"TOY STORY 3": Another Pixar movie achieves big box office - but is it a great movie?

"Toy Story 3" is the shot-in-the-arm big success of the lackluster Hollywood box office summer of 2010. The Pixar team is an impressive combination of computerized animation and storytelling talents. The Toy Story franchise is one that makes the most of the limitations of the format, which, however tweaked with computers and CGI, still makes "living" things look like objects, generally shiny and pristine ones. Despite new tricks such as a swoosh effect like a camera panning swiftly and blurry backgrounds, surface details like bruises and dirt tend to look added-on. So, logically, the main characters in the film are a child's collection of favorite plastic playthings; a Ken and a Barbie doll, a Slinky toy dog, a talking cowboy and cowgirl, a mechanical spaceman, he and she potato figures with pop-on facial features. If the comic is in Bergson's definition "the mechanical encrusted on the living," "Toy Story" isn't the first animated film to present the living encrusted on the mechanical.

Last year my favorite animated feature was not the overpraised and sentimental "Up"* (another Pixar cash cow) but Wes Anderson's stop-motion film from a Raold Dahl book, Fabulous Mr. Fox. Still more stimulating to the imagination, really, were the experimental short films from Annency shown at the 2009 SFFS Animated Film Festival. A feature in the festival along with Mr. Fox was the Belgians Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar's Town Called Panic (Panique au village), a lower-budget stop-motion animation. They didn't have the likes of George Clooney and Meryl Streep to do the voices. Panic actually uses mock-ups of simple little stand-up toys -- Coyboy, Indian, Horse, etc. It's totally wacko. It also evokes the feel of inanimate objects coming to life better than Pixar's infinitely more fluent creations, which are based on real toys but, being computer animations, can do anything, make any moves the Pixar people want, and hence quickly make you forget that they're based on inanimate objects. A Town Called Panic is boldly artificial and crude. The story is twisty and hard to follow, seemingly improvised like a surrealist "exquisite corpse" drawing, with one part folded over so the artists don't see what they're connecting to.

Toy Story 3 is doggedly faithful to its theme, and it begins with a lot of talk as the toys natter on about what on earth they should do. Andy, the toy's owner, is now seventeen and is going off to college. It's time for him to put away childish things. He has a sentimental attachment to them. They evoke nostalgia for his childhood. You'd think he might have gotten over that, like, when he was about twelve, but the sentimentality of the film is undeniably valid: people do cling to or long for their youth. This is touchingly illustrated when, after many vicissitudes, Andy (spoiler alert!) turns over the little group of his favorite toy-personalities (they are, in effect, marketable characters, which you will find for sale, part of the franchise of the megabucks film) to a little girl who he has heard is "good with toys" (as if they were animal pets and not plastic). Before climbing into his VW bug and driving off to school, Andy pauses and takes the time to introduce the girl to his toys one by one, to make sure they'll have a good "home." It's a rather odd notion, but in his ability to play with the little girl, Andy seems somehow more gentle and more grownup than the usual college freshman; he's still in touch with his inner child in a way that may make him a good father. On the other hand when he is standing next to his mother earlier, due to Pixar's inability to "do" aging with subtlety, she looks more like his sister. Perhaps, like Lewis Carroll and other great writers of books for super-intelligent children, the Pixar people are essentially adults whose love of childhood verges on the perverse.

"Toy Story 3" has moments of considerable ingenuity (not only technical ones), which are deceptive because it is fundamentally simple. It may seem like a thought-provoking meditation on themes of growth, abandonment, and loss; somewhere inside the film there surely is the ghost of such a meditation screeching be let out. But while its overriding flaw -- as well, of course, as its most successful commercial hook -- is its sentimentality, it is primarily nothing more more than an action film about escape, with cruel oppressors posing as cuddly critters, and a small loyal band uncertain where to turn.

The now (more or less) grown up boy, Andy (John Morris), sentimentally chooses to take Woody (Tom Hanks), the cowboy doll and his apparent chief childhood toy "friend," along with him to college as a talisman, and would leave the rest in a bag to go in the attic; he does not want them thrown away or passed on to others. Like so many of us, he can neither keep his past in front of him nor wholly sever his ties with it. By accident the toys get rerouted to the Sunshine daycare center. They are greeted by the jovial Lotso (Ned Beatty), a worse-for-wear teddy bear that turns out to rule the center's toys like the head o"f a penitentiary. (Beaty just appeared in the grisly new thriller "The Killer Inside Me.") Believing himself to have been rejected by his little girl owner (who in fact only lost, not abandoned, him), Lotso takes out his bitterness on the world. In all this, and a moment when the little band of brothers is threatened with near-infernal annihilation, Toy Story 3, though ostensibly made for the very young, moves into areas that are perhaps not so child-friendly.

Woody is a brave and upright leader who sets out to save the other toys. It's appropriate that this toy is voiced by Tom Hanks, an actor associated with simplistic American heroes like those of "Saving Private Ryan" and "Forrest Gump." Woody seems to do more than his fair share of dithering, but he is always doing the right thing in his own eyes, and, in the end, despite terrible missteps, he proves devious or intrepid at just the right moments.

There is not as much complexity to "Toy Story 3's" action as to its implications. Like most animations from their beginnings, it's a lot of chasing around and being smashed up. (That the worst smashing is done by very small children, and Lotso's most evil enforcer is a large Baby doll, are creepy notes.) It's a stretch, but a necessary one for a franchise, to string this out to 103 minutes. Typically, it has gotten pushed more each time: number 1 was 80 minutes, number 2 a little over 90, now this.

A sly irony is that the toys only move around and talk to each other when alone, and quickly snap back to "pretending" to be inanimate whenever people are around. Another child's toys are impressed by the skill of Andy's at "playing dead" and, in a witty touch, asks, "are you classically trained?" A flashback to the sad story of Lotso and a funny interlude when Ken (whose potential gay overtones are not touched) gives a fashion show to Barbie (whom he's just met), doing campy disco turns from a wardrobe of hundreds of outfits. Someone trashes Ken by yelling, "He's not a toy, he's an accessory!" Likewise the space man toy Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) adds amusing padding to the film when he's switched back to "demo" mode by Lotso's henchmen so he can be used as a prison guard; then, jolted, reveals a sexy Hispanic program, prancing and dancing and talking in comically deep-throated Spanish.

All this adds layers, but doesn't change the movie's basically simple trajectory. People who herald "Toy Story 3" as a masterpiece are desperate in the middle of a dead Hollywood season. It is nothing more than merely competent, and I'd rather watch real actors on screen or, if forced, stop-motion, which has richer ironies and distracts less with its technical pretensions. Walt Disney had the right idea with "Fantasia," an omnibus of seven separate movements or stories, each with a completely different mood set by a strong piece of music. "Fantasia" is two hours long and still delights, but it's a dubious pursuit to stretch out an animated film that tells only one story to an hour and a half. There comes a point midway through "Toy Story 3" when you realize it's done what it's got to do, and, like every franchise, it's turned into a player greedy for attention who has used up his time but refuses to leave the stage.

_________________
©Chris Knipp 2010

*My review of "Up" can be found here: http://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t;=1279&p;=1297#p1297.