Tin Toy - Production

Production

In the spring of 1988, cash was running so short that Jobs convened a meeting to decree deep spending cuts across the board. When it was over, Lasseter and his animation group were almost too afraid to ask Jobs about authorizing some extra money for another short. Finally, they broached the topic and Jobs sat silent, looking skeptical. The short would require close to $300,000 more out of his pocket. After a few minutes, he asked if there were any storyboards. Catmull took him down to the animation offices, and Lasseter started his show. With the storyboards pinned on his wall, Lasseter did the voices and acted out the shots—just as story men had done on the Disney lot for decades—and thereby showed his passion for the project. The stakes here were much higher than before, however. Ralph Guggenheim, manager of the animation unit, recalled, "We knew that he wasn't just pitching for the film, he was pitching for the survival of the group." Jobs warmed up to the project and agreed to provide the money. "I believed in what John was doing," Jobs later said. "It was art. He cared, and I cared. I always said yes." His only comment at the end of Lasseter’s presentation was, "All I ask of you, John, is to make it great."

That fall, after completion of Red's Dream, most members of the company gathered at Stillwater Cove, near Fort Ross, to design a new software that was designed completely for the work of an animator. From the meeting came Menv software ("modeling Environment"), the first program specifically designed to facilitate the workflow of an animator, separating the various phases of the animation (modeling, animation and lighting), later renamed Puppets. To show the application of the new program, it was approved the production of a short. Inspired by the birth of his daughter Julia, William Reeves proposed the idea to create a human baby. Lasseter had an inspiration for the new opera based on the observation of his nephew, intent to put any toy in the mouth on the way. Lasseter said "In terms of toys the child must have seemed a terrible monster!"

The story was about Lasseter’s love, classic toys, and was inspired by a visit made in 1987 at the Tin Toy Museum in Yokohama, Japan. It was told from the perspective of a toy one- man band named Tinny, who meets a baby that charms and terrorizes him. Escaping under the couch, Tinny finds other frightened toys, but when the baby hits his head and cries, Tinny goes back out to cheer him up. Tin Toy was inspired much like Luxo Jr., namely, Lasseter's observations of a friend's baby. This time, he opted for a more ambitious task, attempting to mimic a human baby in its appearance, the movement of its arms, and its fickle moods.

The film was officially a test of the PhotoRealistic RenderMan software. This was the only Pixar short rendered on the RM-1, a RenderMan specific computer that was never sold to the public. As with Luxo Jr. and Red's Dream, it was also a chance for Lasseter to one-up his earlier efforts, taking his animation and storytelling to another level. The baby proved very difficult to model and animate; "it just became an incredible burden," remembered Flip Phillips, a new member of the team at the time. In early attempts at a model of the baby's head, he appeared to have the face of a middle-aged man. The final version of the baby (known to the team as Billy) had a much-improved face, but his skin had the look of plastic. When he moved, moreover, his body lacked the natural give of baby fat and his diaper had the solidity of cement—compromises made necessary by lack of time and the still-developing technology.