If you're one of those fans who loves spotting hidden and not-so-hidden references in movies, you are absolutely going to love Toy Story 4. Pixar's latest, which is apparently really good, is stuffed full of shout-outs to the animation company's previous works. That might not come as a shock given Pixar is always a fan of fun little surprises, but thanks to large portions of the film being set in an antique store, there were way more chances this time around. Those who worked on the movie have already revealed a handful of the fun references, but today, director Josh Cooley officially confirmed there will be at least one from every single Pixar movie.
Here's the quote Josh Cooley gave during the media press conference we attended for Toy Story 4 in Orlando, Florida...
...If you pause any frame in the story you'll see something in the background. From every movie Pixar's ever done, there's something in the antique store.
In case you're out of the loop, some of Pixar's newest movie takes place inside an old antique store. In its inventory, there are numerous old toys, some of whom we get a chance to meet, but there are also a ton of inanimate objects just hanging out, some of which are references to prior Pixar movies including a record, a pinball machine and an Elasticycle. You can probably guess which movie that last one is a reference to.
Now you can probably picture in your head Pixar animators going crazy and just having the best time with their newfound freedom to jam in references. I'm sure a little of that happened at the beginning, but according to director Josh Cooley, the backgrounds needed so many different objects that after awhile, it was just easier to default to what they knew best. He actually called it "lazy", which is a kind of funny but given how much time all involved spent making the movie, probably shouldn't be taken too seriously. He's the full quote...
The technical challenge in this one was the antique store because there's 10,000 items for the antique store that all had to be built and shaded and set dressed and everything. We didn't even know if the computers would actually render that.. So then we needed to just make more stuff to go into that antique store so a lot of it was made for this film. There's a lot of easter eggs in this movie because we just got lazy.
Obviously they were able to get the technology right in order to render the images, and we will all be in for a visual treat when the movie opens on June 20th. We'll do a rundown here at CinemaBlend of the background references we spot, as well as which characters return, which characters disappear and what we loved most about the fourth installment. Spoiler alert: it will probably be the jokes, at least if our editor who saw it's viewpoint is any indication.
