The next thing John and his team decided was that Andy had to have the toys they had. Therefore, trips to ToysRUs during work hours to buy toys on the company credit cards were now "Research". "One for the project, one to open, one to keep in the box." John explained.  

Ignorance was bliss. They really had no idea what they were doing, fumbling through a 75-minute story. They just did what they liked. First and foremost, what did the toys want? What was their motivation? Well, toys want to be played with, more than anything else in the world. They had to maintain the integrity of the object: how would it move? From the shorts, they learned that to make an object "alive", they had to identify its "head". In any living creature, the movement is led by eyes and head, if they have it. If not, they have to assign it.

About the characters' personalities: should they be juvenile or adult? Most definitely adult, John said. They should be adult, with adult worries. Of course, Toys aren't "alive" when we're around, but when we're gone, the playroom is framed similar to any other workplace. That's why there's staff meetings and such. One of the funniest moments, says John, is when Woody thanks Mr. Spell for the plastic erosion awareness meeting. Imagine a meeting about something as dull as plastic erosion awareness delivered by Mr. Spell, who speaks in a complete monotone, how boring would that be?

Mr. Potato Head would be ticked off all the time, because his face would keep falling off. He'd have a big chip on his shoulder, and a personality like...oh, Don Rickles perhaps. Tom Schumacher, now head of Disney Feature Animation, took him to meet Don Rickles at his home in Palm Springs. They handed him a Mr. Potato Head to look at, and the hat fell off. Tom and John almost fell over: Mr. Potato Head and Don Rickles had the same head.

Jurassic Park came out around this time, and John just loved it: he was "thrilled, scared to death, blown away". John proclaimed: "We gotta have a dinosaur!" they all ran out to ToysRUs to do more "research", and made a very important discovery: most dinosaur toys, at that time, were "cheap, icky, mold flashing". The most fearsome creature to ever walk the earth was represented by a bunch of junk. If a Tyrannosaurus Rex were alive, it would have this huge inferiority complex. With those teensy arms, it couldn't even scratch its own nose. "T. Rex's arms! What's with that!?" Wallace Shawn, who writes amazing, incredible plays that are shown all over Europe, will do Rex at the drop of a hat. He loves it.  

At the birthday party, the toys are nervous: someone's not going to get played with anymore, they fear, and the essence of toys on earth is to be played with. Anything that stops that - being lost, stolen, broken or passed over for a new toy - creates anxiety for the toys. In the birthday party scene, Andy opens his presents, and the toys breathe a sigh of relief until - just like John's wife - Andy's mom "finds" a surprise present in the closet.  

Absolutely everything - color, lighting - must be driven by the story, no matter how cool the effect might seem. To work out the scene in Sid's room where Woody discovers the mutant toys took some rearranging. John and his team had a blast creating the mutant toys, cute things hobbled together in horrific ways. Babyhead was his favorite (the packaged toy version is called "Baby Face" ~Fab) It's a baby doll head with the hair cut down to the plugs and a missing eye attached to an erector set spider body. To stage this, they decided to reveal the baby face, then reveal the horror, using lighting, under the bed as a flashlight snapped on.  

They had to back up and widen Sid's room: they added cheap metal L bracket shelves. Where before, Woody just had to jump on the bed to try the nearby doorknob, now, after watching Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, they had Woody grab this, a pencil, then grab this other thing, and get hold of the flashlight in that manner. Again, it's how you tell the story. Everything is there for a reason, story or background.