Toy Story 3 (2010)
Directed by Lee Unkrich
Written by Michael Arndt
Starring Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger
Release Date June 18th, 2010
Published June 17th, 2010
With the release of “Toy Story 3” Pixar authored a third masterpiece in the film series that began the company's unmatched winning streak. Toy Story 3 is as bright, imaginative, compassionate and thoughtful as the first two entries in the series. And yet, the series doesn't simply fall back on qualities that it has become known for. Much like how a child learns about the world, the Toy Story franchises grows, learns to embrace change, and gets better for the lessons learned and commented upon.
We rejoin our friends Buzz (Tom Hanks) and Woody (Tim Allen) and their family of toys as they make a vain attempt to get their kid Andy's attention. Andy is now 18 years old and preparing to leave for college. It's been several years since Andy has played with his toys but they hold out hope that one day he might pick them up again. If not, there is always the attic where they can wait for Andy to start a family and pass them on to his kids.
Things go awry however when Andy's mom mistakes the toys, sans Woody who Andy decides to take with him to college, stuffed into a garbage bag intended by Andy for the attic, for trash. This begins one terrifically suspenseful action scene as Woody risks everything to get to the curb and save his friends while Buzz attempts to save the day from inside the bag.
Thinking that Andy had abandoned them, the toys duck into a box of toys to be donated to a local day care center. Woody joins them, attempting to get them to go back to Andy. The day care meanwhile seems like a dream, a retirement home for toys where they can get played with by new kids for years to come.
There is a sinister undercurrent to all of the good natured fun of this kid friendly aesthetic. That sinister undercurrent emanates from a suspiciously too friendly stuffed bear named Lotso (Ned Beatty) who steps forward as a leader of the daycare toys and appears to have a place for the new arrivals. However, instead of taking care of Woody and his pals, Lotso dooms them to the Butterfly room where kids too young to properly care for toys end up playing with them in the most painstaking fashion.
Juxtaposed with this story is Woody's journey to get back to Andy and his very real internal conflict between his loyalty to Andy and his loyalty to his family of toys. It's remarkable the ways in which director Lee Unkrich along with Toy Story creators John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton cause us to invest so deeply, emotionally in these toy characters. We feel for these characters as deeply as any human character we've ever seen on screen.
Just as remarkable is how this deep emotional connection is forged with joy and laughter. Toy Story 3 racks up big laughs through out its feature length even at the most dramatic and heart rending moments. Unkrich, Lasseter and Stanton know that the best way to deliver a hard lesson is to follow it with a big laugh and no scene demonstrates this quite as well as the landfill conveyor scene, a scene filled with danger, sadness and eventually a big laugh.
This is some of the finest writing and voice acting we've seen in any Pixar feature and some of the most eye popping, remarkable animation as well. Pixar has advanced this art form to such lengths that it's hard to find superlatives that haven't already been overly ascribed to the artists at Pixar.
”Toy Story 3” is a masterpiece. It is a remarkably emotional, action packed, breathtakingly beautiful movie. The characters that we came to know from Pixar's early days have only grown even more warmhearted, funny and vulnerable over the years and our emotional investment in them has only deepened with each ensuing adventure. What a remarkable feeling it is to be moved so deeply by non-human characters. Moved and yet also gleefully, joyfully entertained.
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