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Cover Story

Cover Story - Spanish Version

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Comprehension Quiz

Teacher's Guide and Worksheets

Cartoon People Get Real

Cowboy Woody and Buzz Lightyear delighted audiences of the 1995 movie Toy Story. As the playthings came to life in a boy's bedroom, they looked amazingly real.

But the humans in Toy Story looked a little creepy. They moved like robots and had the same shiny, smooth surfaces that the toys did. Why? Animators have had a tough time making human skin, movements and clothes look just right.

Until now. Pixar, the company that created Toy Story, has come up with new computer-animation software that puts a much more human face on cartoons. To show it off, Pixar made Geri's Game, a short film in which a wily old man plays chess against himself.

Who wins? The real winner of Game is technology. During the film, Geri's face scrunches up and breaks into laughter in a way that's completely lifelike. His stooped, shuffling walk is just as realistic. So is the way his forehead wrinkles as he ponders his next chess move. Even the wrinkles in Geri's jacket look real.

"Clothes are really hard," says director Jan Pinkava, who worked for two years on the five-minute film. His team used complicated mathematical formulas to imitate the ways cloth moves and facial expressions change. "It's about getting ordinary bits of the real world into machines," he says.

Geri's Game probably won't be released in theaters, but Pixar plans to use its techniques in future projects, including two new full-length films. In A Bug's Life, folks can take a closeup look at the adventures of ants, grasshoppers and other tiny creatures. And a sequel to Toy Story arrives in video stores in 1999.

Both movies will present a whole new world of animation, with lifelike humans and bugs with expressive faces. Pixar's technology is taking animated movies, as Buzz Lightyear would say, "to infinity and beyond!"

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