PITTSBURGH — Animation was always Alyssa Minko’s refuge from the very real challenges life threw her away.
The 25-year-old North Huntingdon native knew from a young age that she wanted to be an artist. Her ultimate goal was always to work for Pixar Animation Studios, although her family’s struggles with money, domestic violence and drug addiction sometimes made that dream feel unattainable. She was, however, able to count on her art teachers at Norwin High School.
“Art was always my escape,” Minko told the Post-Gazette. “I had my eyes on Pixar from a really young age. To have that support from my school and community members who saw something in me before I did was life-changing.”
Minko now has a full-time job at Pixar and served as the shading technical director on “Lightyear,” the studio’s latest animated adventure hitting theaters Friday. Pixar fans will finally get to see the fictional Buzz Lightyear film that inspired the legendary space ranger action figure in 1995’s “Toy Story.”
As someone who grew up with the “Toy Story” movies and did her final graduation project in high school on the history of animation, Minko still can’t believe that she just spent almost two years helping to create the sci-fi world of “Lightyear.”
“It really came full-circle, getting to study the movies that created this industry and getting to work on the prequel for the movie that came out right around the time I was born,” she said. “It was super surreal.”
Minko’s lifelong passion for art began with her grandmother sticking her in a high chair and instructing her on how to draw everything from flowers to elephants. Her father was a carpenter and made picture frames to house all her art. She spent a lot of her adolescence creating artwork that she would submit to local contests and every art category at both the Westmoreland and Fayette county fairs.
After graduating from high school, she left Pittsburgh to study film and animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y. She never wavered from her childhood aspiration of one day working professionally in 3D animation.
“I think a lot of people go into school wanting to figure it out,” Minko said. “But I knew coming out of Norwin that’s what I wanted to set my sights on.”
Her first internship was with Pittsburgh production company Animal Inc. while she worked part time at a local Walmart. Minko ended up at Pixar through the studio’s undergraduate internship program. That was the first time she had been around “other like-minded creatives” who all wanted the same thing as her. In retrospect, that Pixar internship was the “point that changed my life,” she said.
She went on to be part of the last internship class at the now-defunct Blue Sky Studios and moved to New York City for yet another animation opportunity before going back to Pixar for her fifth internship. That one got her hired full time, and Minko has now been an official Pixar staff member since March 2020.
Before putting her talents to use on “Lightyear,” Minko also worked on the recently released Pixar film “Turning Red,” the short film “Nona” and the upcoming Disney+ series “Win or Lose.” “Lightyear” was the first Pixar project she was with from start to finish.
On “Lightyear,” she focused more on the film’s sets and environments than the characters. Her job as a shading technical director was to use her “deep understanding of material properties and color harmonies” to make everything from a Star Command outpost to alien vegetation feel as if they didn’t just spring up out of nowhere.
“Our job is to make all the props feel used, like they have history and character,” she said. “It’s just about interpreting the world around me, taking pieces of it and figuring out how to inject story into the sets in a sort of subliminal way ... that’s also rooted in reality.”
“Lightyear” viewers will be able to catch Minko’s handiwork in many places, including the hallways, elevators and concrete floors of Star Command that she was tasked with aging along with the film’s jumps in time. She’s most proud of her work on the crawler transportation vehicle — which moves spacecraft between rooms — because it was her specific responsibility. It was emblematic of the “massive loads of trust” placed in her on this film, she said.
There’s a statue in “Lightyear” of space ranger Alisha Hawthorne (voiced by Uzo Aduba), the grandmother of ranger-in-training Izzy Hawthorne (Keke Palmer), that Minko was also instrumental in bringing to life. Working on it was particularly emotional for her because it reminded her of her grandmother, who died during her freshman year of high school.
“It very much catalyzed a lot of our struggles at home,” she said of her grandmother’s death. “This statue of Izzy’s grandmother really resonated with me. Getting to shade the statue was a very full-circle moment in how far I’ve come.”
Minko is excited for everyone to finally see “Lightyear,” especially Sox, the robot cat she describes as “by far the best” animal sidekick in any Pixar movie.
“It’s totally unlike any other Pixar film,” she said. “I really think we’re breaking new ground with how realistic our worlds look, how believable the characters’ stories are and the worlds they live in. If you love space, action and adventure, it’s the perfect Pixar movie for you.”
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