Table of Contents
While the story about Jessie and Woody is amazing, there is one part of the movie that everyone is talking about. It is the Multi-Buzz scene. In this part of the film, about 50 identical Toy Story 5 Buzz Lightyear animation toys march around, react, and even ride toy horses together.
An animator named Donghoe Kim was the guy in charge of making this happen. He is Pixar’s expert at animating big groups of characters. He previously worked on huge group scenes in movies like Elio and Inside Out 2. But making 50 Buzz Lightyears move together was the hardest job of his life.
The Story: Screen Time vs. Toy Time
Before we talk about the computer magic, let’s look at why there are 50 Toy Story 5 Buzz Lightyear animations in the movie.
In Toy Story 5, Bonnie is now eight years old. She is trying hard to make friends at school. To help her, her parents buy her a brand-new tablet named Lilypad. The tablet looks like a cute green frog.
But things go wrong. Bonnie gets addicted to the tablet. She spends all her time looking at the screen and ignores her old favorite toys:
- Jessie, who is now the room’s leader since Woody left.
- Buzz Lightyear, the space hero.
- Bullseye, the friendly toy horse.
Jessie tries to tell the tablet that Bonnie needs real-world playtime. The tablet thinks like a computer, so it tries to fix the problem by sending a social media friend request to a girl in Bonnie’s class named Chelsea.
Jessie gets scared that Bonnie will never play with toys again. So, she secretly sends a message to Woody. Woody comes back to Bonnie’s house right away, and the toys team up to help Bonnie remember how fun imagination can be.
At the very start of the movie, a big shipping container full of high-tech Buzz Lightyear toys washes up on a lonely island after a storm. The box breaks open, and all the Buzz toys wake up.
The problem is, they are all stuck in “demo mode.”
They think they are real space heroes lost on a scary alien planet. They follow the stars to find “Star Command” and escape the island. Later in the movie, Woody and the original Buzz find this group, called the Multi-Buzz, and try to teach them that being a toy is actually a wonderful thing.
>>> Read more: Why Pixar’s Newest Sequel Tackles Every Parent’s Worst Nightmare
What is a “Hive-Mind” Character?
The funniest part about the 50 Buzz Lightyears is that they have a hive mind. This means they do not think like 50 separate people. Instead, they think and act like one single group.
“They share behaviors like a school of fish,” animator Donghoe Kim said. “They act together, believe the same things at the same time, and realize things at the same time, too.”
This leads to some great comedy. For example, when all 50 Buzz toys see Jessie for the first time, they all fall in love with her at the same split second. When they finally find out they are just plastic toys, the shock hits all 50 of them at once.
Donghoe Kim says these 50 Buzz toys are very important to the story. They stand right in the middle between old-school toys (like Woody and Jessie) and new electronic screens (like the Lilypad tablet).
The Multi-Buzz toys are high-tech, and they start out acting like robots that can only follow rules. Watching them learn how to be creative and fun shows the main lesson of the movie: the world is changing fast, but a child’s love for a toy is still the most important thing.
The Computer Nightmare: Why Toy Story 5 Buzz Lightyear Animation Has Broken the Software
In 3D computer animation, putting 50 main characters into one scene is usually a terrible idea.
When Pixar makes a character like Buzz Lightyear, the file is huge. It has thousands of settings for how his armor shines, how his face moves, and how his joints bend.
Loading just one Buzz takes a lot of computer power. Trying to load 50 of them at the same time would make the animator’s computer slow down, freeze up, and crash completely.
Animating a single character is very different from animating a massive crowd. Here is how they compare:
| Feature | Just One Character | Big Crowd Scenes (Multi-Buzz) |
| How many on screen? | 1 to 5 characters | 50 or more characters |
| Computer Data | Heavy and super detailed | Light and simple so computers don’t crash |
| How they move | Unique, individual movements | Shared movements with small changes added later |
| How it’s made | Made slowly, frame by frame | Made by copy-pasting a small group |
The Clever Trick: How Donghoe Kim Solved the Problem
To stop Pixar’s computers from breaking, Donghoe Kim did not animate all 50 toys one by one. Instead, he and his team created a smart shortcut using Pixar’s special animation program, called Presto.
Step 1: Making a “Lightweight” Buzz
First, they built a new tool in the software. This tool made a special version of the Buzz Lightyear model that looked normal on the outside but had all the heavy computer code stripped out from the inside. This kept the file size very small.
Step 2: Animating the Leaders
Next, Kim focused all his attention on a tiny group of just three or four Buzz characters. He put these characters right at the front of the crowd where the audience would look. He animated their faces and arms by hand to make them look perfect.
Step 3: Copy and Paste
Once those front characters looked good, Kim used another software tool to copy and paste those exact movements onto the other 40+ Buzz toys in the background. Because the models were lightweight, the computer handled the copy-pasting easily.
Step 4: Showing the Director
To save time, Kim did not wait to finish the whole scene before showing his boss. He would take a picture of a single frame and show it to the director, Andrew Stanton. Once the director said the layout looked good, Kim would apply the copy-paste tool to the rest of the scene.
Step 5: Teamwork
After Kim finished the movements, he sent the scenes to the lighting and color teams. They added shadows, reflections, and bright colors to make the plastic suits look real and beautiful.
“If we had tried loading all those characters at full quality, it wouldn’t have worked,” Kim explained. “It would have crashed. These scenes happened because a lot of smart people worked together.”
Adding Heart: Making Clones Feel Real
If you just copy and paste an animation 50 times, it looks fake and boring. The audience can tell right away. Because these Buzz toys are a big part of the movie, director Andrew Stanton gave Kim a hard task: The toys must move together, but they cannot look like a lazy computer glitch.
The director wanted the audience to love these goofy clones, so the scenes needed to feel alive and full of energy.
The hardest part of the whole movie happens during a big action scene. In this scene, the entire army of 50 Buzz Lightyears jumps onto a herd of different toy horses to ride away with Jessie.
This was a giant puzzle for the animators:
- You have 50 Buzz toys.
- They are on lots of different toy horses.
- Every horse runs and jumps in a totally different way.
The director would look at the scene and say, “Hey, let’s make that Buzz on the left look like he is falling off his horse, and make that other Buzz in the back hold on tight!”
This meant Kim had to go back into the computer, break the copy-paste link for those specific toys, and animate those changes by hand. It was a massive amount of extra work, but it made the scene look incredibly fun and real.
Becoming a Teacher
Because the Multi-Buzz scenes were so huge, Pixar realized that Kim could not do it all alone. As the movie deadline got closer, Pixar hired a big group of extra animators to help finish the scenes.
This was a big moment for Kim. It was his first time being a mentor and teacher to other artists.
To help the new animators, Kim:
- Wrote guides on how to use the new software tools.
- Gave live presentations to show how the workflow worked.
- Stayed by their desks every day to help them fix mistakes.
Kim admits he was very nervous at the start because he was the very first animator picked for this job. But teaching other artists helped him grow and gave him a lot of confidence.
Why Making People Cry is the Ultimate Goal of Toy Story 5 Buzz Lightyear Animation
For Donghoe Kim, working at Pixar is not just about using cool computers. It is about making people feel real emotions.
Kim shared a story about why he wanted to become an animator. Years ago, when he was still a student, he went to see the first Inside Out movie.
“I watched the first Inside Out when I was still in school and I cried a lot,” Kim said. “Bing Bong was my favorite character. I loved that movie so much that it became my dream to work at Pixar.”
Kim worked very hard, and his dream came true. His very first job out of school was working on Inside Out 2. While working there, he made sure to meet Pete Docter (the director) and other senior artists. He wanted to learn exactly how they make drawings feel so human.
Kim brings that same passion to his work today. He wants to make people laugh, make them cry, and share a good message, whether he is animating one character or 50 clones.
Conclusion: Animation Never Stops Changing
The 50 Buzz Lightyears in Toy Story 5 show what happens when smart computer tricks meet real human creativity. By building simple, clever tools, Donghoe Kim saved his computer from crashing and gave a whole army of space toys a wonderful soul.
Toy Story 5 is playing in theaters right now. Go see it on the big screen, bring some tissues, and look out for the scene where 50 Buzz Lightyears ride toy horses!
Source: awn
–
Animost – Vietnam 3D Animation Studio
hello@animost.com