In 1991, when Toy Story was just about to go into production, Pixar was faced with a dilemma. None of their employees had ever written a script, every single short Lasseter had every done had no dialogue. At the time Pixar was seen as a failing company and over thirty of the employees had just recently been laid off(Steve Jobs); there was no room in the modest budget to hire a screenwriter. Lasseter and several other animators attended a screenwriting workshop and then wrote the first draft of Toy Story. Lasseter and his team decided to stay away from traditional fairytales and to not include any songs in the movie. This decision was made for duel reasons. Firstly, despite Lasseter being an admirer of Walt Disney and his work, he wanted Pixar to have their own image and not merely copy the Disney formula. Secondly, he wanted Toy Story to be a movie that appealed to adults as well as children. By taking out the flashy songs and putting the characters in a more realistic world setting with very real fears that both children and adults could respond too, rivalry, jealousy, the fear of abandonment, he felt that the movies connected with a larger audience. Unlike Disney animation where the characters are often stereotyped and exaggerated for comedic effect, Lasseter wanted to make his characters as nuanced and three dimensional as possible.
After Disney agreed to distribute the movie, Lasseter and the creative team worked with Disney Executive Jeffrey Kratzburg on the rewriting the script. Kratzburg urged them to make the film as edgy as possible, extensively rewriting the script to emphasize the adversarial relationship between Woody and Buzz. After Disney watched some of the animation for version of Toy Story they dropped the project. After careful thought Lasseter realized why the film had not been greenlit, the main character, Woody was cruel and Buzz was unrelatable. The Pixar team spent the next two months rewriting the script and altering the characters substantially. With Woody now a cowboy with a good heart suffering from jealously and Buzz an enthusiastic but misinformed astronaught the script was completed (Pixar Story).