Cinema Science PLAYING WITH PHYSICS IN THE TOY STORY UNIVERSE
Released just under a quarter of a century ago, Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) was an experiment of sorts. This tale of what children’s toys get up to when left to their own devices was Pixar’s first foray into feature film and, most notably, was also the first feature film ever to be entirely computer-animated.
Animation that seemed revolutionary in 1995 now looks subpar compared to contemporary computer games, characterised by threadbare textures, simple lighting and some truly weird-looking humans.
The experiment proved successful. Toy Story wowed critics – even today, it has a 100 per cent positive critical response on Rotten Tomatoes1 – and dominated the box office, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1995 in the United States.2 For children of the 1990s, it was a defining film (I know I personally wore out my VHS copy through rewatches), and it went on to spawn three feature-length sequels – Toy Story 2 (Lasseter, 1999), Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich, 2010) and Toy Story 4 (Josh Cooley, 2019), the last of which recently cracked a casual billion US dollars at the global box office3 – along with a handful of spin-offs, shorts and mountains of merchandise.
The franchise, then, is perhaps the Platonic ideal of a Cinema Science subject. You can practically guarantee your students will be familiar with the films, while their family-friendly content ensures that they can be safely incorporated into your Science or Mathematics classroom at any year level. With modern-day streaming services, they are easily accessible – at the time of writing, the first three are available on Stan, though I suspect that by the time of publication they’ll have parachuted over to the budding Disney+
