Toy Story carried its analogy through from start to finish. © Disney Enterprises Inc.

Toy Story is the granddaddy of the current trend in CG features, but it isn’t a victim of “tech uber alles.” Instead, this is a film with a solid foundation in analogy.

The starting point, that the toys are alive, is garden variety. But adding the idea that they are aware of their precarious lot in life — one day you’re the favorite, next day you’re in the giveaway bag — opens up a wellspring of ideas. One of the most interesting is the nature of the film’s alternative world.

The story takes place in a world just like ours, with the twist that the toys are active participants in the job of being toys; they know the rules and believe it is in their best interests to obey them. This generates a believable tension that becomes an effective story engine.

The plot is a grand adventure played out on a microcosmic scale in which a move across town is an odyssey and the boy next door is evil incarnate. Then there is the ensemble of toys, each with their own unique movement possibilities, each possibility incorporated so nicely into the story not just for the laughs, but as an essential story element.

And finally, there is the technology, which, in this case, is a near perfect fit. Toy Story could just have easily been done with 2D drawn animation. But the combination of the real world setting and the totally convincing CG toys gives the film the feeling of being some kind of impossible live-action footage, at least as long as the story stays focused on the toys.

This, combined with the rules of toy behavior (that they can only act alive when we aren’t looking), creates an atmosphere of eerily heightened reality, one that lets the audience consider the possibility that things like this might really happen. This, in turn, adds drama to the moment when the toys break the rules in order to give bad boy Sid his comeuppance.

Notice here how all the elements are drawn into the storytelling and then interwoven, with each part playing multiple roles and multiple parts combining for a common purpose. This harnessing of all the elements towards effective, theme-based communication is the key principle of a uniquely animated style of communication called integrated storytelling.

In integrated storytelling, we can take advantage of one of animation’s most inherent properties: the ability to control every element down to the frame. So smoke can become an expression of the villain’s intentions, wrapping noxious fumes around his intended victim; background music can become an offscreen character’s cocky attitude and the camera can become the off centered and shaky POV of a drug addict.

Is Finding Nemo plot just a clothesline to hang random gags? © Disney Enterprises Inc./Pixar Animation Studios. All rights reserved.

Now remember here that, as animators, we have the power of gods over our films and we must use that power well. By allowing us to treat every part of a film like a character, integrated storytelling lets animation make the best use of its most inherent properties. But to do this we need clear guidelines, like the ones we get from analogy. Without them things can go seriously awry.

For example, let’s look at Finding Nemo, a film that is charming but surprisingly weak — weak enough to cause concern.

Finding Nemo has a good location, lots of great characters and plenty of inventive situation-based action. But the storyline doesn’t rest on any analogy at all — if there is an intrinsic relationship between fish and humans, it certainly isn’t revealed here.

So instead of developing multiple strands of story, character and theme that can be woven together, the story becomes like a clothesline: a rope along which various unrelated sequences can be strung, connected by only the vaguest cause and effect.