Toy Story 3
Lee Unkrich | USA | 2010
103 min
Consistent – that’s the word that best describes both the Toy Story series and Pixar’s monumental achievement that is this third film in the saga. If the Pixar of the past was about creating films with increasing levels of sophistication and depth, the new Pixar proves that, miraculous as it may seem, it can go on doing this quite consistently even with a trilogy, in an age where most sequels rarely measure up to their original. A week after having seen it, I still can’t quite place where Toy Story 3 ranks amongst the others (better than the first or its sequel? you decide), but what I do know is that I can’t quite stop thinking about how stellar and emotionally satisfying it was.
The Toy’s dilemma this time revolves around their owner Andy having grown up and leaving soon for college. This means that all of his toys, save for Woody, get packed up and sent to the attic. Via a stroke of bad luck and a mix up of bags, the toys end up as donations to a day care centre where they not only have to deal with unruly toddlers, but also a prison like internal environment where older, veteran toys, lead by cuddly but nefarious Lotso, are protective of their status and resentful of the new enrolls. Woody of course tries to help get his friends out of this situation, but ends up separated and possessed by an unlikely new owner. This displacement quandary, long a staple ingredient of the Toy Story scripts but augmented in scale this time, adds not just more excitement and uncertainty, but also stuffs the film with moments of wonderment at the imaginative settings and ingenious characterizations, especially of the many newer toys.
One of the biggest joys of the film is the sheer number of ways the setup can be interpreted. Where one might see the day care centre as an analogy of an old age retirement home and their burgeoning in modern society, others might view it as a cautionary message about the impracticality of longing for a utopia, the toys after all look forward to being at the day care centre, where they will never fear being someday abandoned. Even if you shrug this off as reading too much into the script, the playful inventiveness of the plot and its loving embracement of movie clichés, from genres as diverse as horror to prison dramas, will send you into fits of laughter, all while admiring how the makers have steered clear of the pitfalls of sampling pop culture references by not recycling them for cheap laughs. It’s clear from watching the film that Pixar’s greatest strength is the one-two punch of its quality attention to visuals and also its superb script, credited, in addition to new director Lee Unkrich himself, also to Toy Story alumni John Lasseter, Wall-E’s Andrew Stanton and even a helping hand from Little Miss Sunshine scribe Michael Arndt.
As the sendoff to characters we’ve grown to love and cherish, the film is a fitting and satisfying conclusion. It actually provides closure not just to this film but also to the series as a whole, a daring move if you consider that this franchise has not only been Pixar’s most successful, but also the one that practically launched the studio in the mid 90’s. While everything is fun and games for the first two thirds of the film (and it follows the template of Toy Story 2 perhaps a bit too closely), it really changes gears and goes into overdrive during its knockout last act. Nothing can prepare you for the sheer intensity of the thrills that await you (surpassing even Wall-E) or the touching final scenes (outclassing even Up). By its closing moments we realize how much of Toy Story 3 is embedded and imbued with adolescent nostalgia, stemming from an adult longing for the past.
