The following article discusses a new film currently in theaters. While I will try avoid revealing too much of the movie’s plot, there are going to be some spoilers. If you would prefer to avoid spoilers, see the movie first, then read the article. Otherwise, you’ve been warned.
I knew I wanted to see Toy Story 3 from the moment I knew there was going to be a Toy Story 3. (More accurately, from the moment I knew there was going to be a Pixar-helmed Toy Story 3. The eventually scrapped sequel that Disney’s now defunct Circle 7 Animation was less of a sure thing.) After all, this film would be the third in a series that included the first of Pixar’s animated features and one of my favorite movies of all time. So as the film’s debut grew nearer, I tried to learn as little about it as possible. I did see a trailer or two and ran into a couple of details here and there – some inadvertently. But I stayed away from books, news segments, “making of” information, and reviews. Even with this lack of new information, my expectations for the film were high, so high that my one fear was that no movie – no matter how good – could possibly live up to them.
Leaving the theater on Friday, I was not disappointed.
Toy Story 3 returns viewers to the familiar world of Andy’s room, but with some major changes. Andy is now seventeen and though he has held on to most of the toys that make up the main cast of the movies, he hasn’t played with them in ages. Now Andy is getting ready to leave for college and the toys are faced with spending an indefinite amount of time in the attic. Andy does decide to take his old pal Woody to college with him – one of the very things the Prospector implied that Andy would never do in the previous movie, but Woody has to unpack himself when the other toys are accidentally tossed out on the curb as garbage. Feeling abandoned, the toys decide that their best bet is to donate themselves to Sunnyside Daycare, where new children will play with them. Woody is still loyal to Andy, but ends up going with his friends to Sunnyside as he tries to convince them to return with him to Andy.
Even though Toy Story 3 is a sequel to two well known and well loved movies, Pixar does not take the audience’s memory of either film for granted. The movie opens with an action-packed fantasy scene that finally shows us what Andy sees in his head when he plays with his toys. There are numerous nods to the games Andy played in the previous two films and viewers who remember those films well will probably get more out of the scene than those who do not. But the main purpose of this and the following montage of home videos of Andy at play is to remind the audience of how things used to be. Seeing the toys enjoying the best years of their lives makes it all the more painful to see them going unplayed with.
There is a lot of pain – both physical and emotional – in Toy Story 3. Many of the early tearjerker moments come from the contrast between the toys’ lives in this film and the previous ones. When Woody called a staff meeting in the original Toy Story it was a big production that involved rounding up a huge number of toys. Now Woody calls a staff meeting and realizes that the dozen or so toys that remain are already present, their number looking even more pathetic in the center of the teenaged Andy’s redecorated room. All of Andy’s other toys have been sold or given away and it is Rex who points out that Bo Peep was among them. Woody’s quiet reaction to this reminder makes it clear that this was a hard loss for him, but it’s remembering the first two movies that reveals just how hard Woody must have taken it. Rex himself is still the same neurotic dinosaur we met in Toy Story, but his worries about being ditched for another dinosaur or his inability to beat a video game have been replaced with a desperate need to be played with again. Even being held by Andy for a few seconds is a big deal for Rex. Though Woody’s reassurances in the first movie that none of the toys would be replaced fell on deaf ears, especially when Woody finds himself bumped out of his spot at the top, but he was ultimately right. Now Woody’s attempts to convince his friends that if Andy has held on to the remaining toys for this long, he will continue to do so don’t even convince Woody himself.
The visuals in Pixar’s latest film are what you would expect from a Pixar movie. The animation is fluid, the environments are full of details that add to the lived-in feeling, and the toys all look touchably real. The Toy Story films allow Pixar to explore a wide variety of different character types and the plethora of new characters introduced here are all wonderfully distinctive in design and animation. Once again, the style and physical properties of the toys help to determine their personalities, nowhere better than with flirtatious clotheshorse Ken, who courts the Barbie that formerly belonged to Andy’s sister Molly. Ken’s stiff-legged walk and fashion obsession are just what you’d expect from a fashion doll with a fully stocked wardrobe of retro styles.
What I really loved about Toy Story 2 were the risks it took and the honesty of its story. There was no false reassurance that toys would be loved and played with forever and ever. Toy Story 3 ups the ante again by addressing the end of Andy’s childhood head on and presenting the characters with choices even less black and white than those in Toy Story 2. Even as I could kind of guess the general nature of the ending, the details of the story continued to surprise me. I was particularly impressed by one scene towards the end. I don’t want to spoil it for you, so let’s just say that even though I knew the characters would probably escape their plight, I was completely caught up in their emotional reactions to what they were faced with.
A big part of Pixar’s success is their willingness to push the envelope and make films that aren’t just for kids. Up proved that an animated movie about a widowed senior citizen could make money and Toy Story 3’s lucrative opening weekend seems to show that kids will not run from a movie about toys being outgrown (though plenty of adults have shed a tear or two). Kids have grown up with this series of films and this is a rare case where the movies have grown up alongside them. Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich has confirmed that a new Toy Story short will run with the upcoming Cars 2, so this is not “goodbye” so much as “see you soon.” But I suspect that this and any future Toy Story shorts will not include any major new plot developments. The story is over and Toy Story 3 bring an amazing trilogy to a bittersweet yet satisfying close.
All images in this article are copyright DIsney.
Tags: computer animation, lee unkrich, pixar
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Your reviews are always very insightful and interesting to read. I must admit though, I’ve always thought that Pixar movies are extremely overrated. And when I heard about Toy Story 3, obviously being one of the most inspiring, original and touching movies of the decade, I simply decided not to see it.
But a friend of mine, who just so conveniently happened to be the biggest pixar fan on earth, invited me over to watch it I said okay. And I must say I was rather surprised! This wasn’t at all what I had expected.
I just didn’t like Toy Story 3 at all. At best it’s a slightly entertaining but overall pretty mediocre movie that doesn’t at all deserve its hype or critical success. All the characters felt tired and shallow, offering little to no character development. Woody is the same whiny, undistinguished doll he was in the other two movies and Buzz, one of the few characters from this trilogy who actually offers any depth in personality at all, spends most of the movie not even being Buzz. His only actual character development is not more complex than the switching of the button on his back. Literally.
And as such he spends most of the movie playing his intergalactic space agent persona and about 20 minutes as a boring and surprisingly tasteless Spanish stereotype. And all the other dozen toys have like one personality treat each, so shallow and one-dimensional that they might as well be renamed after it. This is the grumpy old potato, this is the comic-relief dinosaur this is the stereotypical Mrs. potato-wife. All the rest of the toys, being all the toys except for Woody and Buzz, all function as some sort of impulsive mass that simply agrees with Buzz, not because there is any logical reason for them to do so but because the plot requires them to.
Everything feels, not only extremely formulaic, but also very familiar. The toys are worried about Andy not wanting them anymore, you know, like in the other two freaking movies! And again, Woody is the only know who still believes in Andy and AGAIN he fails to convince the other toys when they all decide to leave. Pixar must be the only film studio in the world that can get away with repeating the same old synopsis, over and over again, and they are still being praised for their “unyielding originality”.
There is more. The directors and writers behind Toy Story 3 don’t threat their characters with respect. Their only function in the movie is to be funny, and thus they are constantly seen doing stupid things and most of them spend more time being chewed on by drooling babies than demonstrating any character development, whatsoever. (And if there are still people who stubbornly claim that the Pixar studio consists of creative directors that never gave up on their childhood imagination and love children, it should be more than apparent how very untrue that is when you look at how children are actually being portrayed in this movie)
But what I hate the most about this movie, and most Pixar movies, is how they always have this bad guy. They rely on evil antagonists in much the same way James Cameron relies on extra effects and in Toy Story 3, we got this pink teddybear. He is always there to push the plot forward. But the last thing we wanna teach kids that all the evil attributes can just be subscribed to one person who can consequently be blamed for all problems. That the kind of simplistic, unrealistic view of the world modern media is trying to move away from!
Lets focus on some by far more sophisticated but comparably underrated movies. In How To Train Your Dragon, the enemy is ignorance and prejudgment against animals. There is a very important message here about understanding and trying to coexist peacefully with nature. See this is what we wanna teach children.
In Bolt the only actual antagonist is Hollywood and the shallow entertainment industry it represents. As such, Bolt is about the importance of being yourself rather than a character to be consumed through media. In a time when reality shows are raising ethical questions and the media industry is constantly influencing children, telling them to be in a certain way and value shallow, superficial abilities– a movie that centers on the importance of knowing who you are and accepting your limitations couldn’t be more timely and relevant.
Shame on you Pixar. You have fallen behind by almost every standard. To find good movies you will have to look beyond the mainstream critics and their one-sided reviews. Is there some kind of Pro-Pixar law that says that everything the self-righteous company shits out has to be glorified like oil paintings from the renaissance?
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion and for the most part, I think you made your point very well with specific examples of why you didn’t like the film. I just happen to completely disagree with you.
Are the characters just shallow stereotypes who only act as they do because the plot requires it? I didn’t think so. In fact, I was very clear on why the majority of the toys were disagreeing with Woody. They believed that Andy was going to throw them away and more importantly (because it’s true) that Andy wasn’t ever going to play with them again. And even though it’s Woody vs everyone else, you can also see why the individual characters would have come to this conclusion on their own: Jessie still has her fear of abandonment from being abandoned previously, Mr. Potato Head is generally cynical, Rex is quick to panic, and so on.
Is this a carbon copy of the previous two films? No. This is probably the point you make that I disagree with the most strongly. Yes, the previous movies dealt with toys facing fears of being replaced or discarded, but it’s not the same plot recycled over and over. Toy Story has Woody going from being totally confident that Andy would never replace any of his toys to fearing that he himself is being replaced. And Toy Story 2 shakes Woody’s faith in Andy. He isn’t the only one who believes in Andy here, he is the only one who doesn’t.
I am not a believer in the notion that to retain imagination into adulthood, a person must remain “forever childlike” or even adore any and all children. It is perfectly possible to be an imaginative person with adult sensibilities and concerns, not some permanently innocent child of Never Land. But I don’t think the movie is a screed against children either. So toddlers are at times hyperactive, loud, and rough with their toys? Sounds about right to me.
I’m also not a fan of the notion that the primary goal of films suitable for children should be to impart good lessons and teach life skills. Certainly there have been excellent films that do just that, but the demand that films and other entertainment present good examples for children to follow can lead to some extremely boring storytelling, with only the mildest of disagreements between friends to create conflict and all traces of struggle and scariness wiped away. All that said, I don’t think this movie or Pixar films in general are devoid of good lessons for kids. You may want to check out Finding Nemo which doesn’t have true antagonist. Wall-E and Ratatouille have characters who are more like traditional villains, but the struggles in both films are more about battling ideas than individuals. As for Toy Story 3, you could see it as a movie where the removal of the one “bad guy” solves all of Sunnyside’s problems, but couldn’t you also see it as an acknowledgement that most people aren’t really “bad” and are capable of change? Judging by how many people who I’ve talked to wanted to see Lotso redeem himself, I think that’s the message that a lot of viewers came away with.
Bolt may have been about the evils of the entertainment industry, but I found most of its arguments to be very thin. So much of it’s anti-showbiz stance is put on the character of Penny’s agent, a character so one-dimensionally slimy that I am still at a loss to explain why Penny and her mother ever got involved with him and didn’t leave ages ago. There are great movies with no real villains, but that’s no excuse for having cardboard cutouts and strawmen to make a point about the evils of what the protagonists are fighting against. I’d much rather watch Lotso because while he may never redeem himself, I can at least understand how he got to be the way he is.
Something that I try to keep in mind, and that I hope you’ll consider as well: no one sets out to make a bad movie. Some people may start out wanting to make a lot of money, or create a movie to feature a current big name star, or some other thing that has little to do with making a real quality film, but no one ever sits down and says “Hey, lets crap out some useless garbage!” So while I may hate the movie, I try to respect the studio and the people who made it and not second guess their motives. I don’t know what anyone was thinking when they made the choices that they did on any film and I try not to pretend that I do. All I can fairly comment on, beyond the little bits of background information I pick up here and there, is the end result and how I react to it.
If there was any pro-Pixar commandment handed down to movie reviewers from on high, I never got it. My opinions, just like yours, are my own and i stand by them.
Well, I can certainly see what you mean, and I didn’t mean to sound rude or so, but there are still few things I just don’t understand.
“I didn’t think so. In fact, I was very clear on why the majority of the toys were disagreeing with Woody. “
Well, of course, the directors provided the toys with a reason (in this case the fear that Andy would throw them out) but that doesn’t make the characters decision any more believable. The Toy Story series has reached the point where they have too many characters, about a dozen toys, and they couldn’t possibly develop distinguished personalities for each one of them – simply because there is no room for it. And therefore, each one of the toys has only a few dialogs each – and I find it hard to think of the group as anything else than simply that – an undeceive group with one opinion, one voice following in the footsteps of Buzz Lighyer in each movie, over and over again.
So no, the plot isn’t recycled in the new movie. The synopsis is. Andew Stanton and Lee Unkrich needed on excuse to move the toys from the setting of Andy’s room into this daycare center, and obviously having the toys being worried about Andy not wanting them anymore was the only way to go.
But that only leads me to another problem. The plot. Toy Story 3 starts off with Andy growing up and his toys faithfully waiting for him in his room. Great, thinks I. At least this sequel is true to the other two movies. But no, 20 minutes into the film the plot completely loses focus and instead of Andy and the relevant messages about growing up and leaving your childhood behind, the toys find themselves in this daycare center and the plot is now one big prison break parody. From this point, the unnecessarily complicated storyline is filled with plot twists and indeed some really clever and funny break out scenes – but I cant escape the feeling that the movie has lost its focus. And again, the fact that there are more gay jokes in this movie, than jokes that are actually funny for children, speaks volumes about the directors and producers ambitions. Marketing a movie as a movie for children, when really you are just chasing after the wallets of adults, is almost unethical. And it is what Pixar with John Lasseter in the lead has been doing for almost a decade now.
You mentioned that you don’t that that “the primary goal of films suitable for children should be to impart good lessons and teach life skills”
I couldn’t disagree more. But let’s forget the potential consequences of constantly recreating this improbable dualism for children. Even from a storyboard perspective, constantly relying on some evil antagonist so push the storyline is a failure in itself. Obviously the pink teddybear is the personification of evil. And this isn’t even very well explained! We just get a brief, cheesy flashback showing us how Lotso was abandoned. Directors use flashbacks like putty when it comes to filling plotholes.
See, I had the same problem with Up. The movie starts out great with a story about an old moaning the death of his wife, dealing with issues such as mortality and lost dreams. But about half way into the movie the directors must have ran out of ideas, so they introduced this gratuitously evil antagonist, the old man Muntz. He wanted to capture that bird which I saw very little of in the movie and cared even less about. And during the dramatic end-scenes, the main characters are literally being chased by this villain, who is wielding a shotgun, and stereotypical dogs are flying around in airplanes – and I find myself confused, wondering where the actual plot disappeared.
Toy Story 3 was even worse. Lotso and his evil minions capture the good gang of toys as they try to escape via a garbage dumpster. But after a heartfelt speech by Woody, Lotso’s own companions turn against him – you know like in every other children’s movie ever created.
And as the toys are about to be thrown into the burn pit, Lontso is actually being saved by the noble goodies. And naturally, he doesn’t return the favor, leaving them all to die without pressing the emergency stop button.
But just about the poor plastic toys are about to be burnt, a giant claw reaching down and saves them. At this point, I was convinced that it was Lontso having a sudden change of heart, developing as a character and deciding to save the others would be the one operating the crane. It would have been predictable, but at least it would have some sort of deeper meaning to it.
I was wrong again of course. Instead they toys were being saved by those ugly, green, toy aliens. The toy aliens who couldn’t feel less irrelevant and I don’t even remember seeing them in the movie before. It was as if the directors flipped a coin to see which character would save the toys from the burning fire.
The bad guy gets what he deserves in the end, being tied to the front grill of a garbage truck. They always get what they deserve don’t they? Let’s forget about the kiddies. Im worried about this simplistic movie’s impact on adults!
You mentioned that excluding the antagonist can lead to bad, boring storytelling without any conflicts. Well as movies like How to Train your Dragon and Bolt shows, this is not at all the case. In Bolt, the only character who actually acts at least a bit like an antagonist is the furry main character himself, Bolt. He does treat poor Mittens quite brutality in the beginning, dragging her over the streets of New York, keeping her dangling over busy highways. But the pampered pooch learns lessons of pain and humility on the way, and eventually Bolt overcomes his anti-cat prejudice and Mittens can still emphasize with Bolt as she found out that he was delusional, that he has been tricked and that really, he is the victim. And when Bolt gives up on his proud and decides to expose himself and his vulnerability to Mittens, a new friendship can develop. There are deep, important messages about trust and self-awareness to be found here. Really, the relationship between these two characters offers more depth and complex than all characters from Toy Story 3, added together.
The differences between how the characters are presented in Bolt, and how the characters are being presented in Toy Story 3 are many and quite conspicuous when you think about it. I could continue on this trace, but my comment is by far too long as it is. However, moral messages, sentimentality and character development doesn’t have to make a movie better. It doesn’t have to Bolt better than Toy Story 3. But its certainly what I value when I am to watch a movie.