Toy Story 3

About a month ago, I received an email from a reporter for RTE, Irish national radio, asking -- to my complete surprise -- for an interview related to the upcoming release of Toy Story 3*. Pat McGrath, a terribly nice man who put up with far too much of my nerdy rambling, read my reviews of the first two films of the series and liked them sufficiently to ask for my thoughts about the series and Pixar as a whole.

Now, I kept myself as in-the-dark as I possibly could for Toy Story 3, as I do for any film that catches my interest, so Pat caught me off-guard during the interview when he mentioned that the premise of Toy Story 3, about a college-bound teen leaving behind his toys, effectively targeted the film at my generation, specifically those who got to see the first movie as children in a theater -- I was 6 when I saw it -- and now find ourselves off to college. Because I tried not to let any unfair expectations build in my mind, I had not previously thought about this, and suddenly I felt excitement for the film that matched any of the art films I knew wouldn't come to my neck of the woods. For the first time since leaving childhood, I was in exactly the right age group to see an animated film. (This is also why, in the interview, you can hear me stumble when talking about this, to the point that I use the word "interesting" three times in less than 30 seconds because, damn it, I was very interested suddenly.)

After I sat down in the theater, however, I quickly realized that, as much as Toy Story 3 might be aimed at my generation, it must still play for the one that came after us. An understandable decision, to be sure, as mainstream American audiences still will not see an animated film as anything other than kiddie fare, and if Pixar has a tragic flaw, it is that they choose not to break through this ceiling despite bumping against it so often the glass must be one good shove from shattering at this point. Director Lee Unkrich, a longtime Pixar employee given his first big shot, clearly wants to do well by the series -- and, by extension of the first Toy Story's significance, the entire Pixar studio -- so he attempts to juggle the history of the franchise and the studio while still making a fresh story to appeal to younger children who may well be coming to Toy Story 3 to see their first Pixar movie.

Somehow, he pulls it off. Toy Story 3 deals in nostalgia, which is only natural because its characters are toys, which are rapidly becoming obsolete. With Andy all grown up and headed for college, the few remaining toys in his care find themselves awaiting an uncertain future bound either for the attic or the garbage can. Even Molly, now a tween still young enough to get away with playing with toys, has no interest in them, absorbed with her iPod and concerned only with taking over her brother's room and swiping whatever electronics he does not take with him. With only the slightest suggestion, Unkrich plants the idea into the mind of even a 20-year-old that "kids today" don't know the joy of tossing around some tacky plastic spacemen and cowgirls in your own imagined universe. For proof of this, one need only look at the opening sequence, a brilliant combination of the openings of the first two movies, in which Andy's playtime receives the grand, imaginative visualization that opened the second film (which incidentally presaged the modern mindset by replacing Andy's imagination with a video game). A child can envision a scenario more fantastically out-there than even the most sandbox-oriented video game can accommodate, and the first major heartbreak of Toy Story 3 is the presentation of this delightful use of free time in the flashbacks of home videos, as if capturing something that one day becomes just a memory and not a way of looking at the world.

If I might discuss Toy Story 3 in personal terms -- and, frankly, I can see no other way for someone my age to discuss it -- this opening sequence did not quite tug at my heartstrings, but it did something far more satisfactory: it put me in an oddly serene mood, a wistful reminder not simply of a happier time but an entire perspective that I lost. Watching Andy spin the same basic "story" of his playtime in the first film into an epic space Western, I remembered mashing up my own disparate types of toys into imagined wars for the soul of the galaxy, with Star Wars characters inexplicably fighting Army men and even the odd shark. To think that kids might lose that feeling made me want to leap to my feet in the theater and risk extreme incarceration by shaking the young children in attendance and screaming something largely unhelpful like "Don't you get it?!" before the hot sting of a taser hit my back.

Part of the appeal of the first two movies was the retro style of the toys, culled from the Pixar team's own childhood favorites, but now the age of the toys is just further proof of how outdated the very idea of toys is. These days, a toy like Buzz Lightyear, which looked so cool back in 1995 to my wide, 6-year-old eyes, might as well sit next to the ball-in-a-cup. When Molly's Barbie turns up with Andy's toys, she wears leg warmers and sports '80s hair, and the hollow reflection of chauvinist perception of the ideal woman now seems a hollow reflection of itself. Everything ages, including Andy's formerly manic dog, Buster, but the toys remain forever, sitting neglected in a toy box as Andy outgrows them. Over time, Andy and Molly dispose of all but the most beloved toys, and when someone mentions that Woody's belle, Bo Peep, got thrown out long ago, that brief moment creates a sudden gulf of sadness.

Thus, it comes as no wonder that, when the toys inadvertently find themselves at a daycare center instead of in the attic where Andy relegated all of them but Woody, they find the prospect of being played with for all eternity overwhelming: when the current crop of kids grows older, they are replaced by the next wave of tykes to lavish love upon them. (Toys would love Menudo.) It's certainly preferable to stealing Andy's cell phone and making it ring near them just so the boy will look at them. Upon their arrival, Woody, Buzz and the gang meet all the other donated toys, headed by Lots-O'-Huggin' Bear (Losto for short), a cuddly stuffed bear who serves as the Virgil for the new arrival.

Speaking of Virgil, what's most interesting about the setup of Sunnyside Daycare is how Unkrich expands upon the existentialism of Toy Story 2 by making the third installment into a plastic version of Dante's The Divine Comedy. Initially, the escape from the purgatory of Andy's dusty toy box must seem like Heaven, but, when the bell rings and a sea of toddlers burst in to play, the toys realize they've been sent to Hell, trapped in a room with too-young toddlers. Instantly, we see that Lotso isn't as friendly as he lets on and, like the planes of afterlife in Dante's epic, Heaven and Hell can exist right next to each other, a locked door separating the nightmarish den of two-year-olds from the older children who will really play with toys instead of destroy them.

Soon, Toy Story 3 morphs into a prison escape film, an odd choice but one that lends itself to a number of clever gags. Woody's first attempted escape starts on a triumphant, defiant note and ends with a high comic anticlimax, while the "caging" of Andy's toys recalls a number of classic prison films like Cool Hand Luke and The Great Escape. Most inspired in the breakout is the "Mr. Tortilla Head" bit, a gag that comes out of left field and wins the biggest laugh of the film. Unfortunately, in a film bookended by beautiful ruminations on the nature of aging (and, for toys, horrible agelessness), this angle takes away from some of the emotional depth that the film offers, falling into the trap of cultural references that only briefly entangled Toy Story 2, made more noticeable here by how unrecognizable the references to prison movies will be for children and even most teenagers.

However, every Pixar film builds aesthetically off what came before, and if the prison escape plot distracts from the greater resonance of Toy Story 3, Unkrich nevertheless uses the storyline to exhibit the same sweeping visual advancements displayed on the epic canvasses of Ratatouille and Wall•E into a confined space and doesn't lose an ounce of technical mastery. Lotso is animated with over a million individual thread hairs, allowing his bright purple fur to mingle with a hint of dirt and water damage, hinting at his true character and his backstory long before we see how his own past turned him into a bitter villain (a story that plays as a dark foil to Jessie's own heartbreaking tale from the last film). A cheeky, recurring bit involving Mrs. Potato Head's missing eye allows Unkrich to occasionally peek back at Andy's house without breaking the narrative, and the occasional overlap of what Mrs. Potato Head can see in Sunnyside and what her eye catches back home create shimmering mirages that only enhance the feeling of Sunnyside as a hell that mocks the toys' desires to be played with and to see their owner again.

With limited locations, Unkrich creates a number of unique setpieces using nothing more than inventive exploration and skillful lighting, such as the sickly, neon yellow-green of the interior of a vending machine where all the rulers of the Sunnyside toys meet. Lighting is actually the key component of Toy Story 3: after experimenting heavily with animated reflection with Cars and overwhelming the eyeballs with Wall•E, the Pixar animators shrink the scope from Paris and outer space to a daycare center, yet the lighting is possibly the studio's most memorable. The daycare's default lighting is hazy and oppressive, rather like the same alternately foggy and revealing light Steven Spielberg used in E.T. Toy Story 3 makes the audience feel like these toys are really in a prison, muggy and bleak. All Unkrich needs to do is alter that setup, switching out the stifling mix of sunlight and fluorescent bulbs with the harsh, blinding white of an interrogation lamp or sinister glows to completely change the way you look at the same setpiece. And there has never been a more terrifying moment in all of Pixar's history than the sight of a raging incinerator at the end, belching flames that have actually been animated to be too bright to look at for an extended period of time.

So, the film may be too long by about 10 minutes, which could have been rectified by either cutting out some of the waffle in the middle or teasing out the truth of Sunnyside for a few minutes instead of immediately revealing its dark side. Also, the middle bit, in contrast to the point made by the opening sequence in relation to the imagination, does too much of the piloting rather than let the audience connect fully the way they do at the start and the finish.

However, these minor tremors cannot derail the copious pleasures of Toy Story 3, and writing them down shows me how well the film manages to address and fix its mistakes. Unkrich inserts numerous callbacks to previous Pixar films (and even what appears to be a toy based on Miyazaki Hayao's masterpiece, My Neighbor Totoro), yet he never allows the film to get stuck into the rote of these sequels, serving only to remind the audience of the better films that came before. These are but minor touches in a narrative that expands upon the ideas of the first two: if Toy Story 2 posited the idea of toy (im)mortality and existentialism, Unkrich shows a toy losing its soul, when Lotso has Buzz's programming reset. As much as I suspect that the Pixar team cleared out so many of Andy's toys to allow for easier processing of all the new characters, the loss of so many old characters is logical, appropriate and heartfelt. Besides, the additions are more interesting than many of the original toys who would have outstayed their usefulness and appeal otherwise, such as a group of toys in the home of a sweet, imaginative girl named Bonnie; they take to their roles as if being a toy is an actual occupation, spouting out hilarious lines like "We do a lot of improv" and "Are you classically trained?"

But it all comes back to the central idea of the second film, the question of a toy's life when no one plays with it. When Andy surveys his remaining toys while packing for college, he dismisses his mother's assertion that he should donate them by calling the remnants of his childhood "junk." Unkrich then holds on the faces of the toys, unable to move in front of him, forced to absorb this cruelty with flinching, the frozen plastic eyes more heartbreaking than tears could ever be. Keeping that in mind, who can really blame Lotso for thinking, "We're all just trash waiting to be thrown away"? Toy Story 3 does not settle for simply giving us all our old pals to laugh with: it builds off what came before and reminds us what we leave behind when we mature. And then, somehow, it turns its heartbreaking final scene -- the most touching in Pixar's oeuvre -- into as hopeful and delicate a finale even as it sets off yet another iteration of the same cycle that lead the characters to this point. It may not match the heights of Toy Story 2, nor some of the studio's recent marvels, but Toy Story 3 may be the single best piece of evidence that there are people in this world who know exactly what it means to grow older without losing a sense of wonder, and they all seem to work for the same company.



*For anyone interested, the Toy Story segment Mr. McGrath for which interviewed me can be found on the page of Morning Ireland's broadcast from June 14 here. I rambled about all things Disney/Pixar/animation for about 20 minutes, about a minute of which survives in the final edit. It's almost certainly for the better, given how out-there I got with some of my material, but the idea that my slurred, half-suppressed Southern drawl can be heard for any length of time next to audio of John Lasseter on a bona fide radio broadcast is about as cool as it gets for a geek. Note: RTE's player requires either Windows Media Player or Real Player to run.

Toy Story 1 & 2

Looking back on Pixar's first film, Toy Story's impact on the field of animation has largely overshadowed its lingering worth as a piece of entertainment. It changed the face of popular animated films, sending the traditional cel method into further decline and promoting a whole new type of children's film. But now it looks dated; even in a sparkling high-definition transfer, the 3D animation no longer captivates like it used to, surpassed by a decade's worth of improvements and boundary-pushing.

What survives is the story, an agreeably simple tale, its plain themes of jealousy and acceptance a far cry from the more grandiose messages of Pixar's later features (which is perfectly OK). First and foremost, Toy Story begins with one of the most ingenious premises of any animated feature in history: what if toys came alive when no one looked? Various anthropomorphic mundane objects existed in older animation -- Pixar even tried the idea back in 1988 with the short Tin Toy -- but the brilliance of the film's setup is that it presents a mélange of all toys. Dolls, action figures, cars, even an Etch-a-Sketch and a Mr. Spell come to life when no one watches, devoted to pleasing their child masters but capable of feeling their own emotions.

The world of Toy Story is our own, except blown up out of proportion so as to be infinite and, often, terrifying. Ergo, it's both intimate -- with the primary action taking place in one of two bedrooms, yet vast. Set in the perspective of those wee toys, creatures no taller than a foot who can live out their entire lives in a bedroom, it also implicitly frames itself as the POV of a child. Everything -- the cars, the beds, the doors -- looks bigger, something to great for the brain to ever comprehend. People often refer to "childlike wonder," which stems from this perspective: if the world is this big, we think in our adolescence, what's out there for me?

I'd forgotten how quickly the story moves. John Lasseter, working with future Pixar directors Pete Docter and Andrew Stanton and hired hand Joss Whedon, crafted Toy Story into a zippy, episodic trek home after the initial cut of the film met with disastrous reception from Disney executives (ironic, given that the early print's weaknesses stemmed from these greenhorn animators following executive notes to the letter). In the final version, Woody (Tom Hanks), a cowboy doll and the favorite toy of a young boy named Andy, is less sarcastic and more desperate; his outbursts toward his "replacement" Buzz Lightyear, a sleek new spaceman toy who's all the rage, now contain an edge of fear of abandonment over the perceived condescension of the character as originally scripted. Lasseter introduces Woody, Buzz and all the other toys in the microcosm within minutes, establishes the jealousy Woody feels for the new arrival shortly thereafter and finally launches the two main characters into a nightmarish quest to return home after Woody attempts to kill Buzz and the two wind up stranded away from Andy's house.

He does so through a series of montages, which are prominent in Toy Story and would creep their way into most Pixar features. The dissolve from the Woody decorations that adorn the bed and walls of Andy's room melting into Buzz Lightyear posters and bedspreads, Buzz winning the hearts and minds of the other toys, even Buzz's later identity crisis when he must come to terms with the fact that he's a toy; Lasseter confines these relevant character moments to brief rhythms, allowing for instant connection but denying us a deeper connection to the more emotional elements of the narrative.

Instead, the audience is treated to a tour through bizarre scenarios, such as Pizza Planet. one of those hyperactive whirlwinds of flashing neon and dinging lights that seems to prepare kids for a life spent in a casino. Inside is a claw-grab game filled with alien plush toys who worship the metal appendage that "chooses" the worthy, as well as an uproarious Alien reference via a whack-a-mole game (Whedon came on after the initial print of the film was rejected, but I'd like to think that was his touch). Woody and Buzz eventually find themselves in the clutches of a vicious little Antichrist named Sid, Andy's next-door neighbor and a sociopath who rips apart toys for pleasure. Sid's room provides a horrific counterpoint to the lighthearted, warm feel of Andy's, whose walls even have blue skies and tiny wisps of clouds painted on them.

Yes, the story jumps along, frankly too quickly for its own good, but the wit is every bit as sharp and fast. Rarely has an animated film been cast so perfectly, an oddity given how many celebrities were involved instead of more capable voice actors. Hanks may not sound like a cowboy -- certainly not in the way that Tim Allen is dead-on as Buzz, but his exuberance sells the part better than someone trying to ape John Wayne or Randolph Scott could. His readings convey the wild bliss of being Andy's favorite, the mounting paranoia and resentment of Buzz's unwitting coup and the intense vulnerability that comes with his separation from Andy (though he's a toy modeled after an adult and meant for a child, Woody looks and acts like a lost kid in these moments). For his part, Allen has never sounded so interesting, save perhaps the Toy Story sequel: his programmed bravado the perfect foil for Hanks' deliberate histrionics. Allen of course came from Home Improvement, where he played up the he-man shtick in a manner that softened Al Bundy from Married with Children for easier mass consumption, but his deadpan is hysterical: listen to the way that Buzz deflates Woody's outburst at the gas station, culminating in the booming "YOU. ARE. A. TOY!" with a measured, calm, "You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity." Even the supporting cast is fantastic: Mr. Potato Head cracks wise the entire time, so who better to play him than the Merchant of Venom, Don Rickles? Lasseter uses the celebrities to either bolster or subvert the toys we see on the screen: how great is it to see Rex, a green, menacing Tyrannosaur revealed to be a neurotic, shy basket case voiced by Wallace Shawn? Nearly every joke sounds as if the actor delivering it ad-libbed it, so natural is the dialogue matched to the cast.

And yet, Toy Story shows its age. Lasseter wanted everything to look as real as possible -- impressive, given he had to work with 2/3 the money and 1/4 the staff that the previous year's The Lion King enjoyed -- but for all of the scuffed floors and striking foliage there is the matter of the human animation. Toy Story feature the most realistic humans in any Pixar feature, and also the creepiest. Even setting aside Sid, with his shaved hair and monstrous braces (which, frankly, aren't going to fix that jagged, gap-filled maw of his), every human looks unsettling, dipping well into the uncanny valley and never re-emerging. As quickly as I would recommend Toy Story for any animation class, I might do so as much to teach the perils of using the boundless possibilities of animation for realism as to impart the boundless possibilities it shows everywhere else.

After all, no film had such an impact on the progression of animation since Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, managing to take the limitless freedom of animation visible back in 1939 with Snow White and expand upon it. Frame animation still took hours of intensive work, but a setback as immense as Disney's immediate denial of the first cut would not damn the film to development hell. Lasseter and his crew managed to revolutionize the cinema, and if Toy Story no longer looks up to snuff (though its Blu-Ray treatment really is sensational), it still stands as one of the great cinematic achievements of the '90s. Besides, it's still Pixar's most universally appealing film, eschewing the moralizing that alienates some and crafting a straightforward, thrilling narrative that has lost only some of its charm. What more can you ask of a movie?

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It is no secret that the conceit of the animated sequel ranks as one of the most abysmal, cynical forms of the cinema, a cheap cash-in released straight-to-video to drum up a bit more money for a studio looking for additional revenue in-between "legitimate" productions. Now, the notion that Toy Story 2 nearly suffered such a fate reflects the impact of the film itself; then, the fact that it did secure a theatrical release was the source of head-scratching. Yes, it carried over the same, high-profile voice actors and was the sequel to no ordinary animated hit, but that has no inherent bearing on the film's quality. For all anyone knew, Toy Story 2 would rehash the story of the first film, swapping out old jokes for new, not necessarily fresh, material and increasing the size without changing the scope. Besides, coming off the heels of the slight disappointment of A Bug's Life's reception, Toy Story 2 must have struck some as a return to the well.

When Disney took a look at some of the test footage, though, they understood that Lasseter and co. had hit upon something special once more, and their decision to give it a theatrical release speaks to the quality evident even in the early work. One imagines that the same doubts of animated sequels spelled out above weighed on the filmmakers' minds, as nearly everything about Toy Story 2 builds from the foundation of the first yet modified in ways beyond mere expansion of size. It pokes fun at the emphasis of realism in the first film by opening with a sequence set in deep space with Buzz Lightyear (complete with wry use of "Also Sprach Zarathustra") that eventually reveals itself to be a video game played by the toys in Andy's new room. Not really an "all bets are off" statement, it nevertheless rubs against the expectations placed upon it by the previous movie without self-consciously becoming everything it's not.

As it happened in the last film, Woody is separated from his beloved Andy, but the narrative does not simply play as another "long journey home" flick. Compared to the simple story of the original, Toy Story 2 varies its approach: where the issue of mortality played out literally in the previous film, what with Sid dynamiting toys in his backyard, here Lasseter and the writers ask a deeper question: we can now accept as read that toys are living creatures, but what do they think? Furthermore, how does one seriously define a toy's mortality? They cannot die natural deaths, so is the true test of a toy's life the length of time that a child plays with it?

This is heady stuff, and, in retrospect, Toy Story 2 prompted the shift in Pixar's storytelling to its current incarnation: adult themes nestled, not always snugly, in easily consumed children's entertainment. The movie begins properly with Andy, all set to take Woody to a cowboy-themed camp, accidentally tearing the seam in Woody's arm. So, Andy leaves Woody at home, and his mother sticks the favorite toy on the high shelf, placing him among the forgotten toys of Andy's infancy. There he finds Wheezy, a penguin squeak toy abandoned in this dusty purgatory after his squeaker broke. The experience shakes Woody, showing him the thin line between being a beloved part of a child's life to a compartmentalized memory with a tinge of sentimental reminiscence at best. Galvanized, Woody attempts to save these other toys from a yard sale, only to be stolen by a collector looking to make a hefty sum by selling Woody and a group of related toys to a Japanese museum.

Those other toys -- a cowgirl, Jessie (Joan Cusack), an old prospector, Stinky Pete (Kelsey Grammer), and a plush horse named Bullseye -- affect Woody's desire to return to Andy. They know what it's like to be abandoned and neglected; Woody hallucinated a nightmare in which Andy dropped him into an infinite blackness, but Jessie, Pete and Bullseye have lived that darkness in storage containers for years, and who knows how they got along before Al bought them (if a toy loses its life when it is no longer played with, then can Pete, never removed from his box as his toy model never sold units, be said to have ever lived at all?). Woody halts his attempt to escape long enough to process their plight, and he considers going with them. Better to live in a glass box beloved by children from afar for all time than to be physically involved for a few fleeting years.

This new complexity is visited upon Buzz as well, having undergone his identity crisis in the last film and finally come to grips with his reality as a toy. As he leads the charge to rescue his best friend, Buzz finds himself in a giant toy store, which contains an aisle filled with Buzz Lightyears. It's perhaps the memorable shot of the film, a commentary on the staggering overproduction and devaluation that comes with rampant consumerism marketed toward children, a visualization of the truth of a toy's feelings of individuality, a further counterpoint between Buzz and Woody (Woody now being a rare collector's item, while Buzz Lightyear is now a marked-down item due to market flooding) and, finally, as a means to allow our Buzz to pass on his received wisdom to another Buzz unit, still wrapped up in the delusion of being a real space ranger. As Woody suffers his own identity crisis, Buzz must handle someone else's.

With this leap in thematic depth and intelligence, it is perhaps no surprise, unpleasant as it occasionally is, that Toy Story 2 offsets this potentially child-alienating material by being the most pop culture-centric of Pixar's features.* At times, the Star Wars gags, as well as an ill-advised and already dated Jurassic Park reference, choke what is otherwise the wittiest of the studio's works. The biggest Star Wars reference of the film, involving the new Buzz and a toy Zurg, is extremely broad, yet the moment is amusingly parlayed into the deeper questions of identity that the film poses. Among the many jabs and pokes is a silly swing at Lassie-style exposition that people interpret from animal noises, as we see on an old clip of a Woody-based show where a group of woodland critters jabbers urgently at the Woody from the old program, who translates their chirps into an impossibly detailed account of the peril to which he must attend. Lasseter also inserts grand physical gags like Buzz and the other toys walking across the heavily-trafficked street to the toy store covered by traffic cones, thus causing a massive pile-up as cars halt and screech around unseen construction.

Besides being even funnier than the first, Toy Story 2 also contains a deeper emotional base. It can be somewhat bewildering to return to these films with a greater knowledge of Randy Newman; for my generation, the Toy Story films introduced us to Newman, not his albums, records like Good Old Boys and Sail Away, filled with the most biting, mordant pop songs ever recorded. His big moment in the previous film, "You've Got a Friend in Me," stands as one of his most upbeat numbers, a mite sarcastic when played at the start of the film, before Woody casts Buzz out of Andy's room in jealousy and spite, but by the end any trace of irony was scrubbed from the song. One could almost trace the maturation across the two films through the standout tracks of each: here, Newman counters the lighthearted "You've Got a Friend in Me," Newman stops the show with one of his most somber tunes, "When She Loved Me," made all the more depressing by giving it to Sarah MacLachlan to sing. Toy Story overloaded on the montages to save time and money, but the most affecting moment of its sequel comes in a clip series, showing Jessie's past before winding up in Al's collection. As we watch her owner, Emily, grow and play with Jessie less and less until she finally leaves her in a box filled with assorted crap to be given to charity, the strains of Newman's song does not so much tug on the heartstrings as rip them out as a replacement for a broken piano wire or two.

That the film also looks better than its predecessor should probably go without saying, given the significant difference in time, money, staff and available technology from what Lasseter had to work with four years previously. But the improvement in aesthetic reflects more than just the sleekness that comes with a bigger budget. Lasseter clearly reviewed the work done on the first Toy Story and concluded that the humans really were a bit creepy. While he did not run in the other direction with the people in the movie -- Andy looks mostly unchanged save a graphics update that benefits him immensely -- human rendering is more interpretive in Toy Story 2. Al's bad comb-over looks so real you could slick it back into place, but his frame is more cartoony, a caricature of a fat man that stops short of being insulting. The old man who comes to his apartment to repair Woody looks completely like a cartoon, a composite of every spindly old man who ever was (he may very well be a cousin or some other relative of the old lady at the start of Ratatouille). A Bug's Life marked a significant step forward for the studio aesthetically, but Toy Story 2 finds a balance between these sharp, unmistakably artistic looks with a story that's smart enough to enrich them.

It is miracle enough that Toy Story 2 matches its predecessor, not simply because it is an animated sequel but because it is a sequel at all. As a young(er) lad, I preferred the original's faster story and zippier one-liners to a sequel that I still loved, but now I wonder if Toy Story 2 isn't one of the few -- and it is certainly fewer than some of the more effusive supporters of the studio, including a younger me, would have you believe -- truly great films to come out of the studio. If every passing year makes the easily rationalized flaws of Toy Story more dated and noticeable, it also makes plainer the simple truth that this is a masterpiece, one of the few Pixar films for which this is applicable to all films and not simply its genre.

Personally, though, I would not separate one from the other. I cannot admit much particular enthusiasm for the upcoming third installment, though I have faith that it will be at least be worth the ticket price (increasingly high praise as theaters continue to find creative ways to screw their customers), but few franchise films play off each other as well as these two do: both Toy Story movies are, ultimately, about families and how, despite the old adage, we can choose them. It's an idea communicated most visibly and lucidly in the second film when Andy returns home from his camp to find Woody, Buzz and co. back safe, joined by some new toys to be appreciated by their imaginative owner, if only for a few more years. The boy enters his room to find the toys arranged on his bed welcoming him home even as they return to their plastic, immobile selves that they show to the humans. These toys feel love and friendship and joy and passion, so what's the use of fretting over tomorrow?




*And no, Joss Whedon wasn't involved with this one.