Tom Hanks
Woody
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Find out who voiced Woody, Buzz, Jessie and other characters in the animated sequel Toy Story 2. See the full list of directors, writers, producers, composers, cinematographers and more on IMDb.
Estelle Harris as Mrs. Potato Head: A Mrs. Potato Head who is married to Mr. Potato Head. John Morris as Andy Davis: A young boy who is the owner of Woody and his friends. He is away at "Cowboy Camp" almost the entire film. Wayne Knight as Al McWhiggin: An avaricious toy collector and owner of Al's Toy Barn.
- $512 million
- Helene Plotkin, Karen Robert Jackson
- $90 million
- Randy Newman
Find out who voiced your favorite toys in Toy Story 2, the 1999 animated sequel to the classic Pixar film. See the full list of actors, directors, writers, producers, and more on TMDB.
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- Overview
- Plot
- Cast
- Goofs
- Production
- Release
- Critical response
- Legacy
“The toys are back!”
―Tagline
is a 1999 American computer-animated adventure comedy film, which was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by John Lasseter. Co-directed by Lee Unkrich and Ash Brannon, the film is a sequel to Toy Story and the first of any Pixar film and the third movie made by Pixar, as well as Pixar's first sequel film. In the film, while Andy is away at Cowboy Camp, Woody is stolen by a greedy toy collector named Al McWhiggin, prompting Buzz Lightyear and his friends to rescue him. However, Woody finds the idea of immortality in a museum tempting. The film returns many of the original characters from Toy Story, with their respective actors reprising their roles, and introduces several new characters, including Jessie, Bullseye, Stinky Pete, Barbie, Emperor Zurg, and Mrs. Potato Head, although Zurg and Mrs. Potato Head were only mentioned in the first Toy Story movie. Toy Story 2 is the last Toy Story film in which Jim Varney, who provides Slinky Dog's voice, appears before his death of lung cancer in 2000.
Disney initially envisioned the film as a direct-to-video sequel and Toy Story 2 began production in a building separated from Pixar and was much smaller scale, with most of the main Pixar staff working on A Bug's Life (1998). When story reels proved promising, Disney upgraded the film to theatrical release, but Pixar was unhappy with the film's quality. Lasseter and the story team re-developed the entire plot in one weekend. Although most Pixar features take years to develop, the established release date could not be moved and the production schedule for Toy Story 2 was compressed into nine months.
Two years after the events of the first film, the film begins with scenes of Buzz Lightyear on an adventure in outer space. He finds a cluster of red laser beams landing on him, which turns out to be hostile robots. Buzz fires his laser at a series of rock crystals, creating an explosion. The robots are blasted into several pieces. Then, Buzz runs to the wall as a robotic camera pops out. The camera trains its sights right on him. After he blows up the camera, an earthquake occurs, as the platform Buzz is on turns into an underground cave when a Z-shaped pit opens. Buzz is forced to jump into the cave and turns on his glow-in-the-dark system. The pit closes, putting the area into total darkness. Buzz then traverses through Zurg's Fortress, dodging several obstacles. At the end, he comes face-to-face with Evil Emperor Zurg, who kills him, but it turns out this was all a video game that Rex has been playing. He is upset about losing at the game, mostly because of his small arms. Meanwhile, Woody and the other toys are searching for Woody's lost hat, until Slinky Dog finds it. As soon as Woody retrieves his hat, Buster breaks into Andy's room, terrorizing the toys. Buster stalks Woody and licks him in the face, becoming great friends. Andy then comes into his room, preparing to leave for Cowboy Camp with Woody.
Unfortunately, during his playtime (five minutes before departure), Andy accidentally rips Woody's arm, and is unable to take him to camp. After being placed on the shelf, Woody watches Andy leave without him and becomes dismayed. That night, he has a nightmare of Andy coming home from camp early and throwing him into a trash can because of his torn arm. When he wakes up the next morning, he hears coughing from behind some dusty books, and finds another broken toy, Wheezy the Penguin. Wheezy tells him that Andy's mom was supposed to get Wheezy's squeaker fixed but instead put him on the shelf. Sadly, the dust makes his broken squeaker worse, and he begins to fear he'll soon be thrown away. When Wheezy is set out for a yard sale, Woody manages to rescue him, but ends up in the yard sale himself. He is seen by Al, an obsessive, greedy toy collector and proprietor of Al's Toy Barn. He tries to buy Woody from Andy's mother, but she refuses to sell him. After failing to negotiate a sale, Al creates a distraction and steals Woody, prompting Buzz to take action. He slides down the gutter into the yard sale and sees Al getting into his car after packing Woody in the trunk. Buzz manages to get to the car as Al is driving away, but by the time he opens the trunk, Buzz loses his grip from the car and Al escapes.
However, a clue is presented to Buzz as the car speeds away: a feather from Al's trunk lands in front of him. Buzz tells the other toys the bad news, so they try to investigate the culprit. However, Buzz is trying to type the license plate number that he briefly saw on Al's car - "LZTYBRN" - to track it and whoever he was, while the rest of the toys, including Etch A Sketch, were having problems doing an identity portrait of Al. When Mr. Potato Head gets fed up with Buzz trying to investigate the license plate message with Mr. Spell and irritably tells the others to "leave Buzz to play with his toy," the word "toy" causes Buzz to decipher what the license plate said - "Al's Toy Barn" - and consequently order Etch to draw the man in a chicken suit (which Al wears in the commercials he films for his store). The toys realize that the man in the commercial was the kidnapper. They later manage to find an Al's Toy Barn commercial playing on TV to trace a map to the shop. Buzz then heads out to Al's Toy Barn with Rex, Potato Head, Hamm, and Slinky Dog to rescue Woody.
Meanwhile, Woody is taken to Al's apartment, where he is greeted by a yodeling cowgirl named Jessie, an affectionate horse named Bullseye, and Stinky Pete the Prospector, an unsold toy still in its original box. They reveal to Woody that he is a vintage Sheriff Woody collectible doll and the star of a forgotten children's TV show Woody's Roundup. Along the way, Woody discovers that his show had been cancelled due to the launch of SPUTNIK and children finding more interest in space than the Wild West, which Woody replying how he knows how that feels. Now that Al has a Woody doll, he has a complete collection and while playing with some of the toys, Woody learns that Al intends to sell the whole collection to a museum in Japan, but Woody tells them he can't go as he is still Andy's toy. This shocks the others, and Jessie starts to panic about going back into storage. The Prospector explains that up until Woody's arrival the three of them have been in storage as Al needed the entire collection, and without Woody, they will be placed back into storage. Later, Al arrives and accidentally rips off Woody's torn arm completely, making Woody attempt to recover his arm and then return to Andy, but his plan fails. Al then gets a repairman who fixes Woody (and overpaints the name "Andy" on his boot). After that, a suddenly depressed Jessie tearfully tells Woody of how she once had an owner, named Emily, who loved her, but eventually outgrew and abandoned Jessie at a charity toy drive. The Prospector warns Woody that he will face the same fate as Jessie when Andy grows up. Woody decides to stay with the "Roundup Gang" to go to the museum, now believing that all toys eventually get discarded by their owners.
At the same moment, Buzz and his friends search for Al at Al's Toy Barn. After Buzz orders his friends to split and look for Al. He discovers an aisle full of newer Buzz Lightyears and gets in a scuffle with a new Buzz Lightyear, who, like the real Buzz in the first movie, does not realize he is a toy. The real Buzz then ends up being tied up and repackaged in a box and set on the shelf for sale by the Deluded Buzz who then sets off with the other toys for Al's apartment, genuinely believing that he is attempting to rescue a hostage from his arch-enemy, Emperor Zurg.
The original Buzz frees himself and follows them to the apartment, but he accidentally frees an Emperor Zurg toy, who follows to destroy him while exiting the store, not realizing he is a toy. The toys make it to the apartment and climb up the elevator. Meanwhile, Al packs up for his trip to Japan, and after he leaves the four Roundup Gang members put on a show. When the toys reach the apartment, Woody tells them he does not want to be rescued and intends to go with his new friends to Japan. After the original Buzz arrives and proves to Woody and the other toys that he is the real Buzz by showing Andy's name on his foot, in an ironic reversal of a scene from the first movie, he reminds Woody, "You're a child's plaything. You... are... a toy!" He also said that the reason he came to save Woody was that Buzz believed in him. Woody (figuratively and literally) turns his back on Buzz, telling him that he intends to go to the museum with his Roundup gang so they won't go back into storage and that Buzz has wasted his time coming over to the rescue. Disappointed that Woody doesn't want to go home, Buzz's group leaves without Woody with Rex telling the group that Andy is coming home tonight, but not before Buzz says a rather upset farewell to Woody, warning him that he will end up spending the rest of his life watching kids from behind the glass and never being loved again, and leaves him to contemplate his decision.
•Tom Hanks as Woody
•Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear and Ultra Buzz Lightyear
•Joan Cusack as Jessie
•Mary Kay Bergman as Jessie (yodeling)
•Kelsey Grammer as Stinky Pete the Prospector
•Wallace Shawn as Rex
•RC's eyes are blue. However, in this movie, they are colored black.
•In the beginning of the movie, the Buzz Lightyear video game that Rex is playing appears to be a 3D game and for a gaming platform similar to the Nintendo SNES circa 1990-1997. In real life, Nintendo's first gaming 3D platform was the Nintendo 64 released in 1996.
•Utility Belt Buzz is seen missing his utility belt for a brief moment (mistakenly making him regular Buzz) right before the toys find Woody in the air vents.
•When Mrs. Potato Head put Mr. Potato Head's angry eyes in his back compartment the eyes are connected. If the viewer looks in the back while Mrs. Potato Head is holding them, the stems are slanted than straight. This was definitely an animation mistake because Mr. Potato Head's angry eyes are later seen in the movie and are not connected.
•When the gang reached Al's Toy Barn, Slinky mentioned that it's closed and Mr. Potato Head said, "We're not preschool toys, Slinky. We can read.". But in the first Toy Story, Mr. Potato Head mentioned that he came from Playskool, which is a company that produces toys for preschool-aged children.
•Towards the end, when the toys are in the dog crate at the airport, Mr. Potato Head's angry eyes no longer look angry after they spill out of his hatch, along with his spare feet.
Development
Talk of a sequel to Toy Story began around a month after the film's opening, in December 1995. A few days after the original film's release, Lasseter was traveling with his family and found a young boy clutching a Woody doll at an airport. Lasseter described the boy's excitement to show it to his father as touching him deeply. Lasseter then realized that his character no longer belonged to him only, it belonged to others as well. The memory was a defining factor in the production of Toy Story 2, with Lasseter moved to create a great film for that child and for everyone who loved the characters. Ed Catmull, Lasseter, and Ralph Guggenheim visited Joe Roth, successor to recently-ousted Jeffery Katzenberg as chairman of Walt Disney Studios, shortly afterward. Roth was pleased and embraced the idea. Disney had recently begun making direct-to-video sequels to its successful features, and Roth wanted to handle the Toy Story sequel this way, as well. Prior releases, such as 1994's Aladdin sequel, The Return of Jafar, had returned an estimated hundred million dollars in profits. Initially, everything regarding the sequel was uncertain at first: whether stars Tom Hanks and Tim Allen would be available and affordable, what the story premise would be, and even whether the film would be computer-animated at Pixar or traditionally at Disney. Lasseter regarded the project as a chance to groom new directing talent, but top choices were already immersed in other projects (Andrew Stanton in A Bug's Life and Pete Docter in early development work for a film about monsters). Instead, Lasseter turned to Ash Brannon, a young directing animator on Toy Story whose work he admired. Brannon, a CalArts graduate, joined the Toy Story team in 1993. Walt Disney Studios and Pixar Animation Studios officially announced the sequel to a press release on March 12, 1997. In 1998, they announced it would see a theatrical release.
Story
Lasseter's intention with a sequel was to respect the original film and create that world again. The story originated with Lasseter pondering what a toy would find upsetting. Lasseter wondered how a toy would feel if they were not played with by a child or, worse, a child growing out of a toy. Brannon suggested the idea of a yard sale where the collector recognizes Woody as a rare artifact. The concept of Woody as a collectible set came from the draft story of A Tin Toy Christmas, an original half-hour special pitched by Pixar to Disney in 1990. The obsessive toy collector known as Al McWhiggin, who had appeared in a draft of Toy Story but was later expunged, was inserted into the film. Lasseter claimed that Al was inspired by himself. Secondary characters in Woody's set emerged from viewings of 1950s cowboy shows for children, such as Howdy Doody and Hopalong Cassidy. The development of Jessie was kindled by Lasseter's wife, Nancy, who pressed him to include a strong female character in the sequel, one with more substance than Bo Peep. The scope for the original Toy Story was very basic and only consisted over two residential homes, whereas Toy Story 2 has been described by Unkrich as "all over the map." To make the project ready for theaters, Lasseter would need to add twelve minutes or so of material and strengthen what was already there. The extra material would be a challenge since it could not be mere padding; it would have to feel as if it had always been there, an organic part of the film. With the scheduled delivery date less than a year away, Lasseter called Stanton, Docter, Joe Ranft, and some Disney story people to his house for a weekend. There, he hosted a "story summit," as he called it - a crash exercise that would yield a finished story in just two days. Back at the office that Monday, Lasseter assembled the company in a screening room and pitched the revised version of Toy Story 2 from beginning to end. Story elements were recycled from the original drafts of Toy Story. The original film's original opening sequence featured a Buzz Lightyear cartoon playing on television, which evolved into the Buzz Lightyear video game that would open Toy Story 2. A deleted scene from Toy Story, featuring Woody having a nightmare involving him being thrown into a trash can, was incorporated in a milder form for showing Woody's fear of losing Andy. The idea of a squeak-toy penguin with a broken squeaker also resurfaced from an early version of Toy Story.
Animation
As the story approached the production stage in early 1997, it was unclear whether Pixar would produce the film, as the entire team of 300 was busy working on A Bug's Life for a 1998 release. The Interactive Products Group, with a staff of 95, had its own animators, art department, and engineers. Under intense time pressure, they had put out two successful CD-ROM titles the previous year: The Toy Story Animated StoryBook and The Toy Story Activity Center. Between the two products, the group had created as much original animation as there was in Toy Story itself. Steve Jobs made the decision to shut down the computer games operation and the staff became the initial core of the Toy Story 2 production team. Before the switch from direct-to-video to feature film, the Toy Story 2 crew had been on its own, placed in a new building that was well-separated from the rest of the company by railroad tracks. "We were just the small film and we were off playing in our sandbox," co-producer Karen Jackson said. Lasseter looked closely at every shot that had already been animated and called for tweaks throughout. The film reused digital elements from Toy Story but, true to the company's "prevailing culture of perfectionism, […] it reused less of Toy Story than might be expected." Character models received major upgrades internally and shaders went through revisions to bring about subtle improvements. The team did, however, freely borrow models from other productions, such as Geri from Pixar's 1997 short Geri's Game, who became the Cleaner in Toy Story 2. Supervising animator Glenn McQueen inspired the animators to do spectacular work in the short amount of time given, assigning different shots to suit each animators' strengths. Whilst producing Toy Story, the crew was very careful in creating new locations due to technology at that time. By production on Toy Story 2, technology had advanced farther to allow more complicated camera shots than were possible in the first film. In making the sequel, the team at Pixar did not want to stray too far from the first film's look, but the company had developed a lot of new software since the first feature had been completed. To achieve the dust visibly after Woody is placed on top of a shelf, the crew was faced with the challenge of animating dust, an incredibly difficult task. After much experimentation, a tiny particle of dust was animated and the computer distributed that image throughout the entire shelf. Over two million dust particles are in place on the shelf in the completed film.
Pixar showed the completed film at CalArts on November 12, 1999, in recognition of the school's ties with Lasseter and more than forty other alumni who worked on the film; the students were captivated. The film held its official premiere the next day at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles - the same venue as Toy Story's - and released across the ...
was universally acclaimed by critics. Reviewers found the film to be a sequel that managed to equal or even outshine the original. "Toy Story 2 does what few sequels ever do," The Hollywood Reporter proclaimed. "Instead of essentially remaking an earlier film and deeming it a sequel, the creative team, led by director John Lasseter, delves deeper into their characters while retaining the fun spirit of the original film."
Review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes reports that 100% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 172 reviews, with an average score of 8.7/10. The film is currently #1 on Rotten Tomatoes' list of best-rated films. Rotten Tomatoes summarizes the critical consensus thus: "Toy Story 2 employs inventive storytelling, gorgeous animation, and a top notch voice cast to deliver another rich moviegoing experience for all ages, one that's arguably even better than its predecessor." Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and Toy Story 3 are all Pixar's highest-rated films to date. It currently holds a 100% approval from critics, and 92% from the community, while the original holds a 96% community rating and the best rated animated film. The film also holds an 88 out of 100 on Metacritic. It joins the rare number of sequels judged to be "as good as or better than the original." Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and said in his print review "I forgot something about toys a long time ago, and Toy Story 2 reminded me." Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times said: "Toy Story 2 may not have the most original title, but everything else about it is, well, mint in the box." Entertainment Weekly said, "It's a great, IQ-flattering entertainment both wonderful and wise."
Lee Unkrich regarded the film with pride while remembering the difficulty of meeting its due date. "Even though Toy Story 2 really killed us in a lot of ways - it was really, really hard - I probably look back on that film the most fondly in terms of how we all came together and did this impossible thing."
- 2 min
Nov 24, 1999 · Meet the voice actors and characters of Toy Story 2, the 1999 animated adventure comedy film. Learn about the plot, the toys, and the collectibles in this Disney classic.
- John Lasseter
- Dave Foley
Find out who voiced Woody, Buzz, Jessie and other characters in this animated sequel. See the director, screenwriter, producer, composer and other credits of Toy Story 2.
Find out the cast, crew, plot and trivia of Toy Story 2, the 1999 animated comedy film directed by John Lasseter. See the trailer, user score and streaming options for this classic sequel.
