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Gary Thompson: 'Toy Story's' Andy grows up for sequel

WE KNOW from 1 Corinthians that while as children we speak and think as children, there is a time to put away childish things.

WE KNOW from 1 Corinthians that while as children we speak and think as children, there is a time to put away childish things.

And we know from Pixar that the time to put these things away is, like, never.

The "Toy Story" franchise is built around the idea that in our modern culture, we find it very difficult to surrender the part of ourselves that spent languid afternoons with G.I. Joe or Barbie. (Or G.I. Joe and Barbie. You know who you are.)

Actually, it's not just an idea. It's the product of informal market research conducted by Pixar execs, who used social media to ask grown-up fans to tell their own toy stories.

"We reached out on Twitter to adults and asked them, 'Who still has a favored child toy?' We got a flood of responses from people of all ages, who were eager to tell us about the toys they still have, and the roles they play," said writer-director Lee Unkrich.

That information factored into "Toy Story 3," which has Andy, the boy who fell in love with Woody and Buzz, heading off to college, trying to decide what to do with the toys he's outgrown, or trying decide whether he's outgrown them at all.

The toys, Woody and Buzz and now Barbie, end up at a day-care center, which Pixar animators present as a kind of penitentiary run by a totalitarian teddy bear, incongruously chubby and pink and named Lotso Huggin'.

Finding a new challenge for the toys was only one of the problems that Unkrich faced. Another was what to do with Andy.

"Trying to figure out the story was a huge challenge, because the sequel was so unconventional - undertaken years and years after the last one was released. There is a tradition in animation of stasis. If you look at 'The Simpsons,' for instance, it's been on for decades and nobody ages. But we decided that for story reasons, the thing to do was have Andy grow up," Unkrich said.

That opened a floodgate of ideas and ended up turning on the commercial taps as well. Turns out the idea of a 20something Andy resonates deeply with children who watched the "Toy Story" movies as kids and who now dominate Hollywood's coveted 18-35 demographic.

"Toy Story 3" has been testing phenomenally for Pixar and Disney - pulling strong numbers from a younger audience and of course from the older one enchanted by the baby boomer nostalgia implicit in the original movies.

So Unkrich does not have to worry about being the first Pixar director to deliver something that is less than a box office smash.

"That nervousness is out there to a huge degree!" Unkrich confessed. "It's something we constantly think about, every single one of us. We're all worried about making the first dud. And the pressure gets worse with each success. It just keeps ratcheting up."

It may be counterintuitive, but Unkrich said the way to keep the movies popular is to ignore the box office entirely.

"You can't go into thinking about how much money the movie is going to make. That's never been our approach. We've always been more interested in the critical response, in the feedback from peers. That's why our own internal review process during the writing stage is so rigorous."

Notoriously so.

"The process is extremely hard on [writers and directors]. But there are no bruised egos, because everybody knows it's part of the process of making the movie better."