TOY STORY 3 WEEK- The Edinburgh Premiere

As you'll know by now if you've been reading this week, I saw Toy Story 3 at its UK premiere on June 19th, at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. At the top of the week, I promised a vlog of some description, but as you might have surmised from how I also promised it would be poorly edited and hashed together, I kind of failed.

What I can do instead is blog about my experience in text instead!




The journey to and from Edinburgh was a five-hour trip each way, so upon arriving in the city at 4.30pm, I wasn't at my best. I caught a taxi to the hotel and from there, rushed off to the cinema to get some footage of the red carpet. Typically, I rushed out without my video camera.

The film started at 6pm and was generally rather excellent, as you'll have gathered this week. I also got hold of the first press screening pamphlet thingy of my film reviewing career, which was nice. There was a great introduction from animators Bobby Poedska and Mike Venturini before the film- everyone who works at Pixar seems personable enough that it really is the best workplace in the world.

One thing I haven't mentioned thus far is the traditional Pixar short before the film, this time called Day and Night, not to be confused with an upcoming and ambiguous-looking Tom Cruise film. My favourite of the Pixar shorts is still Presto! from before WALL•E, but this one makes a charming short out of the most simple concept imaginable. I'll say again, it must be the best bloody workplace in the world.

It should once again be reiterated though, seeing the film for the first time with a screenful of kids and their families probably enhanced the experience immeasurably. It's a great film anyway, but the reactions of the target audience were enjoyable too.

Despite what you see in that video though, I didn't see Sean Connery arrive. There were two more screenings starting after the one I saw, so he probably arrived on the red carpet later than I did. I also doubt I'd have been able to stop myself congratulating Henry Jones Sr. for not appearing in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and film geek determination doesn't go well with the kind of security stars of that calibre demand...

Anyway, afterwards I could've recorded some vlog stuff in my hotel room but instead chose to go and watch Macgruber, because it wasn't playing back in Middlesbrough and I had my Unlimited card with me. I reviewed that here, but didn't record much vlog material the following Sunday morning.

Even without the lack of material, my current video camera sucks, so the hotch-potch I was working on to show you today just sucks. Consider this my pledge to get a better camera and work on shooting enough material to give you worthwhile vlogs in the future.

In the meantime, this is the end of Toy Story 3 Week here for The Mad Prophet. Go and see the film when it's finally released in the UK on Monday!

Video courtesy of LondonCitySkies on YouTube, images from EIFF's Flickr stream and Millionaire Playboy.

TOY STORY 3 WEEK- The New Characters

In trilogies, so much of the world-building is done in the first two instalments that it's unusual to see many new characters appear in the third instalment. When you see The Lord of the Rings- The Return of the King, the only new characters with any bearing on the plot are Denethor, steward of Gondor and all-around douche, and Gothmog, who was a gnarly creature effect if anything.

Where Pixar have once again broke the mould is in introducing a wealth of new characters into Toy Story 3. As mentioned in my review at the start of the week, these characters figure nicely in the plot without ever short changing Woody, Buzz, Jessie et al. Spoilers may follow as I cover seven of those new characters.


Lotso Huggin' Bear

Lotso's a fairly beat up old-timer, based on a real-life toy from the 80s and voiced by Ned Beatty. He runs the show at the Sunnyside Daycare Centre, but like most of the toys therein, he's not what he seems and he proves an incredibly effective character when we see his origins.

Ken

With Barbie appearing for the first time in the second film, the third one brings her plastic beau to the screen, and gives him Michael Keaton's voice. The character proves an extraordinarily self-centred scene-stealer and you'll probably forget how awesome it would've been to hear Keaton voicing an unhinged Batman action figure.

Big Baby

This dopey lookin' bastard is one of those baby dolls that blinks its eyes, but his right eyelid was broken off long ago. Now he's something of an enforcer at Sunnyside, and his action figure has gone on tour with director Lee Unkrich to promote the film, arriving in the UK this week.

Bonnie's Toys

These toys belong to Bonnie, a young girl who's dropped off each day at Sunnyside. There's Mr. Pricklepants, a thespian hedgehog voiced by Timothy Dalton, which is just as funny as it sounds. The (male) unicorn is Buttercup and the triceratops is Trixie, who comes from the same range of dinosaur toys as Rex. These are the three I'll mention, but there's one more I'll let you see yourself, whose surprise appearance got one of the biggest laughs of the film.

The Monkey

Watch out for this scary bastard. That's all I'm saying. Jeez.

Toy Story 3 Week concludes tomorrow.

TOY STORY 3 WEEK- Wait, Go Back One...

It occurs to me now, in the middle of Toy Story 3 Week, that I never got around to doing a Toy Story 2 review on this blog. I did the new one on Monday, and there was a review of the first film when it was re-released in 3D in October. Time to plug the gap in my reviews of the series, and in the week's planned posts...

An accident during playtime leaves a demoralised Woody sitting on the shelf as Andy goes off to cowboy camp at the beginning of Toy Story 2. In his owner's absence, he finds himself abducted by Al, a voracious toy collector who's spent years looking for the centrepiece in his Woody's Roundup merchandise collection. As Buzz and co race to rescue him, Woody warms to the idea of becoming a collectable in a museum, to be appreciated by kids for eternity...

Many will know from both previous posts and my willingness to dedicate a whole week to a sequel that I'm a big fan of Toy Story. For me, as with many others my age, it's the foundation stone in my appreciation of films, and it remains my personal second favourite film of all time. Any sequel would have to match pretty lofty expectations, even though I was only nine years old when this one came out.

Pixar have proven equal to that task twice now, and Toy Story 2 is a film that's just as good as the first one. It lacks the sheen of nostalgia that fuels my insane appreciation of the original, but it's just as fine a film. More than anything else, it enhances the story of these characters, bringing forward the notion that toys get broken and lost sometimes as their owners grow up.

That works well when you factor in the antagonist, Al, who's an even bigger geek than Sid was the first time around. He's a tempting prospect for the likes of Jessie the cowgirl, Bullseye the horse and Stinky Pete the prospector, who've spent years and years in storage rather than getting the attention that toys are seen to crave in these films.

We're not going to broach the topic of Jessie too deeply except to say that Pixar is stupid, making stupid toys sing stupid songs that make people cry. Sniffle. But anyway, even academics have come forward to call this a perfect film. This story and these characters continue to garner high praise in the framework of a mere "kids' film". Critics have also bandied around phrases like "the Godfather II of animated movies", but there, I have to disagree.

The Godfather Part II is frequently brought out as shorthand when someone thinks a sequel is particularly good, but Toy Story 2 has what that other trilogy never had. It has heart, and characters you can actually empathise with. I've said before that I never particularly liked the Godfather trilogy, even though it's pretty much perfect on a technical level. Pixar somehow manage to get emotional resonance alongside technical perfection time and time again, and they don't need an excess of three hours to do it. Hell, they only need pixels and some great voice performances!

Toy Story 2 is just as epic as its live-action counterparts, from its nicely misleading opening to the big old traditional chase scene finale. It's bookended by a modern classic and the upcoming conclusion, but it is just as substantial as either of those, and well worth revisiting. I've heard people claim they didn't even know there was a Toy Story 2, so it's definitely worth revisiting. 

Toy Story 3 Week continues tomorrow.

TOY STORY 3 WEEK- Playing Nice

UPDATE: Despite me having discussed the main point of this blog with my friends for months, ever since that 3D re-release of Toy Story back in October last year, I've been pre-empted at the last minute by Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier in this week's Smodcast. Yep, they discussed the Sid thing. Still, I'm a big fan of their films and they've given me hours of free audio entertainment, so we'll call it quits. You win this time, Smith and Mosier!

There's a scene in the trailers for Toy Story 3 where the toys meet the kids of the Sunnyside Daycare Centre and all hell breaks loose. They're damaged, drooled on, smacked around and generally played with in the way that little kids play with toys before they learn to value their possessions.

It's a theme that most will remember better as the main reason to dislike Sid, the kid next door and demented antagonist from Toy Story. This kid, aside from blowing up Combat Carls and attempting to launch Buzz Lightyears into orbit, deconstructs toys and re-assembles them as new and exciting toys, like a baby-headed spider or a duck with arms and legs. Wait, hang on...

 

Why is Sid, arguably the more creative of the two kids in this film, demonised for fucking about with toys? Alright, we know they come to life, and they're our heroes, but Sid's basically an outcast. He's a geek! He's easier to empathise with him than with Andy, to be honest, who plays imaginatively but somehow keeps all his shit in pristine condition for years. How the hell is Slinky Dog not a knotted mess like every other fucking slinky that leaves its box?


OK, so the people are ancillary in these films anyway, but let's be fair to Sid. The consequences of Woody's actions may have scared him off of pulling apart toys and putting them back together, but from there he was probably traumatised enough to move onto doing it to small animals, and then maybe people! Woody made The Human Centipede happen, ladies and gents!

That's obviously not what we see from the small shout-out to Sid in Toy Story 3, a shout-out you need to keep your eyes peeled for, but you can surmise that where he is now is not where he wanted to be in life. The kid seemed destined for a more creative course in life, dammit.

It's reasonable that the younger kids don't play gently with the toys in Toy Story 3, but when you're watching these films, everyone remember Sid Phillips, the true tragic figure of the Toy Story trilogy.

Toy Story 3 Week continues tomorrow.

TOY STORY 3 WEEK- The Spoiler-Free Review

You might not realise it, but it's been a good eleven years since Toy Story 2. Toy Story 3 thus finds an all but grown-up Andy packing his bags for college. His toys have been packed in storage for a good while, and many of their number have been thrown away or passed on. Woody the cowboy looks set to be taken along to college, and so Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the toys donate themselves to the Sunnyside Daycare Centre, Woody trying to keep the gang together all the way.

To say much more would be to rob you of the experience of letting the film unfold before you. If you're any kind of fan of this series, then Toy Story 3 should be the film that takes you back to your youth more than any other in 2010. Director Lee Unkrich and writer Michael Arndt have found a perfect balance in treating the characters we know and love in new and original ways while still bringing in scores of new characters, and never short changing any of them.

Let's take a moment to compare that to another recent animated sequel. It almost feels like picking on Shrek Forever After when its most relevant competitor is a Pixar film (especially this Pixar film), but just look at what went into that. There's been a Shrek film every three years, like clockwork, since 2001. In the time Dreamworks took to make one really good film, two fairly average sequels and an absolute stinker in the middle, Pixar lovingly crafted just one sequel to one of their most beloved properties and made it damn near perfect.

The story hits some of the same beats as we've seen before, but as I've said, the joy of Toy Story 3 is how differently its all brought forward. We get the now regular Buzz malfunction, but it makes for a great comic relief aside as the second act action ploughs forward. The crisis of ownership from the second film comes to the fore in a big way here, but while the earlier plot turns dealt with the idea of immortality, this one's dealing very much in the realm of Dante's Inferno. For toys.

And d'you know which of the characters should be singled out here? Mr. Potato Head. Pixar make it look so effortless that it might have been planned all along, but it's quite important that one point that the respective parts of the Potato Heads move independently of their brown plastic shells. It's a tremendously creative sequence in the middle of a tremendously creative film, and one that uses such body horror quite liberally, for a change.

More than expected, they're playing with horror conventions in this one. Certain new characters could be downright nightmare fuel for younger viewers, but there's always that level of subversion that keeps the proceedings warm and funny. It is a nice touch for older viewers though, who perhaps even more than before can be as engrossed in the action as their younger companions and offspring.

The studio has come into a reputation for tear-jerking since Toy Story 2, liberally tugging at heartstrings in the likes of WALL•E and Up, and with Toy Story 3, there's no exceptions. I've heard various people admit to crying their hearts out at various points in the film, so if you know and like these characters, there's no telling where the film will get you. It would be a spoiler to tell you where it got me, but there's not a lot of shame in admitting that it did get me.

It may seem odd to some who've heard the advance buzz that I haven't mentioned Michael Keaton's performance as a Ken doll. His great vocal work complements a scene-stealing character excellently, but what also distinguishes Pixar as the best studio around is how they get real talents to do voices rather than big names. Stars as high-profile as Tom Hanks are practically invisible here. Hanks is excellent of course, as are Tim Allen, Ned Beatty, Timothy Dalton and the rest, but they're also subtle.

The only use you have for 3D glasses in this one is to hide the tears, a use that might have served you while watching Up last year as well. But all quibbling about the technology aside, it really didn't seem like this was in 3D at all. That's not to say that I forgot I was watching a 3D film, but that it seemed to make no difference. Naturally, I'm really looking forward to seeing Toy Story 3 in 2D, where the richly rendered visuals won't be impeded by a pair of plastic specs.

Don't doubt it for a second- Toy Story 3 is the must-see family film of the year. Hell, it eclipses most action films for thrills and spills, so if you don't have young ones in your immediate family circle, go and see it with some of your friends instead. But most of all, it preserves the same sense of humour and compelling storytelling that made its predecessors so great, capping off the story of some of the best-loved characters of an entire generation. Without a bit of hyperbole, I feel sorry for you if you're not going to see this one.

Toy Story 3 opens in cinemas, showing in 2D and 3D, on July 19th. Toy Story 3 Week continues tomorrow.

TOY STORY 3 WEEK- Introduction...

Welcome to Toy Story 3 Week on The Mad Prophet. Later in the week I'm hoping to bring you a somewhat uneven and hastily edited vlog on the business of my trip to see the film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival last month, but it seems only right that the first order of business is my review of the film.

Yeah, there's been one of these things from me up on Den of Geek for a while now, written up in double-quick time at the hotel the morning after I saw the film. I'd like to think this one has the benefit of hindsight, although I'll still be discussing the film with next to no spoilers. There'll probably a spoiler-ish review after the film has been released next week.

OK, so it is another week before the film's proper UK release (FINALLY), but with nothing new out this week that I haven't already covered and The Karate Kid and Inception to cover next week, makes sense to do this themed week now.


Enjoy!