"It's the ability to really convey the interior world of thoughts and feelings of a character through movement, " said Peter Docter, a central figure at Pixar since "Toy Story" and now the studio's chief creative officer.
A live-action performance occurs, often intuitively, in the moment, while animation can look more like the work of technicians than thespians. Laboring in dimly lit rooms on the Pixar campus in Emeryville, California, animators spend a lot of time staring at computer monitors. With Woody as something like their high-tech onscreen marionette, they painstakingly contrive one pose, one movement and one facial expression at a time — frame by frame, scene by scene — until he begins to resemble a living, breathing character.