No one wants to direct "Toy Story 3."

That's the word in Hollywood's animation world, where the third installment of the incredibly successful Pixar series has no director, writer or, possibly, stars.

My sources in the animation biz tell me that Disney, which will make "Toy Story 3" without Pixar, cannot find a director to guide the project.

John Lasseter, who directed the first two movies, will stay with Pixar after he finishes its last Disney-distributed movie, "Cars," set for release in 2006.

It's also undetermined whether stars Tom Hanks and Tim Allen will reprise their roles in the new film. The odds are that Hanks won't, but that Allen — who's made some successful family films at Disney — will.

Pixar just received four Oscar nominations for its current Disney-distributed film, "The Incredibles." "Cars" will mark the last collaboration between the two studios, since Disney's Michael Eisner has essentially told Pixar to take a hike.

Disney has the right to make sequels to all the Pixar movies it distributed, including "Toy Story," "The Incredibles," "Finding Nemo," etc. But there's a hitch — since Pixar developed all the animation materials to create the movies, it also gets to keep them.

In other words: Disney is now trying to hire another team of animators to recreate Buzz Lightyear, Woody and all the other "Toy Story" characters so that they look the same. It will have to start from scratch to reproduce Pixar's creative work.

The next step, of course, is to find a writer and director for the project. With Lasseter gone, my source says, "Every single animator of note has turned down the director's job. They don't want to cross Pixar. They've become the only deal in town."

One source told me that a possible offer had been floated to an assistant director who worked on Disney's straight-to-video traditional cartoon, "The Lion King 1˝."

But even that film was a bastardization, since most of the creative people who worked on the original 1994 "The Lion King" were long gone from Disney.

Both the original "Lion King" director, Roger Allers, and writer, Irene Mecchi, are said to be now working on Pixar projects. Allers' last big project for Disney animation was "Kingdom of the Sun," the movie that became "The Emperor's New Groove" after he was unceremoniously replaced.

The entire debacle was recorded in a wonderful but unreleased documentary called "Sweatbox," made by Trudie Styler while her husband, rock singer Sting, was writing songs for the film which were ultimately cut from the final release.

Meantime, Disney announced last week that the script for "Toy Story 3" would be based on a proposal submitted to them by a young student in their feature animation story development program.