For Toy Story 2, Pixar wanted to animate 50 Buzz Lightyears at a time. In Play story 5in the end it worked.
In the first scene of the new film, which will be released on June 19, the gang of Buzzes wanders through the desert jungle, each on their own, while they are almost equal. It’s a tough job in animation — a genre that Pixar has wanted to achieve for years, said Thomas Jordan, the company’s VFX chief, while speaking at SXSW London.
To ensure that every Buzz looks the same but is different, the animation team created a Buzz Lightyear library of short animation loops that can be reused across multiple shots and layered on top of each other. “Sequels are an interesting testing ground for technology because the look of the film has already been created, and we can reuse the characters and the environment they live in from previous films,” said Jordan.
Jordan has a great job at Pixar (his favorite movie he worked on is Up), and he explained that. each Pixar film borrows and builds upon VFX effects from the past. The deer from Toy Story 5, for example, is 90% borrowed from Hoppers, which came out earlier this year.
In the case of Toys 5, the animators also had the challenge of animating both a “real” horse and 50 toy horses that had to move at the same time, such as the sea of Buzzes in the opening scene. They brought a real horse to Pixar’s campus in Emeryville, California, where it grazed the grass of the studio’s football field while animators studied how it walked with 54 vertebrae (humans only have 24).
Yee-haw! Jessie and Bullseye ride a real horse in Toy Story 5.
“We developed a new technology called invertible rigging that allows the animators to seamlessly switch between stops, and that technology allows us to create complex and realistic movements,” Jordan said.
The “real” horse that appears, Daffodil, is a brilliant creation. It will inform the creation of horses in future Pixar movies, Jordan said. A scene featuring 50 toy horses, meanwhile, provides a real moment of fascination, which was celebrated at the Pixar offices with a party of puppets dressed in inflatable horse costumes.
Another achievement includes animating the curly hair of the new character, Blaze. Pixar last made strides with curly hair in 2012 when they animated Merida in Brave, but her hair was long and loose, while Blaze’s curls are tighter, requiring more detail and complexity. Hopefully this will pave the way for future Pixar films to feature more Black characters — like Blaze — with curly, braided hair.
Another new character, a tablet called Lilypad, brings children’s dialogue during screen time in the movie, but also presents a challenge to the animation team.
“We need to animate her on-screen, but we also need to animate her body, her face, and her hands, her little toes, and this animation is handled by two different teams at two different times,” Jordan said. “We created a system for the animators to draw temporary ideas on the Lilypad screen, much like sketching in a notebook. This made the animation feel cohesive and served as a guide for the final screen animation that happened later.”
Lilypad is far from the only character to benefit from this system — several other toys also feature displays. “Even our new high-tech program Buzz Lightyear has a screen that requires animation,” said Jordan.
Lilypad requires two animation teams.
No AI at Pixar
Advances in computer technology mean Pixar has gone from making one film every two years to one every year, and it has ambitions to go even further, aiming for three films every two years, Jordan said.
All that said, the company is not relying on AI yet. “We find AI fascinating,” Jordan said. “We’re learning about it, and we’ve done research on it, but so far nothing meets the standards or expectations we have for the quality of our films.”
He described Pixar as “the first artist’s studio” where many artists still used drawing pads and scars to test ideas. It sounds like an obvious place for VFX artists to work in 2026, but that doesn’t mean animators have an understanding of every aspect of the movies they make.
The entire staff working on Toy Story 5 was kept in the dark about one aspect of the film until last week, Jordan told the SXSW audience in London. He was one of a small group of people who knew that Taylor Swift, as a huge fan of Toy Story, had asked to see the first cut of the film in February and made a song for it. A fake version of the film was created for the crew’s preview without the song to keep his contribution a secret, Jordan said.
The song, I Knew It, I Knew You, is available to listen to on streaming services starting today. Toy Story 5, meanwhile, will hit theaters on June 19.