Toy Story 3
By Ad Ross at 19 July, 2010, 10:49 pm
It’s a little bit startling to realise that it’s been fifteen years since the release of the original Toy Story.
Now Pixar, the reigning and undisputed CG animation champions, have released the third in the series, and it feels like the toys have never been away.
Toy Story 2 gave us a brief glimpse of the toys life post-childhood and it didn’t take a genius to work out that would be explored more in this third, and most probably, final instalment.
A warning to any adult entering a screening of this film: You Will Cry!
The atmosphere is thick and melancholy from the word go, as we find Woody, Buzz and their few surviving friends shut away in a chest, about to make one last desperate play for their owner Andy’s attention. He’s soon away to college and their future is uncertain.
However, thankfully, the film is still jam-packed with adventure and avoids becoming a morose meditation on decay that might scar young tots as easily as entertaining them.
Finding themselves in a day-care centre, the film soon switches gears and picks up speed under the framework of a prison breakout. The inevitability of growing up forms a constant backdrop that gives the movie an undercurrent of last-chance desperation and this really comes through in a garbage-pile finale that resembles a vision of hell.
Yet, despite all this, there are laughs aplenty, thrills for the kids and rye jokes for the adults.
The visuals are as eye-catching as ever, enhanced very nicely in 3D, a format that has not yet won my heart; but just as in all Pixar films, that isn’t the point. The heart of these films is beautiful – what other studio would portray a damaged and understandably angry villain in a so-called kids’ film? Or create such a heartfelt rumination on mortality? And still make a rip-roaring spectacle to delight young and old? I can’t think of one.
If there is anything to complain about, it’s perhaps that we’ve seen this all before, but to be perfectly honest, Woody and co are still some of the most watchable characters around.
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