Your first concern when you take this over is you’re just trying to make it all fit together on a basic narrative level. … We did 60 different drafts of the scene before we got to the final version. … It was really only after we set up the narrative structure of [toys realizing they’re going to serve their careers being played with by children and then ‘retire’ to the attic] that we realized how emotional it was, and how much it played into people’s fears of obsolescence. … I think everybody feels the way these toys feel — like they’ve given themselves over to this child, Andy, and given him 100 percent and played with him and given him so much of their lives, and now he’s going away. And they don’t [really] want to go with him to college; what they really want is acknowledgment, and I think that’s a universal thing. I think a lot of people go through life feeling like they work really hard and they’re doing a good job and they just want some sort of emotional acknowledgment.
Michael Arndt speaking on the opening scene of Toy Story 3
