Pixar takes an Apple Watch face to make its

One of the world's biggest entertainment powerhouses has put together a teaser trailer for 2026's Toy Story 5 by re-using Apple Watch animations from 2017.

The animated Apple Watch faces debuted some two years ahead of the release of 2019's Toy Story 4. The new animated trailer for the fifth instalment opens with a space alien being winched up by a steel claw, followed by a blue background with the forthcoming film's logo with Woody, Buzz, and Jessie in the background.

Woody runs up to the foreground to wave hello, Jessie follows with a big wink, and Buzz runs left offstage to reappear in the foreground on the right to give the viewer a salute. These animations used were originally assets by Pixar created for watchOS 4.

Dylan McDonald, owner of SunApps, showed off the re-use of animation assets in a post on X.com, and subsequently posted the Apple Watch faces. He noted that the animations had their original black backgrounds edited out so the characters could appear against a blue background.

Stealing the idea for this from a friend but yeah these are literally just the animations from the watchOS 4 Toy Story Apple Watch face

They even look like they've had a back background edited out https://t.co/aGlrI7YgV1 pic.twitter.com/cvk63GuJdS
— Dylan (@DylanMcD8) August 10, 2024

McDonald, in his tweet, credited an Apple intern working on the Maps app as initially discovering the re-use of the animation assets. The reaction from commenters on both posts was amusement, with speculation that the actual future film has not yet likely progressed far enough to have any new animation available.

Only two pieces of animation in the trailer are not repurposed from the Apple Watch animations, but instead re-used from other sources. The alien being pulled up by a toy-grabber claw has been seen before, as has the brief animation of Buzz running out-of-shot.

Toy Story 5 is scheduled to debut in the US on June 19th, 2026, and will be written and directed by Andrew Stanton. Stanton helped write the first four Toy Story movies, as well as the Monsters, Inc. series of films.

Stanton co-wrote and directed 2003's Pixar hit Finding Nemo and it's sequel Finding Dory. He also co-wrote and directed the 2008 Pixar animated sci-fi romance Wall-E, along with the less-successful live-action Disney film John Carter of Mars.

Separately, in 2019 a "Toy Story" poster signed by Steve Jobs fetched over $30,000 at auction.

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5 Comments

CheeseFreeze 7 Years · 1339 comments

About 4 months ago

Cool watch face. I hope Pixar will return to the days of Monsters, Inc and Ratatouille with more original ideas. It feels they are playing it too safe nowadays.

chasm 10 Years · 3624 comments

CheeseFreeze said:

Cool watch face. I hope Pixar will return to the days of Monsters, Inc and Ratatouille with more original ideas. It feels they are playing it too safe nowadays.

To be fair, entirely new concepts are very risky. While I enjoyed "Turning Red," "Brave," and "Soul," they didn't do that well at the box office compared to "Cars +number" or this forthcoming "Toy Story 5" will do. That said, sometimes the new ideas hit big -- "Wall-E" was great, "Inside Out" was a hit, and I think "Up" did very well as well.

But you can only afford to take those kinds of risks when you have a stable of reliable sequel potential to finance the bold new ideas.

eriamjh 17 Years · 1772 comments

I think that apple got the animations from Pixar for the watch face and simply used their own assets to make the ad. Using them “from the watch face” is like saying Pixar was lazy and copied Apple when it’s just being efficient. They probably didn't copy what they likely created in the first place.

hodar 14 Years · 366 comments

Disney killed the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Disney killed the Star Wars Universe
Disney killed Pixar
Disney killed their animation studios
Disney dug up, and killed their movie classics.

I would have never imagined a company, with such a strong family friendly business model, go to such lengths to kill everything it touches. They are unrecognizable from what they were just 10 years ago.

Marvin 18 Years · 15355 comments

hodar said:

Disney killed the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Disney killed the Star Wars Universe
Disney killed Pixar
Disney killed their animation studios
Disney dug up, and killed their movie classics.

I would have never imagined a company, with such a strong family friendly business model, go to such lengths to kill everything it touches. They are unrecognizable from what they were just 10 years ago.

Original content creation is going to get more difficult as time goes on. Cinema has only been around for 100 years or so and most of the movies have been produced since 2000:

https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/production-countries/#tab=territory
https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/production-countries/#tab=year
https://www.the-numbers.com/United-States/movies#tab=year

There aren't infinite original stories, characters and environments. Inevitably they will retread old ground.

The MCU ran out of interesting stories to tell. There may be more mileage from some characters but they covered a lot with over 34 movies.

It's worse with anthropomorphic characters, that formula runs out more quickly:

https://screenrant.com/every-pixar-movie-what-if-had-feelings-formula/

Superheroes similarly have limited combinations of powers so it's difficult to invent a new hero with an origin story.

Star Wars was based around a single story and a few main family characters, more content is just doing service to this core story and filling in the blanks.

Some games have shown promise for original content. Baldur's Gate 3 did a great job with original characters and storylines, Netflix may be looking at producing this:

https://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/ent/baldurs-gate-netflix-talks.html

Given the low quality of movies over the past couple of years across the industry, it's not just a problem that affects Disney. They've had good financial returns from sequels and reboots and they have to follow the money to please the shareholders. It seems inevitable the industry will run out of interesting original ideas eventually.