Inside Pixar’s toy box

Pixar DOP Matt Aspbury discusses all things animation cinematography & Toy Story 5

Words Nicola Foley 

Way back in 1995, Pixar made history with Toy Story: the world’s first fully computer-generated animated feature film. It was made possible through RenderMan, the studio’s proprietary rendering software, which was capable of transforming digital models into detailed animated images, enabling huge leaps forward in colour, motion and lighting.

Since then, Pixar has continued to lead the CGI animation revolution, introducing groundbreaking innovations with almost every new film it’s made. In 1998’s A Bug’s Life, it massively ramped up the rendering scale, developing software capable of generating huge crowds of independently moving ants while pioneering ‘subsurface scattering’ – a technique that simulates light passing through translucent surfaces.

In Monsters Inc, Pixar tackled Sulley’s fur with the help of Fizt, a system capable of animating millions of individual hairs. In Finding Nemo, it conquered underwater animation, recreating the behaviour of light, water and ocean environments with never-before-seen realism. The Incredibles broke new ground in the animation of human characters, clothing and hair, while Brave introduced a hair simulation system to bring Merida’s iconic mane of curls to life. More recently, Elemental tapped into volumetric effects and machine-learning-assisted tools to create convincing characters made from fire, water, air and earth.

Pixar’s dedication to pushing the boundaries of animation is unparalleled – and that extends to using real-world cinematography principles to ensure the films feel as immersive as possible; no matter how fantastical the animated world it’s creating. To do that, it needs a cinematographer, which is where Matt Aspbury comes in. He’s worked at Pixar as an in-house DOP on some of the studio’s best-loved films including Cars, Wall-E, Ratatouille and the third and fifth Toy Story films.

But how exactly does cinematography work in the context of animation; where there are no physical cameras, lenses or lights? “We have a virtual camera model which behaves basically like a live action one: we can lay down a dolly track, play with lenses and depth-of-field, make it look handheld,” begins Aspbury. “What we can do is almost unlimited, but it’s essentially a virtual representation of what you’d do in live action.

“To take Toy Story as an example; we have Bonnie – she’s been in the last two movies, so we’ve carried her house over from those previous films – that’s essentially our set,” he continues. “We have all the characters in there, rigged in such a way that we can pose and animate them. My department is responsible for doing all the rough initial blockings, so that we can get an idea of how to stage things with the camera.”

In some ways, the process sounds very similar to traditional filmmaking (albeit inside a fully digital environment), with the DOP figuring out blocking and timing, composition and the lens look. But a key difference in the workflow is that the traditional role of cinematographer is split into two: layout DOP (Aspbury’s side) and lighting DOP, which comes later.

“Since animation is such a time-consuming, expensive art form to produce, we do the reverse of what they do in live action: we basically edit our movies up front,” comments Aspbury. “For years they’re writing and storyboarding the film, and then once it comes into our court, we start working with the characters and environments and essentially shooting it, working closely with the editorial department and directors for months. We’re getting the blueprint of the film down before it goes through the expensive part of animation, lighting and everything else.”

That separation may sound surprising to any DOPs out there, when you think about how fundamental lighting is to the craft of cinematography, but Aspbury says lighting still informs the process from the very beginning, even if the final version comes much later in production. “We do have it in our work,” he elaborates. “We have a preview of it, and the truth is, they’re doing colour keys and lighting studies while we’re working, so we always know if it’s going to be a nighttime scene or if it’s going to be staged in some very bright daylight. So we definitely have that stuff in there, but it’s a rough preview of what it will be.”

While animation, in theory, allows complete freedom, one of the secrets to Pixar’s success is how grounded its films are within familiar cinematic grammar, and how rigorously the filmmakers apply the rules of the physical world. This (alongside brilliant storytelling of course) helps audiences relate to and empathise with CG settings and characters. But to achieve it can take discipline and restraint, says Aspbury.

“Because it looks so realistic, especially if you’re talking about Toy Story 4 and 5, we have to try to adhere to real-world sensibilities. We are trying to be faithful and think: a camera wouldn’t do this. We’re trying to be physically based.”

This even extends to building in certain imperfections to ensure that the end result feels genuinely photographic. “We can add in lens flares, bokeh and different type of artefacts – and some of that stuff is comped in later – but it’s all little layers. It’s never gratuitously done, and you might not even be overly conscious about it as the audience, but it’s absolutely in there.”

In Toy Story 5, where the central plot revolves around a tablet device usurping the once-beloved analogue toys, the film’s visual language was designed to reinforce Woody and co’s growing sense of anxiety and displacement.

“The way I look at this movie is that it actually closely mirrors what happened in the first film, where Buzz was this threat to the old toys,” he explains. “Now, the shoe’s on the other foot. There’s this device which everybody can relate to, but now all the characters are analogue and out of date.”

“We had more handheld,” he adds. “There’s a scene where Jesse’s confronting this new device, essentially, and we just tried to have it feeling more unlocked, like she’s off her footing.”

He also deliberately framed the toys to emphasise how small and vulnerable they are within the human world around them. “We’re always trying to ensure that we’re shooting them as toys versus little people,” he says. “That means getting them more toward the lower part of the frame and having more headroom above them; things that show you they’re dwarfed by the environment they’re in.”

The Toy Story franchise completely changed the animation game – and its impact is not lost on Aspbury, who still remembers watching the first film 30 years ago, just as he was starting out in his career. “It got so much buzz for being the first CG animated movie, but once everybody sat down in the theatre, they kind of forgot about that and just enjoyed the story. If it hadn’t had the phenomenal story and characters, it would have just been a blip on the radar; but it had so many things going for it at the same time. It felt so fresh,” he recalls.

Since then, CG animation has evolved beyond recognition – so much so that, Aspbury jokes, while the storytelling is timeless, some of Pixar’s early films are ‘hard to go back and watch’ purely from a technical standpoint.

“The evolution of CG animation has gone through the roof; especially with things like occlusion, contact shadows and depth-of-field – so many things have tipped it towards a more photorealistic world,” he marvels.

Despite the advances, though, Toy Story 5 still had its share of challenges, mostly because of the sheer scale of what they were trying to do. Some sequences feature upwards of 100 characters on screen at one time. “This is by far the most characters we’ve ever had in a Toy Story movie,” shares Aspbury. “Honestly, it’s the most I’ve ever dealt with in any film and I’ve been doing this 30 years.”

This brought about both technical and logistical conundrums. “We had to figure out how to frame them, especially with wide shots, as you don’t want them too small in the frame. On my end, just being able to load all those characters was such a nightmare. We had to do all these optimisations in order to make it physically possible because, ultimately, you never want the technology or the technical hiccups short-changing or compromising your creative side,” he explains.

Still, solving those problems is part of what continues to keep him excited  about the job. “If we were about to jump into Toy Story 6 right now, we’d know exactly how to crack it because we’ve solved all these things,” he laughs. “But if they make another one, it’ll probably be years away and everything will have changed again.”

Of course, one of the biggest recent accelerations has been driven by the rise of AI tools across the entertainment industry – something that the animation sector in particular is deeply divided on. Aspbury’s fairly sanguine about it though: “There have been innovations the whole time we’ve all been working in this field,” he says. “This one definitely feels bigger though. But at the same time, all of us keep coming back to the fact that it’s still all about the story.”

Right now, he’s getting excited by what’s becoming possible in the world of virtual cinematography. “We now have a capture volume which we can use to scout things, and it feels much more like you’re on a physical set,” he shares. “We basically have an iPad that’s a camera and you’re able to move around, which is much more intuitive. With the virtual set-up on a screen, you’re able to miniaturise that camera down, so it’s almost like a toy holding it. All those little things help us get answers quicker, and it feels like we’re all discovering it at the same time.

“In the early days, we were so encumbered by the tech side of it,” he reflects. “Now that part has shrunk, and it means the creative side is the dominant piece of the conversation.”

With three decades under his belt, Aspbury has no intention of resting on his laurels, and he loves having to problem-solve on each project. “No matter how many movies you’ve done, each film has its own unique challenges, and I feel like it’s a good sign if I’m a little fearful,” he concludes. “That’s exciting.”

This article appears in the June/July 2026 issue of Definition