In recent years, Disney has become notorious for tinkering with the cherished contents of its vaults; you could kill a year or so by just comparing all the various "restoration" versions of Fantasia. But Pixar, the computer-animation division that has been responsible for many of the company's biggest hits and most of its critically revered creative muscle since the mid-1990s, has seemed to be too busy moving forward to spend its time and money fretting over its back catalog. Now it's been announced that the 1995 Toy Story, Pixar's first feature film and first release through Disney, and its fine sequel, the 1999 Toy Story 2, will be "remade" in 3-D, in anticipation of the eventual release of Toy Story 3, scheduled to be made in 3-D. John Lasseter, the Pixar co-founder and current chief creative officer at Disney Animation Studios who directed both films, says that "We thought it would be great to let audiences experience the first two films all over again and in a brand new way. . . 3D offers lots of great new possibilities for the art of animation and we will continue to use this new technology to tell our stories in the best possible way." It certainly represents an upgrade for Toy Story 2 in particular — that project was originally supposed to be one of the "direct-to-video" sequels that Disney routinely puts out after it's had a hit, but the movie was repositioned for a proper theatrical release after it turned out that Pixar was unable to sink to the usual Disney level. The 3-D Toy Story will be released in the fall of 2009, with Toy Story 2 coming out early in 2010 and the all-new TS3 scheduled to appear in summer of that year. The situation is slightly reminiscent of the re-release of the gussied-up versions of the first three Star Wars movies in 1997, in anticipation of the 1999 appearance of The Phantom Menace. Except that, you know, we have faith in John Lasseter.