Tin Toy is a 1988 American animated short film produced by Pixar and directed by John Lasseter. The short film, which runs for five minutes, stars Tinny, a tin one-man band toy, trying to escape from Billy, a mischievous human baby. The third short film produced by the company's small animation division, it was a risky investment: due to the low revenue produced by Pixar's main product, the Pixar Image Computer, the company was under financial constraints.
Lasseter pitched the concept for Tin Toy by storyboard to Pixar owner Steve Jobs, who agreed to finance the short despite the company's struggles, which he kept alive with annual investment. The film was officially a test of the PhotoRealistic RenderMan software and proved new challenges to the animation team, namely the difficult task of realistically animating Billy. Tin Toy later gained attention from Disney, who sealed an agreement to create Toy Story starring Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, which was primarily inspired by elements from Tin Toy.
The short film debuted in an incomplete edit at the SIGGRAPH convention in August 1988 to a standing ovation from scientists and engineers. The film went on to claim Pixar's first Academy Award with the 1988 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, becoming the first animated film made using computer-generated imagery to win an Academy Award. With the award, Tin Toy went far to establish computer animation as a legitimate artistic medium outside SIGGRAPH and the animation-festival film circuit. In 2003, Tin Toy was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The department was never meant to generate any revenue as far as Jobs was concerned, but after the release of two shorts, Luxo Jr. (1986) and Red's Dream (1987), some of the engineers working on the company's products wondered whether it made sense to keep the animation group going at all. Pixar was losing money every year and Jobs was supporting the cash-strapped company SO through a line of credit with his personal guarantee.
The engineers felt they were working hard to make money for Pixar while Lasseter's group was only spending it. Their passion was for building computers and software, not entertainment. Eventually, they discerned, to their chagrin, the reason why the company was supporting the division: the real priority of Catmull and Smith was to make films.
Production
In the spring of 1988, cash was running so short that Jobs convened a meeting to decree deep spending cuts across the board. When it was over, Lasseter and his animation group were almost too afraid to ask Jobs about authorizing some extra money for another short. Finally, they broached the topic and Jobs sat silent, looking skeptical. Tin Toy would require close to $300,000 more out of his pocket. After a few minutes, he asked if there were any storyboards.
thumb|John Lasseter at the [[Venice Film Festival in 2009.]]
That fall, after completion of Red's Dream, most members of the company gathered at Stillwater Cove, near Fort Ross, to design new software that was designed completely for the work of an animator. From the meeting came Menv software ("modeling Environment"), the first program specifically designed to facilitate the workflow of an animator, separating the various phases of the animation (modeling, animation and lighting), later renamed Puppets. To show the application of the new program, it was approved the production of a short. Inspired by the birth of his daughter Julia, William Reeves proposed the idea to create a human baby.
The story was about Lasseter's love, classic toys, and was inspired by a visit made in 1987 at the Tin Toy Museum in Yokohama, Japan. It was told from the perspective of a toy one-man band named Tinny, who meets a baby that charms and terrorizes him. Escaping under the couch, Tinny finds other frightened toys, but when the baby hits his head and cries, Tinny goes back out to cheer him up. This was the only Pixar short rendered on the RM-1, a RenderMan specific computer that was never sold to the public. As with Luxo Jr. and Red's Dream, it was also a chance for Lasseter to one-up his earlier efforts, taking his animation and storytelling to another level. but his skin had the look of plastic. When he moved, moreover, his body lacked the natural give of baby fat and his diaper had the solidity of cement—compromises made necessary by lack of time and the still-developing technology.
The picture on the table is a photograph of director John Lasseter.
Release
Lasseter and his technical directors slept under their desks at times to get Tin Toy finished before SIGGRAPH in Atlanta in August 1988, but to no avail. What the SIGGRAPH audience saw was the first three-fifths or so of the film, ending a cliffhanger moment with Tinny running into his box and watching in horror through the box's cellophane as Billy advances towards him. while other critics wrote that the film was "A fascinating glimpse of a fledgling art form." and many praised the ability to move in just a few minutes and have been able to "encompass the full range of emotions you feel when a toy is used by a child." Some criticisms were leveled at the character of Billy, who was called "the most frightening and disturbing piece of animation in the history of this art form." It is unknown when this short was first released in its entirety.
Tin Toy went on to take the Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 1989 at the 61st Academy Awards, it was the third CGI short film to get nominated for the Academy Award (behind Hunger and Luxo Jr.) and was the first CGI animated short film to receive an Academy Award. With the award, Tin Toy went far to establish computer animation as a legitimate artistic medium outside SIGGRAPH and the animation-festival film circuit. A member of the Academy's board of governors, animator William Littlejohn, saw in Tin Toy a window into the potential of the young medium. "There is a realism that's rather astonishing," he told The New York Times. "It emulates photography, but with artistic staging." Tin Toy is also available for streaming on Disney+.
Academy Award
1988 – Best Animated Short Film
Other awards
1989 – Seattle International Film Festival – Best Short Film<br>1989 – World Animation Celebration – Best Computer-Assisted Animation<br>2003 – National Film Registry
Merchandising
Apart from the home video editions of the short film, Tin Toy was not the subject of any type of merchandise, like all of the other short films that have been produced by the company. The only exception is the reproduction of vinyl Tinny, produced by MINDStyle in 2010. Pixar, in fact, sold the license to the manufacturer of Tin Toy MINDStyle objects, which created a maquette of the vinyl character Tinny inside of the line Art Toy Collectible limited Edition of 500 pieces, the price of ninety dollars. The box, which is a faithful reproduction of the packaging of the toy view in short, in addition to containing the model of Tinny, presents a certificate of authenticity printed on a card showing the storyboard in pencil of a scene from the short.
Cancelled holiday special
The success of Tin Toy gained attention from Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Walt Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, who approached Pixar to produce a computer-animated film. In the early 1990s, Pixar began to make arrangements with Disney to produce the first computer-animated film. The project went through, but considering the abrupt transition from shorts to feature a few minutes to an hour and a half, Pixar set out to create a special half-hour to see if they could manage a production that was similar to that of an actual film. Driven by the victory at the Oscars that year, a sequel to Tin Toy called "A Tin Toy Christmas," was originally planned as a half-hour-long television special to be used to convince film studios that Pixar was capable of producing a feature film.
The project was abandoned because the television network that would have produced the film could not afford the fees required (according to director Pete Docter, the special would have required a sum of eighteen times higher than the allowed budget). The character of Lotso, however, was adapted for Toy Story 3, as the main villain,