It is difficult to know which is more surprising: Is it that it is quite possible that the most philosophically deep movie you’ll see this year might very well be an animated movie about toys? Or is it that the third movie in a franchise, a movie that likely exists more out of fiduciary responsibility to shareholders than due to a driving artistic vision, is actually at least as good as—and quite possibly better than—the first two installments? Both are true of Toy Story 3. If you read no further into this review, go away knowing that you should see this movie. You should take your kids. You should take your parents and your grandparents; you should take that Civil War photo of your great-great-great-great grandfather out of the attic and bring it along as well. I’m that certain everybody will enjoy Toy Story 3.
The movie opens with a big action sequence in which Woody (Tom Hanks), Jesse (Joan Cusack), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and Woody’s horse, Bullseye have to save a train full of brightly haired troll dolls from the evil Dr. Porkchop, played by Hamm (John Ratzenberger), and his henchmen Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (Don Rickles and Estelle Harris) and the squeeze-toy aliens. It’s revealed, however, that this is actually a flashback to when the toys’ owner, Andy (John Morris) was still young and played with all his toys regularly.
©Disney/Pixar
That’s no longer the case, though. Andy is now 17 and heading off to college, and it has been years since any of them have been played with. It is an early sign that the movie will touch on some darker thoughts when it is necessary for the toys to pull a con just to get a half-moment’s attention from Andy, and Rex (Wallace Shawn) is left ecstatic simply because Andy had touched him. Andy’s mom gives Andy three days to clean out his room, with anything not going with him to college needing to be put in the trash, in a box to be donated, or stored in the attic. The movie is realistic enough that there is never any thought given that Andy might take a box of childhood toys with him to college.
Each of these three options presents an existential quandary for the toys. Obviously, ending up in a landfill would mean the end of any purpose they’d have; though the question of whether they’d continue, animate, forever buried in trash is an idea too dark for even the story geniuses at Pixar to tackle (though one suspects they’ve discussed it intensely). Donation means separation from Andy and each other (though it is acknowledged that friends have been lost over the years to yard sales and breakage), but possibly a new life with a new child, again being played with regularly. The final option is perhaps the saddest, but also the one that most appeals to them (the moral world of toys is in many ways bizarre)—to be stored in that attic in hopes that one day, far in the future, Andy will bring them out for play when he has kids of his own.
Andy decides that he’ll keep the toys in the attic (with one exception) but through a series of mistakes and coincidences, they end up curbside and believe that Andy had thrown them away. With that unpleasant discovery, they all decide that being donated to a daycare center is the best way to go. Woody tries to talk them out of it but they don’t believe his story that they were headed for the attic, and when they get to the daycare center, they are enthralled by the paradise it initially seems.
It would spoil things too much to go into detail on what happens from then onward but of course it turns out that paradise is actually hell. Where Toy Story was a buddy movie and Toy Story 2 a road movie, Toy Story 3 flips back and forth between being a prisoner-of-war movie and a complicated caper movie. Of course, such movies need a villain, and this time around that villain is a strawberry-scented teddy bear called Lotso, aka Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear (voiced by Ned Beatty) and his two henchmen, Ken (as in Barbie and Ken; voiced by Michael Keaton) and Big Baby, one of those creepy baby dolls with opening eyes that can only make baby noises; the joke being that in the world of toys, those baby dolls are giants.
©Disney/Pixar
Lotso had a bad experience in his past that hardened his heart. The amazing thing (as is the case with most Pixar movies) is that he has more characterization than 90 percent of what live action villains could ever dream of. And honestly? If someone later tells you they could go through what Lotso did and not turn against the world, they’d be lying. A actual sympathetic villain is just icing on a very deep cake (to use a metaphor that makes no sense).
Writing is what sets Pixar apart. They excel at animation, of course, but all of the feature animation houses are doing great visual animation. But it isn’t just coincidence that since 1995, six animated movies have been nominated for screenwriting Oscars and all of them are Pixar movies. John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton, who share credit for the Toy Story 3 screenplay have four nominations. And for this movie, they brought in a third person with some writing cred as well. Michael Arndt may only have one other screenwriting credit, but it was for his Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine script. Director Lee Unkrich is also a Pixar regular, having been co-director on Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo. Together they make up a package of great confidence.
All of the requisite and action beats keep the movie on a level that can appeal to almost everybody, while a steady undercurrent presents a reality that need not be made explicit but still drives the action. What does it mean to have been created with a clear definable purpose? What is the social meaning of literally being mass produced (as Lotso tells Ken at one point, he should get over Barbie since there are literally millions more just like her)? When you’ve been created for the explicit purpose of entertaining a human, what are their obligations to you when they no longer need that entertainment?
None of these are issues explicitly discussed in the movie itself, yet they are issues that reverberate through every scene and explain why we can care so much about these entirely artificial beings, that most will spend the last 15 minutes of the movie in tears. Tears of concern when they all face surprisingly real danger, tears of sadness when we’re forced to face that all great things come to an end, and finally tears at the realization that these characters have been so much fun and the movie is clearly trying to say a final good-bye. Any movie can make audiences cry—it isn’t really that hard. The beauty of what Lasseter and company do is that they can make audiences cry without also making the audience resent them for having done so.
The voice acting is good as usual but also familiar. The decision was made to keep Slinky Dog, and most won’t notice that the voice of Blake Clark replaced that of the late Jim Varney; oddly Tim Allen’s voice seems to have aged significantly, giving a different tone to Buzz Lightyear.
One caveat for parents would be that a couple times, the gang faces real danger (one so real that it is amazing that it was allowed into what is, at root, a children’s movie, though it is also a fantastic moment) and it may be too intense for some sensitive children. When they end up on a conveyor belt, you may want to get prepared for a possible negative reaction.
Ranking the Pixar movies is a popular game among fans, and for me Toy Story 3 doesn’t quite reach the perfection of Ratatouille or the first half of Wall-E, but otherwise it goes right up to the top tier.
- Wide release on Friday, June 18, 2010.
- Directed by Lee Unkrich.
- Written by Michael Arndt, John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich.
- Starring Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Don Rickles, Estelle Harris, Wallace Shawn, Michael Keaton, Jodi Benson.
- Rated G.
- Running time: 103 minutes.
- Alex’s rating: 9 out of 10.
