Toy Story 3 went Ham(m) on all our hearts—and made a fortune doing it
Image: Graphic: Rebecca FassolaScreenshot: Pixar Film Features toy story
I must’ve known that all the toys weren’t about to die. I had to know. This was a G-rated kids’ movie, the third entry in a beloved franchise. Movies like that generally don’t end with their heroes being reduced to puddles of toxic-smelling goo. And yet Toy Story 3 got me. Sitting in the theater, holding a toddler who didn’t yet understand anything except that the big baby was scary, I was completely caught up in the idea that Woody and Buzz and all the others were about to meet their ultimate destinations in a nightmarish molten garbage pit. My rational mind no longer functioned. I was all emotion.
Toy Story 3, like so many Pixar films, preys on your emotions. If you start thinking too hard, you might start asking difficult questions. For instance: Can a toy die? What does it mean to die if you don’t have any biological functions in the first place? When your detached body parts can operate independently of one another, is death itself merely a construct? Will all your immolated atoms go on to lives of their own? And will those atoms live out their lives hoping that children will play with them? Children can’t play with atoms. Are those atoms then sentenced to a hell of eternal frustration?
Toy Story 3 won’t let you ponder those questions because it’s too busy power-bombing your inner child through a flaming table. In the film’s climactic scene, the one where the toys are all sliding downward toward doom, these inexplicable sentient beings all exhibit absolute dignity and absolute love. They wordlessly accept what’s about to happen, holding plastic hands and giving one another whatever comfort they can offer. We’d all be lucky to go out like that, and the beauty of the moment allows you to forget, for just a second, that you are watching a lucrative global children’s-entertainment franchise and not a bleak European art film.
That moment at the incinerator didn’t just have the weight of narrative behind it. It also had time, familiarity. When Toy Story 3 came out, it had been 11 years since the last movie in the franchise. People who’d seen the first two films as kids might have been grown-ups by the time part three came around. They might’ve had kids of their own. These characters might have been as familiar as the actual toys these people had in their rooms once. The Toy Story franchise had told you how this little community of toys had lived, and now it was showing you how the toys would die. This was some heavy shit.
It took a whole lot of corporate machinations before Toy Story 3 could fuck around with people’s feelings on that level. Fifteen years earlier, the original Toy Story had been a delightful cinematic Hail Mary. Pixar, an animation studio that had already been through a long and chaotic gestation period, had used Disney’s money to test the idea that computer animation could tell a complete story, and the experiment had succeeded wildly. Disney had responded to that success by milking Pixar for whatever the company was worth.
Under the original terms of the distribution deal between the companies, Pixar would make the movies, and Disney would own the characters and sequel rights for those first five films. Toy Story 2 was originally planned as a low-budget straight-to-video release, but when Disney deemed the sequel promising enough for a theatrical run, the Pixar braintrust went into brand-protection overdrive, with writers and animators working around the clock to turn it into something special. Toy Story 2 turned out, if anything, even better than its predecessor, and it was also a massive hit—No. 3 at the 1999 box office, behind only The Phantom Menace and The Sixth Sense.
Disney boss Michael Eisner rewarded Pixar by letting the company know that the terms of their deal didn’t include sequels, that they still owed Disney more movies. Pixar boss Steve Jobs was furious. Eisner and Jobs came to hate one another, and when Pixar finished up its original contract with Disney, the animation studio announced plans to go fully independent. Eisner responded by founding a whole new Disney animation studio, called Circle 7, which would be devoted entirely to making sequels to those original Pixar movies. Circle 7 had a whole staff of animators and writers, and it had a Toy Story 3 script ready to go. (That script reportedly involved Buzz Lightyear getting recalled and shipped to a factory in Taiwan and the other toys going to rescue him. It sounds like ass.)
Partly because of fan and investor backlash over those Circle 7 plans, Disney pushed Eisner out and replaced him with Bob Iger. Iger, now the most powerful man in Hollywood, immediately ditched all those Circle 7 plans and instead went to work mending the bridges between Disney and Pixar. Ultimately, Disney paid $7.6 billion to buy Pixar outright. (When Disney bought Marvel and Lucasfilm, the other two splashy acquisitions of the early Iger era, those two moves cost about $4 billion each, which means Disney paid nearly as much for Pixar as it did for Marvel and Star Wars combined.)
All those moving parts meant that America went more than a decade between Toy Story sequels. Toy Story 3 was Pixar’s first feature as a fully entrenched part of the Disney empire. Lee Unkrich, a longtime Pixar insider who’d been co-director of Toy Story 2, signed on to direct. Screenwriter Michael Arndt was a relative newcomer to Pixar, but he’d just won an Oscar for writing Little Miss Sunshine, his first script. All the living members of the Toy Story cast returned. The film ended up with a budget of $200 million, an astronomical pricetag for an animated movie. Really, though, Toy Story 3 cost Disney something more like $7.6 billion to make, due to the purchase of Pixar. The movie had to deliver, and that’s what it did.
Considering the vast economic forces at work, it’s amazing that Toy Story 3 works as well as it does. The film certainly stands as pure entertainment. The opening sequence, a full-on Indiana Jones-level action setpiece, serves as a tremendous showcase for computer animation, which had come a long way since Woody and Buzz first arrived in 1995. But then the movie goes straight from that silly, inventive exhilaration to roundhouse kicking you right in the feelings. Andy, the creative little kid who keeps coming up with these entire worlds for his toys, has grown up. He’s ready to leave for college. He no longer has any use for his toys, and those toys have to orchestrate desperate, dramatic plans to get him to even look at them.
All through the franchise, the toys had been grappling with their own fleeting usefulness. They were like manual laborers in an industry that’s already been rendered obsolete, just waiting for the axe to finally fall. Woody, the hero of the series, is also its deluded religious fanatic—the one who insists, against all possible evidence, that being a beloved toy is a worthy end in itself. His companions don’t have his wild-eyed zeal. They go along with it, but they know it can’t last, and this causes some serious soul-searching. Finally, as Toy Story 3 opens, they all realize that it’s over. They adjust, at least as well as they can.
The promise of life at a daycare center seems, at first, like some long-promised paradise. Ned Beatty’s Lots-O-Huggin’ Bear feeds them lines that sound like utopian Marxist manifestos: “We don’t need owners at Sunnyside. We own ourselves.” But Sunnyside turns out to be a vision of hell, with deranged toys jamming plastic body parts up their nostrils and hammering them into perverse shapes, a great horror-film sequence that clearly informed the most deranged scenes in Sausage Party six years later.
Most of Toy Story 3 is a prison break movie, and it’s a tremendously fun one. The cast, already utterly stacked, gets even deeper: Michael Keaton, Jodi Benson, Timothy Dalton, Kristen Schaal, Bonnie Hunt, Jeff Garlin, Whoopi Goldberg. The villains are a fun group of action-figure henchmen, and most of them are ultimately redeemable. Many of the individual scenes are great, like the gloriously weird sight of Mr. Potato Head’s features jammed into a tortilla—including, uselessly, his mustache and bowler hat. The people at Pixar had been putting together hijinks-heavy adventures at an absurdly high level for years, and the action scenes in Toy Story 3 might be their best. But all those zippy and triumphant little beats lead up to the moment where the scheming Lotso reveals that he’s really just a nihilist: “We’re all just trash, waiting to be thrown away! That’s all a toy is!” Even worse: The bear probably has a point.
The humans of the Toy Story films generally don’t have a lot of loyalty to their plastic belongings, and when they do, it’s a bit weird. The falsest note in Toy Story 3 is the idea that Andy would bring Woody, his ancient vinyl cowboy, to college with him. If I’d known a kid at college with a toy cowboy in his dorm room, I would’ve been seriously concerned about his mental stability. If Woody actually had gone to college with Andy, then there’s a 500% chance that a drunk roommate would’ve thrown the sheriff out a window within the first month. Andy is an outlier case, and even in this rare situation, Woody’s undying devotion seems deluded. Still, the final moment when Andy gives up all his toys to little Bonnie just rips my heart out all over again, an emotional Mortal Kombat fatality.
The cosmology of the Toy Story movies, that inanimate objects that are actually alive and want to be played with, never made sense. It’s a movie franchise built out of childhood dream-logic. We never learn, for instance, why the toys will stop at nothing to keep people from knowing that they’re actually alive, unless those toys are really just worried about our collective sanity. (Sid, the kid who’s doubtlessly scarred by the cursed knowledge of toy sentience in the first Toy Story, reappears in Toy Story 3 as a garbageman. We at least know that he’s gainfully employed, which is a relief.) Throughout the franchise, though, Toy Story gets us invested in this ridiculous world, to the point where entire theaters full of adults were sobbing at the prospect of seeing these little guys get melted.
In the 16 years between the first and third Toy Story films, computer animation took over. Five of the 10 biggest hits of 2010 were 3D animated family spectacles. One franchise limped to its sad-but-still-lucrative end with Shrek Forever After. Two other franchises started up, the shrill Despicable Me and the richly imagined How To Train Your Dragon. Disney Animation Studios, now with Pixar’s braintrust installed in leadership positions, bounced back with Tangled, a film that kicked off another renaissance. The year’s No. 2 blockbuster, Tim Burton’s garbage-ass Alice In Wonderland, is technically considered a live-action film, but it’s a quasi-remake of a Disney cartoon classic, and it’s really mostly computer-animated itself.
Even in the midst of all that competition, Toy Story 3 dominated, not just financially but also critically. At the end of the year, the movie wasn’t just the year’s biggest hit; it was also only the third animated film to compete for Best Picture at the Oscars. Michael Arndt became the first screenwriter ever to be Oscar-nominated for his first two screenplays. Toy Story 3 won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song, and it definitely deserved the Best Picture statue a whole lot more than actual winner The King’s Speech. (I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Toy Story 3 deserved Best Picture over The Social Network. I’m just going to sit here and tell you that Toy Story 3 gets a whole lot more burn in my house than The Social Network does.)
In the years after Toy Story 3, Pixar went through a creative rough patch, following that movie up with Cars 2 and Brave and Monsters University. Eventually, the studio steered into its rep for being the animation studio that made kids’ movies targeted at making parents cry. In 2017, Pixar jettisoned boss John Lasseter, director of the first Toy Story, for sexual misconduct. Many of the other Pixar lifers, including Toy Story 3 director Lee Unkrich, quietly departed afterwards. Pixar has not suffered. The studio now cranks out zippy, likable feelings-wreckers at a furious pace. The last Toy Story was great. So was the last Incredibles. So were Inside Out and Coco and Soul. And yet nothing that Pixar has done since Toy Story 3 has made me feel quite the way I felt when those toys stared death in the face and held each other’s hands.
The runner-up: Virtually every big hit of 2010 was a family film. Besides all those animated movies, the year-end top 10 also had a Harry Potter, a Twilight, and a very bad Iron Man. Christopher Nolan’s wild dream-heist headfuck Inception would stand out in any context. Amidst that company, it looks like a trippy-ass miracle.
With Inception, Nolan corralled a cast of movie stars, all at their absolute most charming, and threw them into an international espionage adventure full of tricks and action set pieces and genuinely great special effects. But with all that pure cinematic pleasure, Nolan also put together a dense stoner-logic storyline about what happens when people get trapped in their own dreamspace. It’s amazing that Inception exists at all, and it’s even more amazing that it made enough money to reach No. 6 on that year-end chart.
Next time: An eight-film fantasy saga truly reaches the fireworks factory, arriving at the protracted climax of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows: Part II.
255 Comments
One thing that I don’t think Pixar gets enough credit for is its ability to create characters who forge an instant bond with an audience. They’re getting viewers to empathize and identify with toys, cars, bugs, fish, a French rat, an old man, and they’re doing it so effectively that the end of the story (or hell, even the beginning) frequently reduces you to tears. Speaking as a writer, that’s hard to do! A lot of attention is given to the meticulous nature of Pixar’s plotting method (which typically involves two or three years of outlining and revision), but it’s all grounded in solid character work.
They throw out the hack writer’s textbook which insists that characters need long explicit backstories to make audiences care about them. The notable exception is Up, and even then all of the intro isn’t really about filling in gaps about Carl so much as they just really, really like telling that story.If a movie can’t set the table in a minute, it’s doing things wrong.
It’s necessary for Up, though – because the movie is about dealing with loss. So they have to show us what was lost and how valuable it was.
We still care about Ellie and Carl from the moment we meet them, though.
It works so damn well in Up that you are 100% on-board with Carl remaining completely frozen in time, his house exactly as it was when Ellie was alive. Fuck those developers, that kid can screw off, leave us alone in this museum to Ellie.
This is why the cars sequels are such garbage. They flesh out a world that didn’t need it.
And a robot that doesn’t speak!
TS3 is pretty great, but I never much wanted to revisit it. (The bit where Andy is playing with his toys with Bonnie before he goes off to college sure did make me tear up, though.) Meanwhile, I can watch my two favorite Pixar movies, Ratatouille and A Bug’s Life a million times without ever getting tired of them. (And I have, because I have children.)Speaking of How to Train Your Dragon, though, that movie has a killer score. “Test Drive,” anyone?
Same with me. I’m slight older than the Andy character (who shares my name) and this one hit me so hard emotionally at the time that I haven’t been able to rewatch it.
I’m quite a bit older than Toy Story 3’s Andy, but 17-year-old Sarcastro was a dead fucking ringer for 17-year-old Andy, so I was also thrown for something of a loop by this one.
You think you were gutted, talk to someone who’s kid grew up watching the movies and was about to leave for college when TS3 came out.My sister must have been a basket case. Hell, my wife was having a hard time with it and our oldest was five.
It’s like saying goodbye to your younger you, or the house you grew up in. Or outgrowing (sort of) your parents, if you and your parents loved each other. As a child of divorce I hated TS2 for the Jesse-abandonment scene, and I voluntarily won’t watch it.
Oh mate yeah I hear you on that. Having had to do both divorced parents and the family home thing, I know exactly how hard those scenes hit.
I firmly believe that TS3 is a legitimate and worthy masterpiece in the truest sense of the word. I will never watch it again because I literally can’t handle it. The scene with Andy giving his toys to Bonnie almost killed me. When the movie was over in the theater and the lights came on, every adult in my row was drying their eyes with napkins.
Speaking of How to Train Your Dragon, though, that movie has a killer score. “Test Drive,” anyone?
I love that.
I can’t believe that the first time I saw ‘Ratatouille’ I thought, “Yeah, that was okay.” Subsequent rewatches – and there have been many – have convinced me it’s a near-perfect film. As someone who loves to discuss food, has been a semi-professional critic, and believes very much in the idea that greatness can come from anywhere, ‘Ratatouille’ feels like a movie that was made just for me.
Somehow Ratatouille has past me by. I think I’ve seen about half of the film years ago, when it was shown on BBC around Christmas time. I guess need to revisit it, as it seems like I’m missing out on a good film.
Ratatouille is wonderful, one of my top non-Toy Story Pixar movies.
Pretty sure you’ll love Ratatouille. It’s a lot of fun (has some very good slapstick too) and contains at least one of those Pixar moments that makes you cry (or almost cry, whatever). Thing is, in Ratatouille, each time I watch it, that moment surprises me – I know it’s coming but I don’t think it could still affect me.No spoilers, obviously. But yeah, watch the movie.
Cool, thanks for the pointers.
Ratatouille is one of my favorite films for a lot reasons, I think mostly because it shifts gears so effortlessly between different genres and winds up telling a bunch of little stories instead of one big one.
I would argue Antons flashback to his childhood is one of the more subtle but effective emotional Pixar moments.
Ratatouille stands out because it doesn’t try to be a kids movie that adults can enjoy. It is a movie for adults that even kids can enjoy.
Ratatouille is second only to WALL-E for me. It somehow gets better whenever I revisit it.
Ratatouille is a near perfect film, especially in the scene near the end with the food critic. I’ve been a professional chef for over 20 years, and I’ve only had a few instances in that period where the food took me back to a different, better, time and place. And it really is not a joke when I say that my finest, best food has always been using all the wrong ingredients but making it work.
How to Train Your Dragon is one of my all time favourite animations and I don’t know how it happened. I feel quite possessive of it.
So much so that when the “okay-it’s-fine-I-guess” movie, Love and Monsters recycled the opening from it beat for beat I felt immediately cross.
Seriously, watch the two side by side, for the first ten minutes, aside from a mention of sex in L&M, it is THE SAME MOVIE.
I really don’t like Toy Story 3. Take away the lava scene, and the jokes are just so hacky.And as for that lava scene, fuck that. It’s resolved with a literal deus ex machina. Maybe that’s the joke? It’s like the writers worked backwards; tried to be as emo as possible; wrote themselves into a corner; and then just said “fuck it”, bring in the claw. If they needed a Disney death, they should have just whacked Andy. Let him get hazed at college and die of alcohol poisoning.I much (much, much) prefer the ingenuity and teamwork on display in TS1’s final set piece. That one still gets me.
The climax is resolved with a literal deus ex machina that is a conclusion to something that was created in the first movie — the worshippers of The Claw have ascended to god status themselves! I ding Pixar a lot for their clockwork screenplays but I loved this.
You couldn’t even cut warm butter with that edge, dude.
So true about the How To Train Your Dragon Score. Wonderful listening. We just watched that movie last week and it is so good.
HtTYD should have won Best Animated Picture.TS3 should have won Best Picture.
I love the How To Train Your Dragon score. I thought for the longest time it would take a lot to beat it.Then Henry Jackman came along and scored Big Hero 6, and I heard “First Flight,” and “Test Drive” lost the top spot almost immediately.But I’m with you – TS3 and TS4 don’t have the rewatchability of the first two. I haven’t felt like revisiting them after seeing them in theaters. I’m not sure exactly why, but I suspect it’s because those two movies are less about the joy of discovery than they are about dealing with the existential terrors of time and death.
“First Flight” to me evokes the sort of triumphant scores you hear when watching movies about the first astronauts.“Test Drive” does an incredible job of helping depict Hiccup’s growing bond with Toothless and his thrill of discovery.I’d hate to have to choose between the two, I’ll tell you that.
I enjoy having film scores on while I’m working, and that’s one of the better ones.
Great for writing, too. I wrote four novels while listening to the HTTYD, Inception, Tron: Legacy, LOTR, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Star Wars scores on repeat.
Since no one else has mentioned the rhinoceros beetle in the room, I guess I’ll bring it up: I can watch my two favorite Pixar movies, Ratatouille and A Bug’s Life a million timesTo be perfectly clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong to esteem A Bug’s Life so highly (tbh, I think it’s underrated myself), but you’re the first person I’ve ever seen mention it as one of their top two Pixar films. So, what about A Bug’s Life speaks to you so strongly and elevates it above the rest of Pixar’s oeuvre? I’m so used to seeing people dismissing or ignoring that film, it’d be nice to see someone talk about why they think it’s great.
It’s clever and fun. It also has Denis Leary and David Hyde Pierce snarking at each other. “I’m the only stick with eyeballs!”
I rewatched Inception for the first time since cinemas last year and fucking loved it even more than I did the first time. Just a great, great movie.
I liked it fine before, but I also enjoyed it even more when I rewatched it recently. Maybe it’s one of the movies that works better on a second viewing (when I’m less confused). Maybe amongst all the regurgitated crap we get today, it still manages to feel feel fresh. Maybe its visuals, the inventive ideas, the cast, but Inception hits a sweet spot for me
Yeah the second viewing makes the plot a hell of a lot clearer. It also helped that I wasn’t watching it at 9pm on opening night after work and wasn’t half asleep like I was the first time.
Like the grumps that insist that Up is all about its first half hour and then nada, I find myself being a grump about TS3: It’s all about its last half hour and everything before that was a “meh.” Barbie and Ken? The prison break sequence reminded me too much of what the first movie did better. I don’t deny the near-death sequence was riveting. Both that sequence and Andy donating the toys to Bonnie are a one-two gut punch. I’ve heard it said that a novel can be garbage, but if it sticks the landing in the last chapter, everything that came before will be forgiven. I think TS3 could have been a riff on any genre (it could have been a sports movie, it could have been a Muppets-style “save the theater” comedy/musical) as long as you tack on Lotso kidnapping the cast and setting them up to die, followed by the reprieve, and the goodbye sequence – I think (sigh) it probably still gets all the box office and awards. (PS, I don’t feel that way about Up. I’m a sucker for blimps.)
Great write-up. It’s easy to forget the cultural impact TS3 had now that it lands near the halfway point between Pixar’s first movie and today. It makes me wish that level of care and that rejection of quick and easy inside jokes was put into a lot more modern reboots. It took what made those movies special, and instead of reminding you how good those old ones were, it gave you 100 completely brand new reasons to love them all even more.
If you start thinking too hard, you might start asking difficult questions.And I’ll say it; frankly, we’ve all gotten way too obsessed with “thinking too hard” and “asking difficult questions” when it comes to things like children’s entertainment, and we really need to dial it back down a lot. It’s a consequence of the hot-take media-savvy TV Tropes-Headscratchers culture we’re living in when we think all of this makes us seem clever and insightful when usually it’s just the same boring pedantic nitpicks done in the same boring pedantic way by the same boring pedantic people who think they’re oh-so-smart because they’ve figured out that a story intended for children, gasp, doesn’t have 100% foolproof airtight logic and can’t stand up to rigorous forensic pathological analysis. “But how can a toy die?” Simple, they’re toys that come to life, so they just can. It’s a fantasy movie calling on a childhood fantasy as old as toys themselves. Just go with it, you’re impressing no one worth impressing when you pick apart Toy Story like that. [Grumbles and throws another handful of bread crumbs for the pigeons.]
Speak for yourself; I’m STILL researching whether or not Shrek had a legal claim to that swamp in the first place, and if Far Far Away laws regarding squatter’s rights would have given him grounds to evict the other characters from said swamp.
I mean, you could argue that this is a valid concern even if you follow ScottyEnn’s logic because Shrek’s rights to that swamp are actually a plot point in more than one of the movies, and the whole story could have been resolved in minutes if a lawyer had shown up with proof that Shrek doesn’t actually own the land. Whereas “why do the toys talk” is never a plot point in Toy Story. They just do.
I mean, maybe he had the grounds on paper, but don’t forget that Lord Farquaad is a despot who has the power to bend and break the law as he sees fit. That’s why defeating him was always going to be the only real long-term solution.
Clearly Shrek was a marxist film after all…
This needs to be copy-pasted as a reply to every article and comment, of any kind, anywhere, that complains about worldbuilding logic in fiction. If a story hits the right emotional beats, then whether the logic makes sense is irrelevant; if it doesn’t hit the right emotional beats, then what difference does the logic make?
This is also why people generally accept the strangeness of Toy Story’s universe at face value but nitpick the world of Cars endlessly: Toy Story is emotionally satisfying, so you don’t CARE if it makes sense. Cars…well, Cars sucks, so you end up sitting there bored and wondering about the larger implications of cars having bathrooms.
Yep, precisely. Stories don’t have to make perfect internal sense. The more emotional investment we have, the more nonsense it takes to bother us.
The more nonsensical a story is, the less emotional investment we have. Why does Gabby need a voice box when all toys can talk whenever they want?
Counterpoint, they have to have their own inner logic that is adhered to. Much can be written off as magical or magical realism that we just accept, but they can’t contradict themselves. Otherwise, you could argue that Lost ended well and everyone knows the last season was shit.
There’s a distinction between internal logic (which should be consistent) and whether the given logic matches real-world logic (which is mostly irrelevant and superseded by the emotional power of the story). I was talking about the latter, not the former (and I think ScottyEnn was too).
There’s a really good video essay on YouTube I’m too lazy to look up where the video maker discusses plot holes, and IIRC he raises the good point that the plot holes themselves don’t really matter, it’s the fact that the movie wasn’t good enough in other ways to make you overlook the plot holes that’s the real problem.
I’m guessing it was this?
That’s the one.
It’s a decent video, I was fairly impressed when I saw it. It’s the stupidest thing, but I saw another YouTuber offhandedly refer to Patrick H Willems as “huge ego” and I just haven’t been able to take him seriously since. One of the most effective dismissals I’ve ever heard.
I’ve kind of come to be a bit down on Video Essays in general in recent years too, in their own way they can be almost as closed-minded and misdirected as plot hole obsessives, and so many of them seem to be aimed at people who know they’ll agree the second they see the title, and created by people who’ve made their mind up before they began their analysis or conducted any research.
There do seem to be quite a few YouTube video essayists who seem convinced that they’re this generation’s equivalent of the Socratics, as opposed to being basically film school graduates with an inexpensive green-screen set up, a non-threatening vocal style and a bunch of those graphic guides to various schools of philosophy on their shelves. Interesting and not without merit, but I get the feeling there’s a lot of ego swirling around in that scene.
Echo chambers. To be fair, that’s not just Video Essays. Because of the way the platform works, it’s basically everything on YouTube. But Willems was weirdly rude to me once, and it was ego-based, so yea. I ceased being a fan.
Yeah, what that guy said.
The inverse perspective on that is Spielberg’s observation that if you ratchet up the tension sufficiently, an audience will gratefully accept whatever resolution you offer. I believe he said that specifically in reference to the exploding air tank in Jaws, but he went on to create the whole “The Mission” episode of Amazing Stories to illustrate the principle.
I still think the logic questions about Cars are pretty tedious though to be honest.
I’m fully on board with not thinking too hard about the details of movies I like, but man I love nitpicking Cars. There are much larger issues with the in-world logic, but the one I always like to harp on is why in the hell is there a storage container on the husband minivan’s roof rack, and how did it get there.
That’s because nitpicking Cars is more fun than watching Cars.
Amen
The issue isn’t really nitpicking; nitpicking is more of a symptom. It’s a symptom of a movie not being engaging enough to hold one’s attention. When you see comments like “what’s the deal with…”, the actual issue is that the movie is boring. As you say, it doesn’t hit the right emotional beats, so people have to make their own entertainment.(that and sometimes people nitpick because it’s fun, not because they hate something)
There is a spectrum, however. At some point it just takes you out of it. Like most of Star Wars.
I agree with this, unless said media depends on the rules around it. For instance, A Quiet Place fucking sucks IMO because the entire movie depends on the rules it sets up in the first ~15 minutes . . . and then its characters act like the rules shouldn’t apply
I found A Quiet Place effectively creepy and yet, at the same time, I’m like, “Jesus H. Christ! Why would you knowingly bring something that makes noise into a world of creatures that kill by sound?”.
Better question: WHY DIDN’T THEY JUST MOVE TO THE WATERFALL FOR HER LAST MONTH OF PREGNANCY??? The main characters have this incredibly complicated and well-thought-out system around the farm, then just . . . act like total fucking morons for the duration of the movie. I’m sure watching it in the theater was an experience, but HOLY SHIT there’s soooo much stupidity in that movie
I don’t care, truly, if a fictional world features illogical elements. The only thing that rankles me, personally, is when a work of fiction establishes facts or rules, and is then internally inconsistent with those rules.
Quite frankly, the REAL world has a lot of problems with worldbuilding logic.
I do agree with you, but at the same time, that spork toy in the next film raises too many questions for my mental wellbeing.
Not long after seeing Toy Story 4 I was playing with my oldest child and pretending a rock was jumping off a bench into a puddle of mud and I suddenly got this horrible sinking feeling that I had just imbued this rock with life and that now this rock would have to work out who he was and why no other rocks were talking to him. It caused a crisis in me which lead to us incorporating three other rocks into the game just so this one could have a few friends to hang out with after we went inside.
That movie really did a number on me!
Did you put googly eyes on the rock? If not, you’re probably good.
Just do what I do, and pretend you live in a world where Toy Story 4 doesn’t exist.
Yeah, I liked TS4 okay, but it manages to stretch the premise will beyond its breaking point.
Forky offered a satisfying enough explanation for the cosmology of the Toy Story universe that I never had to think about it again.How do the toys become sentient? Why is a toy sentient, but not other inanimate objects like forks or pipe cleaners? What exactly is a toy, for the purposes of sentience? As Forky demonstrates, a “toy” is anything built to be played with by a child. Once that condition is met, the physical components gain consciousness. Forky is shown to have a lower level of sentience than the other toys that were professionally designed and produced in a factory, presumably because of the shakiness of his construction, but the universe’s magic works anyway because the base conditions were met.Very smart people spent a lot of time thinking about this in creating the earlier films, and they drew clear limits and rules around the universe’s magic. One could argue those rules don’t “make sense,” as though it’s possible for a story about magical sentient toys to make sense, but the rules are consistently deployed across the franchise.
But that film has the mid credits scene where Bonnie creates a plastic knife toy, to whom Forky promises to answer any question. And when her first question is “How.. am I… alive?” he calmly answers “I don’t know”. And that’s a great self-aware moment for the film (and franchise – human Lightyear spin-off excepted) to go out on.
Fucking this.
Exactly my thoughts as I was reading this. Reading that paragraph, I almost felt compelled to yawn. It’s like watching Star Wars and pointing out that there’s no sound in space. Like, we know. Everybody knows. Nobody cares.
It reminds me of the scene in “Looper” where the characters practically turned to the audience and told us not to worry about the time travel paradoxes. Sometimes you just gotta buy into a story’s conceit. Toys are alive, but they have weird rules? OK. Time travel exists? OK. The world ia frozen, but a train is perpetually running along a planet-spanning track that somehow doesn’t need maintenance? OK. As long as the story and characters are compelling, it’s ok for your brain to let some things slide. That’s why I feel fine tearing apart Into Darkness but will defend First Contact The one aspect of “Toy Story” movies that genuinely bugs me is Sid. The first movie established that he’s kind of a dick, but then they made his ”crimes” against toys into his greatest fault, as if any kid who mashes together plastic to make fun new toys was some kind of deranged sicko. As someone who dis-/re-assembled his toys all the time as a kid, that really took me out of the movie.
With the Sid situation, that’s fair but I think the fact that we’re seeing Sid through the eyes of the toys helps a bit, since they would understandably have a different attitude to the whole “being Frankensteined” situation than the kid would. In addition, he’s also clearly a bit of a dick to his younger sister.
And he doesn’t just rearrange toys, he blows them up! He damages them! He steals his sister’s toys and rearranges THEM. He’s clearly kind of a dick.
Didn’t we all do that? I mean, Sid’s a dick because he cronenbergs his sister’s toys, that’s a bridge too far, but I don’t know many young boys who hit Middle School/early High School who weren’t strapping some sort of explosive to their GI Joes.
Perhaps (I personally didn’t, though if I’m honest that might have just been due to a lack of easy availability of explosives during my childhood rather than me being an angel to my toys), but I think we again have to remember that we’re seeing the toy’s perspective on this whole thing.
There’s a good theory going around that Sid was so changed by his experience that he became a garbage man so he could become the Schindler for toys.
Love this take.
Yeah, Sid is actually very creative. My brother was a Sid. He was always melting holes into old plastic toys, merging them with other bits of junk, and eventually blowing them up with Thunder Bombs. Needless to say, he majored in art. I suspect a lot of the folks at Pixar identified with Sid.But the toys are obviously going to have a different view of Sid because he’s, y’know, torturing and mutilating them. I don’t think we’re supposed to look at Sid the way the toys do. We’re just supposed to understand why they would find him horrible.
I totally agree that thinking too hard about this stuff is annoying when taken to extremes, the way so much clickbait does it. But I also think it’s fun to occasionally think too hard about this stuff and, just for a joke or silly conversation, take these premises to their logical extreme. But yeah, again, too many people/news sites treat that fun diversion as a reason to shit all over fun entertainment and the ultimate determiner of worth.
The worst of these are those moronic Cinema Sins videos where they play dumb and act like movies make less sense than they actually do or that the audience isn’t smart enough to fill in some blanks.
In one scene the protagonist is clearly sitting in a diner, but in the very next scene she’s somehow on an airplane! And then in the scene after that she’s at her parents’ house! Plot hole!
Everything Wrong with… should just be retitled, We Don’t Know What a Cut Is.
Oh, I like them for what they are: overly pedantic nitpicking that in no way is meant to judge the actual quality of a movie. In a way, the Cinema Sins videos prove the point that playing movie-logic-police is really easy and kinda dumb, since there isn’t a movie ever made that you can’t pick to death with just a little thought.
Look, I hate leaving mean comments on silly internet articles … but you’re spot-fucking-on. Nobody cares about the logic behind movies like this. Nobody. It’s not funny or insightful to point that out. Stop.
I do enjoy nitpicking, though. Picking apart some beloved genre movie you’ve all seen 1000 times is a time honored nerd tradition. The issue is when you start thinking nitpicking is a legitimate form of film criticism rather than a pleasant way to spend an evening with your friends talking shit and drinking beer.
Exactly. Like, okay, The Dark Knight, how the fuck does the Joker get from place to place? He’s a creepy guy who looks like The Joker. Is he taking a cab? Calling an Uber? The opening of The Dark Knight he’s standing on a curb, holding his clown mask in his hand, so he’s just in full Joker makeup on a city street. It’s surprising nobody called the cops just for that.
But that’s not film criticism. It doesn’t make the movie worse. It’s just a fun little nit.
Then you start trying to work out a logical way for it to actually work and you end up with all sorts of twisty, bizarre possibilities that are fun to thread through.
I will clarify that I’m not quite crotchety and bitter enough to begrudge people nitpicking movies when they’re just shooting the breeze with their friends. That’s just a bit of fun.But I’m getting there. Oh, you better believe I’m getting there, Keith.
Don’t even get me started on the idiotic mental wankery that goes on about the Cars universe.
Although lets be honest. Overthinking Cars is both impossible not to do, and frankly a lot of fun.
Move over. I have some bread crumbs too. Let’s fight off the hordes together!
Always nice to meet someone else who looks after the pigeons around here.
I like this series a lot, but it tends to overthink the idea of overthinking, which is hilarious. It’s just like the hyperbolic amazement that a movie could make you feel an emotion. The garbage scene is well made, and that’s what well made movies do – they encourage you to set aside your rational knowledge of where the story is going (along with your knowledge that the story isn’t real). Lots of movies aren’t well made, including popular movies people like, which makes it remarkable when a movie clears the bar. Overthinking a premise is what happens when a movie hasn’t sold its emotional reality. (It also happens when people try to prove how smart they are by nitpicking silly movies, not realizing that is a Catch 22. I really love that this series opts for a tone of slightly naive wonder rather than bullshit cynicism.)
I’ve never been much of a plot hole guy, mainly because I’m not really smart enough to catch them while I’m watching the movie, and when people point them out to me later I tend to figure that if I didn’t notice them and they didn’t affect my viewing experience they couldn’t really be that important.We all value different things in art, of course, and I respect that some people really like and value airtight screenplays and stories that don’t have those kind of logic holes. But I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve grown to appreciate more the emotional truths of movies.Do I take a couple points off my personal score of Avengers: Endgame because the time travel stuff doesn’t really make much sense or hold together at all? Sure. But at the end of the day, I value the emotional power of Tony Stark getting to connect with his father or Steve Rogers getting his happy ending more than I do the mechanics of time travel in a movie about stopping a being from a moon of Saturn from using six magic stones to destroy the universe.
Wait, Thanos is from that Titan?How is he so strong? His homeworld is barely more than 40% of Earth’s mass. Tony WITHOUT his suit should have mopped the floor with him.Dammit, now you’ve got me obsessing on another plot hole!
Do I take a couple points off my personal score of Avengers: Endgame because the time travel stuff doesn’t really make much sense or hold together at all?But you shouldn’t. Because it shouldn’t matter. I mean, yeah, it’s there, but it’s doesn’t take away from the movie. It’s like saying, “Well, in Back to the Future 2, Old Biff would’ve returned to the changed timeline version of 2015 instead of the original timeline version of 2015, so Marty and Doc would’ve never been able to travel back to 1985 to the Biff-Centric Hill Valley, so therefore that movie fucking sucks!!”
Agreed. I mean, picking apart the logic of a movie world can be fun, in a hanging around, being stoned or drunk with your friends kind of way. “Hey, how does that thing from that movie work, anyways?” But it’s not now and never should be considered a sign of additional insight, and definitely shouldn’t weigh on the quality of a movie.
Like, the original Donner Superman, Clark Kent goes on his walkabout, creates the Fortress of Solitude, and has a weird Marlon Brando narrated 2001 trippy sequence where he apparently learns everything and comes out of it 12 years later as Superman!!! Okay, fine, no sweat, but then he goes and immediately gets a job at the Daily Planet as a reporter. But . . . dude never went to college. He was, like, 18 and disappeared for over a freakin’ decade. What the hell was on his resume, “farmboy”? Did the Fortress of Solitude spit out a bachelor’s degree for him?
Now, is it fun to pick movies apart like that? Sure it is. Does it make the movie stupid? No, of course not. Does it detract in any way from that awesome, incredible moment when the John Willams score kicks in and we see Superman for the first time and he flies towards the camera? ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT!!
Consistency can be a legitimate gripe. I can understand all the gripes about Wonder Woman 1984’s “wishing rules” and other stuff where the narrative feels arbitrary and stupid. But, yeah, when your complaint is something like “how can a non-living toy ‘die’?” you just sound like some chain-smoking Euro-reviewer who’s flexing their sophistication by “not getting it”.
Oh yeah, if a plot genuinely doesn’t hang together in the sense that it’s not clear how the narrative sequence of events actually link up with each other or the writers are cheating the rules of their universe, that can be a genuine problem. My problem is that we as a culture just seem obsessed with taking the little loose threads or the things that just fall under worldbuilding or “willing suspension of disbelief” and blowing them up as if they’re the problems.I’ve not seen Wonder Woman 84, but as for the wishing thing, yes, something like “wishing for someone to come back to life despite it being clearly established that this is something impossible in the rules of the story” can be a problem, because it suggests that the writers are just trying to cheat. Toy Story’s “How can toys that come to life actually die?” is a ‘just go with it’ thing.
Definitely that “clickbait” syndrome that others in this thread have mentioned. Though, complaining about clickbait in the kinjaverse is truly swallowing one’s own tail.
No, you’re a symbol of the eternal unity of all things constantly being reborn and consumed in an endless cycle of meaningless futility!
Good cartoons like any other media have their internal logic: Wile E Coyote running off a cliff has its internal logic. A classic Roadrunner or Tom And Jerry is nothing but rigid cause and effect. Would you be happy with a film that made no sense, where where the things they strove for turned out to have no meaning, sad people suddenly snapped out of it, people who died returned to life in the next scene, and anyone’s problems could be solved by magic? It’d be terrible. Films need some kind of logic, they don’t necessarily need to be watertight, but they need to make internal sense so if you’re on the edge of your seat wondering “how are they going to get out of that?” then the escape is satisfying. Toy Story does pretty much make sense because the plot holes are incidental to the plot, but there are plenty of other far stupider yet lucrative movies that don’t.
I just read an article on that Rugrats theory where it was all in Angelica’s head and the babies are all dead, and the creators get sincere questions from fans on whether or not it’s true. I guarantee almost all Boomer artists will not think of something that messed up for a kids show.
Oh, don’t get me started on the “they were dead all along!” plot theory…
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…that is also your secret grandfather because the actor that played that cigar happens to have the same accent as you, because that’s totally how accents work. Uh, I mean “I’ve been planting all these clues that the butler did it, then you’re halfway through a series and suddenly thousands of people have figured out that the butler did it, and then you say the cigar’s grandpa did it? No, you can’t do that,”
Two words: Lucky Rat. The strongest Avenger.
A corollary to your point: I’m tired of directors and writers giving interviews commenting on and/or clarifying various plot points, interpretations, subtext, fan theories, etc. After every new movie or TV show comes out. Let the work speak for itself and leave your commentary on the screen. Fans should feel free to come to their own conclusions and or form their own fan theories. but they should also feel free to simply watch the show and be entertained. Having the creators unpack and explain everything a day after it’s been released feels like it detracts from both.
I agree about the idea of Andy taking Woody with him to college. The ending made me tear up but another part of me was thinking, “This nearly adult man is way too attached to these toys.”Btw, this is my favorite line in this movie. God, did this make me laugh.
I love Woody’s “What the fuck?” look on his face.
I do appreciate the technical aspect of Pixar movies but they leave me cold. Monsters Inc. and Wall-E are a couple of exceptions. Hanks and Allen just get on my nerves. And this is just a pet peeve but I don’t like the sound/musical score (too Tom &Jerry: late 40s/1950-ish).
I made it through the incinerator scene. I was on edge, and, at 26 years old, I cheered in the theater when the aliens saved them. Those little guys were always my favorite and I have a doll of them to this day. But the last scene – that got me.I did bring a stuffed bunny to college, that was a replica of the one I had when I was a kid (I lost the original on vacation). I still have toys like that. The idea that Andy still had an attachment, that thought is making me cry now. This movie was beautiful.
Yeah the incinerator scene gets alot of press, but it’s the end that’s the kick in the gut. You’re already at heightened emotions from how harrowing the incinerator scene is, you get this flood of relief that they didn’t go there, then five minutes later Andy is saying goodbye and you just can’t hold it anymore. I saw this in theaters and it was a 3D showing and you could see every adult lifting their glasses and wiping their eyes during that scene.
Yeah, if I had run into a kid in college with a cowboy toy on his shelf at most I would’ve thought “huh, there’s probably a story there.” If he had brought all of his toys and transformed his dorm room into a perfect replica of his childhood bedroom—that’s when I would start questioning his sanity.
My roommate had a suggestion a few years later. He wanted to decorate everything with cats. Cat pictures, cat pillows, cat figurines, everything. And never mention it. Just for the goal of being asked and responding “what cats?”
Yeah, honestly, when the reviewer was talking about that I immediately thought of the girls in my Freshman dorm and knew, with absolute certainty, if a guy would’ve had a beloved childhood toy cowboy like Woody on his bookshelf, that dude was so getting laid.
All I could think about was what would Woody’s reaction be to watching Andy have sex with someone in the dorm
I was travelling when the film came out so I had a couple of weeks of not having seen in but being told how emotional and heartbreaking the ending was (I think there was even a piece on BBC News about how it was reducing grown men to tears). Needless to say, with all that hype, when the incinerator scene started I genuinely believed this was the ending everyone had been reacting to and sat in stunned horror. On rewatches, even without that tension, it still hits hard. It’s a brilliant wordless piece of character work and it’s still heartbreaking to see the toys accept their fate whilst taking comfort in each others company. And yes, the ending itself is heartbreaking too.
Yeah. I still have a little blanket my mother gave to me right before she died. People put a lot of emotion into inanimate objects. I wouldn’t say it’s weird to take that with you. Although yeah, some asshole in College would probably mess with it.
There is a lot of sad/melancholy stuff here and it goes all-out at the end, but right from the start the old camcorder footage of Andy’s puppy jumping around cutting to the present of an older dog moving as well as he can just fucking wrecked me. Our family had a dog at that age and mobility at the time and the animators nailed it.
I’m taking my dog to an oncologist next week. She’s only 5 and I’ve had her since she was 8 weeks. I can’t even think about that scene.
Good luck to you and her, I hope things turn out OK.
Thank you
THE CLAW! Of course they would rescue them with THE CLAW! It makes perfect sense, but I didn’t expect it becuase I hadn’t thought about the little green men since they split off from the main group when they first got to the dump. The writers set this up perfectly becuase toys split off from the main group a couple other times also, for example when the army guys leave. So it just seems natural that the little green men will just chill in THE CLAW control room; it’s a natural ending point for their story. So many times in movies they show us Checkov’s gun and then you guess what happens right before it does at the climax, but this one got me 100%. Absolutely great story telling.
Yeah, the whole “Andy wanting to bring Woody to college is SO WEIRD” thing was odd to me considering I resumed buying action figures and Transformers and stuff WHILE IN COLLEGE.
I somehow never caught this one, but may have to watch it today. Last weekend my best friend helped me clean out my garage, and we got to all the boxes of my childhood stuff my parents had brought down. She told me to order proper lidded containers and she would bring my niece this weekend and we could sort all of my old toys. I have a feeling tomorrow is going to be a big mix of tearing up, laughing and smile crying. (And probably a lot of WTF? I was a 70s/80s kid, some of that shit is just plain weird).
We sent our first son to college with his Simba stuffed animal packed amongst his gear. I took it to get patched up & had the eye sewn on more securely before we surprised him with it. Whether it ever served him in times of stress or overwhelming finals, I never asked. All I know is I never want to send my grandchildren to whatever college Tom wound up at.
Oh my word, THAT scene. That experience really stayed with me, in the cinema in (I think) Lyme Regis, with my then-wife. It’s why I never ever want to see the film again. Not because I think it’ll be upsetting again, just that I’ll be waiting for it, the whole experience will be distorted around that one horrible/beautiful scene. (And it’s already beautiful before they are rescued, them just holding hands, because what else can you do?)
I distinctly remember muttering “holy shit” to myself in the theater when they clasped hands and decided to just face death together. Other than possibly the cut to a grieving Carl toward the end of the infamous opening to “Up,” easily the single most arresting moment in all of Pixar.
For me it’s slightly earlier in the montage – cutting from decorating the baby’s room (and Ellie maybe clutching her stomach?) to the doctor’s surgery, obviously post-miscarriage. Just heartbreaking.
“[Y]ou are watching a lucrative global children’s-entertainment franchise and not a bleak European art film.”
Well, now I want to see the bleak European art film remake of ‘Toy Story’.“To Infinity, then. And beyond that? The void. Nothingness. Madness. Death.”
Now I really want Werner Herzog to narrate the next Paddington Bear movie.
In which Paddington is harassed by a guy in a supposedly bear-proof suit to the point where he finally snaps and tears the guy to shreds? He may try so hard to get things right, but enough is enough!
When I think of Paddington I always think of this tweet
I love how the most offensive misogynist slur in the U.S. is just a casually tossed minor insult in other English-speaking countries.But thank God that didn’t happen to the N-word.
It isn’t as offensive (or as misogynist as it can be directed towards men) as it is in the US, but it still is probably one of the most vulgar insults.
I should probably save this for Savage Love, but when used to describe actual parts of anatomy, by the owners of said parts, during sexy-time, it’s quite effective.
And also weirdly a term of endearment. It’s a strange word.
“God damn it Mr. Noodle!”
Talking bears cannot love marmalade. Its against its very nature. They are not our friends. They are truly a stupid species and do not know what they want.
“Paddington luffed marmalate sandfiches abuff all other dishes.”
Why, hello, may I introduce you to “Na půdě aneb Kdo má dneska narozeniny?” aka “Toys In The Attic”, by Jiří Barta, legendary Czech director who made some of the weirdest and darkest stop-motion movies not made by anyone called Svankmajer or Quay? It is even on YouTube!
(And while it is not really all that dark, it has a certain… rough quality that owes much to a cinematic tradition which highly appreciates using materials that are visibly used and old and for which objects being animated is more than just a metaphor. I once listened to a fascinating talk by one director who always used the word “puppet beings” when talking about his figurines, and who swore that he would never enter his atelier at night, because he didn’t want to disturb them. European art film at its finest.)
I will seek that out just because I love Svankmajer.
Ironically, American children’s movies are exactly the type of movie to pursues heightened, accessible emotions. Bleak European art films tend to be about repression.
Well, there’s always Cormac McCarthy’s Toy Story:https://gocomics.typepad.com/tomthedancingbugblog/2010/06/cormac-mccarthys-toy-story-3.html
Maybe not a movie but read the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Tin Soldier” which heavily inspired Toy Story (and the incineration scene is a direct nod to it). All Andersen fairy tales are depressing or grim. Or both.
I cried in the cinema, that’s for sure.Mind you, I cried at Wall-e.
I don’t want to know a person who didn’t cry at Wall-E.
Well, I can’t say it made me cry, but I do find the Wall-E’s story telling to be profound in its level of emotion, and it’s constantly jockeying in my Pixar Top 3.
You’re on thin ice, you.
I saw WALL-E five times at the cinema in 2008 and by that fifth time my eyes started stinging at the opening credits in anticipation of what was to come.
I don’t like many of Pixar’s films. In fact, I struggle to get a Top 5, let alone 10. But I freaking loved Toy Story 3 and it will always remain my top Pixar film.
The Toy Story series, and Toy Story 3 in particular, aren’t kids films but films for adults nostalgic for the toys of thier youth. I hate it for making kids feel guilty about seeing toys as something that can’t just be discarded with childish things. I still love the movies, but there’s something a bit rotten at thier core. I wish they were more honest about growing up.
I don’t think Toy Story makes anyone feel a particular way about their childhood toys. I think Toy Story was such a success because people already felt that way.The creators of Toy Story did not invent the concept of forming a sentimental attachment to useless, silly things.
I think they make a good faith effort to include some of the ambiguity about sentimentalizing stuff, with Toy Story 2’s Jessie storyline probably the best. The gutwrenching When She Loved Me feeds into the fetishizing collector mentality, and I think the movie tries to say you have to dial both of those back.I think it’s fair to ask if they always got it right. Toy Story 3 seems to say it’s an ironic hell for a toy to end up being played to pieces in a day care center, but maybe that’s really how they should go in the end.
I don’t think the Toy Story movies are really about toy nostalgia. The toy stuff is a metaphor for parenting. But unlike most movies about parenting, that are about the trials of raising kids and providing for them, the Toy Story films are laser focused on a relatively untapped part of the parenting experience, the feelings of attachment and being needed as a parent that change as your child gets older. Toy Story 1 & 2 largely grapple with that time when a parent stops becoming the center of their kid’s world, when the child starts exploring other interests/friends/attachments that supplant the importance that a parent used to have. Toy Story 3 is about specifically when your kid is grown up, and letting go. Toy Story 4 is an empty nest story, about a parent figure finding value in their life once they are no longer “needed” as a parent.
I really believed they were going to die and accepted it with them. That’s powerful film making. I didn’t rationalize it through that this was a kids movie, I was just so emotionally invested.
Yes! I could not articulate this idea in my main comment, but I too had accepted the toys’ fate and was prepared to watch them die. The shock and horror of that realization was almost too much for me, at that moment in the theater. I can’t think of very many films which brought me to that emotional space.
I’ll say it: Toy Story 4 > Toy Story 3When Toy Story 4 came out I kept hearing people say over and over again “they’ll ruin that perfect ending” and… hate to break it to you guys but the ending of Toy Story 3 was a total cop-out that was clearly intended to facilitate future sequels. The basic notion that Andy even still had all these toys at seventeen stretched credulity in the first place and the notion that he’d have a tearful goodbye to a bunch of action figures is ridiculous. It’s placing the emotion of nostalgic middle aged people onto a teenager who is more than likely going to be more than happy to be “grown up.” Toy Story 4 is doing something far more interesting by finally having one of the toys realize that existing to serve children is kind of pathetic and choosing to break away from their eternal slavery.
There’s a vaguely referenced but never fleshed-out backstory to Woody specifically that makes him more sentimental than most – he’s an old family toy, Andy’s Mom references that a time or two, and there’s a fan theory that he belonged to Andy’s dad. So if Woody specifically is a piece of family history, or a link to his absent/dead dad, why wouldn’t he be a bit nostalgic about it?Also, Andy’s clearly shown to be a super creative kid, why couldn’t he be nostalgic/sentimental about passing them on to another super creative kid?
And then you realize Andy’s going to come back some day and ask Bonnie if he can see his old toys again, and she’ll say “Oh, that boring cowboy doll? I just kept him in the closet and then I lost track of him on this road trip. He’s probably in the sewer or something now.”
And then the murders started…
Yeah, I actually think Andy actually giving away Woody is the part of Toy Story 3 that feels weirder than wanting to bring him to college.
I wouldn’t go remotely that far in describing Toy Story 3, but I do agree that Toy Story 4 is secretly just as good, and gets short shrift from too many commenters. If Toy Story 3 was a perfect ending, Toy Story 4 was a perfect (extended) coda to that ending.
Toy Story 2 is the best of the bunch. It’s funny and short, and contrasting toys with collectibles is a nice, curmudgeonly joke at the expense of adults who obsess over children’s stuff. In that sense it’s prescient.
I never had an issue with Andy holding onto his toys. As I grew up, every couple of years my parents would decide, in a fit of wholly American mania, that we absolutely needed to have a Yard Sale to purge our home of excess. I’d spend an evening through my enormous plastic bins, filled with smaller plastic things, doing a proto-Marie Konda assessment to determine which things I was willing to part with for $10 or whatever my parents determined my “share” was. Entire action figure collections would be relegated to be some other kid’s playthings, I’d casually toss aside enough stuffed animals to over-fill a deflated couch, but I’d pull one or two items that I still liked to be added to the permanent “collection.” I think I wound up with a single medium Sterilite storage bin that’s still somewhere in my parents’ house, a handful of Ninja Turtles and Joes that I simply couldn’t do without for whatever reason.
I’m super pissed off that I got rid of ALL of my old Transformers back in the day. Hell, we were going through some old stuff a couple years back and my PARENT were surprised that I did!Still have my Ninja Turtles though!
Yeah, my parents and I have all had that “Huh…we probably should’ve held onto all that Ghostbusters stuff…with the full firehouse playset and the Proton Pack/Ghost Trap roleplay gear? eBay would love that stuff now, huh?” moment a few times now.
I decided to save all my original Star Wars Kenner toys from my mother’s (and even my ex-wife’s) periodic garage sale purges. That {stuff} is now worth a fortune! And my own children got to enjoy them, too!
The opening scene of Toy Story 3 is one of the most confident, audacious pieces of film making I have ever seen.
“That’s MISTER Evil Dr. Pork Chop to you!”
It’s an expanded version of the story we saw at the beginning of the first Toy Story. Including the dog with a built-in force field. And a dinosaur who eats force-field dogs.The story is bigger now, because it had to make room for Buzz and Jessie and Mrs. Potato Head and the other characters we met in the first two films… but at its heart, it’s the same tale.
Isn’t that scene Andy’s last telling of the tale before completely surrendering his childhood ways?
Ugh, why does every shot have the “camera” moving? There’s something to be said for a series of well-composed static shots, especially brightly animated ones. Was Michael Bay a consultant? If the whole movie’s like that, I’m glad I haven’t seen it.
I can’t explain that to you but I can say that the crash zoom to “The orphans!” is fucking perfect cinema.
OK, I am a cis woman so I can’t speak for dudes, but … I brought a few toys with me to college? Some stuffed animals, a Mr Potato Head, a few other odds and ends. And I’m now 40 and looking at my shelf full of Baby Yoda toys, so… would it really be THAT weird for a guy to bring a favorite old cowboy doll (“action figure”) to put on a desk or shelf somewhere?All that aside… this is a wonderful movie. I love the Toy Story movies. Even Toy Story 4, which didn’t truly need to be made, is a pretty wonderful movie and I was glad I saw it in theaters. And man, nothing quite ripped my heart out like watching the toys quietly accept their fate, together.
Saying a “drunk roommate” would throw your shit out the window makes me think the writer is a bad drunk who was less popular in college than he thinks.
Or that he had a particularly terrible roommate. Cause yeah. I went to a school where an entire lounge worth of furniture got thrown out a window by drunken idiots (we called it the Defenestration of Bishop Roberts) but I don’t know anyone who’s roommate threw *their stuff* out a window.
It’s true that there are a lot of old toys squirrelled away on shelves in dorms, but it’s also true that there are a lot of obnoxious drunks.
Oh, totally – but the drunken stories I remember from college are “my roommate had sex with a girl in the closet while I was trying to sleep” and “my roommate peed in the corner while sound asleep” – not as much destruction of property.
My college smartly made sure the windows couldn’t open that far… or maybe had an on-campus suicide problem years before I enrolled.
This. My freshman year dorm was full of football players and was literally destroyed by the end of the year. Broken lights, windows, waterfountain ripped off wall… Good times. I transferred after that year…
I think everyone has had a terrible or crazy roommate. Except me. All of my roommates have been normal and….oh.
I’ve been pretty lucky, actually – I had a single my freshman year, sophomore year roomed with one of my best friends, a single again junior year and shared a house with three friends my senior year. One of those friends did turn out to be an incurable slob, but our issues as housemates were all relatively minor.
I am a man, and I wouldn’t have found it particularly odd for one of my college roommates to have an old toy. If he actually played with it like a kid, yeah that would be weird. But if he just had it on a shelf as a memento or something, no problem.That passage made me wonder if the author just hung out with a bunch of jerks in college.
Being that Woody is a rare toy from the 50’s, I always assumed that he was a hand-me-down from Andy’s probably deceased dad, and that’s why he was so attached and willing to take him to college.Also, I’m a pretty emotionally healthy 42 year old with a job and a wife and kids, along with a fairly sizable collection of Marvel Legends. So if someone wants to shame someone else for the things they collect, fuck that person.
Yeah, I referenced both of those things above. I’m 40, my husband is 37, we don’t have kids but we do have a pretty impressive collection of Lego, baby yoda figures, Haunted Mansion memorabilia, etc. (Basically Disney/Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars have all of our money.)
Then you and I would probably be friends as that’s all my favorite stuff too.
I have a collection of Belle figurines. I met the voice actress, nicest woman in the world. Got me through a lot. I feel no shame at all.
Belle rules.
I couldn’t agree more.
Do you have any original animation cels, or is that framed artwork?
Artwork made by Paige O’Hara herself. She’s a painter alongside being a voice actress and Broadway star. She calls it Belle By Belle. She’s quite good.
I’m honestly surprised Disney let’s her do this.
I think she has a deal with Disney Fine Art. Otherwise yeah, she mentioned Disney contacts are very strict. It literally says what you can’t do anywhere on Earth or otherwise.
Lots of people display toys, figures, or silly things in their homes or at their desks. I see Funko Pops littered all over the cubicles of my co-workers. It didn’t strike me as too unusual that he’d opt to take it, especially when considered as a moment of sentimentality while going through lots of emotions about growing up and leaving home. It actually struck me as pretty realistic that an imaginative, sensitive kid like Andy would be willing to do that.
Yeah, I thought the review was off on that. I was thinking of the girls from my freshman dorm, and if some otherwise average guy had a beloved toy cowboy like Woody on his bookshelf, that dude was absolutely getting laid.
You know, I have to wonder how many people either kept on collecting toys into adulthood as a result of watching the Toy Story movies as kids or resumed collecting toys as a result of watching the Toy Story movies as adults.Signed, a guy with way too much LEGO and Doctor Who stuff on his desk.
I’ve been doing a bit of remodeling so some of my collectibles are packed up right now. The AC guy came out for my annual check up this week and after about five minutes he was like “Where is all your Mario and Star Wars stuff????” He was very upset. He was relieved to see that the beloved Leg Lamp was still in the entry hall. I’m a 47 year old single woman.
Lookit all you pansies crying about a cartoon. Lol. Fyi I was a grown ass man when the first toy story came out so toy story 2 is much better than 3 because I don’t get the “feels” from these things.
I think Woody is one of the most fully realized characters in cinema. Think about how the character changes over the course of four films, from the arrogant leader of the first film to the searching, lost toy in the fourth film. Each movie gives him a specific arc, but they never completely repeat themselves. He doesn’t have to learn new lessons all over again (which granted would be true to life), but he gradually over years becomes a new person. I think the Toy Story saga can be seriously compared to the Before Sunrise and Antoine Doinel movies. It’s earned it.
“But then the movie goes straight from that silly, inventive exhilaration to roundhouse kicking you right in the feelings. Andy, the creative little kid who keeps coming up with these entire worlds for his toys, has grown up. He’s ready to leave for college.”
Not to mention the clearly-on-his-last-legs Buster wheezing around the corner, old and gray.
The falsest note in Toy Story 3 is the idea that Andy would bring Woody, his ancient vinyl cowboy, to college with him. If I’d known a kid at college with a toy cowboy in his dorm room, I would’ve been seriously concerned about his mental stability. This doesn’t ring false to me; in the UK we have a fine tradition of taking ‘mascots’ with us to university, that are often childhood toys (if there are any other Brits on here around 40 years old, you’ll recall contestants on various gameshows like Blockbuster always took said mascots with them – University Challenge still features team mascots from time to time). I myself took a mannequin’s leg to university, which is a whole other story.If Woody actually had gone to college with Andy, then there’s a 500% chance that a drunk roommate would’ve thrown the sheriff out a window within the first month.However, I concede that this would be more than possible, even in the UK.
My wife and I (both American) have gotten hooked on episodes of 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown on youtube and you just answered our “what the hell do the mean by ‘mascots’ and why do they spend 15 minutes of every episode introducing them?” question, so thank you.
Screw anything with the toys, the scene that goes straight to my heart is when it’s revealed that the funny, lively puppy from the second film is, well, not long for this world. I’ve buried three dogs, and seeing one in that state makes me die a little too.
Oh dang, should’ve scrolled down. 100 percent the same here.
Oh, man! I lost my childhood dog the year after I graduated from college. My parents called me and told me that I had better drive home soon (like – that weekend) if I wanted to say goodbye to my best pal. I’ve got a little lump in my throat right now just typing those words. You were the best boi, Lucky.
Oh, I should really go watch that Toy Story 3 ending, it’s been a while.
Oh, it’s shown as already played on YouTube. So I already watched it, with the express purpose of making myself cry.Oh. Maybe I should self-examine what that means, why do I keep doing this to myself….(clicks)
Crying is therapeutic, everyone should have a good cry on a regular basis.
Sorry, American male here — no crying, no showing of any emotions at any time.Ok, maybe Dennis Reynolds is a bad example and I should let it out some time.
That script reportedly involved Buzz Lightyear getting recalled and shipped to a factory in Taiwan and the other toys going to rescue him. It sounds like ass. I mean, that sounds like a perfectly workable premise to me?
I feel like the “En Espanol” bits with Buzz in Toy Story 3 might have been inspired by some ideas Circle 7 came up with.And this scene just fucking slays me:ROFL. Every. Time. I think it’s that tango-esque spin move Buzz uses to sweep Jessie into his arms, followed by that slow-mo eyebrow move.I practically wet’em just typing that.
It is a perfectly workable premise…almost like it was the plot of of Toy Story 2, with a quick find/replace run on it. (Woody Buzz is stolen recalled and threatened to be shipped to Japan Taiwan., leading Buzz Woody to rally the gang to leave Andy’s house and rescue his friend.)
Oh man, the first paragraph of this review was so me. I was watching in the theater with both my young sons, one sitting on either side of me and gripping one of my arms tight during that scene where the toys are in peril. And even though my rational brain was saying that this was at the end of the day a kids movie and everything was going to be fine, my heart was saying: “I brought my kids here to watch Buzz and Woody get melted before our eyes? CRAP. Don’t do is Pixar!”I actually vowed during that moment that if the worst happened, I would find a way to never buy or consume a Disney product again. At that moment, I was really worried about my kids, and how they would feel if this movie turned tragic. The scene was so effective that it really seemed possible that these characters were going to meet a terrible end. Thankfully, everything turned out fine and Disney is able to continue to reach into my wallet constantly-even though a small part of me has never forgiven Pixar for bringing these characters so close to the edge.Aside from that. Toy Story 3 is a great movie-an argument can be made that it is the best of the four. As a big Great Escape fan, I particularly enjoyed the escape from the daycare.
This movie has been on my mind a lot lately. Apologies in advance for therapy session.
Sometime before he turned 2, my son started playing with a stuffed gingerbread man. He’s made by the Ty company that makes Beanie Babies, but he’s a mini version. His name is “Gingy” (I think Sweetsie is the name the company gave him, but my son was a toddler and went with Gingy)
My wife and I do not remember for sure where this doll came from. Neither one of us admit to buying it and no friends or family remember giving it to us. Our best logical guess is that he was a toy in a Happy Meal, but we’re not sure. For all I know, he really did wander in from some other family who was ignoring him.My son and Gingy were absolutely inseperable. More than once, I had to get up at 2 a.m. to find him when he slid down the side of the bed that touched the wall. We told babysitters, dead-ass serious, that keeping track of Gingy was the second most important job that night (as we added children, Gingy fell down the priority list, but he always stayed on it)The one time we put our feet down was when we went to Disney World. We let our son take another stuffed animal, but I had visions of Gingy disappearing into the Small World river and me driving back from Illinois to Florida to go find him.Gingy has busted stitches and been re-sewn. He’s lost an eye to a playful puppy and gotten a mismatched version and he probably wouldn’t survive too many more washes, but he’s still around.My son is now 11. Every once in a while, I ask him if he knows where Gingy is. He always finds him, but he’s starting to roll his eyes at me when I ask. I finally suggested giving Gingy to his youngest sister, who is 5. That stopped the eye rolling and he shook his head without words. We’re not totally at apathy yet.But the day is coming.
We’re not totally at apathy yet.But the day is coming.Probably for the best. You don’t want this to happen to him:
This is so lovely. I’m 47, and Le Mutt! (TM) is still sitting on the futon in my guest room. He also has an unfortunate, puppy induced eye injury and has been re-sewn many times.
Can I just point out that that Michael Keaton’s Ken is the secret MVP of this movie?And Jodi Benson’s Barbie doesn’t suck, either.
“We never learn, for instance, why the toys will stop at nothing to keep people from knowing that they’re actually alive, unless those toys are really just worried about our collective sanity.”Overlooking the obvious answer of narrative convenience, questioning this sort of logic can lead to interesting conjectures. My favorite has always been that you never really get a sense of what might happen if the Farmer catches Shaun and the other sheep doing People Things (ordering pizza, playing football, having a rave, etc…) but durn it if it’s not important to keep him from doing that….
I think Inside Out handled existential ennui and meeting the passage of time with grace a whole lot more elegantly and impactfully than Toy Story 3, but I will say that the end of TS3 never fails to reduce me to a blubbering mess when Andy drives away.Likely I feel this way because when both TS3 and Inside Out came out, I was already a parent, so the encroaching inevitability of death that the incinerator scene alludes to was already a reality I had faced many times, whereas kids watching TS3 would have been experiencing it fresh. But I was (and am) always vulnerable to the march of time and the assurance that your kids will eventually outgrow you, so Andy driving away and Bing-Bong sitting alone on the cliff’s edge and weakly muttering, “She can’t be done with me,” turn me into a Niagara of tears.
You should talk to my wife. Our youngest (and only daughter, which probably makes it even more emotional somehow) has this lovey she’s adored since she was 1, this weird thing that’s basically a plush elephant’s head sewed into the middle of a washcloth that looks like some kind of creepy elephant ghost, but I digress — it’s resemblance to Bing-Bong makes Bing-Bong’s sacrifice in the memory dump particularly excruciating for her.
Toy Story 3 comes from the pixar era when they were laying on the melodrama *way* too thick in an effort to transition away from being seen as purely kids movies. It definitely worked even if it makes these movies a bit hacky in retrospect.
Uh, have you seen Onward or Finding Dory? In my opinion, they were much better at the melodrama back then. Now it seems like it’s a crutch for them.
After watching Onward with my kids my 8-year old asked me why every movie is about dead parents lol. It does feel like pretty lazy writing at this point. I really liked Soul but even that had a whole arc about the protagonist claiming the mantle of his dead (of course) dad’s suit.
My issue with Onward is that they never let the kid meet his dad, for the thinnest in plot reasons. Like, I get that that’s sort of the point but come on. Soul at least more naturally fit into the universe.
Inception is a very good movie. Also Toy Story 3’s climax literally had me shaking in my seat. It was so intense to watch that in a theater
Toy Story 3 won’t let you ponder those questions because it’s too busy power-bombing your inner child through a flaming table.
Somebody’s a stealth Dudley Boyz fan!
I mentioned the very same concentration camp-like theme of incineration and also the marginalization, betrayal and ultimate imprisonment of the toys in Toy Story 3 to my mother who proved to be still very wise by reminding me of the old Grimm’s Fairy Tales where children were often considered expendable and even the objects of culinary preferences as a way to warn them against the evils of society and to behave appropriately. She also thought that the younger kids maybe don’t quite understand the gravity of some of the scenes, but only respond to the cartoonish nature of the characters.
Here is my contribution to the esteemed field of overthinking animated children’s’ movies.
We already know that all toys are sentient, not just those belonging to Andy’s family which means there are potentially billions of sentient toys in the Toy Story universe.
We have also seen how often the limited number of toys portrayed in the movie come close to being discovered and how much effort they put into preventing this.So it stands to reason that over the entirely of sentient toy existence at least a tiny portion of them have been discovered by humans and, considering how many toys there are, that tiny portion is still a huge number of revelations. Yet there is no evidence that humans have common knowledge of sentient toys.
So does that mean…1) That belief in sentient toys makes up a huge portion of metal illness cases and no one is connecting the dots?or2) There is a vast and effective network or toys who are tasked with the job of making the problem go away, possibly through kidnapping and “reeducation” or lots of deaths made to look like accidents?
I’m hoping it’s the latter and I very much want to see this made into a movie.
I wonder if dog toys come to life too. If so, they must be in an existential hell after what my dogs do to them.
This is a great piece of writing, Tom, but this line slayed me (metaphorically!):“Still, the final moment when Andy gives up all his toys to little Bonnie
just rips my heart out all over again, an emotional Mortal Kombat
fatality.”
I never got what everybody else gets out of the Toy Story movies. They’re the same goddamn movie over and over again. TS1: “What does it mean to be a toy? Oh, and let’s save Buzz.” TS2: “What does it mean to be a toy? Oh, and let’s save Woody.” TS3: “What does it mean to be a toy? Oh, and let’s save each other.” I’ll give the incinerator scene in TS3 credit, but when everyone else was crying over Andy giving Bonnie the toys, I just didn’t care. I didn’t even bother with TS4.Not that I’m completely heartless—the opening of Up and the titular dish in Ratatouille causing Anton Ego to recall a happy memory both get the ol’ lump in the throat going. But otherwise I feel like the 5th dentist who wouldn’t recommend Aquafresh.
“What does it mean to be a toy” isn’t really the message, it’s just the premise.TS 1: What does it mean to be a friend?TS 2: What does it mean to be family (I think, I haven’t seen it in a while)TS 3: What does it mean when someone in your life moves on?TS 4: What does it mean when you want to move on in life?
At the end of this movie, I turned to my then young daughter and said through copious tears “You’re never leaving home”.Now she’s finishing her freshmen year. (Wipes away a tear.)
I remember being genuinely shocked they aged up Andy and had the same actor come back. And that the series essentially grew up with me. I haven’t seen the 4th one yet, but I don’t really want it to ruin this one for me.
After watching the downbeat Japanese trailer for Toy Story 3, I was convinced that if it were a Japanese animated movie it would have ended with the toys actually getting melted down and recycled into new toys, as a sort of reincarnation thing.
Obligatory Top 10 Highest Grossing Movies Of 2010 Post: The Numbers1. Toy Story 3, Disney, $415,004,8802. Avatar, 20th Century Fox, $408,392,7273. Alice In Wonderland, Disney, $334,191,1104. Iron Man 2, Paramount, $312,433,3315. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate, $300,531,7516. Inception, Warner Bros., $292,568,8517. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 1, Warner Bros., $283,533,2158. Despicable Me, Universal, $251,203,2259. Shrek Forever After, Paramount, $238,736,78710. How To Train Your Dragon, Paramount, $217,581,231Wikipedia1. Toy Story 3, Disney, $1,066,969,7032. Alice In Wonderland, Disney, $1,025,467,1103. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 1, Warner Bros., $976,920,1034. Inception, Warner Bros., $825,532,7645. Shrek Forever After, Paramount, $752,600,8676. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, Summit Entertainment/Lionsgate, $698,491,3477. Iron Man 2, Paramount, $623,933,3318. Tangled, Disney, $592,461,7329. Despicable Me, Universal, $543,113,98510. How To Train Your Dragon, Paramount, $494,878,759
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)Saving Private Ryan (1998)The Dark Knight (2008)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)Toy Story 3 (2010)Beverly Hills Cop (1984)Back To The Future (1985)Batman (1989)Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King (2003)Spider-Man (2002)Toy Story (1995)Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi (1983)Spartacus (1960)Titanic (1997)Rain Man (1988)Kramer VS Kramer (1979)Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)Top Gun (1986)The Longest Day (1962)Aladdin (1992)Independence Day (1996)Three Men And A Baby (1987)Billy Jack (1971)My Fair Lady (1964)Cleopatra (1963)The Sound Of Music (1965)Avatar (2009)Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)Spider-Man 3 (2007)Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006)Forrest Gump (1994)Home Alone (1990)Grease (1978)Shrek 2 (2004)The Bible: In The Beginning… (1966)Love Story (1970)How The Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
Toy Story 3 is an amazing movie, and it’s all on the page. Arndt claims to have written 30 or 40 drafts, which I understand is pretty common for Pixar (and explains why their movies are so goddamn good), but still, the script is a wonder. I write and revise scripts, but even still reading scripts is a goddamn chore for me given the formatting. But not TS3! It’s one of the very few scripts that reads almost as fun as the movie itself, it’s a masterpiece of economy.Inside Out might win for most emotionally intelligent, but TS3 is IMO the very best Pixar movie—it’s a laugh riot, it has amazing action, the story pulls you like no other, and I get misty just thinking about it. The sequence at the dump is incredible, five minutes that will reduces nearly everyone to tears—and then cheers. Just amazing.Arndt helped draft early drafts of the Force Awakens—we can only imagine what it could have been if he’d employed the same process he used on TS3. The man’s a fucking wizard, god love him.
Honestly, I knew I was in for some shit from the minute the opening montage, set to “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” just cuts suddenly and smashes to black on the line “our friendship shall never die”. Like sitting in the theater right then I almost felt a bit of fear as I realized those madmen had begun a mission to make me cry in front of actual children.
It’s not the incinerator scene for me. It’s when he gives the toys away. That scene breaks me so thoroughly and completely that I’m tearing up just typing this comment, even though the clip wasn’t in this article (thankfully). I don’t think any single scene has been so effectively devastating.
My children were born in the late ‘aughts, and thus, I became intimately familiar with Pixar in general, and Buzz Lightyear in particular. The arrival of Toy Story 3 was met with yuge anticipation, let me tell you. At the climax of the film, I was absolutely sure that all those toys would face certain death. I remember thinking (in absolute shock) — are they REALLY going to kill these guys? In a Disney film? (!)[11 year old spoilers]The rescue was absolutely delightful, and a wonderful callback to the original. Just perfect.And then (!) the toys are donated to Bonnie, and I finally lost it. What a roller coaster ride! Someday my kids are going to grow up, too. It hits you right in the feels. Bravo, Pixar! You guys really know how to tell a proper story.
The funny irony is I remember people were very vocal that we didn’t need this movie (myself included), and that TS2 ended perfectly. We were so worried they were going to ruin this, and it says something about how protective fans were of these beloved characters and this IP. Frankly, the filmmakers had us right where they wanted us, for them to pull off what they did emotionally.
I just can’t with Sausage Party’s ending, but a lot of that movie did make me laugh, and I liked some of its ideas.
In the film’s climactic scene, the one where the toys are all sliding downward toward doomI’d argue that the actual climactic scene from Toy Story 3 — the climax Pixar had been building toward over the three movies— is the one between Andy and Bonnie.
Wait wait wait wait. Wait. The last Incredibles movie was ‘great?’ I saw it in the theater and was incredibly disappointed by it. It had forgettable villains and a plot ‘twist’ you can see coming from a thousand miles away, and it jettisoned of all character development from the first movie. Not great.
The truest, most poignant moment comes at the end after Andy finds Woody in the box he’s giving to Bonnie. Bonnie reaches out to take Woody, and Andy instinctively and reflexively keeps Woody away from her. In that moment, Andy, a young man driving going off to college and letting go of his childish things to pass on to another child, instantly becomes a little boy again. In that instant, everyone watches that scene has just drunk from the fountain of youth, and it hurts so much. And in the next few seconds, Andy immediately grew up again and bequeathed his most beloved toy to a new generation. For me, this is heartbreak of the sweetest kind, not because my heart was smashed by ugliness, or it broke out of misuse, but because my heart burst from so much love and affection and goodness. Knowing that Andy was voiced by the same actor who voiced him in the first Toy Story movies makes it all the more poignant.