Only a great movie: “Toy Story 3”

By Mike D'Angelo

Wednesday, June 16, 2010 | 6:19 p.m.

The Details

Toy Story 3

Voices of Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack

Directed by Lee Unkrich

Rated G

Beyond the Weekly

Toy Story 3

IMDb: Toy Story 3

Rotten Tomatoes: Toy Story 3

Few movies achieve the towering historical significance of 1995’s Toy Story, the first feature film created entirely via computer—and unlike such previous milestones as The Jazz Singer (first feature with synchronized dialogue) and The Robe (first movie shot in CinemaScope), this one still holds up marvelously well many years later. Not yet satisfied, Pixar went on to make most sequels look paltry and unimaginative by comparison to Toy Story 2, which retained the original’s giddy, fast-paced comedy while adding elegance, pathos and a measure of genuine profundity. Realistically speaking, there was little chance that even these modern-day wizards could pull off yet another miracle with this series, more than 10 years later ... and, well, they haven’t. Instead, they’ve “only” succeeded in creating a fine, rousing adventure that puts every other would-be blockbuster released so far this summer to shame.

Onscreen, summer is nearly over, and the toys’ owner, Andy, now 18, is about to head off to college. Cleaning out his room, he intends to put all his old friends in the attic; through a series of mishaps, however, the gang winds up being donated en masse to the Sunnyside Daycare Center, which is depicted as such a glorious, love-happy Shangri-La that you just know there has to be a pretty ugly catch. Sure enough, the joint’s apparently benevolent leader, Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, aka Lotso (voice of Ned Beatty), in fact runs the place like Alcatoyz, consigning new arrivals to the “Caterpillar Room,” where they’ll be horribly abused by toddlers with shaky motor skills and no impulse control. And so Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen) and company must engineer what amounts to a prison break, giving Pixar the opportunity to dream up clever, hilarious variations on some of cinema’s hoariest genre tropes.

Which is a good thing, because the movie as a whole does feel a tad recycled. The fear of being discarded by a kid who’s outgrown you (so resonant for parents) was already explored in considerable depth by Toy Story 2, and Lotso’s avuncular sadism recalls that film’s Stinky Pete. When Buzz gets factory-reset and loses all memory of his friends, the characters are actually forced to say “Not again,” or words to that effect. Also, in striving to keep our heroes relevant after so many years, TS3 doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense. Andy, who seems like a very normal teenager, intends to take Woody along with him to college, which means that he intends to have no friends and never get laid. And Woody’s insistence that the toys’ proper destiny is to gather dust in the family attic waiting for Andy to have kids of his own smacks of some kind of weird, codependent masochism. (Thankfully, the movie goes somewhere else.)

All that means, though, is that Toy Story 3 isn’t the instant classic that its predecessors were, and doesn’t achieve the envelope-pushing creative heights of WALL-E’s wordless first act. In terms of surface-level entertainment, Pixar totally delivers—the jokes are still sharp (I loved the collective shudder when Woody claims it’ll be fun hanging out with the crew from the Christmas decorations), the complications just as ingenious, the characters no less endearing. (There is a little crass, Shrek-y humor this time, but not nearly as much as I’d feared based on the trailer.) And when the gang’s lives are threatened in the grand finale, it isn’t just generic third-act peril—even though you could safely bet your life that a movie financed by Disney would never follow through, you may be surprised to learn just how attached you’ve become over the years to these goofily animate objects. Which qualifies as a small miracle of its own.