Blaze is the new Toy Story 5 character whose tight curls required special animation work. Pixar developed a hair system for Blaze and consulted Black colleagues to make the curls behave authentically in different scenes.
Blaze Manoukian is an eight-year-old girl who loves animals and lives with her parents in the farmhouse once associated with Jessie’s original owner, Emily. Jessie meets Blaze while searching the property and recognizes that Blaze’s imagination and love of play could help Bonnie reconnect with traditional toys.
The hair work is part of a broader effort to make the film’s human characters feel convincing without losing Pixar’s stylized look. The production also introduced RenderMan XPU for feature-film rendering and expanded the Luna tools used with Presto. Viewers may confuse Blaze’s special animation challenge with Daffodil, the horse character, which required more than a year of building, rigging, and simulation. Those are separate technical feats.