paying a premium to see a feature film in its best possible presentation and you're entitled to it.
Happy moviegoing next time!
A few corrections...
Phil's wife's name is Lisa.
Mike Nawrocki and Phil Visher do about 3/4 of the voices, Lisa does her share as well. The rest are friends and family, employees and a few hired guns.
It is true that we beat Toy Story to the punch, and we have also had tremendous video sales as well. Most of the studio uses octanes for for animating and rendering. We have a few 02s as well.
We currently started using Maya for our new prject, having use SoftImage in the past.
I can try to answer any other questions that you might have: ttoll@bigidea.com
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
> ... it isn't the speed of the individual processors that was important
> to them, but the speed PER CUBIC FOOT OF SPACE...
Man, that's my kind of problem. I wonder what their air-conditioning bill is per month...
Hey, Steve-o! When the hell are you going to convince your company to port Renderman to your other company's machines? Mmmmm...Renderman for G4...(drool)
#include "stdcarmackpraise.h"
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
I saw it last night, and I liked it. I'm a geek (and proud of it), so anything all CGI is cool in my book. And I'm not so old that I can't enjoy the sort of fun a kid can have. Given that Pixar adds enough sofis... sophista... grown-up stuff to appeal to adults, and it is a pretty good movie.
:(
The "Star Wars" pardoy bit was great! The climax on the elevator had me laughing so hard I nearly passed out.
I've seen references here to various animated shorts that Pixar has done. Does anyone know where those of us who cannot go to film festivals might be able to see some of this stuff?
Anyone have a link to anything about the "Renderman" software the credits say they used? I'm just curious. I tried renderman.com but all I got was a server error.
I realized something with this film: The first "Toy Story" was the only Disney animated film I've ever heard of without a character singing a song in the middle. Disney realized their error and corrected it for this movie, to increase sound-track sales, no doubt.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Hmm, nobody's looking at this thread, I'm pretty sure, so I'll try it here :-) I did that before but left out the quotes, maybe it needs them.
amazing.com is my web site!
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