Jun 18 2010
PCN Movie Review: Another ‘Toy Story’, well told
It isn’t surprising to learn that Pixar’s third installment in the Toy Story series is another homerun for the team. What caught me off guard is just how well ‘Toy Story 3′ compliments and completes the cinematic journey of Woody, Buzz and the gang. Visually charming, with much wit and mirth applied to the jokes and gags, TS3 also finds a sincere emotional wellspring from which it draws the richest and most poignant messages of the entire franchise. It may be strange to say, but Toy Story tells a tale of life’s passage, youth lost, and finding heroic responsibility in the face of obsolescence, and in doing so it is every bit the movie that Indiana Jones 4 wanted to be but couldn’t.
Written by: Nathan Bartlebaugh
Ninja Rating: 
Director Lee Unkrich and writer Michael Arndt once more find plausible human traits within the plastic hearts of their artificial characters and it’s a welcome refreshment to see that although this Toy Story has been designed with kids in mind, it doesn’t coddle us through the final chapters. There’s also no shying away from an intensity of feeling that may be sure to draw tears from the older members of the audience.
Finding a way to continue a series when you have already struck gold twice before can be challenging, but from the opening scenes and onward, TS3 draws us right back into that familiar and enchanting world of Andy’s room, and those characters we have come to know and love. Now, Andy has grown up and is heading off to college, and leaving behind his faithful toys of childhood. For Woody and the rest, they are faced with a life without purpose, challenged with the choice of staying behind in boxes in the attic, waiting for the fateful day they are thrown away, or being donated to a nearby daycare.
When Woody and Buzz, best friends and earnest leaders of this little community, make the decision to relocate to Sunnyside (the daycare), they envision a world where they can once again make children happy. Trying to move onward and upward from Andy’s growing away from them, the toys approach their new surroundings with purpose. Alas, it isn’t what they expected.
While the cuddly on the outside, sinister on the inside, Lotso’ Huggins Bear (a cheerfully plotting Ned Beatty)—the self appointed leader and coordinator of this tribe of toys—ensures the new arrivals that Sunnyside is a wonderful place, this isn’t the reality they encounter. The older, more experienced toys have a system worked out; they get to be shared with the older children who care and have affection for them. Meanwhile, hapless newbies are sacrificed at the altar of the toddlers room, where anything goes, and each day is a whirlwind of chaos, snot and being errantly stuffed into grubby little mouths.
It isn’t long before Woody, Buzz, and Jessie are hatching a plan with the other mainstays, Rex,Hamm, and the Potato Heads, to bust out of Sunnyside and find Andy once again. Along the way they encounter all manner of imaginative silliness and lean some significant and painful lessons about moving on in life and losing that which was familiar and comfortable to us.
It’s easy to see the early parallells to sending elderly relations off to nursing homes, or the way in which the cruelty and indifference in the daycare and the fateful trip to the junkyard have odd but unmistakable echoes to the Holocaust. In a lesser movie, those elements would overpower the film, but Pixar has invested a great deal of heart into these characters, and we have a history with them.
Wisely, the series has moved forward in the lives of Woody and Buzz, and unlike, say, the Shrek movies, these two pals aren’t rebooted to the bickering rivalry they shared in the first film, or even the budding bond of the second. Both are older and a bit wiser about their world and what the future holds, and what Hanks and Allen help put up on screen is one of the most endearing and honest portrayals of lifelong friendship I’ve ever seen in a family film. There are sequences in the climactic junkyard milieu that are sincerely touching and have something to say about the connections we make in this life.
But forget all this talk of serious themes and melancholy overtones, because those elements have been expertly inserted into a movie that is even more comedic and bouyant than the first two. Owing much to great prison escape movies of the past, there are also some dazzling comic-action set pieces and I was delighted by the uses the movie finds for an erratic barrel of monkeys.
Kids won’t need to worry about the film being fearsome or too somber, it isnt. What’s up on screen is as chipper and envigorating as playtime itself, and the subtext of the story will resonate with parents who may find they are enjoying those high energy escapades just as much as the quieter, more resonant stuff.
TS3 zips along with an array of brand new characters, including a fussy, conflicted Ken doll who has his world undone when he finds his Barbie, or Mr. Pricklepants (Timothy Dalton), a thespian hedgehog who treats a young girl’s tea parties as if they were classical theater. Of the returning characters, the Potato Heads may have it the roughest at the daycare, and the scenes where their disembodied parts end up in dank, dark regions of the child anatomy are predictably hilarious.
Even Lotso is made out as a multi-layered character, and Beatty’s world weariness, echoed in lines like “”No owners means no heartbreak.We own ourselves, we control our own destiny” is contrasted against his big fuzzy, pink exterior that ‘smells like strawberries.’
In the end, Toy Story 3 is a grand concoction that probably marks as much of a genesis for Pixar as the original Toy Story did when it arrived in 1995. Finally, the studio has reconciled the push and pull of telling adult stories that also fasicnate and capture the imagination of a younger generation. Toy Story closes that gap between adulthood and childhood with a wise and knowing frivolity, and the result is a series that has truly gone to infinity, and beyond.
Jun 18, 2010 @ 06:34:49
I always thought Ned Beatty should have played the pig. That would have been some inspired casting.
Jun 18, 2010 @ 08:10:27
Awesome, heading out tonight with the kids to check this one out. I always enjoy the Toy Story flicks and it sounds like I won’t be disappointed this time either.