Why Do Toy Story Animators Move the Body First?

Ben Gilbert says Toy Story animators work frame by frame on the bodies first and only later on the faces. If the body motions already work for the story with no facial expressions, the facial expression and the moving mouth are icing on the cake. You never want to rely on the facial expressions to do the heavy lifting.

Each character goes through rigging, which hands the animator a buffet of options for moving the hand at the wrist, the arm, the elbow, or the shoulder. The aim is to turn stick figures into something alive. Animators still use the method from Snow White in 1938: they film themselves acting the scene and treat the video as reference for how the character would act.

Footage from 1992 shows the animator working on Woody going through motions, and separate reference for how the army men would move in Toy Story. To understand how a person moves when the feet stay locked together, they duct taped ski boots to a giant plank of wood and jumped around the room. The performance is then taught to the computer through the rig, by pulling the strings until the character moves the right way.