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23rd Jul 2010

Toy Story 3 review

Millions of grown men across the world are leaving Toy Story 3 trying to hold back the tears. JOE's reviewer was no exception.

JOE

perfect

Millions of grown men across the world are leaving Toy Story 3 trying to hold back the tears. JOE’s reviewer was no exception.

I’m not the kind of person who normally sheds tears at movies. I’ve cried at the cinema exactly twice in my entire life. The first time was when I was a kid, at the Francis Ford Coppolla film Jack, starring Robin Williams. The second was yesterday, at Toy Story 3.

Re-watching Jack is a disappointing experience. It’s a poor film, but interestingly, though it doesn’t address it nearly as well, it shares a similar theme with Pixar’s Toy Story 3. That is, the horrible inescapability of growing up and growing old. Once your childhood is over, you can never recapture it. Nobody wants to grow up, but there comes a time where you must ‘put away childish things’.

The Story

The film begins in the imagination of a young Andy, with Woody, Buzz, Jessie, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm and all the gang cast as characters in Andy’s own blockbuster movie. It then moves from the imagined world to the real world, as we see Andy happily playing with all his favourite toys. You’ve Got a Friend In Me by Randy Newman plays in the background to invoke nostalgia from the first two movies.

Then, suddenly, the song cuts short. It is years later, Andy is seventeen and getting ready to go to college. What’s left of his Toys are tucked away in a box, having not been played with for a very long time. His mother gives him a choice – either get rid of them, or put them in that retirement home for toys, the attic.

Andy can’t leave Woody (Tom Hanks), that symbol of his youth and innocence, behind, and packs the cowboy away to bring with him to college. The rest of the bunch he can’t bring himself to throw away either. He puts them in a plastic bag to put into the attic. A mix-up, however, results in the toys getting donated to the Sunnyside day care centre. Woody follows trying to convince them to come back.

They refuse, believing Sunnyside to be some kind of Utopian paradise for toys. In fact, it is a totalitarian prison run by Lotso (Ned Beatty, Deliverance) an evil bear who smells like strawberries. During the night they are locked up, during the day they are played with by age inappropriate children. Buzz and co have little choice but to try and somehow break out.

The love-story between Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and Jessie (Joan Cusack) is deft. The new characters are all cracking, such as the hilarious Ken (Michael Keaton) who falls in love with Barbie (Jodi Benson, Enchanted) on first sight.

“There are a hundred million Barbies in the world,” Lotso tells him. “Not to me there isn’t,” he replies. Ken laments the fact that the rest of the toys don’t understand clothes, and gets annoyed when people refer to him as a girl’s toy.

Other highlights include toys who believe that they are actors (voiced by Timothy Dalton, Kristen Schall, Jeff Garlin) and Bud Luckey’s Chuckles, a toy clown with the most miserable face you’ve ever seen.

Moving

The two scenes that affected me most were towards the end of the film, the first where Andy’s mother (voiced by Laurie Metcalfe, Rosanne) gets choked up as her child gets ready to leave home. The second is where Andy is showing a little girl his toys and there is a look in his eye where he realises he’s not a kid anymore, and that he’ll never know such joy again.

Toy Story 3 is part comedy, part gripping prison-escape movie, part meditation on family, ageing, love, loss and death. A second sequel to an animated children’s movie has no right to be as good as it is. It’s a fitting conclusion to arguably the greatest film trilogy of all-time.

Conor Hogan

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