Buzz Lightyear - sand sculpture

I've always been a big fan of Pixar. The animations are amazing and they push the limits with each film but, the story and characters are where they really shine. I feel Disney movies on the other hand have cookie cutter characters and there is never much of a surprise in the stories.
I had the pleasure of Hearing John Lasseter talk in Dublin many years ago and loved his passion for story telling. Of course now Pixar is under the umbrella of Disney having been bought by them in 2006. Toy story was produced for Disney by Pixar and even with their meddling it turned out to be a great movie.

For the 1998 Schevenigen Sand sculpture competition in The Netherlands we were asked to do a sculpture based on Pixar. There were around five of us on the team and we decided to have a bit of a message about this smaller studio slowly being taken over by the whale that is Disney. Buzz sits with a little model of himself in his hand.

Merch

The amount of merchandise produced for kids films is getting to sickening levels. The new 'Cars' movies have hundreds of models to be bought and my son wants ever one. Check out children's videos on Youtube and you will be bombarded with subliminal ads showing you your childhood will not be complete unless you get the lightening McQueen toy in every size. Disney have really learned over the years that this is big business and now lots of films seem to be produced more for this reason than for the films sake.

On the back we had Donald Duck climbing up into Buzz's back ready to control him.

Ok it all seems a bit soapboxie but I think it went over everyone's head including, luckily our sponsor who was Disney.
I stll think Pixar is pretty cool.

On the morning that we were supposed to finish our sculpture, ready to be judged at mid day we went to the beach to discover that Buzz's right arm and chest had collapsed. Damn it, we had three hours to try and salvage something. With the compacted sand that was still there we quickly carved a spring like form and finished the rest to the ground. There really wasn't much we could do and so the sculpture looked pretty sad in the end.

You win some, you lose some.

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As a special bonus sculpture in this post, Disney as a sponsor of the event asked us to put in some subtle ads for their upcoming movie the 'lion king 2'. I carved this Pumba from the movie as a last minute thing and put him as far away from the sculpture as possible. It made no sense him being in our plot so I hid him in the back corner.