The fourth installment of the Toy Story films sees Woody, Buzz and the gang searching for old friends as well as meeting some new ones.
Two of the wackiest characters Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) meets are Ducky (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key) and Bunny (voiced by Jordan Peele), two carnival toys strapped to the back wall of a shooting game. Buzz gets trapped there by a bad stroke of luck, but thanks to Ducky and Bunny, they’re all able to plan their escape.
Director Josh Cooley told Blackfilm that Key and Peele brought a lot to their characters — personality, heart, and a lot of humor, much of which was improvised.
We sat down with Josh Cooley and producers Jonas Rivera and Mark Nielsen at Pixar Studios in San Francisco.
Blackfilm: Do you have any memorable moments working with Key and Peele? What did they bring to their characters?
Josh Cooley: There was one session — Keegan came a little early and I was talking to him about Ducky and Bunny, introducing them hanging in the carnival game. And I said to him, “Do you have any thoughts?” ‘Cause they’re so good with character, obviously, and I was like, “I wanna get your thoughts on this.” And I watched him become that character as he’s talking out loud, and he said, “Their window to the world is just what’s right in front of them. They have no idea what the rest of it is. Modesto, California is their Mecca.” And he was just spitting out all these brilliant ideas like what that character would be thinking at all times.
Blackfilm: It’s so hard to put yourself in that frame of mind like, “I’m a hanging toy in a carnival.”
Josh Cooley: Yeah, but he did it!
Mark Nielsen: Their moral compass is defined by carnival workers, and rigged games.
Jonas Rivera: I remember them saying, “We know two things: corn dogs are great, AC/DC’s great.”
Josh Cooley: That’s all they know!
Jonas Rivera: This wouldn’t literally be in the movie, but they would infuse that. Even that scene [when Bunny and Ducky first meet Buzz] Ducky says, “Hey, give me a hand.”
Josh Cooley: It was the scene where Bunny says, “I’ll help you with my foot.” And he starts kicking at [Buzz]. I remember that they improvised the whole, “My feet are a little small. I need your help.” That really was just pure improvisation. And we said, “We’re keeping that.”
Blackfilm: And it worked for the plot. It got Buzz out of the trap.
Jonas Rivera: It was great because these are the characters that are literally sewn together. They are all day together, talking. There’s frustration, there’s a special shorthand, there’s all these things that they just amplify.
Mark Nielsen: Another thing that helped lock it in with them was — you know, when we’re casting roles we’ll do animation tests. We’ll make character models, and we’ll grab clips of these people from their films, and animate the character to that dialogue. So we took some clips from some of Key and Peele’s skits, and we had Ducky and Bunny acting out the scenes. I said, “There’s stuff you can never put online.” But it was really, really funny and we showed it back to them.
Josh Cooley: I remember showing it to Jordan first, and I said, “Your character already looks kind of wacky, so we don’t need to do a wacky voice or anything like that. It’s just your normal voice against that design would work great. Here’s what I’m thinking.” And I showed them that test of them just talking, and they were busting up. I thought, that’s it. That’s great.
Blackfillm: And you never do these kinds of tests for actors you’re still considering for the role?
Mark Nielsen: No, we usually don’t. Because it’s really to get a head start on animation to do character tests. Using the voice of someone that you know eventually is gonna be recorded as that character. We did one for Forky with Tony Hale’s voice.
Jonas Rivera: Sometimes actors with no real intention think, “Oh, I’m gonna do a cartoon voice.” But a lot of the time we say, “We want you. We want your voice.” To them the test, I think it’s a little bit of an insurance policy, like “Oh, I can do that.”
Toy Story 4 is in theaters June 21.
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