“Toy Story” animator gave life to Woody, other Pixar characters

Bud Luckey, an Oscarnominated animator who crafted hand-drawn, twodimensional characters for more than three decades before using new digital tools to create Woody, the pull-string star of Pixar’s “Toy Story,” died Feb. 24 at a hospice center in Newtown, Conn. He was 83.

He had suffered a stroke in 2013, said his son, Andy Luckey.

Bud Luckey began his career as a protégé of Art Babbitt, the Walt Disney animator who developed the long-eared character Goofy and the wicked queen of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Working out of San Francisco, he animated the original “Alvin and the Chipmunks” television series, collaborated with “Peanuts” creator Charles M. Schulz on advertisements for Dolly Madison snack cakes, and devised entire segments for “Sesame Street,” in which his hillbilly-fiddler character Donnie Budd introduced young viewers to Nos. 2-6.

By the early 1990s, however, Luckey’s curiosity was piqued by plans for a computer-generated film at Pixar.

He was soon hired as the studio’s fifth animator and worked variously as a character designer, storyboard artist or voice performer for “Toy Story” (1995) and nearly every Pixar movie that followed.

Luckey was “one of the true unsung heroes of animation,” John Lasseter, who directed “Toy Story” and went on to become the studio’s chief creative officer, said in a 2004 Pixar documentary on the animator.

Known to some colleagues as Bud Low-key, Luckey also helped shape the whimsical worlds and characters of movies such as “A Bug’s Life” (1998), “Toy Story 2” (1999), “Monsters, Inc.” (2001), “Cars” (2006) and “Ratatouille” (2007).

Although animation is almost always a collaborative process, Luckey was granted near-total control of “Boundin’,” a 2003 Pixar short that was shown in theaters before “The Incredibles” and received an Academy Award nomination for best animated short film.

Still, he remained best known for his work on “Toy Story,” which set a benchmark for computergenerated animation and made more than $370 million worldwide.

The movie’s characters — toys that come to life whenever they are separated from their owner — included an astronaut named Buzz Lightyear and, initially, a decidedly creepy-looking ventriloquist’s dummy.

Luckey suggested a change: Turn Woody into a cowboy.

“As soon as he said that, I knew it was just perfect,” Lasseter recalled in Karen Paik’s book “To Infinity and Beyond!: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios.”