Friday, June 18, 2010

Like so many others, Toy Story has been the defining filmic trilogy of my life.  Sure, I watched Back To The Future one through three repeated times, burned through the Indiana Jones trilogy time and time again, and of course stuffed myself with the galactic space opera of Star Wars.  But at the end of the day, these were films that came before I cared all that much.  I wasn't a developed human being at the beginning or the end of these trilogies, thus, enjoyment aside, they're burned in to my brain as nostalgia more than anything else.  Toy Story and its ilk is entirely different.  The first Toy Story film dropped in to my conscious when I was 13, just barely an adolescent, but already decidedly in love with film and all that came with it.  Toy Story 2 appeared as I faded out of high school, and it's themes of the abrupt transitions of life still resonate with me to this day.  Toy Story and Toy Story 2 sated me on both a cinematic and an emotional level, paralleling the themes of my steadily progressing life.  I approached Toy Story 3 fully expecting the white-bearded wizards of Pixar to tie up their masterful trilogy with the same sort of wittily imposed emotional weight I'd grown used to.

Review - Toy Story 3D

Toy Story 3 finds our toy heroes, Buzz (Tim Allen) and Woody (Tom Hanks) and Jessie (Joan Cusack) and the rest of the beautiful animated gang exactly eleven years older.  Andy (John Morris) is preparing for college, and the toys, sans Woody (Andy's stalwart college companion) are, through a bit of impressive story-telling, are shipped off to Sunnyside Daycare, a sort of retirement home for toys.  Sunnyside is less comfy solace for abandoned toys and more a penal colony lorded over by the sinister Lotso (Ned Beatty) and his gang of thuggish toy-orphans.  What follows is a classically told prison break film seen through the eyes of the Pixar geniuses.  New characters, by the handful, are introduced, and somehow Pixar makes each and everyone, regardless of their screen time, pulse with life.

And of course, the action in the film is impeccable, the writing witty and outstanding, the animation far above everything else being produced right now, but at this point, these are all to be expected from Pixar.  What blows me away in Toy Story 3 is the sheer fact that in this age of quickly shit-out sequels and franchises and adaptations, this is the third film in a series that respects the characters they've created and the stories they've lived through.  There is a moment near the end of the film, the toys trapped in a hellish dump, their lives on the line, where I vacillated between sadness, as I knew the film and these characters were coming to an end, and pure happiness because the going-ons projected above me were playing upon jokes created in the first two films fifteen years ago.

My girlfriend, as we slowly walked out of the theater, said, "Do you think Pixar will be this good forever?"  Honestly, in the wake of Toy Story 3, already the best film that's hit the screens this year, I couldn't say no.
 

 

Noah Sanders is the blog/news editor at Light In The Attic and a contributor at Sound On The Sound and the KEXP blog.  He also has his own Criterion-based film site, Criterion Quest.   If you'd like to contact Noah in regards to his writings here at Side One: Track One then please do so here.

- Noah Sanders - -



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