In “Toy Story 4,” there are even more emotionally delicate scenes that hinge on what appear to be deeply felt performances by its cartoon cast, especially in Woody’s case. (He also gets trodden on.) “I knew from the very beginning that, this being a movie about relationships, I was going to be leaning on the animators’ acting very heavily to carry a lot of the emotion,” Josh Cooley, the film’s director, said. “It really is like being a live-action director where you go and you talk to the actors. And in my case the actors are the animators.”

Hanks himself freely admits there’s more to Woody than his voice and line readings. “The team has poured the better part of three years of their lives into it,” he says. “There’s so much work that I had absolutely nothing to do with.”

The animators do their homework. Some take inspiration from the mannerisms of voice actors during filmed recording sessions. Others will act out the film’s blocking themselves, in the studio’s ground-level acting room, which is equipped with video recording equipment and fitted with floor-to-ceiling mirrors. A few will sign up for in-house acting and improvisation classes (though, as one animator noted, the enthusiasm for performing in front of colleagues is “minimal”), while others prefer to study and dissect live-action screen performances, or spend the educational allowance they receive on theater tickets.

Still others working on the new film found it useful to spend hands-on time with actual toys from the franchise.

More intangibly, but perhaps most crucially, animators learn to empathize with their characters, and invest their performances with their own memories and feelings. As far back as the original “Toy Story,” Docter, who said he had been feeling outshone by a new hot shot animator, was able to draw from a personal place when evoking Woody’s punctured confidence at the arrival of Buzz Lightyear.

“It’s about trying to connect to a moment in your own life and trying to pull from a real place from inside yourself,” the supervising animator Robert Russ said.