Toy Story 3 (2010)

Like people who don’t like dogs, people who do not like the Toy Story movies are not to be trusted.  Chances are quite good that they’re dead inside, had a terribly unimaginative childhood, don’t know who Calvin & Hobbes are, hate fun, take themselves too seriously and should probably be sequestered on an island far away from people.  On this island would be man-eating tigers.  PROBLEM SOLVED.  However, I will admit to a bit of trepidation when Toy Story 3 was announced to be in production.  I had already endured Cars and was worried that this would be a soulless merchandising shillstravaganza.

Thankfully (no matter what Armond White says) it was a masterpiece.  There.  Review’s over, five stars, perfect movie.  Best Trilogy of All Time.  That’s the easy way to write this review, and I wish I could just leave it at that instead of talking about how I was glassy-eyed and trying not to cry during several scenes.  Believe me, this is an emotionally devastating movie, and I cannot imagine seeing it through the eyes of a child because how could I do that, that’s weird!  I mean, as a kid, 17 years old is a lifetime away.  You say you’ll never give up your toys or whatever, but you grow up, and sometimes you leave things behind.  Some things might stick around far longer than should be healthy for your image though I’m a Pokemon Master.

It’s not just that the wonderful storytelling, the gorgeous animation, the perfect voice casting/acting, etc. that makes the Toy Story Trilogy the Best Trilogy of All Time.  It’s the attention to detail, the little things, like Ken (Michael Keaton) mispronouncing “library” as “lie-berry”.  The Star Wars references that correlate to the Original Trilogy so brilliantly and not in a pandering nerd way.  There’s a sequence in this movie where the toys are in an impossible situation, and the way they accepted it and were prepared to stick together to the end, well if the movie would have ended that way, it would have been dark, but I’d still have loved it.  A bit more bittersweetly, though.

In a way, I hope the Pixar people leave it like this, and don’t go ahead and make a Toy Story 4.  However, if they do, the first Trilogy will have to be called something related to Andy.  Andy’s Years.  Andy’s Trilogy.  Something like that, because sometimes we’ve got to let things go.

5 / 5

Toy Story 2 (1999)

Just so you know, this is another re-posted review, back from my snarkier days.

Right off the bat, let me say that Toy Story 2 ended up being far better than it had any right to be. Originally envisioned by Disney as a straight-to-video sequel, the folks at Pixar decided they didn’t want to sully their good name by lending it to an inferior product. So they expanded on the original sequel idea, pumped up the running time with even more awesomeness and ended up with one of the most underrated movies of all time. I say this despite it’s 100% rating at RottenTomatoes, and its score of 87 at Metacritic. How is that such a critically lauded film can seemingly be so easily forgettable? Perhaps it was just a case of people enjoying themselves but not being able to put it on the same level that they felt after watching the first Toy Story. Whatever it is, people need to get over it because Toy Story 2 is nothing short of excellent and it should be hailed as nothing but.

The entire voice cast of the first Toy Story return to their respective characters, giving them a little more depth and showing off a bit of the knowledge they gained in the past few… well I was going to say years, but it appears hardly anytime has passed at all. Andy (John Morris) is still a kid, his sister Molly is still a baby, and his mom (Laurie Metcalf) is still single, which is odd enough for a Disney film. Woody (Tom Hanks) and Buzz (Tim Allen) are getting along famously and the rest of the toys are loving their pseudo-lives. Unfortunately disaster strikes as Woody’s arm suffers a tear just before he was about to go off to Cowboy Camp with Andy, resulting in Andy’s mom retiring Woody to the dusty shelf where broken toys die. All of this leads to Woody being stolen by Al the Toy Collector (Wayne Knight) at a yard sale, and eventually results in the introduction of Woody’s old gang of similarly-themed toys. The story is really deep and amazing actually, I’m not doing it any justice at all here.

If you loved Toy Story, the sequel is just as good – if not better – and takes you on a much greater emotional rollercoaster than the first managed to do. The best example I can think of for this is Jessie’s (Joan Cusack) song, a little musical interlude that for my money is one of the best uses of a song in a movie ever. The fact that it’s a Sarah McLachlan song and l’m still touched by it shows you exactly how powerful that piece of cinema is to me. The song perfectly captures Jessie’s feelings, and just how crazy she may go if things don’t turn out for the best. And it’s not just the song, but the gorgeous Pixar animation and scene-setting, it gets me a little glassy-eyed everytime.

Everything about Toy Story 2 is excellent and awesome. From the Buzz / Zurg storyline to the absolute chaos the toys cause on their way to rescue Woody to the awesome Wheezy the Penguin (Joe Ranft), everything solidly rocks hard. It’s not one of the general cash-in on the name value of the original sequels. The characters grow and mature in ways that usually aren’t ever seen in animated kid flicks. The jokes are funny without insulting anyone’s intelligence, the animation is jaw-droppingly gorgeous and the running time is nowhere near the bloated levels most sequels shoot for. At Pixar, they almost always value quality over quantity, and Toy Story 2 is simply one of the best movie sequels of all time because of that ideal.

5 / 5

Toy Story (1995)

Even though I’m a recovering film snark, I am glad I have a wealth of decently-written reviews to re-post because I said what I want to so succinctly the first time.  Here is another instance of that.  My original review:

It never fails to amaze or depress me how many CGI-animated movies are made these days that pay almost no attention to the lessons that Toy Story taught us. With a relatively unproven newcomer in John Lasseter directing Pixar’s very first full-length motion picture, the film turned out to be a critical darling and a monster financial success. As well, it ushered in a seemingly new genre of animated film, those that adults and children alike end up loving for many reasons. Upon writing this paragraph and re-reading it, it feels as though this is the conclusion to my full review. Or – for those of you that have never watched the film (and why the hell not?) – it seems like it’s giving away my entire review right off the bat. Duh. Toy Story is one of the most phenomenal movies of all time, never mind just animated movies, and if you don’t think it’s a 5 / 5 movie, I feel sorry for you.

I mean that in all seriousness. If you’re an adult and you watch Toy Story and don’t have a little longing in your heart for the days when you were a kid, playing with your toys, killing hours and hours of time with nothing but your own derivative imagination, well I pity you. Especially if you can’t even remember those days, how dead inside do you have to be to be like that? I’m starting to get a bit off-topic there, so back to the movie. Toy Story is generally the template that most animated movies (CGI or hand-painted) that were made after it’s 1995 release have applied to their productions. Big name celebrity voices, a look into the world of something we humans generally take for granted, and amazingly realistic animation, which are all aspects of the so-called “Pixar formula”.

Generally though, Pixar films tend to have celebrity voices that fit their characters, not create characters to fit celebrity voices like SO many other animated films have done in the intervening years. The Pixar films have a great mix of A-list celebrities and reliable and talented character actors to voice the wonderful creations. This is in stark contrast to something like Shark Tale, which had an enormously bloated cast of A-listers basically voicing fish versions of themselves in a film that was basically a hacked-up-rip-off of Pixar’s Finding Nemo. What I’m saying here is that I can’t picture anyone other than Jim Varney as the voice of Slinky Dog, but if you cosmetically change the appearance of the lead fish in Shark Tale, it could easily be Ben Stiller, or anyone else enormously famous.

Yet another aspect of Toy Story that gets bastardized in almost every animated film nowadays is the overall premise of the tale. Yes, it’s about the world of toys and what they do when humans aren’t around, but the toys don’t live in a world that is only populated by toys because that would not make any sense and it would make my head hurt and my heart angry. You should probably just read my review of Robots so I don’t end up repeating myself yet again. Pixar has only been guilty of that premise once with Cars, and even then they still somehow made a “good” movie, rather than the usual greatness we’ve come to expect. There is actual substance behind all that pretty style.

There’s so much to love about Toy Story, whether it be the wonderful performance Tom Hanks puts on, or that it actually gave me an appreciation for Tim Allen. The animation is amazing even now, with small little details that you don’t fully appreciate until you’ve seen the movie a few times and finally notice. The score and songs by Randy Newman are whimsical and fit absolutely perfectly. There are enough visual gags to keep the kids entertained, and a multitude of pop culture references from the comments the toys make to the toys themselves that adults will enjoy it just as much, if not more.

5 / 5