
Unkrich, who edited Toy Story, co-directed Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo and most recently directed Toy Story 3, says Pixar's animators embraced the computational limitations of their early projects. So it's no accident that our first film was about toys made out of plastic and wood and metal," explains Lee Unkrich, a member of Pixar's creative team since 1994. "Things that were shiny or plastic or hard - like wood or plastic or metal - those were pretty easy to make. So they focused on designing a movie based around items they knew they could render: toys. In the early 1990s, Pixar's animators had a hard time creating lifelike representations of organic material like water, hair and animal fur on their computer screens. This interview was originally broadcast on October 19, 2010.
