Script To Screen: “Toy Story”

“Alright everyone, this is a stick-up! Don’t anybody move! Now empty
 that safe!”

The opening scene from the 1995 movie Toy Story, screenplay by Joss Whedon and Andrew Stanton and Joel Cohen & Alec Sokolow, story by John Lasseter and Pete Docter and Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft.

Here is the movie version of the scene:

What’s so great about this opening scene is how entertaining it is — entering into a young boy’s imagination — while being so efficient. It’s framed as a mini-story with Beginning, Middle, and End, and within that little narrative, we are introduced to many of the key toy characters who will populate the rest of the movie. Most notably, we get the affection Andy has for Woody and how Woody is The Hero in the pantheon of Andy’s toy universe.

While we’re at it, check out this live action version of the movie.

This is just one of many other live action iterations of Toy Story including some in different languages.

One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a series on Go Into The Story where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.

For more Script To Screen articles, go here.