When Toy Story came out, everything was on the line for Pixar.
There’s not a lot of wiggle room when you’re making something unprecedented.
Following the success of the Oscar-winning short film, 1988’s Tin Toy, Pixar decided to expand its stories from a little toy’s perspective in a major way, and that is obviously a lot more complex when you’re making an 80-minute feature film instead of a five-minute short.
The bigger company wanted the story to be a little “edgier,” if you can believe it, and when the movie did finally come together, it was still made with a relatively limited budget.