Riding with Woody and Buzz
When Pixar co-founder and Disney creative chief John Lasseter was growing up in Southern California, one of his early jobs was on the Jungle Cruise at Disneyland. Decades later, the medium of 3D computer animation that Lasseter pioneered by directing the 1995 movie Toy Story has evolved into a "4D" ride experience called Toy Story Mania! Opening at both Disney's Hollywood Studios (at Florida's Disney World) and at California Adventure in Disneyland, the new ride represents yet another platform for the film franchise's animated characters, including Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Mr. Potato Head and Little Bo Peep.
In this attraction, the characters host an array of game booths in a "carnival midway," inviting guests to play virtual versions of classic games like ring toss and darts. Visitors spin through the midway in vehicles that take them from booth to booth, and they use spring-loaded shooters to launch virtual projectiles that interact with animated game play on screen. Because visitors wear 3D glasses that let them view the animation stereoscopically, these familiar characters appear more dimensional than ever before. Bursts of wind and water spray triggered by the game play complete the experience that Disney calls 4D.
It's the first time that the Toy Story characters have been presented in 3D stereo, according to Roger Gould, Pixar Animation Studios' Creative Director for Theme Parks. "The great thing about these characters is that they were built in three dimensions, so bringing them into stereo made them look phenomenal. When John Lasseter started seeing them, he flipped out. But there were a lot of things to tweak. At Pixar we pay a lot of attention to the eyes of our characters. People instantly look at the eyes. It's where we expect to see expression and life. The focus of where a character is looking lets you know what they're thinking about. Stereo has some strange properties about the way you track eye lines, and of course we wanted our guests to sense that these characters were looking directly at them. So we spent a lot of time running across our theater with our stereo glasses on, looking at our test animation and asking 'Did it feel like they're looking at you?'"
The Experience Once people board the ride vehicles, things move quickly. The vehicles spin to face the game booths, and just as at traditional carnival midways, people are aware of the action happening around them at different booths. They aim the onboard shooters at various 3D animated targets and compete with other riders. They can see whether the virtual projectiles they've launched have hit the target -- or not. When a virtual projectile leaves the shooter, a player gets a sense of it moving through 3D space. The wind and special effects technology add to the sense that things are whirring past.
Sue Bryan, Walt Disney Imagineering's senior show producer/director, explains the origin of the engine used in Toy Story Mania! "It was developed by Disney originally and has the seeds of some of the 'Disney Quest' attractions like the Aladdin ride." (The company began experimenting with Disney Quest attractions a decade ago in an effort to develop "indoor interactive parks.") The technology, notes Bryan, "really became a production tool when they started to use it for the Toon Town online massively multiplayer environment. We took that basic structure and added the functionality to have the carnival game play and the character animation possibilities."
Toy Story Mania! features five carnival games, plus an introductory "Pie Throw Practice" where visitors try to splatter targets with virtual pies. Gould explains, "When you play the practice game, you see the characters standing there holding targets. You can end up spattering the characters as well, so we wanted the characters to be truly interactive. It's Woody and Buzz and Jessie the cowgirl and Rex the dinosaur. That's where we crossed boundaries between simply rebuilding animation and having animation that was 'live' in the game. It was not enough to build animation as we would for a film. We had to create an enormous library of animation for many different target positions and for all the transitions between those -- as well as for the characters' reactions to getting hit with pies. You're playing about 12 seconds, but for every character we produced several minutes of animation that are used within the game engine to make it a completely interactive experience."
From the minute guests arrive at Toy Story Mania!, the focus is on interacting with the characters. Walt Disney Imagineering developed a five-foot-tall audio-animatronic version of Mr. Potato Head to be the carnival barker that welcomes visitors to the midway. "Mr. Potato Head is the size of an adult human," notes Gould. "So everything around you tells you you're toy sized." Inside, the attraction looks like a recreation of the bedroom in Toy Story, where the toys owned by the boy Andy come alive when nobody is watching. Gould adds, "When you're in Andy's room everything is giant scale. It's that simple -- the toys are big, so you are therefore small. That was our conceit. There is no announcement of 'Let the shrink-down procedure begin… '"
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