The Telegraph – Toy Story 3 Review
I’ll be honest. In the past the very mention of Toy Story made my blood
freeze. It triggered a ghastly train of associations that went something
like this: Toy Story, toy shop, retail outlet, shopping mall, Bluewater,
suburban sprawl, ecological tipping point, global apocalypse. The series
that, back in 1995, ushered Pixar’s reign as purveyors of some of the
smartest, most loved and certainly most profitable films of recent years,
seemed to me vastly inferior to the same studio’s Ratatouille or Up, little
more than extended plugs for kiddie merchandise.
Toy Story 3, what seems certain to be the final installment in the series,
is a different matter altogether. Directed by Lee Unkrich and written by
Michael Arndt, it has all the usual ingredients — squeaky toys, happy
anticry, high-octane “To infinity and beyond” set-pieces and escapades —
but something new too: a heart, a huge beating heart. It’s a film that
moves as much as it entertains, that will make adults cry as much as —
perhaps even more than — younger children.
What gives it its emotional heft is the sense of expiry and mortality that
hangs over it almost from the outset. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), Buzz
Lightyear (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack) and the rest of the motley
crew are on the brink of being separated from their owner Andy (John
Morris). He’s older now, about to leave for college, and even though he
decides to take Woody with him for sentiment’s sake, the game seems to
be up: barely managing to escape being carted off on a rubbish truck,
they wind up in a day centre for toddlers.
At first the place seems like paradise regained, a happy-slappy utopia.
New toys to pal around with! New children with whom they can have
funny-fits and giggles! But those children, it turns out, are brats who
whack, batter and abuse them as — well, children tend to do. As for the
other toys being kindred souls who might protect their backs — that’s a
joke. Bossed about by Lots-o’-Huggin (Ned Beatty), a superficially-kindly
bear nurses untold bitterness and against the world after being lost —
worse: replaced – by his beloved owner, they shackle Buzz and pals in
cages each night.
They have to escape. But to where? Their owner no longer wants them.
Their future is seemingly lonely and Sisyphean. And if that seems a lofty
frame of reference, I can only say that it barely touches the epochal
grandeur of a scene in which the toys, faced with what appears to be
certain death as they sink inexorably towards an incinerator, whose
roaring light is itself redolent of a Dantean inferno, hold each others’
hands in a gesture of collectivity and mutual love.
Waste, trash, leftovers. Toy Story 3, like WALL-E, Ratatouille and even
Cars, attempts a juggling act: redefining digital technology in the service
of stories that hanker back to an earlier, analogue era. It doesn’t always
pull it off: too often the film’s colours recall those of a gaudy
confectionery stand or are over-lit like a boring vision of heaven, and
sometimes there’s not enough depth of field (the 3D version doesn’t fully
remedy this).
Still, by the end, these are minor caveats. The toys make the biggest
transition of their lives. And we are reminded, beautifully and rather
agonisingly, about how it’s both possible — and sometimes vital — to let go
of those whom we most love.
The Observer – Toy Story 3 Review
As always, the generous gang at Pixar films offer excellent value, starting
with the usual bonus of an animated short as a curtain raiser for the
feature. In this case it's the delightful, five-minute Day & Night,
directed by Teddy Newton, who worked on The Incredibles, Ratatouille
and the magnificent Pixar short Presto, which accompanied Wall-E. Two
amorphous, asexual creatures – like cartoon ghosts – confront each other
against a flat, black background. One, it transpires, is the surly Night,
the other the cheerful Day. Within the outline of each two-dimensional
figure we're shown 3D images of the world in sunlight and moonlight, of
Las Vegas neon-lit by night and under blue skies by day. The pair mime
their challenges and at the end come to accept their happy,
complementary roles.
The charming, semi-abstract whimsicality of Day & Night puts us in the
right mood to encounter for the third time, and in unobtrusive 3D, the
toys we first met in little Andy's nursery back in 1995. In that early
episode, which began a new classic era of animation, the devoted cowboy
Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), representative of the Old Frontier, is
challenged for supremacy by the astronaut Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen),
boastfully confident avatar of the boldly-going New Frontier, who doesn't
believe he's a toy. (Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon,
once threatened to sue Disney over the film but eventually thought
better of it.) In the even better Toy Story 2 (1999) we have the theme
about kids getting tired of their early nursery favourites, and there is
some remarkable satire when Woody is kidnapped by a ruthless dealer in
vintage toys and his mates come to the rescue.
The truly wonderful Toy Story 3 completes a trilogy. It's set on the eve
of the 17-year-old Andy's departure for college and sees him clearing his
room for his little sister. Andy decides to take Woody with him and put
the other toys in the attic. But the bags get confused. All except Woody
are sent to the Sunnyside Daycare Centre, which they regard as total
rejection. This place is ruled over by the apparently benevolent,
strawberry-scented Lotso'Huggin'-Bear (Ned Beatty), who's accompanied
by the mute Big Baby, and the tone suddenly gets seriously dark in the
manner of Dead of Night and Child's Play, where the dolls are possessed
by evil spirits. Lotso, a tragic-comic figure, has become an emotionally
twisted sadist as a consequence of thinking himself abandoned. He's
turned the daycare centre into a penitentiary run by the convicts, a
parody of a Hollywood prison film, as chilling as Dickens's Dotheboys Hall
or Pinocchio's Pleasure Island. Also present at Sunnyside and cleverly
used are a reunited Barbie and Ken, the former very amusingly becoming a
liberated woman, recognising the preening Ken's limitations and giving a
speech reminiscent of the founding fathers. The dogged Woody comes to
the rescue, but before all is resolved there are chases and cliff-hanging
escapes, and Buzz is first reprogrammed as a militarist and then as a
dashing, Spanish-speaking gallant.
The earlier films bring lumps to the throat by evincing a conventional
nostalgia for childhood but without resorting to characteristic
Disneyesque sentimentality. Toy Story 3 achieves the same results by
showing Andy moving towards an emotional maturity. In the course of the
film Andy and his toys develop in different ways as he passes on to a
further stage in his life, understanding that his old, somewhat battered,
deeply faithful companions are best cared for by a younger generation. It
is a reflection of the hold that the old west still has in American life that
Woody should be the token toy he takes along with him – rather more
endearing to me than Sebastian Flyte taking his teddy bear Aloysius with
him to Oxford in Brideshead Revisited.
Seeing Toy Story 3 and Christopher Nolan's Inception within 48 hours of
each other was to be made aware of two things. First, that there are
good reasons for being alive in these dismal days of the second decade of
the 21st century. Second, there are areas of popular culture where
whatever is the diametric opposite of dumbing down is at work, and that
those who respect the intelligence and tastes of the general public are
being rewarded for their confidence. On a slightly different but not
dissimilar note, it was pleasing to see at the end of Toy Story 3's final
credits that 72 babies were born to members of the production team
while the film was being made.
The Guardian – Toy Story 3 Review
Nothing deserves its U certificate less than this: Toy Story 3 is a
brutally adult movie with brutally adult themes: the origin of evil in
childhood pain, the death of childhood and, well, just death. There are
scary villains and intensely, unbearably sad moments. Earlier this year, I
wrote here, online, about how having a child of my own opened my eyes to
the true and terrible meaning of the Toy Story movies, and particularly
cowgirl Jessie's heartrending song When She Loved Me in Toy Story 2,
describing how her mistress gradually fell out of love with her as she
became a teenager.
Before I became a parent, I had vaguely thought that song was a parable
for the child's fear of abandonment. Watching it recently again as a dad,
I experienced something between an epiphany and a nervous breakdown.
Like the theologian crazed by his theory of the New Testament in
Borges's short story Three Versions of Judas, I was gibberingly
convinced that I, and I alone, understood the real meaning of the Toy
Stories; John Lasseter had spoken directly to me. We, the adults, are the
toys. One day, our children will get bored playing with us. They won't want
to be cuddled by us; they won't want to confide in us; they will go away
and leave us. It will never be the same again. The toys in Toy Story 3 are
sent away to a daycare centre where they are victimised and mistreated –
just like the infantilised inmates of an old people's home.
TS3 undoubtedly takes its cue from TS2's gloomy visions of mortality
and obsolescence, and amplifies them in ways that, though not as brilliant
and novel as the second movie, are tremendously inventive and, yes,
powerfully sad. The melancholy that was largely compressed into When
She Loved Me is now diffused throughout the film, but it is still superb,
and the opening sequence is as thrilling, funny and visually gorgeous as
anything in the Pixar canon.
We join the story as Andy, 17, is about to go up to college. Sentimentally
loyal to his boyhood self, he intends to take Woody (voiced by Tom
Hanks) with him as a mascot and store the rest, including Buzz (Tim Allen)
in the attic – but a mixup means they all get taken to a daycare centre. At
first delighted by the prospect of playing with real kids once more, the
gang find the roost is ruled by an evil bully: the insidiously cute LotsoHuggin' Bear, voiced by Ned Beatty, who turns the centre into a jail like
the one in Cool Hand Luke. He has a horror-movie-style sidekick in the
form of Big Baby, a chilling, dead-eyed enforcer.
The humour, the drama, everything in the film seems targeted more at
the parents than the children: certainly those cheeky hints at the
metrosexual proclivities of Barbie's true love, Ken, with his scarf and
blow-dried hair. That said, it's an effortlessly superior family movie. We
grownups, however, may have to gulp back our tears and somehow keep it
together in front of the kids: just like the toys who revert to blank grins
when their owners come back into the bedroom.