I Said Draw, Pardner : In ‘Toy Story,’ inanimate objects spring to life in a universe existing only in cyberspace. High-tech, yes, but it’s the human side of Mr. Potato Head and his friends that matters.

For many adults, toys are just overpriced plastic things they consider buying only when their children begin to vigorously test out their diaphragm capacity in a department store. But then, very few adults pay as much attention to toys as John Lasseter.

In Lasseter’s office at Pixar Animation Studios here, toys line the shelves, and many of them were there long before he began work nearly five years ago on “Toy Story,” the first fully computer-animated feature, which stars the voices of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen. Prior to “Toy Story,” which opens Wednesday, Lasseter directed a series of acclaimed and ground-breaking computer-animated shorts (one, “Tin Toy,” won the 1989 Oscar for best animated short), each of which brought inanimate objects to a vivid life in a winsome but hilarious fashion.

“John’s work has been a huge technological breakthrough, in that he made a film about an inanimate object with heart and soul,” says Tom Schumacher, executive vice president of Disney Animation. “You can’t just rely on the exoticness of the look; then, it’s just a parlor trick. The story and the characters are key, and John has made them so engaging.”

Lasseter explains a bit of his creative process that brings life to the lifeless: “I study the toys in order to create their personalities,” he says. “Toys are made to be played with by children. So when you think of things that would cause anxiety in a toy’s life, it would be the things that would prevent him from being played with by a child--he could be broken, stolen, lost, or he could be outgrown.”

Lasseter picks up a cheesy plastic dinosaur, a model for one of the film’s supporting characters, Rex. Wallace Shawn, who gives Rex his voice in the film, has extravagantly signed the reptile’s back. “Every kid needs a dinosaur, and everyone’s favorite is T-Rex,” Lasseter says. “We thought he could be mean, because they are supposed to be the most fearsome creatures that ever lived--but look at these pathetic arms! He can’t even scratch his nose! And then I started thinking about this Godzilla I had on my wedding cake and how badly spray-painted he was and if he wagged his tail or shook his head, the paint wouldn’t line up anymore. So that’s where I came up with the idea of playing the Rex against type--he’s completely insecure and neurotic.

“Then we went on--the little green army men, they’re a classic; with them, it’s the integrity of the object,” Lasseter says, producing a bucket of plastic heroism.

“Look at the army men. With the mold casting, their faces aren’t lined up, and their gun barrels are always bent. They have these plugs in the back of their heads. For our characters, we had to have the mold casting, the plugs in the back of their head, their guns bent, but most of all we had to have their feet stuck to these little bases.”

Next, Lasseter produces another American classic--Mr. Potato Head. “We needed a guy who questioned authority and was a rabble-rouser, so we came up with Mr. Potato Head,” he explains, “because his facial features are always falling off. You’d have a chip on your shoulder too if your features were always falling off.”

(Don Rickles lends his voice to Mr. Potato Head. Initially, he says, “they talked to me about this cartoon and I told them, I don’t need this Popeye-Olive Oyl stuff. I was very indifferent to it but they were very interested in me. I’m glad I did it now, but seeing the movie is strange--here I spent my life building a whole career, then I look at this potato and my voice is coming out of it.”)

“The main reason to do this film,” the director says drolly, “was so during work hours, I could go to a toy store and buy toys on the company credit card.”

‘Toy Story” concerns Woody (Hanks’ voice), an old-fashioned pull-string gunslinger and the favorite toy of a boy named Andy. Until, that is, the youngster receives a high-tech action figure complete with laser lights and sound effects, Buzz Lightyear (Allen’s voice). Buzz and Woody squabble, then get lost in the big, bad real world, where they must quit bickering and join forces if they’re to survive the clutches of Sid, the sadistic kid next door.

“So many things in the movie were spurred from the things we did when we were kids,” explains Andrew Stanton, one of six people who receive screenwriting and/or story credits on the film (he receives both). “When Sid is introduced, he’s blowing up a Combat Carl, which is something I used to do with G.I. Joes. . . . Sid’s just exaggerated a slight degree from reality in the film.”

Lasseter worked as an animator for Disney in the early ‘80s, what he calls “the dark days of ‘Black Cauldron,’ ” the years before Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg came in to rescue the studio’s animation heritage from sloth and indifference.

Lasseter was awakened to the potential power of computer graphics when he saw some early dailies from the otherwise forgettable sci-fi thriller “Tron.” “I was blown away by what I saw--not the imagery, but the potential, the extreme potential for character animation.”

He begged his superiors to let him do a test using the technology, blending cel and computer imagery to bring a brief sequence from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” to life. “It was very successful from my standpoint, but . . . they were only interested if it saved them money.”

A brief stint at Lucasfilm brought Lasseter to Pixar, which initially was a company marketing computer hardware and software. Despite the accolades and awards that had gone to such Lasseter efforts as “Luxo Jr.,” “Knickknack,” “Red’s Dream” and the Oscar-winning “Tin Toy,” the animation department was a perennial money-loser that was kept around because it showed off exotic applications of the firm’s products.

Eventually, Pixar began making serious money from its animation thanks to TV commercials, and Disney, which had purchased software from the company, began negotiations for a feature film. “Toy Story” was green-lighted more than three years ago, and has been in production ever since. In the meantime, Pixar’s animation department has ballooned from a staff of five or six to 125 strong, which is still but a fraction of that for a traditional cel-animated feature.

But, as producer Bonnie Arnold points out, the high-tech process does not translate into cheaper or faster productions. “It’s not quicker, but it takes less people,” she says. “But the process itself is not quicker at this point.” The budget, she will only say, is “less than ‘Waterworld’s.’ ”

Lasseter couldn’t just run out and hire Pixar a bunch of hotshot computer animators, because for all intents and purposes, he was the only one. So “Toy Story” was made by a variety of artists and technicians, each adding levels of detail to ensure that the final product appears eye-poppingly realistic.

“To get great acting out of your characters, you need traditional animators,” he says. “That’s the only place where you’re trained to think in terms of acting with your characters. When we started hiring people, the most important criterion, no matter what the medium, was whether they made the characters look as though they were thinking. I didn’t care if they knew computers or not, and would say the vast majority of the animators had no computer backgrounds.”

One exception is Ebon Ostby, one of the production’s animation scientists. He takes a physical mold sculpted for each character, and draws a grid on it. Then, with a digitizer, he inputs information with an electronic wand--specifically, where each grid intersection is on the sculpture--into the computer. This gives the computer a three-dimensional vision of the character.

Each grid intersection in the computer is called a control point, or an avar. For example, Woody has 712 avars across his body, including 212 on his face alone.

“You move an avar, and all points move with it,” Ostby says. “They’re like muscles. But they also have specific controls they can play with. Faces have more controls, to give them genuine expressiveness.”

As opposed to traditional cel animation, in which one artist and a supporting team work on one character throughout the entire film, animators on “Toy Story” would animate entire sequences.

The computer monitor at Pete Docter’s work station is set up for a scene in which a chastened Woody pulls himself out from under Andy’s bed, where he has been casually tossed, while Buzz has been given his place of honor upon Andy’s bed. His screen splits into a number of views of the scene--one, rough animation for the scene as it is expected to appear in the film; another, a close-up of Woody’s face, as he emotes and speaks; another, a vocal track that helps sync Woody’s animated mouth with Hanks’ reading.

“In this scene, I’ve broken it down into three passes,” says Docter, a supervising animator who, like Lasseter, put in time at Disney. “One’s just a basic rough thing, I don’t animate the hands or feet. The second is all the extremities, down to the finger tips. Once I have the body moving, I’ll do a facial animation. We have a camera aimed at his nose, so that no matter where his head turns, we can see his face very clearly. That helps concentrate on the acting, although ultimately you won’t see his face, you’ll just see--” he points to the screen, where Woody’s face is obscured by his cowboy hat.

Others will add such details as clothing, backgrounds, lighting and textures.

“Computers are a completely different animation medium,” Docter marvels. “You’re always conscious of three dimensions. In 2-D, if I needed to reach an object across the room, I might just draw the arm longer, then go back to normal, whereas here, you’re almost like puppet animation, where if the hand isn’t long enough, you have to move the character to compensate. There’s less cheating.”

For Docter, used to having his work on paper, the fact that nothing exists except in Pixar’s cyber universe still takes some getting used to. “The first time I saw dailies, even though I had animated a certain shot, I swore I was looking at a real set that had been built somewhere. But it just doesn’t exist, anywhere. It’s kind of baffling to me, too.”

The computer was likewise baffling to Ralph Eggleston, the film’s art director--he scarcely touched the thing; his office is one of the few with hand-drawn pages of film scenes lining the walls.

“The biggest struggle in this film is the humans,” he says. “The skin was the hardest; there’s several layers. The blood layer, the epidermal layer, the peach fuzz layer, and two oil layers, one that catches blue light the other that catches other light; they’re just slightly offset to give the skin depth. There’s something like 140 paintings on it to get this effect.”

Eggleston also designed many of the “sets”--the ones Docter was sure existed--adding, along with Lasseter and the rest of the crew, some inside jokes. Andy’s bookcase includes titles from past Pixar projects. The carpeting in the bully Sid’s home is a design “borrowed” from “The Shining.” The license number for Andy’s family’s minivan is the room number of the animation department where Lasseter went to college.

Eggleston’s designs went to Tia Krater, one of the project’s “painters.”

Each object went through a series of painting passes to achieve their realistic look, Krater says. “For example, the bedspread. One layer was painting flat images that show the color. Another layer was to show dirt. Another layer was to show stitching and where the stitching gets puckered. All that gets slapped together. . . . One of the things we tried to do was somehow get away from things looking so clean and perfect and plastic. The fun part is not the beautiful things rendered so nicely, but the stuff that we can screw up.”

Krater calls up an image on her computer. “This is one of my favorite paintings, though you can’t really see it in the film.” It’s Sid’s mattress, scuffed and filthy--and with a number of unsightly, un-Disneyesque urine stains. “Luckily, it never shows up, but I’m very proud of it,” Krater says with a broad smile.

Krater’s work goes to animation scientist Tom Porter. “I put surface appearances on everything,” he says, picking up a cowboy hat and examining its felt. “There’s a lot of detail--this part is fuzzy, this part is beaten up. . . . How do you explain to the computer things like dust and labels and dirt and grunge and cracks and splotches? I write computer programs to describe surface detail. In order to describe the bumpy pattern of a toy, it’s a standard matter of sines and cosines, simple high school trigonometry.” Simple to him, maybe.

No sooner had Pixar completed “Toy Story” than Lasseter and his team had a script for their second project prepared and accepted at Disney. Its title, subject and targeted release date remain closely guarded secrets. But given that it took five years from the initial pitch meeting to their first film’s opening, “Toy Story” just may be considered state-of-the-art computer animation for the rest of the millennium.*