From riffing with a just met scene partner to a cut joke about donuts, the 11-year-old actor shares about recording ADR with director Andrew Stanton, improvising lines, and every part is important.
11-year-old actor Paxton Andrews has lent his voice to numerous animated projects, from Disney’s Robogobo and Triple Media Film’s animated series Power Pals to The Museum of Innocence and Cells at Work!. Most recently, Andrews landed a role in Pixar’s Toy Story 5. It was a small role, one of his smallest yet. But he said, thanks to director Andrew Stanton and the rest of the Toy Story team, he’d never felt like a bigger star.
“I play one of the Jordan twins who lives across the street from the main character Bonnie,” shares Andrews. “Bonnie doesn’t really have any friends at the start of the movie and really wants to be friends with our characters. By the end of the film, she asks if we want to play and I end the movie with one line: ‘Sure.’ Even if you’re the smallest role, it’s still really valuable and it's just so cool to work with a big studio on a feature film like this. I got to work directly with Andrew and he made me feel like I was the lead role.”
In the highly anticipated Toy Story 5, now out in theaters, eight-year-old Bonnie receives a frog-themed tablet named Lilypad from her parents in hopes of helping her socialize with kids her age. But Bonnie soon becomes addicted to Lilypad and begins to neglect her cowgirl toy Jessie, action figure Buzz, toy horse Bullseye and the rest of her assorted gathering of dolls. Having been appointed as the new sheriff of Bonnie's room since cowboy Woody's departure, Jessie tries to explain to Lilypad about Bonnie's need for a real friend, which the “device” attempts to solve by sending a friend request on social media to a classmate, Chelsea.
Fearful of losing Bonnie's affection, Jessie secretly contacts Woody, who returns to Bonnie’s house to help the toys regain her favor and find “their kid” a friend who values toys and imagination over screens.
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The film, co-directed by Kenna Harris and produced by Lindsey Collins, does have, like all Toy Story movies, a happy ending. But it paints a concerning picture early on of a world where kids are glued to their phones and iPads and have forgotten how to play together. Andrews’ character and his twin sister, played by Hazel Shea, are two of the many kids like this in the film. Bonnie attempts to play with them and her toys is met with disinterest, and disdain, until the end of the film, when she and her new friend Blaze invite the twins to come play with them… and the toys. The role was small, with Andrews and Shea only having a couple lines at the beginning and end of the film. But they got to represent a change in mindset and a hopeful future for toys and kids.
“Our characters were added to the film later on to help enhance the storyline,” shares Andrews. “I feel lucky to be in the final cut of the film and to have gotten to work so much with someone like Andrew Stanton.”
Stanton, in a previous interview with AWN, said, “[The film] was really about Bonnie. Bonnie, being at this age where socialization is a big deal and making friends presents high, high stakes.”
Andrews and Shea’s characters represent Bonnie’s victory over those stakes, so it makes sense why Stanton decided to get in the booth with the kids and get the most out of their few but important lines. Andrews says working on ADR for Toy Story 5 was the first time he’d recorded with a director being right in the booth with him.
“In my other voice acting roles, when I was recording, everyone else was always in another room or behind a glass window,” says Andrews. “I’d have to use headphones to listen to them. But this was very different. Andrew was right there with us, and it made the process so much fun and exciting. It made us feel super important.”
This was also Andrews’ first time doing improvisation in the booth, rather than working from a script.
“Our characters are supposed to be riffing on each other, so I just got into it, mocking my sister and teasing her,” says Andrews. “We didn’t even know each other. I’d just met Hazel that day and we immediately started trying to embarrass each other. I’d never done anything like that but I wasn’t nervous. Andrew made it feel very natural and I thought it was a really cool experience.”
Pixar productions have a long history of getting kids to record very natural and organic responses for their films. One of the most memorable is the character Boo (Mary Gibbs) in Monsters Inc. (2005). The young girl forms a bond with the monsters Sulley and Mike Wazowski and, throughout the film, expresses herself with enthusiastic coos and small words here and there. But the giggles, cries and squeals all felt real because they were real. Like in Andrews’ experience, the crew got into the booth with the kid and did all they could to get authentic recordings from her.
“It was our friend’s daughter who did the voice of Boo because he was the only friend in our friend group that had a kid,” shares Nathan Stanton, now assistant director at Sunrise Animation Studios who previously worked with Pixar for over 20 years on films like Finding Nemo, WALL-E, Cars 2, Finding Dory and more.
Stanton’s wife, Esther Pearl, now CEO of Nell Productions who also worked at Pixar with her husband for many years, added, “I remember we’d all be running around the room with Mary to make her laugh and I’d take things away from her to make her cry.”
Stanton continues, “Those recordings were always a really fun time. Pixar was a company full of a lot of young people who were as interested in creating great friendships as they were in creating great movies.”
And that mindset has continued into Pixar productions today, experienced first-hand by Andrews.
“We were all just messing around and having as much fun as we could,” says Andrews of his recording session. “There was even an idea Andrew had about putting a small Easter egg in the film through one of my lines. He told me to say something rude about him so there was a part where I whispered to Bonnie, ‘Andrew smells like donuts.’ But that got cut out.”
Like how Jessie’s short time with Emily had left a bigger impact than she imagined, Andrews says his small role and short time in the booth carried a lot of weight with him, more than the Pixar crew probably knew. And he hopes his role also makes an impact on other young actors trying to find their way in a tough industry.
“If you want to get into voice acting, my biggest advice is to have fun,” says Andrews, who is now in the process of wrapping up recordings for the character Nico in CoComelon: The Movie (2027). “Being silly will probably help you get the role. And don't get discouraged if, even after the audition, you don’t get the role. Because even getting the audition is a big deal. It’s all practice and it’s all important. No part is too small.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
