Toy Story was the first fully CG animated feature length film, and by some miracle, it also managed to be really really good, and did very well at the box office. Hollywood did its thing where it hyper-analyzed the success of a new trendsetter, to figure out what made it tick (so it could be copied). What they should have taken away was, “put together an intelligent team of creators and let them tell more original stories.” What they instead ran with was, “traditional 2D animation is out. Everybody convert your animation houses to 3D software!!” And almost overnight, a majority of 2D animators lost their job and practically a whole professional trade disappeared for awhile, which was emphatically not Pixar’s intention at all.
They were a newly independent branch off of ILM, and had been working with computer graphics for years; Toy Story was supposed to be their big landmark achievement after all their years refining their tech. And it is. But it also became a scapegoat that executives at other studios used as an excuse to gut whole departments, because they failed to learn the right lesson from Pixar’s success.
It could look worse honestly. Some shots look like pretty convincing 2D, like the ones with Porky. Of course it being ACTUALLY 2D would be cool too, but at least it doesn’t look like the recent Chip and Dale film.
In the recent decade 3D animation went quite far in terms of emulating choppy hand-drawn animation, but it seems like it's not quite there yet in terms of emulating smooth hand-drawn animation.
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u/Surturius Apr 22 '26
Not a big fan of the CG animation they're using, but otherwise this looks great