A Toybox of Memories

Toy Story 3

**** out of ****

Directed by: Lee Unkrich

Featuring the voice talents of: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Don Rickles, John Ratzenberger, Jodi Benson, Wallace Shawn and Michael Keaton

Running time: 103 minutes

I may have spent more time as a young boy watching Toy Story than I did playing with my own toys. I wanted to be Andy, riding a constant surge of raucous fun with his playthings. As a young boy, I sympathized with him. But times have changed.

In Toy Story 3, I feel for the toys – trying to cling on to the last shreds of joy they feel with their beloved owner. They want to be more than just playthings but his companions, his protectors. They yearn to be there for him anytime, any day.

We’ve had a friend in Pixar ever since the first Toy Story film was released in 1995. But in the last 15 years, Pixar's core young audience have grown, and alas, Andy has grown up too. In the third (and final) installment, he’s headed for college.

Toy Story 3 is an exceptional sequel that works on two levels: first, as an exuberant rollercoaster of sparkling visuals, exhilarating set pieces and pure manic fun (a top notch kid’s flick), and second, as an emotionally grueling throat-grabber: a dark, intelligent, moving meditation about growing up and moving on (what most top notch adult flicks try to be).

The film opens with the same set-up that submerged us into Andy’s room in the first Toy Story, albeit with a few new characters and nearly 15 years of advancement in digital technology.

The whole gang is there, divided in this scene into heroes and villains. The good guys are Sheriff Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack), Bullseye and that tyrannosaurus Rex (Wallace Shawn). The bad guys are the Potato Heads (Don Rickles as the Mr., Estelle Harris as the Mrs.), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), Slinky Dog (Blake Clark, taking the duties from the late Jim Varney) and those squeaky alien toys.

It’s a cops vs. robbers setup in an old-time Wild West locale, with some new adjustments, such as spaceships, giant metal bridges that explode a la David Lean, and (gulp) nuclear weapons.

But, just when we’re consumed in this tidal wave of digital spectacle (compared to the charming splash that opened Toy Story), we’re pulled back into Andy’s room. The whole dandy action sequence we’ve just witnessed is all in the young boy’s imagination as he plays with his toys.

Didn’t we use to magnify all of our pastimes as if they were projected onto a 100-foot screen? Don’t kids have that boundless creativity and sense of adventure that make anything possible?

In an instant, we’re five years old again, creating elaborate universes alongside these small figments of plastic and polyester. The opening could not have been more perfect.

The Randy Newman favourite, “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” cues up. But as the lyrics reach the refrain “And as the years go by, our friendship will never die,” the music halts and the crooning echoes as the screen turns to black. Silence follows.

In a mere five minutes, Toy Story 3 makes us feel like a kid again and then make us long for that childhood. That lyric used to be delightful. Now it feels false. Cue the next nostalgic 98 minutes.

Much like Pixar’s previous film, Up, Toy Story 3 deals with the sorrow one feels when aging. The citizens living in Andy’s toybox are desperate to be played with again. But after Andy refers to Woody and Co. as “junk,” many of them lose faith in ever being a plaything again. They just can’t take this kind of rejection!

The toys eventually sneak into a box bound for Sunnyside Daycare, a retirement home of sorts for toys who have outgrown their owners and can now be playthings for sets of adolescents day after day.

Sunnyside is governed by a plush, pink teddy bear named Lotso (Ned Beatty), and its well-groomed tour guide, a Ken doll (Michael Keaton, we’ve missed you). But even though the toys get their wish to stay at Sunnyside, Woody abandons the team to be with Andy at college.

But things go awry for the rest of Andy’s toys. They are not played with by the young children; rather, they are defaced, whacked around and injured by the hyperactive nursery kids. Worse, the toys soon realize the irony in the daycare’s name, as the facility is – and you’re reading this correctly – run like a Nazi concentration camp.

I need to express how dizzyingly dark Toy Story 3 is: it is the coldest, most morose and most sinister film in the Pixar pantheon. The toy dictators at Sunnyside are heartless and frightening. A prolonged sequence in a trash incinerator at the film’s end is also unnervingly intense, to the point where you accept that these toys may not make it past the scene’s end.

Pixar ups the ante with these chilling scenarios, but they’ve even outdone themselves (imagine that) with the whiz-bang inventiveness of the film’s second half, which consists of an elaborate escape planned by Woody to bust the toys out of Sunnyside. Mixed in with a dash of humour (el Buzz Lightyear), this frantic sequence is absolute fun.

The middle hour of Toy Story 3 packs itself with so many subtle jokes, colourful characters, amusing subplots and swerving tone shifts, it’s a stitch away from overdoing it. What makes it all work is the way director Lee Unkrich and screenwriter Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine) understand that this story is worthless without these beloved toys.

We have such investment in the characters as they wallow in the dreary thoughts of losing their owner and as their lives are held in treacherous peril. We’re so caught up with their plight, it becomes quite difficult to think of the characters as any form of merchandise.

Think we feel these characters’ pain when they are being tortured by a room of pre-schoolers? Think again. We feel for their pain by imagining what it will be like if they cannot reconnect with the owner who has abandoned them.

As riveting the action, as shocking the horror and as sharp the comedy is throughout the film, it is a mere warmup for the emotional pungency of the last 10 minutes. If those 3D glasses are good for anything in this movie, it’s for hiding tears (although the extra dimension adds little, visually).

In several years, those who grew up watching the Toy Story series will revisit Andy’s toybox with their own children. The three films – which comprise a cinematic trilogy as good as there has ever been – are kind of like toys themselves: they should be dusted off every few years so we can revisit the moments we remember so vividly from our younger days.

Toy Story 3 is a film that reminds us of the times that have gone by while delivering us an experience we will not soon forget. To reference a line you’ll undoubtedly remember from the first film, Toy Story 3 doesn’t just fly. It falls (to its conclusion) in style.