There’s no outgrowing Toy Story
Image: Graphic: Natalie PeeplesScreenshot: Toy Story Film Features toy story
You shouldn’t be able to make great art by committee. A great work of art is supposed to be made by one person digging deep and offering up a shred of a soul, or maybe by two people butting heads and pushing each other and finally breaking through to some universal truth. It’s not supposed to come from a corporate boardroom where everyone notes everyone else to death. That maxim has been critical consensus for nearly as long as critical consensus has existed. And yet Pixar Animation Studios has spent the past quarter-century disproving received wisdom.
Pixar functions as a corporate entity, and its movies are a result of years of painstaking rewriting and restructuring, with everyone involved working on everyone else’s projects. I can’t imagine what a pain in the ass it must be to sit in one of those meetings while your co-workers disassemble and reassemble your ideas, and yet Pixar has made it work. They had to. It’s the only way they could’ve made Toy Story.
These days, Pixar operates as a kind of emotional wrecking ball. If you’re an adult taking your kids to see one of the studio’s movie, you can be fairly certain that there will be at least one point where you will try to hide your face from your children so that they will not see you weeping. Pixar has its duds, but it seems to be the one blockbuster house in Hollywood where sharply sentimental storytelling, rather than vague name recognition, is the chief goal. Before Toy Story, though, Pixar was basically an experimental tech company without a whole lot to show for its long, chaotic history. By spending years working on Toy Story, the people at Pixar shaped themselves into master emotional manipulators. It can’t have been easy.
Disney owns Pixar now, but Pixar was an independent company when it made Toy Story, the most successful film of 1995. They made Toy Story as a partnership, spending years responding to notes and transforming the movie into something that would satisfy the bosses at Disney. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the notorious micro-manager who was Disney’s chairman at the time, was constantly blowing up everything the Pixar people were putting together, even shutting down production for a while in 1993. (Today, Katzenberg is a laughingstock for his role in the ongoing Quibi debacle. But give the man credit; he did have the idea to turn Toy Story into a buddy movie.) Toy Story has four different screenwriters, with two others getting story credits. But that group came up with a premise, a setting, and a group of characters that continue to resonate, long after they achieved the goal of making computer animation into a viable artistic and commercial pursuit.
The people who made Toy Story were true believers. Director John Lasseter had worked as a Disney animator in the 1980s, and he’d been fired for pushing the idea of computer animation too hard. (Lasseter joined Disney in the same class as Tim Burton, another ousted animator who went on to make blockbuster movies and eventually return to Disney. Later on, Lasseter became a Pixar exec under Disney, then resigned in disgrace once his history of sexual harassment became public.) Pixar, meanwhile, had its origins in a mid-’70s computer-graphics lab, and it had spent years as a division within Lucasfilm, where the company had done CGI effects work on movies like Star Trek II and Young Sherlock Holmes.
George Lucas, hurting financially after an expensive divorce, decided to sell off Pixar in the mid-’80s. Steve Jobs basically paid Lucas a few million for the company. (This was during Jobs’ wilderness years, the stretch of time after Apple fired him and he was trying to make his NeXT company happen.) In 1988, the newly hired Lasseter got $300,000 from Jobs to make Tin Toy, a five-minute computer-animated short about a wind-up one-man band and a vaguely terrifying baby. Tin Toy won the Best Animated Short Oscar that year, and that’s what brought Disney to the table.
At this point, Tin Toy looks so crude that it’s barely watchable, but the basic DNA of Toy Story is all there. Toy Story, like Tin Toy, uses its limitations. In the ’80s and ’90s, computer animation wasn’t really sharp enough to reliably depict humanity in any kind of satisfying way; that’s why Pixar didn’t make a movie entirely focused on human characters until The Incredibles in 2004. But even with those limitations in mind, Toy Story must’ve been a daunting task to take on.
Toy Story is the first-ever computer-animated feature film. That alone makes it a landmark work—maybe the most important animated movie in the 83 years since Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. But nobody watches Toy Story because of its historical significance. And nobody really paid to see it in 1995 because it represented a technological breakthrough. (I remember thinking Toy Story was going to look cheap and polygonal, like the Canadian TV cartoon Reboot.) Instead, then as now, people watch Toy Story because it’s a fun, imaginative, beautifully assembled piece of filmmaking. After the past 25 years of technological advances, the original Toy Story now looks thin and clunky, but you stop noticing that within five minutes.
There’s a lot going on in Toy Story. The central idea—toys are sentient beings who live lives of servitude and who only want to be played with—allows a whole lot of thematic wiggle room. Sometimes, the toys seem like harried and anxious workers, watching the clock run out on a dying industry. Sometimes, they seem like symbols for a childhood innocence that can’t possibly last—their fears about their own inevitable obsolescence mirror regular human fears about mortality. There’s a weird religious component, too. The kids are indifferent, all-powerful beings whose fleeting approval means everything. Maybe that means the kids are gods.
There’s a lot that Toy Story never tells us. Why are all these toys alive? Why do they need to keep their status as sentient creatures a secret from humanity? Why do some of the toys, like the army guys, reflect the characteristics of the things they’re supposed to represent, while others are the opposite of that? How come Buzz Lightyear is the only one who doesn’t know he’s a toy? (A quality he shares, in later Toy Story movies, with all the other Buzz Lightyear-branded toys.) But Toy Story is smart enough to leave those questions unanswered—to plunge us into the world that it has created and to let us figure out the rules ourselves.
From a certain angle, Woody, the hero of Toy Story, is a religious fanatic. Other toys are workers with their own lives, and they don’t always trust the idea that their prime purpose on the planet is to serve a child. But Woody almost never questions it, and he badgers the other toys into going along with his belief system. He’s also kind of an asshole, jealous and petty enough to put Buzz in harm’s way when his own favorite-toy status is challenged. In early drafts of the movie, Woody was the villain, a dictatorial leader who used his status to bully the other toys into submission. There’s still a bit of that in the final product, at least until Woody goes on his personal journey and becomes the worthy leader that he’d always pretended to be.
Buzz is a more tragic figure. Early on, he’s a clueless naif whose total lack of self-knowledge is a kind of superpower. Buzz understands that he’s got a purpose, a mission, and that gives him the swagger needed to, for instance, convince all the other toys that he can really fly. The problem is that he’s absolutely wrong, and when he discovers that he really is just a toy—that his entire self-conception was an illusion—it sends him into a suicidal identity-crisis funk.
Tom Hanks was, smartly, Pixar’s first choice to play Woody. He hadn’t yet gone on his absurd ’90s winning streak when he was cast in Toy Story: He recorded his parts while he was filming 1992’s A League Of Their Own and 1993’s Sleepless In Seattle. (You can hear traces of League’s boorish, grumpy manager and Sleepless’ lovingly aggravated dad in Woody.) But Toy Story, however unintentionally, still finds interesting ways to subvert Hanks’s movie-star persona.
Five months before Toy Story was in theaters, Hanks had been the calming presence at the center of Apollo 13, the guy responsible for staying cool, keeping himself and his fellow spacemen alive. In Toy Story, Hanks is the opposite—an insecure wreck who just wants the spaceman in his life to get out already. In the end, though, his role in both movies is the same. He’s the guy with the luck and ingenuity and supportive grace needed to lead cooperative efforts and get everyone safely back home.
As Buzz Lightyear, Tim Allen didn’t have the same kind of persona to subvert. At the time, Allen was America’s best-loved sitcom dad: The ABC comedy based on his grunting, power-tool-obsessed stand-up act, Home Improvement, was coming of season when it was the No. 3 TV series in America, behind Seinfeld and ER. In 1994, Allen had starred in the bafflingly popular family comedy The Santa Clause, while his TV son Jonathan Taylor Thomas had led the voice cast of The Lion King, that year’s biggest animated film. But Allen doesn’t bring much Home Improvement baggage to Toy Story, just as he hasn’t brought any of his more-recent right-wing-crank baggage to any of the sequels. He’s just good as a warm-hearted, square-jawed lug. It’s baffling to even consider how the movie would’ve turned out if both of Pixar’s first picks landed the leading roles: The studio had initially wanted Billy Crystal for Buzz.
Even beyond those characters, Toy Story is some kind of masterpiece of casting. The legendary insult comic Don Rickles and the Cheers supporting player John Ratzenberger play Mr. Potato Head and Hamm, the two cynics in the toy family. Jim Varney, who was most famous for playing the rubbery-faced Ernest P. Worrell and who would die of lung cancer five years later, plays Slinky Dog, the most devout of Woody’s disciples. (I always thought Slinky Dog was a deeply illogical toy, one that offered all the maddening tangled-up fragility of actual Slinkys without the cool walking-down-stairs action. But the Slinky Dog, it turns out, was a real toy that had dated back to the ’50s.) Wallace Shawn is Rex, the neurotic dinosaur—a fun twist on the still-fresh Jurassic Park phenomenon. R. Lee Ermey, the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket, is a plastic army man. Few movies have character-actor benches that deep.
Toy Story bears the clear imprint and writers and animators squeezing every clever trick they can conjure into the frame—the Exorcist head-spin, the Alien-style whack-a-mole game, the constant stream of one-liners that we can almost certainly credit to co-writer Joss Whedon. (Whedon had done script-doctor work on films like Speed and Waterworld, but his only real credit before Toy Story was for the original Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie. Toy Story became the first animated film ever to be nominated for a screenwriting Oscar—it lost to The Usual Suspects—and that remains the only Oscar nomination of Whedon’s career.) The scene where neighbor kid Sid’s mutant creations emerge from the shadows is a minute of great horror filmmaking. For all the difficult work that went into its creation, Toy Story seems like it was fun to make.
It’s fun to watch, too. 1995’s biggest hits are mostly family films, which makes sense; by this point, millennials were old enough to make up a huge chunk of the moviegoing audience. Disney Animation Studios’ big traditional-animation film, the historically ridiculous Pocahontas, couldn’t come close to Toy Story’s grosses, but it still did business. Casper and Jumanji and the proudly juvenile Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls did, too. Warner Bros. brought the surging Jim Carrey in to frantically mug his way through Batman Forever, banking on the idea that kids would pay to see him fight Batman. They were right; Batman Forever was the year’s second-biggest earner. On a smaller scale, Babe made a ton of money and got a long-shot Best Picture nomination.
But all those movies feel like relics of a moviegoing moment, products of their time. Toy Story could’ve easily been that, too—a novelty, a historically interesting proof-of-concept for computer animation. Instead, Toy Story is eternal—a wellspring of sequels and theme-park rides and actual toys that never quite gets old. Maybe that’s because it’s great art.
The contender: While dozens of other action movies were ripping off his original Die Hard, John McTiernan’s sequel Die Hard: With A Vengeance gleefully discards its own blueprint, sending Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson madly ping-ponging across New York City to stop Jeremy Irons’ mad bomber. With A Vengeance is a definitive New York movie and a proud example of ’90s-style big-budget action done right. At the U.S. box office, Die Hard: With A Vengeance was the No. 10 movie of 1995. Globally, it was No. 1.
Next time: Independence Day becomes a juggernaut on the strength of ecstatic-destruction spectacle, beautifully dumb rah-rah speechifying, and the electric crackle of Will Smith’s presence.
249 Comments
Tin Toy himself looks pretty damn good even even if that baby looks…well, what could they do?Considering how many Toy Story movies there are now, they’re nice little benchmarks to track how far along Pixar’s animation skills have gotten. Each Toy Story film looks better than the last to the point where 4 looks nearly photo-realstic at times.
This is the reason I’m pro-Toy Story sequel even though everyone whines “who even asked for a sequel” before it’s released and becomes critically acclaimed and a box office hit. It’s a nice way to check in and go “this is what we can do now”.
The animation equivalent of the “7-up” series? I like it!
A great example is the opening scene of Toy Story 4 when they show RC with water, rain, darkness and torchlight all mixed in. It’s a quick shot (and I couldn’t find a great picture) but it’s amazing to compare.
This looks like a shot from Resident Evil 7.
That carnival scene at the end of the film is just stunningly beautiful. It captures all the warm feelings a kid would associate with a night time summer fair.
I swear, a whole bunch of scenes in 4 were designed entirely so the animators could show off. And that’s not a bad thing.
It really is crazy to compare Toy Story with Toy Story 4, animation wise. Things really started to improve with 2 – Al, from Al’s Toy Barn, looks much more like a real human. Early Andy is really only a small improvement over the terrifying Tin Toy baby. But yeah, 4 is just … something to behold.
I think the scene in 2 that shows the biggest jump is the Woody cleaning scene. The way the paint spreads, the glossing of his eyes the close up of a needle being threaded. It’s an amazing showcase.
Yeah, the detail they’re showing off there is pretty impressive and could not have happened in the first one. The scene of Woody climbing onto Al to retrieve his arm is also a good one; the details in Al’s face and the texture of the cheesy puffs…
Absolutely – the leap in human hair that you can see in that scene is huge.
Look at the difference in Bo- she glistens in it like a beautiful ceramic toy would. And then there’s the facial expressions and how they convey a multitude of expression in a just a few sections. There’s times I thought the toys were better actors than actual real live actors
Some of the facial expressions Bo gives are just amazing. Same with Violet in Incredibles 2. I hadn’t even considered you could improve facial expressions until I saw how much character and emotion you can see in the most subtle of movements with those two characters.
The expression Jesse gives when Woody gives her his sheriff badge is stunning. She goes from confused to really, really sad to super happy and proud in a 10 second shot. I kind of believe that both Jessie and Bo should have gotten acting noms
Best Performance by an Animated Character goes to…
I was going to say, just looking at the youtube thumbnails, there’s a big difference between how the toys look and how the dog looks.
I read that one of the reasons they never showed Andy’s dad was because they couldn’t figure out how to make humans look realistic so did as few of them as they could
RE-RENDER TOY STORY YOU COWARDSI’d love to see what they could do for a rerelease using current lighting, texture, and rendering capabilities.And if you want to update the human and dog models while you’re in there, sure why not?
It’s almost inevitable, I think. At some point the “live-action” remakes will catch up with Toy Story, but it would be super interesting to see the actual old models & scenes imported into Pixar’s latest rendering environments with as few changes as possible.
Exactly. It would be more of an “HD remaster” than a reimagining.Not that I’d shed any tears over their replacing the Scud model. Woof.
So this might seem like a silly question but the usage of the word “woof”. That’s not a thing in the country I come from and it’s something I’ve been meaning to ask about for ages. What does it mean/What is the etymology of it?
IMO, a declaration of something being ugly or unpleasant, but more fun to say.
“Woof” originally was used to represent a particular type of dog bark. Some people call women they don’t find attractive “dogs”. “Woof” has over time become a shorthand way of saying something is ugly, like a dog.I’ve never understood the whole thing. I think most dogs are beautiful.
Lion King remake style would be insane
I believe they mentioned that they didn’t have the source code for the film, so it would be a herculean task to remaster or recreate the film from ground up.Beside, it still looks pretty great even to this day, warts and all. Unless Pixar really feels that they can and will remaster it, I wouldn’t be touching it.
I saw a documentary once stating that each movie featured some new tech development. Monster’s Inc. for example was using the latest in the motion of hair and I assume Finding Nemo had something to do with water environments.I think most of the shorts are straight up demos of whatever is new.
I think so too. Aside from the baby, it looks more stylized than crude. And the baby-through-cellophane image was genius.
Dhe Hard With a Vengeance isn’t what I’d consider the best Die Hard movie (that’s, obviously, Die Hard) but it’s the one I have the most fun watching. It’s like a Rube Goldberg machine in movie form, and Willis and Jackson make a dynamite buddy duo.
I love the original trilogy. 2 and 3 are weaker than the first one for obvious reasons but are both an absolute blast from start to finish.I rewatched them all a months go and they’re just awesome.
For just a moment I thought you were referring to the Toy Story films and got really upset.
Oh, they’re fantastic together, and would have made for a great 90s Shane Black buddy duo.
Also, I think we’re at the point where “With a Vengeance” is regarded as a minor classic, right? Or at the very least it was a great way to cap off the earlier films before “Die Hard” crawled up its own ass and became “Die Hard” on a “Die Hard.”
Yeah’d I’d agree with that. Even 2, which has its detractors, is now hailed as a classic. They’re just fucking great movies.
I seem to recall Ebert being a champion of the second one, but yeah, it has received an entirely undeserved amount of hate over the years, and it’s nice to see it get its dues.
Shit, even the later ones have their charms. I really enjoyed seeing Timothy Olyphant as a bargain-bin Bond villain — although, like with Cristopher Eccleston in “Gone in 60 Seconds,” I wish the whole movie had risen to support the talent of its baddie.
When there were only three Die Hard movies, Die Harder was easily the worst of the lot. Not that it was actually bad, but it wasn’t as fun as the first and third ones.
Then they decided to make two more and they got progressively worse, though Die Hard 4.0 (as it was called over here) has some good points.
Side note: 4 out of the 5 Die Hard movies had the villain’s ultimate motivation being money. Only Die Harder was about something else (though they were getting paid for it).
I never understood what the beef was with DH2 – it was fun! (and I vaguely recall a PS FPS based on it that I played waay too much of).
Hard same. It’s got a kick-arse cast, the plot is a lot of fun and there’s memorable set-pieces. It’s got everything I’m looking for.
I’m a huge action movie fan, I’ll watch anything. The problem with Die Hard began (for me) after they jump onto the villain’s boat. The whole “safety catch” thing just reminded me of the “ceramic gun” moment in 2. Just seemed like a kid wrote that. And then the extended Bond-style “we don’t need to see you die” thing. Also why would he be carrying aspirin? I dunno, there were just a few too-convenient moments in that movie that took me out of it. And the one chase hinging on the ABS fuse, again, just felt like a draft script. Small, cheap, or silly movies can do that. Die Hard was always kinda bigger than that. After 2 the series became dissonant: they matched these big, impressive and possible setpieces with doses of silliness and odd details.
It’s the how long does it take for a grenade to explode thing.
The ‘escaping the grenades in the ejector seat’ scene got so much focus in the criticism of the movie, it was ‘Indiana Jones escaping the nuclear blast in a refrigerator’ 13 years earlier. But as FilmCritHulk would say, it was the tangible detail that represented a larger problem with tone. Audiences were already upset that John McClane was acting more like a superhero, taking on a special forces squad singlehandedly, way before he started killing helicopters with cars. Now, after five films, Part 2 doesn’t seem so far out of line with what we think of classic John McClane, although Part 3 was more loved for bringing the character back down to earth.
But I’m actually on the team for Die Hard 2, as well, and thought the criticism was too much. It was a clever and fun film and Willis still had enough underdog charm to make it work for me as a whole. As far as a single scene, the one that takes me out of the movie was never the grenades in the cockpit, but instead the snowmobile shoot-out, where the paramilitary unit seems to be about as effective with their weapons as the A-Team and you realize that McClane is past being slowed down by broken glass.
Id prefer to have With A Vengeance as the direct sequel to the original, and skip the existence of 2 altogether. Not that DH2 is a bad film as such, it’s just so … sequelly, in that super obvious way … plonking recognition points in (William Atherton etc), failing to recapture the claustrophobia and occasional hopelessness that made the original feel so unique – and could have made a good calling card for a series – but also not replacing them with anything different. DHWAV goes its own merry way enough to feel very different without being an imitation, but still has enough connective tissue to the original through the Gruber revenge plot and the increasingly fucked up central character to well justify its sequel bona fides. Much more satisfying for me
I actually don’t think the Gruber connection is necessary, but I like Jeremy Irons’ performance so I’ll let it slide. The thing that jumped out for me about DHWAV is the way it leans into its R rating. No big budget movie today would show its main character standing on a Harlem street corner holding that sign.
But both the terrorists and the military are secretly in cahoots. They’re actually shooting blanks. You see the terrorists briefly switch cartridges before the shoot out. That’s why McClain is the only one who actually kills anyone, and the poor terrorist doesn’t see it coming. It’s a clever detail that I didn’t notice until I saw the movie a bunch of times.
As far as a single scene, the one that takes me out of the movie was never the grenades in the cockpit, but instead the snowmobile shoot-outI thought the reason it seemed like everybody was missing during the snowmobile shoot-out was because some or all of the participants were shooting blanks. That’s when McClane starts to put together the fact that John Amos wasn’t on the up-and-up. But it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.
You’re right that the special forces team and the terrorists are using blanks when they stage a fake firefight, and then McClane gets his hands on one of the guns and tries to kill terrorists with it. And then when he later figures out the clip just has blanks, he gets wise to the ruse. But in the scene I linked above, the bad guys switch to the red-tape clips with the live rounds. You can see them kicking up snow and hitting (and ‘sploding) the snowmobile, but they never manage to hit McClane even though they have the advantage of knowing he is just firing blanks at them.
I’m not so fond of 2, but that might be mainly because some of the formative moments of my young life involved air travel in some way, and the multiple plane crashes / explosions in this movie absolutely fucked me up mentally. To this day, I still can’t watch those scenes.
I could never get past the basic idea if DH2, which is that planes would circle Dulles Airport cut off from all radio contact until they ran out of fuel and crashed.That is about as likely as terrorists shutting down the grill and fryers at White Castle and having the customers wait in line patiently until they starved to death.
There are a dozen runways within 15 minutes of Dulles. Nobody wants to fly into Dulles in the first place. It’s a terrible airport! People would jump at the chance of being rerouted into National Airport. They could even land at Andrews and park the jet next to Air Force One.They even made a plot point of having Airphones on the seats. After ten minutes of circling, you can bet people would pay the dollar a minute charges and call their lawyers to sue the airline, FAA and the National Weather Service. They would know they had other options for landing besides falling from the sky. Grrr.
The phones in the plane seats thing was such a novelty for me as a kid. We didn’t have anything like that on any planed I’d ever been on. I remember seeing them when I went to America in the mid-90s.I don’t imagine they still have them anymore right?
Also, the whole “telling the pilot the ground is way lower than it is so they’ll crash” thing works only in a blizzard. A regular storm wouldn’t cut it. You’d need something that puts their visibility at zero. Not a good idea to rest the success of your plan on something that unusual.
“Oh, they’re fantastic together, and would have made for a great 90s Shane Black buddy duo.”You’re not far off. The script was originally bought by Warner Bros. to be used as a Lethal Weapon sequel.
I remember reading somewhere that the script was originally intended to be a Lethal Weapon movie, hence why the Bruce / SLJ partnership is so strong.
Completely agree with you. With a Vengeance is definitely the one Die Hard I’ve watched the most because it is so much damn fun.
So…LA thing? You famous or something?For about 5 minutes.Don’t tell me, Rodney King right?Fuck you.
Just the fax ma’am, just the fax.
I’d say Die Hard With A Vengeance is just as good as Die Hard. That taxi cab chase scene is even more impressive 25 years later because nowadays there’s no way they’d spend all that money to drive actual cars high speed through Central Park. It would all be CGI and it would look horrible. Samuel L. Jackson’s character is as relevant today as he was in 1995, if not more so. Die Hard 2 is the ultimate “Just do the first one again… in a new location!” type of cash-in sequel, but it’s still well-done. I just don’t ever have the urge to watch it over Die Hard or Die Hard With A Vengeance.
Can we please address DH2 by its proper Christian name (Die Hard 2: Die Harder) every time? It’s one of the most delightfully stupid titles ever and should be celebrated for it.
i’ve always found it insane that they didn’t bring jackson back for any of the late period die hard sequels.
To be fair, its really great film with some awesome moments of action and humor and developments.But yeah, the best Die Hard films to me are… the original and Live Free or Die Hard (4th film). Those two films really cast John McClane as a hero that we love to root for as well as relating to all of his personal failings and misgivings. The actions in both those films are just the best (although the jet sequence in 4th is quite over-the-top, still just dumb fun) and the character developments and humors across the board are well written and acted.
I fucking love this movie. It’s just so good.
I could go into so much detail about how wonderful this movie is, how timeless and magical, and why even to this day it is justly lauded as titan of modern cinema. But you’ve heard it all before so really, why bother?So instead, I’m just gonna post some YouTube clips of my favourite bits in a shameless attempt at grabbing upvotes*.* Or saves or whatever the hell Kinja call them these days, let’s not kid ourselves, they’re upvotes and we all know it.
Nothing beats this.
“Howdy howdy howdy” is such a wonderful little scene. 3 laughs in 12 seconds.
ahahh…ahahh…ahahhhh
I always guessed they got the “Howdy, howdy, howdy” line from a classic Far Side cartoon:
Fun fact, Katzenburg tried to push for the movie to be “cynical and edgy” which resulted in early story concepts of Woody being a horrible asshole.Thankfully everyone else hated his idea so they went back to the original plan.
Hard to believe that this man would one day come up with Quibi.
He already EP’ed Father of the Pride, we should’ve known what he was capable of.
Oh my god, why does Early Woody have ventriloquist dummy/nutcracker mouth? Horrifying.
The original (fortunately nixed) plan was for Woody to be a ventriloquist dummy.
Geez, Jeff: even Walter White had to start out as likable.
I quote this movie all the time. The “I am MRS NESBITT” scene gets a lot of play. “Tell me the hat looked good?”
“Years of academy training WASTED!!!”
I don’t even like Tim Allen much but I LOVE him as Buzz and he really wrang the pathos out of that scene.
Tim Allen was great in Galaxy Quest too. He does great with the right well structured role. I wonder if he is like Adam Sandler and could go even further with the right script and director, although I don’t know if he wants to.
It’s less his acting skills (clearly he has some talent) and more that he seems to be a real dick in real life. But that’s not gonna stop me from watching Toy Story 🙂
He had a darker role in David Mamet’s Red Belt, but I don’t remember being wowed by him.
Allen was fine in Red Belt, but considering I already hated him at that point and assumed he would be a distraction, I was surprised that I didn’t mind his role when I actually watched the movie.
Absolutely! Though speaking of Tim Allen, Toy Story and reasons why I can never quite bring myself to fully hate the guy as much as perhaps I feel I should…
The shark’s “I’m Woody! Howdy, howdy, howdy!” is the best line of the film. “The word I’m searching for I can’t say, because their are pre-school toys present” is the second best
My vote goes for, “This is the PERFECT time to panic!”
I still quote that one (way too often, lately.)
This movie is soo quotable. Maybe because I used to watch it every day before I could read, but every line in it is gold to me. Certainly helps that they have such good performers doing it.
The “I’m Woody! Howdy! Howdy! Howdy!” is a wonderful reference/tribute to a classic “The Far Side” panel where vultures are eating the carcass of a cowboy, and one of them puts on the cowboy hat.
A lot of early attempts at computer animation rode entirely on their own novelty: “WHOA, IT’S COMPUTER ANIMATION FOLKS!” The first computer-animated feature film was almost The Works, an art-like experiment with a nearly nonexistent story. But that project ran out of money, and the ones who were first were instead Pixar, and the industry was the better for it.
Pixar were smart enough to realize the story was the most important thing. I remember someone on staff saying their job was to make you forget you were even watching animation after a few minutes, and they succeeded.Hoo boy, next up is Independence Day, eh? The movie business still hasn’t recovered from that one; for a while afterward the only point of a summer tentpole was to blow landmarks up, and the standard is barely better today.
I’d still argue that Tom’s “…nobody really paid to see it in 1995 because it represented a technological breakthrough” is off the mark, at least slightly. I have to believe it definitely garnered its fair share of “Wow! A talkie made with a computer! What a novelty!” ticket sales.(And as much as you can criticize ID4 for what it did to blockbusters, you could just as easily do for Toy Story and what it did for American animation. It kickstarted the trend of “If we do it with computers, and get famous people to do the voices, that’s a hit movie!” and Shrek sealed the deal.)
I was a freshman on college and the novelty of computer animation is exactly why I went to see it at the time.But the story, characters, and music are why I show it to my son today.
I was in middle school, so pretty much the exact wrong age for kids movies – I had been watching them as a kid not too many years before, but I wasn’t yet old enough that watching kids movies didn’t make me childish. (Aladdin was the last Disney animated movie I saw, but I didn’t see Pocahontas or The Lion King). I definitely went to see it because it was a computer animated movie, and loved it.When TS2 came out, I made sure that I arranged to watch a child for family friends to have an excuse to go see it.
yeah, as a 13 year old who was a bit past “Kids movies” and was into computers I definitely went for the novelty of the animation.
The story and overal quality of the movie was ultimately what made Toy Story a hit, but the novelty of the fact that it was the first computer animated feature film played a major role in it’s initial marketing. It was pretty widely reported and something that a lot of people were interested in seeing or at least curious about, well before it started getting good reviews and positive word of mouth.
When I was a tween, I thought Twister was the absolute nadir of the “It has CGI! Why wouldn’t you want to see it?” marketing approach. As I got older I realized how technically challenging it must have been to make CGI tornado (all those particles!), especially with mid-90s computers… but it’s still not a fucking dinosaur (or even Sean Connery’s character in Dragonheart).
That was a movie sold entirely on that one “there’s a cow in the Twister!” shot. To this day I’m perplexed how that movie gained as much traction as it did that one summer two decades ago.
That clip of Toy Story’s opening credits also highlights how good the animators were at old-fashioned cartooning. When Woody “lassos” those box-cows, they get yanked out of the frame without a hint of inertia. But when he crashes into one of them, it slides just a little bit, which emphasizes the slapstick timing as Woody flies headfirst out of the car. That kind of exaggerated “physics” is especially big in old Warner Bros shorts, and it helps orient the audience to the story’s slightly off-kilter version of reality. And at least these days we have recognizable characters from other media blow up all those landmarks, rather than attempting to (shudder) create original characters. And then fill them with a hilarious motley assortment of character actors, Jeff Goldblum to Harvey Fierstein.
After Tin Toy was the snow globe movie, Knick Knack. Probably the project that gave the final push. Man, the frustration for the snowman just strikes home. Where Tin Toy was a technology demonstrator – Knick Knack was a standalone movie short. I bought the Renderman reference from Pixar just after seeing that.
Unpopular opinion; I think this is still the best Toy Story film. It has to be just about the tightest film of the last 30 years; there isn’t a second that isn’t moving the story along or developing the characters or adding a moment of humour or charm. And as much as I dislike the escalating cynicism of non-Pixar animated movies in the years since, I like the slightly edgy humour and the way it prioritises making you laugh over making you cry. It’s a Pixar movie from before they got Oscar Bait in they DNA.
I think I’m the only person in the world who can’t stand this movie.
Hitler? Is that you?
Don’t be silly. Hitler is currently residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
…where he spends all his time watching TV and posting to social media. Maybe he thinks a Kinja comments section is just his phone showing Twitter in a weird way?
Are you enjoying your low-hanging fruit right now, or saving it for later?
Lol. Good one 😀
I feel that way about Jurassic Park.As for Toy Story, the praise was so overwhelming when it came out that I saw it and enjoyed it, but I was in my mid-20s at the time, so it wasn’t a formative movie for me. I saw the first sequel, too, for the same reason, but I’m damned if I can remember a thing about either of them…
I think the critics’ take on Jurassic Park in 1993 was broadly right; it was an above average summer blockbuster and technically groundbreaking, but also a bit patronising in places and not in the same league as, say, Jaws. For some reason, some time early in the last decade, there seemed to be some silent agreement that it’s one of the best films ever made.
I remember going to see Toy Story at the theatre with my best friend. We were around 17. We did really like it. I think we may have been at the perfect age to both appreciate the child focused elements as well as some of the edgier content designed to appeal to adults. (Like the horror movie references, which I remember us both cackling through with delight.)
However, that was the same year (and around the same time) that Alfonso Cuaron’s stunning adaptation of A Little Princess also came out, which we also went to see together. That movie is the reason why I have loved Cuaron for so long. I thought that movie was amazing, and I was a little bitter that it seemed like Toy Story had stolen all of Princess’s thunder.
Shit, I saw Toy Story on release at age 10 and it wasn’t formative or particularly enjoyable or memorable for me. I honestly can’t remember if I ever saw the second one, I would have been 14 so its possible someone showed it in school on a lazy teacher day and I slept through it.
You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity. Farewell.
You’re not alone. I never saw another Toy Story, nor do I intend to.
Do you also hate Babe and the Princess Bride?
The Princess Bride is VERY overrated.
What the fuck is going on in this thread? It’s early to be that drunk.
I will stand by my opinion of The Princess Bride all day long. To be fair, part of why I can’t stand this movie is that EVERYONE loved it back when I was a kid and couldn’t stop saying how god damn great it is, which gets pretty tiring. I’ll grant that it has it’s upsides and I’ve grown to appreciate it a bit more than I used to, but a lot of it is really schticky and to me, the schticky parts get irritating really quickly.
It’s 9pm somewhere in this world, good excuse as any to get drunk.
I wouldn’t say I can’t stand it, but I don’t see what the big deal is. Breihan’s right: the film’s cast is incredibly deep and everyone plays to their strengths, which earns the characters (and by extension, the filmmakers) a lot of leeway. But tonally it’s all over the place, the plot has no idea where it’s going at any given moment, the characters do too much screaming (I wonder if they had the actors record their voices like that in anticipation of maybe not being able to properly make the cgi models emote,) and the actual “filmmaking” (editing, blocking, camera placement/movement, etc) is pretty poor. Pixar quickly got much better with all of these things (I love the sequels) but the original still looks and feels like a technical exercise first and foremost, built on a thin script to keep everyone from going off the rails. And then there’s Sid, a genuine jerk of a kid who is portrayed as a demonic monster because he “tortured” toys, even though nothing in the movie’s rules suggest that he should know better. Hell, Woody explicitly says that the toys themselves have to break the rules just to fuck with this kid. Am I taking a cartoon too seriously/literally? Ugh, maybe, but my toys looked a lot like Sid’s when I was a kid: dismantled Transformers reassembled with Erector set pieces, GI Joes taken apart to create new uniforms for characters (or disfigured zombies for other toys to fight.) It was a cheap, nonsensical way to villify a character who was already a jerk, and his comeuppance probably led to him being deeply affectedthrough his adolescence.
My wife is kinda in the same boat, she finds many Pixar movies to be too “videogame-y” where the characters keep just missing safety or learning they need to go find something else to be able to move forward. She finds it stressful, even if it’s just background noise for the kids. I dig it but I guess I understand why some folks don’t like it.
Your wife has a point. I wasn’t so big on Toy Story 3 because the action scenes felt a little rote, especially that stretch where they escaped from the day care and almost ended up in the incinerator. (Okay, the incinerator bit was fucking intense.) But Pixar movies start to feel same-y to me after a while. Maybe that’s to be expected from a studio that’s been producing content for a quarter century, but watching Coco, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the good guys’ tricking the bad guy into confessing his crimes on camera. Pixar has used that one before.
No, I’m there with you. I remember seeing it in the theater with several friends and being unbelievably bored. I was sure we’d sat through this thing for three hours or better and was dumbfounded to realize it was only 90 minutes.
You are a monster.But if you join me in hating Harold and Maude, I will give you a certificate of rehabilitation.
What?! Harold and Maude is the greatest love story of our time!
I certainly think it’s over-rated, easily my least favorite of the franchise. Then again I in college when I saw it a good fifteen years after it first came out so my relation to the movie was always going to be different than most people’s.
Oh yay. We found the commenter who must proclaim the thing most people love is not a thing they love. Do you also want to announce you hate Stranger Things? Game of Thrones? That you never understood the hype of Ferris Bueller?If the shit isn’t racist, sexist, etc. just leave it alone.
My reactions to each one:TS1: That was fun. Nothing more.
TS2: OK, more of the same, but more technically impressive.
TS3: I don’t get why everyone’s crying. It’s the same goddamn movie as the first two. (OK, the incinerator scene was pretty bold.)
TS4: Haven’t bothered.
The first time I saw it, I thought it was just okay. I didn’t want my money back, but I also didn’t think I was seeing the future of cinema, or an animation studio that would be a prime mover in the industry. Even after I realized that Pixar had something special going on, I wasn’t excited about the sequel, and didn’t see it in theaters.About a decade after Toy Story, my friends had a health emergency, and I wound up having to take care of their son, who was a toddler, until a family member could come in from out of town to help out. I was just married and didn’t have any kids at the time, and I had no experience with kids his age. The one thing I could do to keep him calm while his parents dealt with the emergency (and I had his parents’ approval on this) was show him his favorite movie, Toy Story. I wound up watching it at least four times in the next 24 hours. Like almost all Pixar movies, it gains a lot on rewatch, because they pack a ton of little details in there that I didn’t notice the first time. Still, I can understand why someone would feel it was meh or even dislike it.
I’m glad there are 4 of us (wife and daughter also don’t like it).I also admit to us not liking Tom Hanks. For the last 25 years every Tom Hanks movie is just “Tom Hanks… alone on an island! on a boat! in space! a lawyer!”And yes we hate kittens, sunshine, and rainbows.
I have caught enough flack for my post, but you went there so I will too: Tom Hanks has made over 87 movies and I like – maaaybe – three of them.“For the last 25 years every Tom Hanks movie is just “Tom Hanks… alone on an island! on a boat! in space! a lawyer!” This pretty much sums it up. But Woody is certainly the most irritating version.
I wouldn’t go that far, but I saw it in theaters at age 10 and had absolutely no strong feelings about it. Seeing advancing CG animation was nice compared to what I got Saturday mornings on Reboot and other (even worse looking) shows, but it didn’t make me laugh much, I didn’t connect to it emotionally, and I didn’t care for the songs. The “freak” toys scene was kind of nifty. I’m not big on Pixar movies in general, although I liked Ratatouille a lot and I enjoyed Inside Out far more than Toy Story. I need to get around to Wall-E and The Incredibles, those are the only ones I have not seen that actually look like they might be up my alley (as opposed to say, Cars, I don’t need to watch even one of those to know its not for me). I do like Pixar’s shorts, for the most part.
I know people who think there are other best trilogies; Star Wars, Dollars, El Mariachi, Back to the Future, Lord of the Rings, etc.
But I still think the original Toy Story trilogy was the most consistently excellent.
You may be right. That said, I greatly enjoyed the fourth film too. It’s interesting how big the world of the films has become — the number of memorable minor/one-shot characters rivals “The Simpsons” at this point — yet the stakes remain rather small and personal throughout, and that’s to its benefit. I think it also helps that they make those short films on occasion that focus on the minor players (“Partysaurus Rex”, the “Forky Asks a Question” series, etc.) so they don’t have to worry too much about characters elbowing for room in the main series.
“Partysaurus Rex” is perfect from beginning to end.
Of all the spin-off shorts Pixar has pushed out, “Partysaurus Rex” is the clear stand-out. Simply brilliant.
“Party-POOPAH!” My family and I love Partysaurus Rex so much. But Toy Story of Terror is really damn good too.
Four is interesting because it’s the only kids movie about becoming an emptynest-er and retiring.
Come on, Three Colors is obviously the best trilogy! There can never be another sequel!
Toy Story 1 is rather primitive in retrospect, 2 is an improvement but still has some kind of off moments. 3 is probably the best made of the three but is basically just a retread of 2 on a thematic and story level and its ending is a cop-out. Four is easily the best movie of the franchise.
There are few moments in cinema that are as purely joyful as the opening scene of Toy Story 3.
That’s MISTER Evil Doctor Porkchop to you!!
Toy Story gets better with each passing film, which is exactly how it should be.
It was without a doubt the best in my estimation. But since it’s not a trilogy anymore, I don’t count it anymore.
Think about one of the great disappointments in your life. A time when you realized something you had always dreamed about simply wasn’t going to happen.Now, watch the scene where Buzz realizes he is just a toy. If the look on his face, paired with Randy Newman’s bitter music, doesn’t bring a tear to your eye, you are either too young or made of iron.
I’m old enough to have seen the original Toy Story in theaters, but I can’t think of any such great disappointments.
I don’t know that I’ve ever had such a defining moment of disappointment, though. There are things that I have gradually accepted, but this would be like finding out as an adult that you were adopted or something.
I was in my first year of junior college when the first film came out and appropos of nothing my Contemporary Theater teacher straight-up recommended the movie to us one day, saying he’d seen it and thought it was truly exceptional. By ‘98 my Film 101 class was running a clip from it as an example of filmmaking craft in animation.
I agree that this is really the only “big” movie of 1995 that has stood the test of time. “Babe” looked like it was going to become an evergreen title for a while, but the failure of the sequel with audiences was so massive that it couldn’t bounce back. Not to mention that it has a lot to answer for, being directly responsible for a ton of mediocre live-action/animatronic/CGI animal movies for the next 15 years or so, and less directly the dire line of Disney live-action/CGI remakes (which actually started in earnest with the “101 Dalmatians” remake in ‘96) we’re dealing with now.
That’s just the incredible thing about Toy Story. As Tom pointed it out, on its ‘first CGI feature’ credentials alone it is an absolute landmark, but that they knocked it out of the god damn ballpark as a tour-de-force of character, cinematography and story is still to my eyes unbelievable.
I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it stands up there with the very best of cinema, and it’s only because of the irrational stigma that still exists regarding animation (and kid-friendly films) that its stature in the public/critic sphere has been wrongly diminished.
I feel the same way about the Incredibles which without question for me is better than pretty much every Marvel film and stands toe-to-toe with the likes of Spiderman 2 or The Dark Knight… yet I barely hear the film mentioned in any ‘superhero films as art’ discussion.
Shout outs too to stuff like Princess Mononoke/Spirited Away that should have won/been nominated for Best Picture (not just best Animated Feature). Akira should also be better represented in the ‘sci-fi as art’ pantheons.
It’s interesting because it also uses major setpieces the way big action movies do. The scene in Sid’s house and final chase both jump out as looking like something you’d see in a live-action film.
Spider-Man 2 is the most overrated superhero movie of the last 20 years
Boy, the “Independence Day” retrospective’s gonna be an interesting one. I’m getting ready to rewatch it for some list-making I’m working on at Letterboxd, and my expectations are tempered. I loved seeing it in theaters (I was there opening night…and the night after that), but even in ‘96 I was willing to cop to it not being great cinema so much as just fun. Nowadays it’s rather unintentionally poignant in its “we can come together” messaging.
The internet’s general vibe around that movie has been a real rollercoaster over the years.
Fun is good enough for me. I still find ID4 very watchable and also dip into it whenever it’s on tv over here in UK.
Even though the arrival scenes of the alien spacecrafts seem very familiar to those of us kids who saw V in the 80’s, it was still spectacular to see in the cinema.
Around the time the sequel came out Lessons from the Screenplay did a thoughtful video that described what exactly the film did right that various disaster / sci-fi movies afterwards didn’t; one of those things was actually having a sense of scope and spectacle (basically, not just tossing off some FX work and calling it a day).
i remember it was such a hit siskel & ebert reviewed it twice.
Joss Whedon has actually said hardly any of his stuff made it into the film, though he did have the initial idea for one of the toys to be an insecure T-Rex struggling to make everyone think he’s big and tough.
He’s also said he never got enough credit for his contributions. Needs to make up his fucking mind.
It’s probably because this is a movie everyone likes, without a famous bad line like “toad struck by lightning”, so he can’t pull his standard move of claiming everyone messed up his work
Undoubtedly, because I’m pretty sure in the same article/interview he said Alien the Fourth wasn’t his fault.
The one thing in Toy Story that feels a bit out of step with the Pixar style as it would develop subsequently is the way music is used on the soundtrack. That “I Will Go Sailing No More” song that plays over Buzz’s post-realization crisis, especially.Pocahontas has largely been remembered as a disappointment, so it’s a bit weird to look back and remember that it was the #4 movie of the year at the box office in North America. But then, the post-Lion King Disney of the 1990s in general has a disconnect between how much money they made and how they’re perceived now. See also Tarzan, which made more money than any film between TLK and Frozen but is kind of forgotten — Mulan is the one people really remember, and Hunchback and to a lesser extent Hercules are also remembered as flawed but interesting.
I believe the soundtrack – at least the use of songs – was one of those compromises they made with Disney. They insisted it have musical numbers like their classic animated films (not wanting to mess with a formula too much I guess). Pixar didn’t want the characters to sing. Randy Newman songs over key scenes was were they landed. I’m glad it wasn’t something forced elsewhere though they’ve cropped up here and there – Jessie’s Song being the greatest use (though I Won’t Let You Throw Yourself Away in 4 is fun).
Woody’s antagonism towards Buzz is a metaphor for sibling rivalry that springs up whenever a new baby is brought into a house that previously had an only child. I figured that out while babysitting my nephews. For a few years, my sister only had one little boy, and he was just old enough to be watching “Toy Story” when his little brother was born. My nephew (the older one) could be just as hostile towards this strange new baby who was getting all the attention in his home.
It also works as “the new guy is going to push me out” workplace anxiety.
I say this as someone who’s three years old is currently wearing a woody tshirt, watching clips on YouTube and has seen the all the movies god only knows how many times over the past year, they still hold up even after the twentieth or so viewing. The stories hold up so well and there’s little details that you notice even after all those viewings.
That idea sets up the nice joke at the end when Andy gets the puppy.If they wanted to be darkly realistic, that puppy would be a bigger existential menace to the toys than Sid.
I love that the sequel plays against that assumption and has Buster be this loveable, loyal chum to the toys.
I also felt like Woody is the most gung-ho about everyone falling in line with their duty to be there for Andy, because he’s the one who is played with on a daily basis. The toy phone probably hadn’t been touched in five years.
Watching the movies as an adult Woody comes off as a lot darker. He has serious issues with codependency and insecurity and very possibly Stockholm syndrome too.
He COMPLETELY has Stockholm Syndrome.
If Andy asked him to drink some kool aid, Woody would have totally drank it
I was in my freshman year of college when this came out, and I forced my entire family to go see it. It took some convincing, since my parents were understandably loathe to go see a cartoon when they didn’t have small children anymore. But I kept shouting “But it’s gonna be amazing! A technological miracle!” I think they thought, much as you did Tom, that the computer animation was going to look weird and polygonal and rough. And then the movie was, as I knew it would be, amazing, but because of the story and the characters and the music. The technological stuff was just the gravy. My parents became believers after that, and I never had to convince them to see the rest of Pixar’s films. My mom still, to this day, will watch a Pixar movie when she has zero time for other cartoons.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 1995 Post: The Numbers1. Batman Forever, Warner Bros., $184,031,1122. Apollo 13, Universal, $172,036,3603. Toy Story, Disney/Pixar, $150,148,2224. Pocahontas, Disney, $141,551,2465. Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, Warner Bros., $104,371,4966. Casper, Universal, $100,328,194 7. Die Hard: With A Vengeance, 20th Century Fox, $100,012,499 8. GoldenEye, MGM, $93,662,1469. Crimson Tide, Hollywood Pictures, $91,387,195 10. Waterworld, Universal, $88,246,220Wikipedia1. Die Hard With A Vengeance, 20th Century Fox, $366,101,6662. Toy Story, Disney/Pixar, $363,007,1403. Apollo 13, Universal, $355,237,9334. GoldenEye, MGM, $352,194,0345. Pocahontas, Disney, $346,079,7736. Batman Forever, Warner Bros., $336,529,1447. Seven, New Line, $327,311,8598. Casper, Universal, $287,928,1949. Waterworld, Universal, $264,218,22010. Jumanji, TriStar Pictures, $262,797,249
Toy Story isn’t #1 in either list, so I wonder why it’s featured here. Domestic vs international box office?
Batman Forever is only number one if you’re looking at calander grosses (I.E. what movie made the most money between 1/1/1995 and 12/31/1995), which disadvantages a movie like Toy Story (which came out in late November), Toy Story is number one if you’re looking at In Year Releases (I.E. the highest grossing movie to have been released in the year 1995).
That explains “The Numbers” but not the wikipedia list.
Those are worldwide grosses rather than domestic
The Wikipedia ones for the past few posts have been the Worldwide Box Office, not domestic. It might be more useful to post that as its what Tom is going by. Maybe from Box Office Mojo? (The Numbers one is also that literal year -Jan – Dec – rather than the total each film in that year took in their whole release. I think it’s an interesting comparison but it’s also -for obvious reasons – not what the column is using)
Obligatory Every Movie Featured In These Articles Ranked From Best To Worst Post:The Godfather (1972)2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)The Exorcist (1973)Jaws (1975)Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981)Blazing Saddles (1974)Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid (1969)Rocky (1976)Jurassic Park (1993)The Graduate (1967)West Side Story (1961)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Forrest Gump (1994)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)
I get the feeling that Love Story is never going to leave the bottom of your list.
Depends if hulk6785 loves Armageddon like me or thinks it’s some of the worst cinema committed to screen (like some folk).
That’s the movie I thought that would take Love Story’s place at the bottom.
Three Men And A Baby has Tom Selleck, Ted Danson, AND Steve Guttenberg. Love Story has Ryan O’Neal. I rest my case.
Conversely, we’re halfway through the 90s and I get the feeling The Godfather isn’t go anywhere.
How you can rank Three Men and a Baby above Forrest Gump is beyond me.
TMAAB has done well to not be ranked 34th on the current list and I LIKE the film.
I saw this as a kid, and even if it was made independently it struck me as yet another Disney movie (The Iron Giant also seems like Disney despite being from Warner Bros). I decided to avoid Pixar, which is why the only other film from them I’ve seen is Up.
Do yourself a favor and watch the rest of the Pixar catalog (maybe not the Cars trilogy or The Good Dinosaur, but I can’t say that definitively because I haven’t seen them).
The first Cars is a solid movie heavy on the nostalgia for route 66. I have never seen the second or third, and the Good Dinosaur is just a mess.
The first Cars was the Pixar film most obviously directed at a very young audience, but it’s a beautiful movie and a lot of fun with some good messages. It would be remembered much differently without the sequels and spinoffs.
Cars was “ruined” because of Cars 2. Cars 3, although not as good as Cars, is far superior to 2 and is actually very good. I have spoken.
My intense hatred for the movie Doc Hollywood has kept me away from Cars.
I’ve never actually seen Doc Hollywood!
My memories of The Good Dinosaur are fuzzy, but I liked it quite a bit. It’s closer to a vintage Disney movie like Bambi than anything Disney has made in years. That scene where the Boy explains what happened to his family is textbook visual storytelling.
It’s visually stunning at points but the story is incoherent, Pixar’s movie by committee failed them and there are 3 or 4 movies mashed together.
The thing is that Pixar movies, as great as they usually are, often adhere to recognised storytelling structures *so* tightly (e.g. The Hero’s Journey for Up) that it was oddly refreshing for me to have one that played a little lose and indulged in some tangential pleasures (again this is something I think it has in common with 40s Disney films)
I know lots of people insist Pixar movies are good, but those people also generally seem to think Toy Story is good.
How is this not canceled for promoting a white male patriarchy?
I have loved Toy Story since the day it first came out, I saw it 3 or 4 times in theaters, I bonded over it with my college roommate and my husband – I love it. I even owned “Tiny Toy Stories” – the early Pixar animation shorts, all packaged up – on VHS. Katzenberg is an ass and Lasseter is a creep and Whedon is a jerk but that movie is just something special.
Two things about this film made me want to see it: The technology (of course), because the previews showed how far computer animation had come since the “Money For Nothing” video, and because it looked like a funny movie with quality talent involved. I was still impressed at how good a story they did around it, so A Bug’s Life was instantly required viewing when it came out (and is a weirdly forgotten film, I guess b/c the Pixar cry-generator hadn’t really been cranked up yet).
It also is just The Seven Samurai with creepy looking animated bugs.
I considered it more ¡Three Amigos! with animated bugs, but that’s also Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven-inspired. I’m also partial to things that involve former Kids in the Hall.
Agreed, it has a Seven Samurai type set-up, but it very specifically has the Three Amigos (latterly Galaxy Quest) twist on the scenario.Both have lead to some great films. On the play it straight side of the fence, we have:Seven SamuraiThe Magnificent SevenBattle Beyond the Stars (shut up, I like it)and on the ‘accidental frauds’ side we have:Three AmigosA Bug’s LifeGalaxy QuestPlus plenty more of each, I’m sure.
I always wondered if, at any time in the development of the movie, they asked if Tom Hanks could do more of a “cowboy” voice for the character. The fact that he doesn’t – and yet does in his voicebox and the old TV show clips, along with Stinky Pete – further complicates the character: Woody not only knows he’s a toy cowboy, he knows he’s an actor playing a cowboy! My head hurts.
Then its all the more puzzling why Hanks portrayed Walt Disney with a southern accent. Its not like we don’t have countless recordings of the man to know he spoke with in very mid-Western pattern.
(I remember thinking Toy Story was going to look cheap and polygonal, like the Canadian TV cartoon Reboot.)Alphanumeric!
yeah, I didn’t love the Reboot snark. That show was a lot of fun, and the character designs where excellent.
I was a ytv junkie when reboot began. It was a big deal. I think the character designs are good. I think Tom’s take is… Off. But the animation in S1 and s2 does not hold up very well. S3 is much better. Even by the time beast wars aired, mainframe had improved a lot. There are a lot of ways reboot and beast wars have more visual flair, style, and uniqueness than a lot of modern bland cg
The first CGI TV show was actually the (obscure in the US) French TV show Insektors, which started shortly before Reboot. All things considered, it’s actually aged pretty well, and the character designs have considerable charm.
I liked the villians George Sanders-esque purr
Megabyte, as voiced by prolific voice actor Tony Jay. Also Frollo in Disney hunchback, Shere Khan in talespin, countless others…Mainframe cast *excellent* actors. I tried watching the new Netflix transformers show. While I’m sure the animation is “technically” better, it is directed so poorly and looks so generic. It doesn’t look “25 years better” than reboot/beast wars. But the voice acting was awful. Generally generic and one-note, even produced and mixed badly.
that George Sanders-esque purr would have been handy for Shere Khan
My 3-year-old has had something of a Toy Story obsession over the last year, so I’ve watched the original well over 100 times in that time span. I can’t say it gives me the same joyous feeling it did the first time I saw it, but I can genuinely say parts still thrill me (the whole last 20 minutes or so is basically perfect) and I never mind watching it again. And again. And again.I can also definitively say that Toy Story 2 is the best movie in the series.
The problem is that he’s absolutely wrong, and when he discovers that he really is just a toy—that his entire self-conception was an illusion—it sends him into a suicidal identity-crisis funk.But then why didn’t he hook up with Woody? If Blade Runner has taught me anything it’s that contributing to the realization that one’s life was entirely a fiction and that you are technically non-human is apparently a basis of romance.
I saw Tin Toy in animation class in the late 80’s and you have no idea how revolutionary it felt. We sat there stunned and our lecturer was just grinning. Also, it was funny af.
Went to an early-afternoon show the day it opened. Maybe 20 or 30 other people in there, but they were all mothers with their small kids. I remember feeling a little uncomfortable being 22-year old guy in there by himself. Still enjoyed the movie enough to convince my parents to go see it with me the next day.
Outdated media story: I won a copy of Toy Story on VHS (and a Toy Story edutainment CD-ROM) through a radio call-in trivia contest. The question was, “What is the name of Charlie Brown’s school?” No one calling in could get it, and I had time to search through all the Peanuts specials we had taped off of TV until I found one where they showed an exterior of the school (the answer is Birchwood Elementary).
But Allen doesn’t bring much Home Improvement baggage to Toy Story, just as he hasn’t brought any of his more-recent right-wing-crank baggage to any of the sequels. I’m very aware of the audience here, but I’m not sure what this has to do with anything unless I missed the part where you talk about all the other actors’ political leanings. I remember a commenter (deservedly) getting hammered for bringing this same topic up saying something along the lines that they should recast Buzz for Toy Story 4 because Allen is a vocal Republican. Lest we not forget #9 of 2018’s 11 Questions: “Do you think art should be separated from the artist?” which was answered with a consensus yes. So I really don’t understand the inclusion of this line unless we’re trying to fill a Splinter-sized hole.
I think it was relevant here in terms of discussing Hanks bringing his celebrity persona to the role of Woody and Allen not doing so, either here or later. Usually I’m against these points being raised put of nowhere but the Hanks mention was a good point and it’s a good comparison.
The point isn’t about political leanings, it’s about a public persona. Tim Allen isn’t just a Republican, he’s very outspoken and stars in a sitcom that’s specifically oriented around a family with conservative values. It’s not a dig on Allen, he seems to be very conscious about that being who he is.
Tom is simply contrasting how some of the characters can be a reflection of who their actors are. The Woody character be viewed through the prism of who Hanks is. Woody starts the movie as a character who is a leader, well liked, and has a sort of family charisma.
On the other hand, Buzz is a recognizable name but it’s not really a mirror (warped or otherwise) of Allen’s persona then or now.
I just posted another comment on this, but disagree with you because Allen’s bluster and overconfidence on Home Improvement made him perfect for Buzz.
Sure, I was more trying to contextualize the line about Allen’s politics and how it wasn’t about cancelling him for being a Republican or whatever.
Casting Allen as Buzz was genius; it just fits. For me, the casting gold standard is Jack Black in School of Rock— no one else could fit that role by a Headley Grange mile. Allen is up there, too.
At the time Allen’s politics weren’t really known and even if they were no one would really have cared.But he absolutely brought Tim Taylor’s near-delusional confidence to the role of Buzz. I’d say the timing of Allen’s casting was perfect given his TV persona.
I just surprised ‘separate art from artist’ was answered yes. Nobody’s doing it.
(Pixar will appear in this column again.)GRADE: 10/10
Sadly not for Ratatouille or WALL-E. I’d love to have read Tom’s discussion on those.
They might get a mention in the runners up bit?
Good point!
EVERY Toy Story movie is great, even the weirdly standalone-ish epilogue. Also Die Hard With a Vengeance is in fact almost as good as the original. It’s not as well constructed, but it has something to say and watching Willis and Jackson pingpong off each other is fun as hell. Also Jeremy Irons. Time for a rewatch.
This was great but oh fuck am I ready for your analysis of Independence Day. Not nearly talked about as much on here as Pixar’s stuff has been.
Back to Toy Story, it’s one of those movies I never go back to because I watched it a ton when it first came out and also because it does look a little…off compared to their more recent work. It’s the same mentality as seeing the first few seasons of Futurama or Family Guy. I just don’t bother anymore, but doesn’t mean they’re not great.
IMO, 2D animation doesn’t really “date” as much because the technology and techniques essentially haven’t changed as drastically as the improvement of CGI. Like, Snow White was made in the 30s and still looks great, and stuff from today like say that Green Eggs and Ham show doesn’t look too dissimilar from it. Compare something like the new CGI Muppet Babies show to ReBoot and the contrast is undeniable.
Exactly. CGI ages in a way 2D animation does not. Tin Toy is the perfect example. Computer animation is limited by the program’s limitations. Meaning if the technology isn’t there, they can’t do it. (Think of all the movies that couldn’t get made at certain times because the tech wasn’t there). Meanwhile a hand-drawn image is always going to look exactly as you remembered it.
Tom, would love to get a special edition of A History of Violence for Die Hard With A Vengeance, a close second to the original Die Hard in terms of sheer entertainment. The ending doesn’t QUITE land, but the actual narrative is SOOOOOOO FUCKING GOOD
That one month where the AV Club had the Pixar Moment feature and we got to discuss Pixar movies every day was a lot of fun.Maybe they should cover a Neil Young album once a day and call it The Neil Young Moment!
I love Toy Story with all my being. It made me want to become a 3D animator and my career is dependent mainly on me seeing Toy Story.Question: has there ever been a remake of an animated movie? I don’t think so. Would it be crazy to re-do Toy Story? Like, use the exact same audio. Even shot for shot, but update it with 2020 technology? I know, blasphemy; and I normally would agree with anyone who thought so. George Lucas would agree with me, not sure if anyone else will!
If not Toy Story because it’s such a classic….A Bug’s Life deserves to be remade. It was such a good story/great characters/great humor but watching it now kind of hurts my eyes. Toy Story has a softness to it because they nailed the lighting but A Bug’s Life is just kind of harsh (at least the outdoor scenes) imho.Toy Story 2 kind of evolved a bit, although I remember reading something about how Pixar didn’t take advantage of technological advances at the time purposely because they didn’t want it to look overwhelmingly different than TS1. By TS3, I’m pretty sure they abandoned that idea because it would be a bad move artistically. Monsters, Inc. is the first Pixar movie where the look and technology doesn’t seem dated, also imho.
“Question: has there ever been a remake of an animated movie?”Disney has made an industry of it: Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, Aladdin, Cinderella, Mulan, The Jungle Book, 101 Dalmatians.If you mean a purely animated remake I think The Lion King fits that category.
Sorry, I should’ve specified a 3D animated movie! A 3D animated remake of a 3D animated movie. And yeah, The Lion King is probably the closest to what I was thinking…
lol touche
I can only think of animated remakes in the realm of videogames. And even then, a lot of those remakes are by new studios. The closest thing to a near exact re-do is probably Metal Gear Solid: Twin Snakes. It was still done under the guidance of creator Hideo Kojima, brought back all the actors to re-record their lines, and was developed once again by Konami Computer Entertainment Japan (with help from Silicon Knights). I know it wasn’t a movie, but Metal Gear Solid was a landmark cinematic game full of cutscenes, so it was basically a movie-like experience. They took that animation and recreated all of it with updated technology. Just to see if they could. And even then, they still added a lot of flourishes that ended up annoying fans.
A Bugs Life is also the one I would pick for a makeover. (But they probably won’t since photoreal insects are pretty gross)
Ha, I was thinking more about the effects/shading/lighting etc. being updated but keeping the characters the same design. But you’re right; a real Hopper would be terrifying, and not just because it’s voiced by Kevin Spacey.
I probably haven’t seen it in 20 years, but I still remember how brutal Hopper’s ending felt for a kid’s movie. That and how the brightly-coloured German accordion slugs look when you find them under a couch in Tennessee. Yuck.
If you know Demon’s Souls and have seen the footage of the PS5 remake, it sounds like what you’re talking about.
This was supposedly the plan for Babylon 5. They shot the live action in HD, but only rendered the CGI in standard def. They were going to rerender in HD for the syndication package for pennies on the dollar when the series was complete. Unfortunately, with PTEN folding and all the rest, the digital assets were apparently lost, so they’re just left with blurry, letterboxed footage.
“While dozens of other action movies were ripping off his original Die Hard, John McTiernan’s sequel Die Hard: With A Vengeance gleefully discards its own blueprint, sending Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson madly ping-ponging across New York City.”
I know this is the common take on Die Hard 3, but I actually think the way that McTiernan shoots New York, it become just another enclosed space. With a Vengeance often feels more closed off and claustrophobic than Die Harder. It’s just that the enclosed space happens to be the largest city in the United States, but it still works.
I love Die Hard with a Vengance, until the last bit when they end up on the container ship. It’s too bad they couldn’t have come up with an ending that fit the rest of the movie.
There’s always something discomfiting about the push-and-pull of the Toy Story movies – they have become increasingly melancholy as they tell us, over and over, to let go, and that you can’t go back, yet for 25 years we have been invited to go back. I suppose the last film was the definitive can’t-go-back message, and that is the end. It’s a satisfying series of films, compared to many. I just wish I could get that feeling back, for a moment, of the first film, without all the sadness to come.
Maybe b/c of Toy Story 3’s opening, but the opening of Toy Story now makes me cry too. It’s so beautiful, and so innocent. It’s definitely this hellscape of a year, but I find myself yearning extra strongly to be a kid again, so this scene just hits so hard…
Is Babe as a piece of film entirely transcendent of its time? No. Is Babe 2: Pig in the City? Yes.
I actually think the first Babe gets underrated in some quarters, on account of the second being a cult classic that didn’t go down so well at the time.The first film is still a stone classic. James fucking Cromwell, man.
Damn, I kind of forgot about Young Sherlock Holmes. I might have to rewatch that soon.
I remember seeing Toy Story 3 in the theaters with my 2 daughters, and vowing never to watch Toy Story 4 if it came out. I kept that promise. Not because it wasnt a good movie, but failing to stop the gasps and sobs from the end of 3. The now college aged girls always seem to bring this up.
Classic= timeless in my book. Anything that retains relevance well past its creation is great art.
Between Toy Story and Galaxy Quest, it’s a shame Allen couldn’t stick to a full time career doing variations on Captain Kirk. It’s the only appealing persona he’s ever adopted, and Buzz Lightyear is the best acting of his career, mainly because live-action, Allen can’t keep himself from mugging at all times. Even though Pixar’s animators were using what we’d now consider stone-age tech, they were able to make Buzz emote much more subtly than Allen ever could.
“There’s a lot going on in Toy Story. The central idea—toys are sentient beings who live lives of servitude and who only want to be played with—allows a whole lot of thematic wiggle room. Sometimes, the toys seem like harried and anxious workers, watching the clock run out on a dying industry… There’s a weird religious component, too. The kids are indifferent, all-powerful beings whose fleeting approval means everything.”It’s an inverted Animal Farm (the symbolically anthropomorphic characters have little to no desire to rebel against the system, even if some human children are revealed to be monstrous), and that’s as close to pure genius as you can ever ask mainstream Hollywood moviemaking to be. Bonus points for the fact that old-school ‘90s Woody (see above) still looks a lot like Tom Hanks’ son.
It was only mentioned as a runner up here but I really really love Jumanji
I remember getting the novelization of Jumanji for Christmas way before I actually saw the movie, so I ended up with a weird headcanon for it that kind of conflicted with the film. It might be the least-consequential piece of art to ever inspire a headcanon.
1995’s biggest hits are mostly family films.
#NotMy1995. Along with Die Hard 3 I remember Braveheart, and Se7en, and Heat, and Bad Boys, and Desperado, and GoldenEye, and fukkin Species! That was my year. Toy Story and Pocahontas were outliers, but I spent a lot of 1995 trying to sneak in to the Casinos and the Showgirls. If I saw anything that skewed “younger” it was along the lines of Batman Forever, or Mortal Kombat, which are still mildly violent.
I don’t know if Clueless counts since it’s geared more towards teens, but I was just moving away from family films around this age. If I had a favorite of these after Toy Story it’s probably… The Brady Bunch Movie?
Pretty great year, when you put it like that. Although I hate Braveheart and I think Se7en is very overrated.Showgirls and Mortal Kombat, on the other hand, are much better than their reputations suggest. Heat, Desperado and obviously Clueless are all stone classics in their respective fields.