Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear (Ned Beatty), its seemingly jovial patriarch, explains that there, toys are played with every day, and when one group of youngsters outgrows them, another cohort arrives. But instead they wind up at the Sunnyside Daycare Center, which at first seems like a paradise where the problem of obsolescence has been magically solved. They’ll live in the attic until the next generation comes along. “Face it, we’re just trash,” says a bitter pink teddy bear near the end of “Toy Story 3.” Though the movie, directed by Lee Unkrich from a script by Michael Arndt (“Little Miss Sunshine”), labors to dispel the gloom of this statement, it can’t entirely disprove it.Īs Andy prepares for college, Woody surveys the depleted ranks of his pals, noting that some have passed on (rest in peace, Wheezy) and reassuring the others that everything will be fine. When we grow up, or just grow tired of last year’s cool stuff, we don’t just put away those childish things, we throw them out. When Woody chose life with Andy and the others over immortality with Stinky Pete at the museum, he was embracing a destiny built on his own disposability. The first “Toy Story” acknowledged this bond, and “Toy Story 2” turned it into a source of startlingly deep emotion. “I want that!” “That’s mine!” Slogans of acquisitive selfishness, to be sure, but also articulations of desire and loyalty. Its purest, most innocent expression but also its most vulnerable and perishable is the attachment formed between children and the toys we buy them. ![]() A tale that captured the romance and pathos of the consumer economy, the sorrows and pleasures that dwell at the heart of our materialist way of life, could only be told from the standpoint of the commodities themselves, those accretions of synthetic substance and alienated labor we somehow endow with souls.Ĭars, appliances, laptops, iPads: we love them, and we profess that love daily. Therein lies its genius, and its uncanny authenticity. “Toy Story 3” is as sweet, as touching, as humane a movie as you are likely to see this summer, and yet it is all about doodads stamped and molded out of plastic and polyester. And perhaps only Pixar, a company Utopian in its faith in technological progress, artisanal in its devotion to quality and nearly unbeatable in its marketing savvy, could have engineered a sweeping capitalist narrative of such grandeur and charm as the “Toy Story” features. Each one feeds, and colonizes, the other. All those crazy effects are the products of his restless and inexhaustible imagination, which is no less his for having been formed and fed by movies, television shows and the cheap merchandise spun out of them.Īnd how many real kids who have grown up with Buzz Lightyear and Sheriff Woody have unspooled their own improvised movies on the rec room floor? Perhaps no series of movies has so brilliantly grasped the emotional logic that binds the innate creativity of children at play to the machinery of mass entertainment. The action is taking place in Andy’s head as he plays with his toys. The resolution of the opening scene in the latest episode shows this to be a false choice. Can it be that “Toy Story,” built over 15 years and two previous movies out of the unlikely bonds that flourished among a band of beautifully animated inanimate characters (and Andy, the mostly unseen boy who collects them), has succumbed to flashy commercial blockbuster imperatives? Or would we be fooling ourselves to suppose that it has ever been anything else? There are force fields and laser beams and a big noisy surprise every time you blink.Īt first glance your heart may sink a little. ![]() A train is hurtling down the tracks a bridge explodes stuff is falling out of the sky. They’re in a western, albeit one made in the amped-up modern action style, rather than the more stately idiom of old-time oaters. ![]() The major toys Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz (Tim Allen), the Potato Heads (Don Rickles and Estelle Harris), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), Jessie (Joan Cusack), Rex (Wallace Shawn) and the others are in a setting at once wholly unfamiliar and instantly recognizable. “Toy Story 3” begins with a rattling, exuberant set piece that has nothing to do with the tale that follows but that nonetheless sums up the ingenuity, and some of the paradoxes, that have made this Pixar franchise so marvelous and so successful.
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