Pixar Director Josh Cooley Discusses TOY STORY 4 and Says It Was Secretly Being Written Before TOY STORY 3 Was Released
Toy Story 3 felt like such a wonderful, natural conclusion to the Toy Story franchise. A lot of fans didn’t feel like there needed to be any more Toy Story movies after that. But while Toy Story 3 concluded the story for Andy, Toy Story 4 continues the story for Woody, who is the character that this whole franchise is built around.
As it turns out, even though Pixar said time and time again that they didn’t have any plans for a fourth Toy Story film after the third one, there was a fourth film actually being secretly written before Toy Story 3 was released! Director Josh Cooley revealed this interesting bit of info while talking to ComingSoon:
“Andrew Stanton one of the writers, who’s written on all the Toy Story films, one of the godfathers of Toy Story, he actually started the outline for number 4 while 3 was still finishing, and but he kept it secret. We didn’t know, I’m speaking for all of us.”
Like a lot of other fans, many of the Pixar employees wondered why there needed to be a Toy Story 4, but the creative team felt that this would allow them to try something new and different with the characters and continue Woody’s story. Producer Jonas Rivera said:
“That started to light us up a little bit, and slowly, we started to crack that open and go, ‘What would happen if Woody did everything right, he survived it all, he landed on his feet with Bonnie.’ And what we realized in that discussion was the end of 3 is really the end of Andy’s story, but the story of Toy Story is Woody….Now that I’m saying it, I’m realizing Andrew’s kids had gone off to college and moved out. So there’s definitely some of that in there. Like, what do you do when you’ve done everything right and your life’s not over? You have to reinvent yourself. And that was kind of the crack in the nerve, like okay, how would Woody do that? That was interesting to us.”
Cooley went on to explain that this film wouldn’t only be used to focus on Woody, he also wanted to bring Bo Peep back. That was Stanton’s original plan:
“It had Bo returning. That was pretty much it. It wasn’t until after you work on it for a while, you start to understand this is what the movie’s telling me it should be, and also that’s me in the movie as well. So it’s not like Andrew sat down, ‘I’m going to tell a story about being an empty nester,’ he just sat down like, ‘What if Bo Peep came back?’ That was it.”
That’s when the story started to take shape and the characters were led down a different and interesting path:
“It was interesting. We know this character. What would he do in this new situation? So we just kept going down these different paths, and just a random thing of coming up with Forky. And then we were like, ‘Well, actually, Forky forces him to explain what it means to be a toy.’ And so, all of these things just started to kind of fall in line very slowly over time. And just speaking about that part of Woody on the road with Forky talking about basically what it means to not have your kid living at home anymore. When Andrew wrote that, I read it and was crying because it was just so awesomely written. And I even told him like, ‘Nobody else could write this. You’ve experienced this and I could feel it on the page there.'”
I loved the movie and the story it told. I thought it was a great new chapter in the franchise, and it did some fun and unexpected things. I think fans are going to love it! You can read my review of it here. Toy Story 4 opens in theaters this Friday, June 21st.