'Toy Story 4': A Pixar Artist Reveals The Secrets Behind Bringing Bo Peep To Life

For fans of the original Toy Story and its 1999 sequel, the return of Bo Peep, Woody's girlfriend, in Toy Story 4 is one of the new movie’s many, many highlights. (Hello, Ducky and Bunny!) But the new Bo Peep (again voiced by Annie Potts) isn’t the same porcelain figurine we knew before — she’s no longer a pristine shepherdess, but a battered, battle-ready explorer. Once a supporting character, Bo Peep is now a lead.

Mara MacMahon, the character designer and rigger who worked on Bo Beep in 'Toy Story 4'. I also did a little bit of work on Forky, MacMahon tells 8 DAYS.SG. I also did a bunch of work on the crowds and the humans running around. They're stuff you don't really see.

As the character designer and rigger, Mara MacMahon is one of the several Pixar animators (more of that later) tasked with Bo’s makeover, which they had to start from scratch. “The technology we had back then was really different from what we have now,” MacMahon tells 8 DAYS.SG “So we are able to realise Bo in new levels of details that we haven’t before.”

Before and After: Bo Peep in the original 1995 'Toy Story' (top, left) and 2019's 'Toy Story 4'. “The technology we had back then was really different from what we have now,” says MacMahon, who joined Pixar in 2016. “So we are able to realise Bo in new levels of details that we haven’t before.”

In Singapore recently for the first-ever Pixar Animations Studios Drawing Workshop, a special programme in the Children’s Festival by Gardens by the Bay, MacMahon remembers watching the first Toy Story when she was “six or eight”. “When I found out I get to be picking up [after colleague Tanja Krampfert worked on the modelling side], I was really excited, honestly.” All in all, she spent a year working on Bo.

As character designer, MacMahon's job is to create a bunch of images of the character that complements its quirks and traits in the story. In other words, she has to figure out how the character is going to look like. What does a rigger do, then? Her job is to translate the art department’s designs into a 3D sculpture and add controls for the animation department to manipulate the character’s movements, from facial expressions to shifting joints.

“Think of us as creating the strings for a puppet and the animator would then take the puppet and pose them,” says MacMahon who joined Pixar in 2016 and has worked on Cars 3, the Oscar-winning short Bao, and Purl, a workplace satirical short released on Pixar’s YouTube channel.

1. It takes a squad of artisans to bring Bo Peep to life.

Every aspect of Bo Peep’s look, backstory, evolution and eventual design was taken care by Team Bo — a bevy of story artists, animators, modellers and even actress Annie Potts who voiced Bo. Says MacMahon: “We would have Bo Tea Time once every other week, and everybody would just get together and share what we were working at that time. Because we were all sitting around one table, we were not only getting to know each other, we were also trading ideas in a way that normally doesn’t happen in production. Somebody in animation gets to hear from story artist Carrie [Hobson], ‘We’re working on the scene and her personality is going down this direction and she might kinda act this way in this scene.’ The animation director hears about that and goes, ‘Oh great!’ [The character] benefits from hearing the ideas from everybody.”

2. They studied porcelain dolls.

“One of the things the artists working on Bo did was they took a trip to a porcelain factory and a doll fabrication workshop in downtime LA. So they got to see what porcelain looks like as they are carving it and then having it fired and glazed. They were looking at collector’s dolls and how their features are painted on. One of the things they noticed about porcelain is that when it goes into the firing process, the glaze softens everything. So unlike Woody and Buzz, you don’t really get sharp details on Bo. So things like her nostrils — you barely see them — are soft and melted, her eyelashes painted on. Even with her hands, the animators were posing them like a doll’s hands: an actual porcelain’s fingers are group together because they’d break off as single fingers.”

3. They actually made Bo’s outfit for real.

“Woody and Buzz look like toys because they have exaggerated body proportions. Bo, however, has more realistic proportions because of the type of toy she is. With the outfit, we were looking at how these materials will look like up close? What does a ribbon look like on a waist of a doll? In the time she spent running around as a lost toy, her seams have come apart, so she repurposes her dress as a cape. Tailoring artist Mariana Galindo, who did the digital clothing for Bo, also made a real reversible cape — dark on the outside, polka dots inside. It came with Velcro attachments so that you can wear it either as a skirt or a cape. This is something we don’t normally do, but Mariana is really passionate about Bo. The animation and simulation artists could actually wear it and act out the shots to see how the cape would move. A cape on a full-size adult moves in a different way than a little cape on a tiny toy. On a toy, the cape is a lot stiffer. When we were drawing, we had conversations on how the cape would move. We need to remind audiences that she is not a small human, she’s actually a small toy.”

4. They modelled Bo’s athletic prowess on gymnasts.

“[Lead animators] Becki Tower and Patty Kihm said Bo shouldn’t be just like the martial artists or different action characters they've collected as references. I think the analogy they used was, these video references are kind like a spice drawer — when you’re animating this shot, is this something you can use to spice up your a shot a bit? So if we’re looking at a martial artist, we don’t need Bo to be a 100 per cent martial artiste because she isn’t a fighter, but there is stuff in there we pull from it. It was really important to note that Bo is athletic, but she’s also very feminine. When we were looking at a lot of previous action heroes like Lara Croft, a lot of the times when the action heroine is either sometimes tomboyish or very masculine. We thought, how about we make her very feminine and very athletic, qualities that aren’t paired together? So we look at gymnasts [because] when you are thinking of somebody who has to move with a lot of confidence, grace and speed. We wanted to find a new way to mix up these qualities and say that girly girls can be just as athletic as tomboys.”

Photos: Disney