Toy Story 3

If, like me, you grew up watching and loving the Toy Story films, you will probably enjoy the third and final installment of Pixar's trilogy. However, Toy Story 3 is surprisingly full of sadness and sentimentality, which makes it a difficult film to judge.

Andy (John Morris) is going off to college, and his old toys are afraid for their future. Andy decides to send most of his toys to the attic, while taking Woody (Tom Hanks) with him. However, a misunderstanding leads to the toys being donated to a day care center. The toys are initially happy, but they find themselves badly treated by rampaging toddlers - and ruled over by the tyrannical teddy bear Lotso (Ned Beatty), whose thugs reprogram Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) to serve them. Woody arrives to try and save his old friends, remaining loyal to Andy through all adversity.

Personal feelings aside (having watched the first two films a million times as a kid, and played Buzz Lightyear in an elementary school play), the original Toy Story was groundbreaking. CGI was already being used in live action movies, and films like The Lion King employed it in a supporting role, but the idea of a completely computer-generated movie seemed ridiculous. However, Pixar's combination of simple but endearing story and wonderfully creative animation was a huge winner, providing a whimsical, original film like nothing ever seen. I don't much like that computer-generated films have almost completely driven out hand-drawn animation, but it's hard not to give Toy Story its due: for better or worse, it completely revolutionized animation.

Toy Story 3 gets a lot of mileage out of the audience's good will. It's nice to see our old friends again, ten years after their latest adventure. The movie drives home the nostalgia theme: Andy has grown up, things have changed, and even the characters have developed: Buzz and cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack) have a thing for each other, many other characters have been thrown away. The movie does have its share of creative sequences, particularly Buzz's transformation into "Spanish mode" and a Barbie (Jodi Benson) and Ken (Michael Keaton) subplot, which make it worthwhile. And the poignant, bittersweet finale would have been a perfect note for the series to end on, if it weren't for the interminable credits sequence.

However, Toy Story 3 doesn't measure up to its predecessors. It plays the sentimentality and recognition card a bit too heavily: I can imagine a neophyte at loss for an entry point. To its credit, the film manages a semi-original plot, but it ultimately seems almost incidental to the movie's overall content. The schizophrenic tone is off-putting, too. It's a surprisngly dreary and heavy film without the courage of its convictions: it can't settle for being just a kid's movie, but doesn't have the guts to go the other direction either. And as mentioned before, the "happy ending" during the credits is overlong and worthless, undermining much of what came before.

If you enjoyed the first two Toy Story films, and have some degree of empathy for Woody, Buzz and Co., then by all means go see Toy Story 3. However, for others it may prove a middling, overly-sentimental effort that doesn't match up to Pixar's best work (Finding Nemo, Wall-E). To each their own, however.