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Breaking character
With lead roles in three new films, Philip Seymour Hoffman, one of the great character actors of the '90s, is about to hit the big time. Are we sure we want him to?
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In retrospect, it seems inevitable that Ranft got into what he now calls "this surreal business." He was a kid magician ("I used to send away for stuff in the back of Boys Life magazine") and joined the Junior Magic Castle Club when he was 15; growing up, his favorite writers were Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson and Tom Wolfe. Like Lasseter, Ranft comes from Whittier, Calif. But he first met Pixar's prime mover when Ranft was a freshman and Lasseter a senior at the Disney-sponsored California Institute of the Arts (or CalArts) in Valencia in 1978.

Ranft had an experience shared by many of the Pixar hands I've talked to. "When I saw a veteran Disney story guy [Bill Peet] show sketches from 'Song of the South,' something about conceptual work clicked for me -- getting across the characters and the feelings in a scene and relating it in pictures that are visually entertaining. How do you get a character who's this personality to face off against a character who's that personality graphically? It's the business of drawing up ideas."

After two years at CalArts, Ranft signed on at Disney. He also started taking classes with the Los Angeles improvisational comedy troupe the Groundlings, which then included Jon Lovitz, Phil Hartman, Paul Reubens (Pee-wee Herman) and Bob Saget ("Saget was very funny there!"), and frequenting the silent movie theater on Fairfax Avenue, especially when it played Laurel and Hardy shorts.

"Laurel and Hardy used to dream up a funny idea, then get on their feet and make it play -- and working with the Groundlings made me realize I could do that. Before 'Toy Story,' all of John's films -- his shorts -- were silent; he thinks like a silent filmmaker. I think animated films work best when they're like pantomime and the dialogue adds the icing. Even in a movie like 'Aladdin,' my favorite moment is when the magic carpet comes alive."

Storyboarding is Ranft's bailiwick -- the rendering of a movie's action in drawings. Even more than they do for live-action filmmakers, the storyboards allow animators of all kinds to see whether humorous ideas translate into visual comedy, and whether a group of them coheres and generates momentum. When put on a reel, they become a rough-draft cartoon. "The animators then retranslate our drawings and, hopefully, make them better," Ranft once explained to film historian Frank Thompson. "It's like a relay race. We're the first baton and we try our best to get something up there that's entertaining and funny. But everyone else down the line takes it and improves on it."

At Pixar, that kind of catalytic collaboration starts long before the storyboarding, in comedic jam sessions, and -- to borrow from Buzz Lightyear -- it continues "to infinity and beyond." In "Toy Story," which centered on the hate-love relationship between Woody and Buzz, Ranft says, "We had to make sure that these two had enough depth that you'd root for them to work things out. You had to feel close enough to Woody to feel what he was feeling, like, anger for the way Buzz was screwing things up, even though Woody himself was sort of an aggressive jerk. Woody started out being too sarcastic -- we had to get him to be more genuine and benevolent, so you would pull for the guy if he got twisted in his pullstring. And Buzz had to get less like Captain Kirk or Dudley Do-Right and more like this cop from outer space. Tim Allen really helped push it in the right direction. He made us see that it was as if this soldier were on his way to Washington to help strategize for D-Day and instead gets stuck in this Podunk town, where he meets this guy, Woody, who thinks he's just gone off the deep end. It was great to have Tim as Buzz and Tom Hanks as Woody; we never thought we were doing a sappy, G-rated relationship."

Ranft believes that with "Toy Story 2" Allen makes Buzz "an even more dimensional character. And he's such a good comic he always comes up with alternative improv lines; he just zeroes in and makes the material better." Ranft loves an Allen ad-lib near the end, when Buzz attempts to befriend a new cowgirl-doll character (played by the irresistible Joan Cusack) and gets off a fumbling fond remark: "I'd just like to say that your hair ... it's a lovely shade of ... yarn."

To Ranft, a pair of brainstorms -- one apiece for Woody and Buzz -- gave the sequel its gale-like slapstick force. First, Lasseter and Pete Docter (a key collaborator on "Toy Story") cooked up the concept of a creepy toy collector, Al of Al's Toy Barn, kidnapping Woody. (In the film, voice actor Wayne Knight gives Al a lewd edge.) "As soon as I heard that," Ranft admits, "I thought, oooooh -- it would be fun to get into the whole world of collectibles. And along with that came the idea of Woody discovering a history that's new to him and to us. In the first film you knew Woody was a cowboy jealous of a modern space toy, but you didn't know he was based on a 'Howdy Doody'-ish TV show with all this merchandise from the '50s." The merchandise grew to include several engaging new characters -- Jessie the yodeling Cowgirl (Cusack), Stinky Pete the prospector (Kelsey Grammer) and Woody's trusty steed, Bullseye. The TV show also inspired composer/tunesmith Randy Newman's snappiest contribution to the soundtrack: a theme song for "Woody's Roundup" that proclaims our hero to be "the rootinest, tootinest cowboy in the wild, wild West." (Take that, Will Smith.)

Next page | Going for a bigger, better Buzz