Cars 2 (John Lasseter, 2011)

I will not ask why Cars 2 exists because I've seen the merchandising figures from the first film. Nevertheless, it's a question I couldn't force out of my mind while watching this two-hour bore. After a string of ambitious, beautiful films that established Pixar as one of the most respected studios on Earth, they finally sink to the sad state of their bosses at Disney. This isn't a film, it's a preview of coming attractions at a theme park. I didn't stay through all the credits, but I nearly did just to see if it ended with an advertisement to come check out Cars Land next year at Disney California Adventure.

Underlining the sheer cynicism of this film's conception is the near-total lack of characterization. John Lasseter, whose erstwhile evocation of the young, winsomely childlike George Lucas here brings out the mercenary side of the Star Wars creator, transparently structures the film to avoid personal connection in favor of selling toys. Forgettable as the first Cars was, it at least spent time with its characters; Cars 2 throttles past the drama between Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and his loving but tiresome best friend Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), preferring instead to get in as many new vehicles as possible to make sure Disney's merchandise wing ends this year in the black.

A Bug's Life

Following the game-changing success of Toy Story, Pixar still had something to prove but also won themselves a great deal more breathing room from the heavy executive supervision that plagued (and occasionally helped) their first feature. Demonstrating that the creative team's penchant for grabbing story ideas from interesting places was no fluke, Lasseter and co. decided to adapt a number of films rooted in the great Japanese masterpiece Seven Samurai, specifically its loose parody, Three Amigos! But how is that interesting, one might ask? Well, they transplanted the story into the microcosmic world of ants, a universe so small that the words on the poster were written in lowercase.

Small protagonists set against wide backdrops are a Pixar staple, from toys who make even a child seem a giant to clownfish in the Pacific Ocean to a rat scurrying through the city of Paris to a wee trash compactor with treads that explores outer space. So, the idea of ants scurrying around a world where a blade of grass is proportionate to the size of a tree to a human (thus making the actual tree in the middle of the any colony seem like the Tower of Babel) surely caught the animators' imaginations. As few could argue, A Bug's Life represents a marked step up from the animation of the limited backgrounds of Toy Story: gorgeous green blades rub up against blue skies and fertile soil gives way to cracked, arid riverbeds in dry season. As seen on Pixar's Blu-Ray, A Bug's Life is one of the more visually tantalizing works in terms of its color scheme and large-scale design.

Unfortunately, the beauty of the backgrounds outweighs just about anything else in the picture, from the story to the characters to the design of the characters. Still working with technological limitations, the lack of fine texture in the plant life is excusable, but there are as many ants as blades of grass, it seems, and the shortcuts the animators take with the creatures that move stick out like sore thumbs among the rest of Pixar's spellbinding work across the years. Nobody seems to have a mouth distinct of the rest of the body, each colored in the same color as the body of the character in question with rudimentary teeth. Limbs typically flail, because when they move at a normal speed the animation looks awkward and unfinished.

The story does not have the usual Pixar ambition, either. Even more popcorn-oriented works like Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. have a spark to them, a point-of-view that A Bug's Life lacks. One could go all the way back to 1912 and watch Władysław Starewicz's The Cameraman's Revenge to see a movie about anthropomorphizing bugs (and the director used actual roaches and such for his animation), and the Pixar team only fitfully attempts to build a unique point of view from this angle, choosing instead to insert a number of weak puns and lazily construct a world that looks like our own, albeit made from our scraps. There's nothing about a bug's life that seems so very different from a human's, except Bloody Marys are made with real blood.

Following the Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven/Three Amigos! line, the colony of ants depicted in the film are subject to the harsh rule of grasshoppers, who demand heavy tributes of grain to get them through the winter months, taking most of the harvest each year despite the far larger number of ants. Only one ant, Flik (Dave Foley), a misfit with a knack for thinking up inventions but an inability to make most of them function properly. After his idea for a motorized harvester ends up knocking the stone containing the tribute pile into the lake it overlooks and he subsequently attempts to stand up to the enraged grasshoppers until cowed into submission, Flik seeks to redeem himself by traveling off the island to hire larger bugs to defend the colony when the grasshoppers return.

Instead of finding warriors, Flik inadvertently recruits a band of failed circus performers -- masculine ladybug Francis, high-wire spider Rosie, gigantic rhinoceros beetle Dim, put-upon stick insect Slim, two foreign pill bugs, Teutonic caterpillar Heimlich, praying mantis magician Manny and his wife/lovely assistant Gypsy -- when he mistakes their reluctant altercation in a bar for valiance and strength. When Flik discovers his error after bringing the bugs back to the colony and receiving a hero's welcome, he spends much of the rest of the film covering up the truth so as not to diminish morale and earn yet more scorn.

But then the movie shifts to focus on the colony's feelings of togetherness, surely to build up the suspense to the inevitable fallout from the revelation of the true nature of the "warriors," but Lasseter lets the tension slack, laying the groundwork for a message of standing up to bullies and working together to pull off a plan bigger than any one person (or ant). That's fine and dandy, but even the short length of the film does not allow him to reach the reveal quickly enough to draw any weight from the scene. Worse, this entire plotline comes to feel like nothing more than a typical romantic comedy tale, complete with Big Misunderstanding.

A Bug's Life rallies at the end, when the grasshoppers return and Flik sets aside his self-doubt and inspires the ants to victory. We see the evil Hopper's resolve break when faced with a bird, real or fake, and the ants finally understand their power and how they never needed outside help at all, though they respect and value the circus bugs' contribution. Pixar don't yet have the technology, team size and/or budget for great water effects, but the rainstorm that hits is made convincingly terrifying from the small perspective despite the fact that the water does not seem to leave lasting wetness on what it touches. Yes, the ending is pat, but so is everything else in the movie; at least Lasseter finally injects some blood in the picture for the ants' fight back.

There are aspects of the film I quite admire. It's background animation, of course, which still lingers in my mind and makes a Blu-Ray purchase worth your money despite all the flaws. I also enjoy the idiosyncratic voice cast, from Phyllis Diller as the queen ant to NewsRadio geek Dave Foley as Flik. Though I usually side with the voice actors in their conflict with name stars getting fatter paychecks simply to talk in their normal voices, the choices here are too unique to be stunt casting. And finally, I think the message is great for young kids, who -- let's be honest -- are the target audience of Pixar's films, much as everyone might enshrine them in the annals of the entire medium. No shortage of anti-bully movies exists to my knowledge, but A Bug's Life makes the case for never taking abuse no matter your age.

Still, there is a tedium to this movie absent in nearly all other Pixar movies. The romantic subplot between Flik and Princess Atta detracts from the rest of the story and doesn't have nearly the charm of the other computer-animated ant movie from 1998, Antz (how weird is it that two such movies came out in the same year?). That film did a better job with its neurotic protagonist, more distinctive character animation that was also truer to bug movement while still humanizing the creatures, and just generally more imaginative. I still pop in A Bug's Life from time to time, but it always brings me down a little to watch a Pixar movie and focus only on the "pretty colors."

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.