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.

The More Things Change...

The year is 1996, and I'm experiencing the first of many absolute obsessions in my life, and it's with a film I haven't even seen yet. The (almost) six years of my life so far have largely centred around watching Winnie the Pooh, Mr Bean and repeats of the 1960s Batman series on Channel 4. Nothing before or since captivated me like the marketing for Toy Story, the first ever completely computer animated feature film. It was colourful, interesting and quite frankly, it looked like the most amazing thing ever to me. This was the start of mine and everyone else's dalliances with Pixar.

Of course, the year now is 2009, and I've gained about three feet in height, a few GCSEs and A-Levels a cynical outlook on life, the universe and everything. But Toy Story is still brilliant, as are the vast majority of Pixar's other nine films. Even their only misfire thus far, 2006's Cars wasn't awful- the world just probably wasn't ready for a "toyetic" animated remake of Doc Hollywood. Their latest effort, Up, is the story of a retired balloon salesman called Carl Frederickson being evicted from his house by distinctly Agent Smith-like property developers. So because it's a Pixar film, his natural response is to lash up a quarter of a million balloons to his house and fly it to South America. Accidentally picking up a naive boy scout called Russell, Carl discovers a lost world and ends up embroiled in a feud with his childhood hero. It can never be said that Pixar is anything but original in its storytelling, and I toddled along to see Up on Saturday in much the way I go to see any other films they make, and here's what I thought, with the usual considerate lack of spoilers.


That said, I'll try to warn people in advance not only that Up crosses that threshold that few other Disney films cross, but that it does it in the first ten minutes. Yes, you know what I mean. Mufasa, Bambi's mam, and now... well, you'll see. It's utterly galling and more mature in places than anything in any family film I can think of. But nevertheless, those first ten minutes are just absolutely perfect. Literally, probably the best scenes in any film released this year. Beautifully animated and acting as a preface to the lighter antics to come. It's not jarring that the tone shifts back once the film crosses that threshold, because the balancing act that director Pete Docter creates means that the sad bits are absolutely heart-wrenching, but not so much that you can't laugh at the really funny bits that follow once the narrative really gets going.

It's not a mark against the film that it never quite lives up to that perfect opening, because it is still very good and very enjoyable, which goes without saying when it comes to this company. You know you're in safe hands, but ten films in, it takes something really exceptional for people to sit up and take notice. Up is being critically acclaimed by all and sundry, but I'm wondering if a day will come when Pixar is constantly expected to up the ante and make films better and better than what has gone before, purely because they're so good at this. This is an outstanding film, but it's not their best. The trouble is that besides the physics-related implications of the central premise, the film is more rooted in the real world than Docter's directorial debut, Monsters Inc. And now his sophomore effort loses steam a little once the house arrives in South America, giving way to a slight mish-mash of ideas. I had similar issues with WALL·E last year, but I loved that too. And the last paragraph comprises everything that detracted from Up as far as I'm concerned- the rest of the film is marvellous.

More than anything else, you have to applaud any film where the protagonist is a good 70 years older than the target audience, especially when that film makes the audience care about the character so quickly. But on top of that, the supporting characters are rather terrific- Jordan Nagai is funny and charming in his film debut, voicing Carl's de facto sidekick Russell, and Pixar voice-regular Bob Peterson as a talking dog called Dug is arguably one of the best part of a film where there are lots of things to praise. Up is one of those films that's just delightful. It's certainly not lacking in substance, by any stretch of the imagination, but all the same you're going to leave the cinema with a great big smile on your face. I saw the film in 2D by the way, and it's just as good, so it's safe to avoid shelling out extra to see it in 3D. It's pointless to go on any further when most people are already persuaded of Pixar's general genius, not to mention the fact that I've already given my epitaph for this review- just delightful.


Apologies for going all over the place again, but let's take another look at 1996. You've probably all seen Toy Story by now, but for the uninitiated, it's the story of a group of toys who come to life when their owner leaves them unwatched in his bedroom. The first film begins with hand-me-down cowboy doll Woody ruling the roost, a role which is usurped in the wake of their owner's birthday. His favourite gift is a brand-new spaceman action figure, Buzz Lightyear, who quickly becomes more popular than Woody. The pair's bickering sends them hurtling into the big bad world outside the bedroom, as Woody struggles to get home and Buzz, who believes he really is a spaceman rather than a child's action figure, trying to launch into outer space to fight for Star Command.

Similarly to Up, it's a buddy movie. You might say not much has changed, and in some respects you'd be right, because Toy Story was recently released again on the big screen, with the sequel to follow in January, and I absolutely adored it. Just as I was 13 years ago, I was absolutely transfixed. The jokes are still funny, the story is still brilliant and literally every time I see it, I notice something new- who noticed that the fireworks company supplying young boys with massive explosives was called Ill Eagle (illegal), with a sniffy bald eagle as its logo? And it's in things like this that the film's enduring appeal is guaranteed- the friends I saw it with all said they noticed more of the adult oriented jokes they didn't pick up on when they were younger. This is a film with cross-generational appeal that goes beyond nostalgia value- it continues to appeal because it is so damn good.

Everything is just pitch perfect. To try and get a bit of coherence to my gushing, I could point out that this is the only Pixar effort where studio interference from Disney could be inferred. It's the only one that fits that Disney musical sort of template, with numbers by Randy "Sings What He Sees" Newman appearing throughout, and maybe it's only me who thinks about these things enough to wonder whether or not it's a matter of Disney values that Woody seems to have lost the gun that should go in his holster. Sorry, this doesn't have any coherence does it? No, it sounds like a film nut rambling about studio politics because he watched the DVD and found out Disney were going to pull the plug on the film at one point. You can always tell I like it when I can't articulate how good it is. What I'm getting at is the fact that this is one of my all-time favourite films for a reason- it never, ever gets old.

At the film's climax, the rocket blasts into the sky and Woody and Buzz are carried what seems like miles into the air, above the moving van. This is the part where they blow up, Woody tells us, but Buzz has other ideas, and suddenly I'm six years old again, getting goosebumps as that music comes on and they fly after the car. I'm now 19, and should really be gushing about more mature fare, but screw that. Toy Story is one of the few completely perfect films ever made, and I defy anyone to say otherwise.

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Ahem, after that almost embarrassing gushfest, I still have a few other films to look into. Already seen Zombieland, and I promise a review of that will be coming up, and this week sees the release of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, Couples' Retreat and Fantastic Mr. Fox too, so you can expect those to be incoming as and when I see them. In the meantime, if anyone else fancies sharing the Pixar love, feel free to comment. :)

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, watch Toy Story over and over again, on loop, forever. You've got to love it.