Toy Story 3D Zoetrope

Twenty-five years ago, Pixar released Toy Story (1995), the first completely computer-animated movie, where we met an irresistible cast of toys: Woody, Buzz, Bo, Rex, Mr. Potato Head, and the others, who captivated audiences as they came to life in Andy’s bedroom.

At its core, Toy Story is a classic work of animation, presenting a quick sequence of still images that appear as continuous movement. From flip-books to stop-motion movies, animation fools the eye, and Toy Story did so by combining a traditional form of filmmaking with the latest technology at the time.

Yet there’s another story to tell about Toy Story, one that animates its beloved cast in a whole new way.

In the mid-2000s, the Pixar crew built a giant zoetrope that featured beloved characters from the film. They began by mounting 214 Toy Story maquettes, each posed in a sequence of postures, on a turntable. As the table turns and strobe lights flash, the characters come to life: Woody and his horse buck past in one direction; Buzz rolls by on a Pixar ball in the other; Jesse the cowgirl, from Toy Story 2, dances inside a lasso; army men parachute from the sky as three-eyed aliens wave and play. The cumulative effect is magical.

Enchanting as it is, the Toy Story 3D Zoetrope isn’t the first of such devices. With precursors across the millennia—some of which will be on view in The Path to Cinema: Highlights from the Richard Balzer Collection when the museum opens—zoetropes first appeared in the 1830s. Descendants of the phénakistiscope, a slotted, spinning cardboard disc attached to a handle that displayed (what appeared to be) a moving image when viewed in a mirror, the earliest zoetropes were cylinder- or drum-shaped, with vertical slits in their sides and image strips inserted on their inner walls. As the drums spun and the slits flicked past, the image inside appeared to animate.

The first 3D zoetrope appeared in 1887, when French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey animated a series of plaster models of birds in flight. The zoetrope’s effect is much more dramatic in 3D: for the Toy Story version, each of the 32 maquettes was created using a 3D printer, which converted visual data from the films into a blueprint for the pose.

As inspiration for their own, the Pixar crew was indebted to another object as well. Earlier, studio head John Lasseter had seen a similar zoetrope, created by filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli in Japan. Located in the Ghibli Museum, Mitaka, this zoetrope also featured beloved characters from a well-known film, My Neighbor Totoro (1993)—Totoro, Mei, Satsuki, Catbus, and others—who themselves whirl and spin past. (Many of the same characters will be on view in the Academy Museum’s first large temporary exhibition, Hayao Miyazaki.)

The Toy Story 3D zoetrope has a long viewing history. On display for years at Disney’s California Adventure Park, it recently arrived at the Academy Museum, where our collections and conservation teams prepared it for installation—with condition reporting, physical numbering, cleaning, and preservation treatments—in time for the 2021 opening.

The Toy Story 3D zoetrope is something truly marvelous. Familiar as we are with these characters from their films and pop-culture omnipresence, when viewed here, they come alive, whirling and prancing in mesmerizing sequence. They feel as real to us as they must have to Andy or Bonnie, their child guardians. And although their form has evolved over time, from hand-painted figures that grace a 200-year-old wooden drum, the wonder and delight they evoke are timeless.