For Toy Story 2, Pixar wanted to animate 50 Buzz Lightyears at a time. In Toy Story 5, it finally succeeded.
In the opening scene of the new movie, due for release on June 19, a gang of Buzzes patrols a dense desert-island jungle, each moving individually, while remaining roughly in sync. It’s a complex feat of animation — the kind Pixar has dreamed of achieving for years, said Thomas Jordan, the company’s VFX supervisor, while speaking at SXSW London.
To ensure that every Buzz looked the same but different, the animation team created a library of Buzz Lightyear short animation loops that could be reused across multiple shots and then layered on top of one another. “Sequels are an appealing testing ground for technology because the look of the movie is already established, and we can reuse characters and their environments from past films,” said Jordan.
Jordan has a storied career at Pixar (his favorite film he’s worked on is Up), and he explained that each Pixar movie borrows and builds on VFX breakthroughs from the previous one. The deer that appears in Toy Story 5, for example, is 90% borrowed from Hoppers, which came out earlier this year.
For Toy Story 5, the animators also had the challenge of animating both a “real” horse and 50 toy horses that had to move all at once, just like the sea of Buzzes in the opening scene. They brought a real horse to the Pixar campus in Emeryville, California, where it munched on the grass of the studio’s football field while the animators studied how it moved with its 54 vertebrae (humans have only 24).
Yee-haw! Jessie and Bullseye ride a real horse in Toy Story 5.
“We developed new technology called invertible rigging that allowed animators to seamlessly switch between posing moments, and that technology allowed us to create complex and realistic motion,” said Jordan.
The resulting “real” horse, Daffodil, is a masterful creation. It will inform the design of horses in future Pixar movies, Jordan said. The scene featuring the 50 toy horses, meanwhile, offers up a true moment of hilarity, which was celebrated in the Pixar offices with a party of animators in inflatable horse costumes.
Other breakthroughs included animating the curly hair of a new character, Blaze. Pixar last made strides with curly hair in 2012 when animating Merida in Brave, but her hair was long and loose, whereas Blaze’s curls are tight, requiring more detail and complexity. This will hopefully pave the way for future Pixar films to feature more Black characters — such as Blaze — with curly, textured hair.
Another new character, a tablet named Lilypad, brings the children’s screen-time conversation into sharp focus in the movie, but it also presented a challenge to the animation team.
“We need to animate what’s on her screen, but we also need to animate her body, her face, and her hands, her little nubby toes, and this animation is handled by two separate teams at two separate times,” said Jordan. “We developed a system for animators to sketch temporary ideas onto Lilypad’s screen, kind of like sketching in a notebook. This made the animation feel cohesive and served as a guide for the final screen animation that happens later.”
Lilypad is far from the only character that benefits from this system — several other toys also feature displays. “Even our new high-tech edition Buzz Lightyear has a screen that needs animation,” said Jordan.
Lilypad required two animation teams.
No AI at Pixar
Advances in computing mean Pixar has gone from making one film every two years to one film every year, and it has aspirations to go even further, aiming for three films every two years, said Jordan.
All that said, the company isn’t relying on AI at this point. “We find AI is fascinating,” said Jordan. “We’re learning about it, and we have done experiments with it, but so far nothing lives up to the standards or expectations that we have for the quality of our films.”
He described Pixar as an “artist-first studio” where many artists still use sketching pads and sculpture to experiment with ideas. It sounds like a utopian place for VFX artists to work in 2026, but that doesn’t mean the animators have an insight into every element of the movies they’re making.
The entire crew who worked on Toy Story 5 were kept in the dark about one aspect of the film until last week, Jordan told the SXSW London audience. He was one of a small group of people who knew that Taylor Swift, as a big fan of Toy Story, had asked to see an early cut of the film in February and subsequently made a song for it. A decoy version of the movie was created for crew previews without the song to keep her contribution a secret, said Jordan.
The song, I Knew It, I Knew You, is available to listen to on streaming services from today. Toy Story 5, meanwhile, will be out in theaters on June 19.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
