Editing Geri's Game (section)

=== Initial conception ===
Work on the short began shortly after the release of ''[[Toy Story]]'' and during early production of ''[[A Bug's Life]]'', when [[Ed Catmull]] decided that the studio should resurrect its short films production as a way to bring new animators and storytellers into Pixar, and as a way to further push [[research and development]] for the studio.<ref name="New Face">{{cite magazine|last=Robertson |first=Barbara |title=Meet Geri: The New Face of Animation |url=https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/glmiller/public/computational-geometry/15-852-F08/RelatedWork/meet-geri.pdf |magazine=Computer Graphics World |date=February 1998 |access-date=May 7, 2018}}</ref> For the first of these shorts, which would be the first one made in 8 years, Catmull wanted Pixar to create a story which featured a human as its central protagonist. Upon Anderson's suggestion, he reached out to Pinkava to direct the short.<ref name="20 years" /> According to Pinkava himself, Catmull said he could direct the short as long as it starred a human character and had a serviceable story behind it.<ref name="20 years" />

When trying to brainstorm a concept, Pinkava asked himself if he would be able to come up with a story that featured only one character, which would both give it an artistic edge and make development easier on the technical side of things, as coming up with just a single stylized, but credible, human character was hard enough.<ref name="New Face" /><ref name="20 years" /> He designed an elderly character {{En dash}} belonging to the polar opposite age sector of Billy,<ref>{{Cite web|title=Tin Toy 1988 Film Short Pixar|url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7x4qUKWCf0|access-date=February 25, 2021|website=[[YouTube]]}}{{cbignore}}{{Dead YouTube link|date=February 2022}}</ref> the infant character in ''[[Tin Toy]]'', and one of Pixar's earliest attempts at creating a human character. He felt it would be interesting to animate a character with the body language of an old man, similar to how Billy was animated with the gesticulations of a baby.