Toy Story 2 is a 1999 American animated adventure comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures.[5] It is the sequel to Toy Story (1995) and the second installment in the Toy Story franchise. The film was directed by John Lasseter, co-directed by Ash Brannon and Lee Unkrich (in their feature directorial debuts), and produced by Helene Plotkin and Karen Robert Jackson, from a screenplay written by Andrew Stanton, Rita Hsiao, Doug Chamberlin, and Chris Webb, and a story conceived by Lasseter, Stanton, Brannon, and Pete Docter. Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Annie Potts, R. Lee Ermey, John Morris, Laurie Metcalf and Jeff Pidgeon reprise their roles from the first Toy Story film. In the film, Woody is stolen by a greedy toy collector, prompting Buzz Lightyear and his friends to save him, but Woody is then tempted by the idea of immortality in a museum.
Disney initially envisioned Toy Story 2 as a direct-to-video sequel. The film began production in a building separated from Pixar, on a small scale, as most of the main Pixar staff were busy working on A Bug's Life (1998). When story reels proved promising, Disney upgraded the film to a theatrical release, but Pixar was unhappy with the film's quality. Lasseter and the story team redeveloped the entire plot in one weekend. Although most Pixar features take years to develop, the established release date could not be moved and the production schedule for Toy Story 2 was compressed into nine months.[6][7]
Despite production struggles, Toy Story 2 debuted on November 24, 1999, to a successful box office run, eventually grossing over $511 million. It received widespread critical acclaim from critics and audiences, with a 100% rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes, like its predecessor.[8] It is considered by critics to be one of the few sequel films superior to the original[9] and is frequently featured on lists of the greatest animated films ever made. Toy Story 2 would go on to become the third-highest-grossing film of 1999, behind Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and The Sixth Sense.[10] Among its accolades, the film won Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy at the 57th Golden Globe Awards. The film has seen multiple home media releases and a theatrical 3-D re-release in 2009 as part of a double feature with the first film, 10 years after its initial release. A second sequel, Toy Story 3, was released in 2010, and a third sequel, Toy Story 4, was released in 2019.
Woody and Buzz Lightyear have become the co-leaders of Andy's toys. Andy plans to take Woody to Cowboy Camp, but accidentally rips his arm. Andy's mother places Woody on a shelf, and Woody begins to fear that Andy will throw him away. The day after Andy leaves, Woody finds Wheezy, a penguin toy with a broken squeaker who has also been shelved. After saving Wheezy from being sold at an outdoor yard sale, Woody is found and stolen by a greedy toy collector. Buzz fails to foil the theft, but finds clues identifying the collector as Al McWhiggin, the owner of the "Al's Toy Barn" store. Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Slinky Dog, Rex, and Hamm set out to rescue Woody.
At Al's apartment, Woody discovers that he was designed after the protagonist of Woody's Roundup, a children's Western series from the 1950s, and meets his co-star character dolls - Jessie the Cowgirl, Bullseye the Horse, and Stinky Pete the Prospector. While initially delighted to meet them, Woody realizes that Al plans to sell the whole Roundup collection to a toy museum abroad. He announces he will return home to Andy, dismaying the gang, as the museum will not take the collection without Woody. After Woody's arm is repaired, Woody learns that Jessie was abandoned by her owner Emily as she grew up. Afraid that Andy might do the same to him, Woody decides to go to the museum.
Meanwhile, Buzz's group reaches Al's Toy Barn and searches for Woody. Buzz encounters a Utility Belt Buzz toy; assuming he is a real space ranger, Utility Belt Buzz imprisons Andy's Buzz as an imposter. Utility Belt Buzz later meets Andy's other toys and, assuming they are on a mission to defeat his arch-nemesis Emperor Zurg, accompanies them to Al's apartment. Andy's Buzz escapes and follows the gang, inadvertently releasing a toy Zurg from its box. Zurg follows Buzz with the intention of destroying him.
Both Buzzes and the search party arrive at Al's apartment, but Woody initially refuses to go home with them. Shortly after Andy's other toys leave, Woody reconsiders and invites the Woody's Roundup toys to go with him and become Andy's toys. While Jessie and Bullseye accept Woody's offer, Pete refuses and blocks the others from leaving; having never been played with, he is adamant about going to the museum.
Al returns to the apartment and takes the Woody's Roundup collection to the airport. While Utility Belt Buzz fights and reconciles with Zurg, Andy's Buzz and the other toys pursue Al's suitcases into the airport. After a prolonged pursuit through the airport's baggage sorting system - during which Pete re-opens the tear in Woody's arm - the other toys subdue Pete and teach him a lesson about playtime as they place him in a little girl Amy's backpack where she can play with him alongside Barbie. They save Bullseye, but Jessie is placed on the plane. Woody, Buzz, and Bullseye work together to save her just as the plane takes off. The toys then return home to Andy's house.
Andy returns from Cowboy Camp, plays with Jessie and Bullseye, and repairs Woody and Wheezy. Al mourns the loss of the lucrative deal with the toy museum on television. Woody tells Buzz that he no longer fears Andy losing interest in him, for even if it does happen, he and Buzz will be friends "for infinity and beyond".
A conversation about a sequel to Toy Story began around a month after the film's opening in December 1995.[11] A few days after Toy Story's release, John Lasseter was traveling with his family and found a young boy clutching a Sheriff Woody doll at an airport. Lasseter described how the boy's excitement to show it to his father touched him deeply. Lasseter realized that his character no longer belonged to him only, but rather it belonged to others, as well. The memory was a defining factor in the production of Toy Story 2, with Lasseter moved to create a great film for that child and for everyone else who loved the characters.[12]
Ed Catmull, Lasseter, and Ralph Guggenheim visited Joe Roth, successor to recently ousted Jeffrey Katzenberg as chairman of Walt Disney Studios, shortly afterward. Roth was pleased and embraced the idea of a sequel.[11] Disney had recently begun making direct-to-video sequels to its successful features, and Roth wanted to handle the Toy Story sequel this way, as well. Prior releases, such as 1994's Aladdin sequel, The Return of Jafar, had returned an estimated $100 million in profits.[13]
Initially, everything regarding Toy Story 2 was uncertain: whether stars Tom Hanks and Tim Allen would be available and affordable, what the story premise would be, and even whether the film would be computer-animated at Pixar or traditionally hand-drawn at Walt Disney Feature Animation.[13] Lasseter regarded the project as a chance to groom new directing talent, as top choices were already immersed in other projects (Andrew Stanton as co-director of A Bug's Life and Pete Docter as director of what would eventually become Monsters, Inc.). Ash Brannon, a young animator who was previously animation director on Toy Story, was selected by Lasseter to direct after admiring his work on the first film. Brannon, a CalArts graduate, joined the Toy Story team in 1993.[13] Disney and Pixar officially announced the sequel in a press release on March 12, 1997.[14]
"The story of Toy Story 2 is based a lot on my own experience. I'm a big toy collector and a lot of them are like antiques, or one-of-a-kind toys, or prototypes the toy makers have given me. Well, I have five sons, four of them are little and they love to come to daddy's work, and they come into daddy's office and they just play with everything. And I'm sitting there [saying]'Oh no, that's uh, you can't play with that one, oh no, play with this one, oh no....' and I found myself just sitting there looking at myself and laughing. Because toys are manufactured, put on this Earth, to be played with by a child. That is the core essence of Toy Story. And so I started wondering, what was it like from a toy's point of view to be collected?"
– John Lasseter, on the story of Toy Story 2[15]
Lasseter's intention with a sequel was to respect the original Toy Story film and create that world again.[12] The story originated with him wondering what a toy would find upsetting, how a toy would feel if it were not played with by a child or, worse, a child growing out of a toy.[13] Brannon suggested the idea of a yard sale where the collector recognizes Woody as a rare artifact.[16] The concept of Woody as a collectible set came from the draft story of A Tin Toy Christmas, an original half-hour special pitched by Pixar to Disney in 1990. The obsessive toy collector named Al McWhiggin, who had appeared in a draft of Toy Story but was later expunged, was inserted into the film.[13] Lasseter claimed that Al was inspired by himself.[15]
Secondary characters in Woody's set were inspired by 1940s–1950s Western and puppet shows for children, such as Four Feather Falls, Hopalong Cassidy and Howdy Doody.[16][17] The development of Jessie was kindled by Lasseter's wife Nancy, who pressed him to include a strong female character in the sequel, one with more substance than Bo Peep.[16] The scope for the original Toy Story was basic and only extended over two residential homes, roadways, and a chain restaurant, whereas Toy Story 2 has been described by Unkrich as something "all over the map".[12]
To ensure that the project was ready for theaters, Lasseter had to add around 12 minutes of material and strengthen what was already there. The extra material would be a challenge since it could not be mere padding — it would have to feel as if it had always been there, an organic part of the film. With the scheduled delivery date less than a year away, Lasseter called Stanton, Docter, Joe Ranft, and some Disney story people to his house for a weekend. There, he hosted what he called a "story summit", a crash exercise that would produce a finished story in just two days.[6]
Back at the office that Monday, Lasseter assembled the company in a screening room and pitched the revised version of Toy Story 2 from exposition to resolution.[6] Story elements were recycled from the original drafts of the first Toy Story film. The first film's original opening sequence featured a Buzz Lightyear cartoon playing on television, which evolved into the Buzz Lightyear video game that would be shown in the opening scene of Toy Story 2.[18] A deleted scene from Toy Story, featuring Woody having a nightmare involving him being thrown into a trash can, was incorporated in a milder form for depicting Woody's fear of losing Andy. The idea of a squeak-toy penguin with a broken squeaker also resurfaced from an early version of Toy Story.[18]
As the story approached the production stage in early 1997, it was unclear whether Pixar would produce the film, as the entire team of 300 was busy working on A Bug's Life for a 1998 release. The Interactive Products Group, with a staff of 95, had its own animators, art department, and engineers. Under intense time pressure, they had put out two successful CD-ROM titles the previous year – Disney's Animated Storybook: Toy Story and The Toy Story Activity Center.[16] Between the two products, the group had created as much original animation as there was in Toy Story itself. Steve Jobs made the decision to shut down the computer games operation and the staff became the initial core of the Toy Story 2 production team.[14]
Before the switch from direct-to-video to feature film, the Toy Story 2 crew had been on its own, placed in a new building that was well-separated from the rest of the company by railroad tracks. "We were just the small film and we were off playing in our sandbox," co-producer Karen Jackson said.[6] Lasseter looked closely at every shot that had already been animated and called for tweaks throughout. The film reused digital elements from Toy Story but, true to the company's "prevailing culture of perfectionism, [...] it reused less of Toy Story than might be expected".[19] Character models received major upgrades internally and shaders went through revisions to bring about subtle improvements. The team freely borrowed models from other productions, such as Geri from Pixar's 1997 short Geri's Game, who became the Cleaner in Toy Story 2.[19] Supervising animator Glenn McQueen inspired the animators to do spectacular work in the short amount of time given, assigning different shots to suit each animators' strengths.[20]
While producing Toy Story, the crew was careful in creating new locations, working within available technology at that time. By the time of production on Toy Story 2, technology had advanced farther to allow more complicated camera shots than were possible in the first film.[12] In making the sequel, the team at Pixar did not want to stray too far from the first film's look, but the company had developed a lot of new software since the first feature had been completed.[20] To achieve the dust visible after Woody is placed on top of a shelf, the crew was faced with the challenge of animating dust, an incredibly difficult task. After much experimentation, a tiny particle of dust was animated and the computer distributed that image throughout the entire shelf. Over two million dust particles are in place on the shelf in the completed film.[21]
"When we went from a direct-to-video to a feature film and we had limited time in which to finish that feature film, the pressure really amped up. Forget seeing your family, forget doing anything. Once we made that decision [on the schedule], it was like, 'Okay, you have a release date. You're going to make that release date. You're going to make these screenings.'"
– Karen Jackson, co-producer of Toy Story 2.[22]
Disney became unhappy with the pace of the work on the film and demanded in June 1997 that Guggenheim be replaced as producer, and Pixar complied. As a result, associate producers Karen Jackson and Helene Plotkin were moved up into the roles of co-producers.[23]
In November 1997, Roth and head of Walt Disney Feature Animation Peter Schneider viewed the film's story reels, with some finished animation, in a screening room at Pixar. They were impressed with the quality of work and became interested in releasing Toy Story 2 in theaters.[23] In addition to the unexpected artistic caliber, there were other reasons that made the case for a theatrical release more compelling. The economics of a direct-to-video Pixar release were lackluster due to the higher salaries of the crew. After negotiations, Jobs and Roth agreed that the split of costs and profits for Toy Story 2 would follow the model of a newly created five-film deal — but Toy Story 2 would not count as one of the five films. Disney had bargained in the contract for five original features, not sequels, thus assuring five sets of new characters for its theme parks and merchandise. Jobs gathered the crew and announced the change in plans for the film on February 5, 1998.[24]
The work done on the film to date was nearly lost in 1998 when one of the animators, while routinely clearing some files, accidentally entered the deletion command code /bin/rm -r -f * on the root folder of the Toy Story 2 assets on Pixar's internal servers.[25][26] Associate technical director Oren Jacob was one of the first to notice as character models disappeared from their works in progress. They shut down the file servers but had already lost 90% of the last two years of work, and it was also found that the backups had not been working for about a month. The film was saved when technical director Galyn Susman, who had been remote working to take care of her newborn child, revealed she had a backup copy of the film on her home computer. The Pixar team was able to recover nearly all of the lost assets save for a few recent days of work, allowing the film to proceed.[27][28]
Many of the creative staff at Pixar were not happy with how the sequel was turning out. Upon returning from the European promotion tour of A Bug's Life, Lasseter watched the development reels and agreed that it was not working. Pixar met with Disney, telling them that the film would have to be redone. Disney disagreed, and noted that Pixar did not have enough time to remake the film before its established release date. Pixar decided that they simply could not allow the film to be released in its existing state, and asked Lasseter to take over the production. Lasseter agreed, recruiting the first film's creative team, including Stanton and Docter, to redevelop t