Creation sets standard for DIY spork toys

If you’d have asked me, directly following my day at Toy Story Land a.k.a. Pixar Animation Studios, what my favorite part was, I probably would have said the pool (which I only imagined using) or the free food (I liked how each of the dish descriptions featured a portrait of one of the characters: Buzz for the slow-cooked salmon, Woody for the roast chicken).

But now, having had some time to process my experience, I have a new and surer answer: Forky.

Forky is one of the new characters in “Toy Story 4.” He is a plastic spork with red pipe-cleaner hands and mismatched googly eyes and Popsicle-stick feet. (The confusing-but-ultimately perfect name came from director Josh Cooley’s daughter.) He is voiced by Tony Hale (“Veep”) and he is in a perpetual state of existential crisis. How could something meant to be thrown away now be a child’s toy? He throws himself away more than once.

The idea came to the movie simply while scenarios were being imagined for Bonnie, the child who plays with these toys. “What if Bonnie picked up a rock and started playing with it? Does a rock come to life?” Cooley says. “It just became fun to think, what if she did actually make a toy.”

Though I have not seen the film, which opens Friday, June 21, in its entirety, I understand that by the end of the movie Forky comes to accepts his new, imposed purpose. This is meant to be heartwarming, but is it maybe also sinister?

But let’s not think too hard about that, because this is not real life and Forky is delightful — he is weird and stilted and extremely lovable in his naivete. In order to better understand him, Pixar had me and several other journalists make our own.

Early on a Thursday morning, we were ushered into a room with long tables. On those tables were sporks and stray googly eyes and multicolored pipe cleaners and clay and Popsicle sticks — everything we’d need to play God.

Claudio De Oliveira, an animator on “Toy Story 4,” was tasked with being our guide. He explained he had made dozens of Forkies while working on the film. And then he showed us a heartwarming video of him surprising his daughter with a make-a-Forky day. She freaked out. It was very cute. I was also freaking out, but I was able to contain my excitement because I am considered an adult. “Unless you make your own, you will not get the full experience that is Forky,” De Oliveira said.

And so we began. Some went wildly off script.

“Yours is like a mythical creature,” somebody said to somebody else. (I was too focused on my own Forky to notice who.)

“Super Forky,” another person said. I rolled my eyes and imagined their abomination.

I will spare you further details, as they are immaterial. All that matters is this: I made the best Forky, and I was proud.

At the end of our workshop, our handlers/friends scooped up our Forkies. They would be kept safe, they told us, while we went to our next class. We could pick them up later. But this, it turned out, was a lie. When it was time for me leave, I was unable to retrieve my Forky. The room he was in was being used for interviews that could not be interrupted.

I was sad for a time. But after a few days, it occurred to me that he was probably in the trash, exactly where he would want to be.

Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @RyanKost

Pixar Forky, who is actually a spork and not a fork, is the new character. Becoming a toy is a dilemma for him.

Ryan Kost / The Chronicle The reporter’s Forky.