GITS Script Reading & Analysis: “Toy Story 3” — Dialogue

We wrap up our week long analysis of the script Toy Story 3 by considering its use of dialogue. There are the standard set of questions:

* What do you consider to be the most memorable lines, either good or… not so good? Why did they work — or not — for you?

* Any notable callbacks (a line used once, then used again later in a different context)?

* How about set-up & payoffs?

* Any exposition that caught your eye for being handled exceptionally well?

Here is another excerpt from the Creative Screenwriting article [May/June 2010] titled “Inside Pixar” featuring comments from Michael Arndt, the screenwriter of Toy Story 3:

Oddly, the early part of the film was where some of the hardest problems to solve resided. Arndt suffered mightily over a sequence the production team called “grown up,” which was a scene designed to catch the audience up on the 10 years that elapsed between Toy Story 2 and 3. “There’s just a ton of stuff you have to deal with right away,” Arndt says. “Character exposition, relationships, expectations for the future and various disagreements. It was just a nightmare trying to figure out what all that stuff is in the first place and then how to communicate it as quickly as possible.”

When problem solving a scene, Arndt uses a process similar to outlining. “If a scene is very complicated,” he explains, “I’ll make a list of everything that needs to happen in that scene and then try to establish the proper chronology. That way, everything happens in the right order.” To hear Arndt describe it, even at the end of the project, the scribe feels his problems within this highly expository scene were never really completely solved. “I actually went back and counted more than 60 drafts of it, and it still feels like the least-great scene in the movie to me,” he laments. “That was my Waterloo. It does what it needs to do, but it doesn’t sing the way other scenes in the movie do.”

The next time you feel utterly spent having rewritten a scene 5 times, multiply what you’re feeling by 12. That will give you some sense of what Arndt experienced writing this particular scene 60 times.

As the saying goes, “Writing is rewriting.”

See you in comments for a discussion about the dialogue in Toy Story 3.

For Day 1 of our analysis of Toy Story 3, you can go here.

For Day 2 focusing on structure, go here.

For Day 3 focusing on character, go here.

For Day 4 focusing on theme, go here.

[Remember next week (10/10–10/14), we will be reading Pan’s Labyrinth. You may access the script here.

NOTE: THIS SERIES AND THE USE OF SCRIPTS IS STRICTLY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES!

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