I just wanna say before you get started that I saw this movie without the rose coloured glasses of 3D.
Toy Story 3 was as nourishing to my soul as three course meal, those courses being story, characters and emotional content. Not a single opportunity for narrative enhancement, humour, emotion was missed. Every single scene was cultivated to its full potential. I imagine John Lasseter wanted to make sure that Pixar’s flagship was given a sendoff befitting its stature as the film that cemented its dominance on the animation scene.
In place of a story I’d heard was going to be about Buzz having to go through a factory recall (thanks for nothing, Internet!) Pixar’s first ever threepeat finds Andy’s toys being shipped off (by accident) to a daycare centre where they can hopefully find a new life as playthings for young boys and girls. But at all is not how it seems at Sunnyside. The toys in charge have established a caste system that keeps one group of toys playing with the docile older children and the other forced to satisfy the destructive needs of the daycare’s toddlers. With their destruction at the hands of these kids imminent, Woody, Buzz, Jessie, Mr. & Mrs. Potato Head (and the kids), Hamm, Slinky, Bullseye, Rex, Barbie have to devise a plan to get out, and hopefully make their way back to Andy.
With the cast having ballooned so much by now, it’s a tall task trying to give everybody some kind of narrative goal to accomplish, but fortunately the guys in the writing room weren’t asleep at the wheel and know that the person who’s in need of something from the narrative is us, the audience who started this playful odyssey all the way back in 1991. In this they have delivered a thoroughly entertaining and emotionally loaded swan song that grabbed just about as many plot threads as it could, and tied them up in a knot that managed to turn back on itself. Closing the circle was the best resolution (rather than conclusion) that they could ave offered up with this film. That we had closure on the toys’ life with Andy, but that there were more adventures to come, whether we would see them or not.
In that ballooning cast of characters I refered to, there were a number of new additions that you could tell weren’t just seat-fillers. Ken was great, the embodiment of a lifetime of ambiguity in the eyes of popular culture. You wouldn’t think that a character’s struggle to solidify his own identity in the absence of the one toy that defines him (Barbie) would be funny, but the Pixar clan pulls it off. Conversely, you wouldn’t think that the adventures of the lost little strawberry bear could bring forth such a cruel character as Lotso, but Pixar’s got the goods.
The core of Andy’s toys were all great too, coping with their forced retirement as best they can. They brought in Happy Madison regular Blake Clark to take over Slinky Dog from the late Jim Varney – I honestly don’t think anyone could tell the difference. Even if not all the remaining original toys served some sort of purpose, none of them seemed tacked on. I don’t know if I’m completely on board with Buzz’s Latin transformation, but what would a Disney film be without a little racial profiling? It was all in good fun, I suppose, and generated some humorous moments – but it did really have to be in there? It didn’t add much to the storyline that wasn’t already accomplished with the “factory reset”, but I suppose it followed the trend of squeezing every scenario to the very last drop.
A few weeks back wrote on Twitter that Toy Story 3 would make the child inside you cry. I wrote back joking if it would make the child I watch it with cry too. Like I said, I was joking, but it turns out we were both right. The early scenes of Woody calling Andy on the phone, and of Andy holding Woody & Buzz and regarding them with almost as much tender remembrance as they hoped he was definitely placed a lump in my throat. And Big Baby, automaton Buzz, and the evil machinations of Lotso had my daughter grabbing my arm and squirming in her seat. After making it through the incinerator scene, I regretted having given the “no” to taking our daughter to see How to Train Your Dragon, having decided it was too scary for her. You could have ramped up the thrills in that one two times over and still not graze the morbid undertones that bubble to the surface in Toy Story 3. It left me thinking that they might have missed the point of what they were doing, but I can forgive them for it. It was a throwback to Disney films like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty & The Jungle Book.
But despite the dark tone, I felt that Lotso’s fate should have been a touch more gruesome. Lotso’s comeuppance seemed an awful lot like Stinky Pete’s in the last movie. It gave me the impression that his intended fate hadn’t tested well with the kids and had been dialed back for the audience at large. The result still had some poetic justice to it, with Lotso being found and treasured, but it just wasn’t apropos to the rest of the film.
Toy Story 3 not only satisfied my hunger for a bright spot in this summer’s lacklustre release roster, but also filled the space I’d been holding for some closure on Woody & the gang’s adventures, and calmed my craving for bonafide cinematic entertainment, animated or otherwise. With hearty helpings of story, character and drama it’s a repast worth taking in and will hopefully tide you over until Pixar’s next endeavour.
