Later, during a Barbie-guided tour of a giant toy store, the characters come across a vast stock of Buzz Lightyear toys and Buzz himself remarks that the store clearly hasn't under-ordered, the way it did last time round.Īll self-referential, post-modern stuff but it will remind beleaguered parents of the Christmas of 1996 - when every child of a certain age in the State wanted a Buzz toy and there wasn't one to be had - while at the same time resign them to a new wave of Toy Story buying. During his ordeal, he discovers that he is a highly valued collectible from a 1950s television show called Woody's Roundup and that he has even appeared in television advertisements. Woody is stolen by Al McWhiggin, an obsessive toy collector, and there's nothing marketing professionals like better than a collector. The storyline is simple enough for kids but packed with enough wit to keep adults well entertained.Toy Story 2 opens in Irish cinemas tomorrow and adult viewers might be surprised or - depending on which stage of pester power they find themselves - irritated by the film's tongue in cheek references to merchandising.Įven the central plot line is based on the power of marketing. The dialogue is crisp and funny, the characters are lovable - without Disney's typical treacle.
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Inveterate moviegoers will also recognize a reference to Jurassic Park when plastic dinosaur Rex comes lumbering after Buzz's getaway car, and an airport chase scene with luggage moving on geometrically-complex conveyor belts bears a decided resemblance to Metropolis.įor the most part, the movie mostly steers clear of gimmicks and facile satire to create a truly enjoyable, as well as visually lovely, experience. Ten minutes later they're throwing a softball around outside and getting in touch with their father-son relationship. "Buzz - I am your father," croaks Zurg before sending his son plummeting down the shaft.
At one point, Buzz confronts his nemesis Zurg in an elevator shaft that looks suspiciously like the setting for Luke and Darth's climactic scene in The Empire Strikes Back. Most egregiously geek-pandering are the Star Wars references.
Numerous references are a sly poke in the ribs for techie types. When viewers aren't rubbing their eyes in disbelief at the visual effects they'll be giggling over the script. To produce authentic-looking retro footage, animation was rendered in color, converted to NTSC black-and-white video, then run through a compositor to add jitter, negative scratches, stains, scan lines, video bloom, and static, all warped to fit onto the television screen Woody is watching.
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Pixar's Renderfarm used 1400 Sun processors to chomp all the data.Īnother impressive effect are excerpts of Woody's campy 1950s cowboy TV show. Add to that the fact that Toy Story 2 has 122,699 frames of up to 4 gigabytes per frame and you'll get an idea of the complexity of the finished product. Not surprisingly, all this high-powered computing was a gargantuan effort - rendering time for a single frame of film ranges from 10 minutes to three days.