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I distinctly remember being eight-years-old and seeing Toy Story for the first time. I was completely and utterly amazed at what they had accomplished not just the technicality of it all – that would come later – but the imagination and heart that they had created. The fact that so many the films I viewed as a child are now forgotten relics (Free Willy?) and that this was just the beginning of Pixar’s might domination in the animation field is a testament to the original’s might. But it was also the first film in a trilogy that has always filled me with warmth, humor and tears. Toy Story 3 is a satisfying conclusion to the series.
The filmmakers made a smart move in picking up Toy Story 3 in the real-world amount of time since Toy Story 2, that is to say that eleven years has happened between our last go-round with Andy’s toys and this one in the film’s continuity as well. Andy is no longer the eight-year-old boy with an amazingly active and vivid imagination; he’s a college-bound teenager debating on what to do with his childhood toys. I went through that not too long ago; it is quietly disheartening knowing that that piece of you is forever sealed away. He can’t bring himself to throw them away. He wants to place them in the attic where they’ll spend the rest of their days. But something happens, and they’re mistaken as garbage, they escape that to only be donated to a daycare. Not a terrible fate for a toy. There will always be a steady stream of kids to play with them, they will always be loved.
But there’s something wrong with the daycare. It’s not the kids, they’re kids. Toys are used to being beaten up, chewed, etc. It’s the plush bear that has named himself ruler of the daycare, Lots-O’-Huggin’ Bear, he’s almost too friendly. Naturally, mystery and wonderfully envisioned actions sequences take place. Our toys don’t want to be here, they want to go back to Andy and remain in the attic. The film follows their journey from the daycare back to Andy before winding up with Bonnie, a little girl with a lot of promise to show signs of artistic creativity and quirky quiet-type. It would be a lie if I said that no point during this film I didn’t get teary eyed and choked up.
While the series has always dabbled in bringing eerily humanistic life to these plastic and synthetic creatures, Toy Story 3 takes it to a new level. This is the most human of the three films. If it’s about nothing else, then it’s about impermanence, a deeply rooted melancholia, a sense of the inevitable and that great topic for all artists, love. These toys express and experience love not just for their owner, but for each other. The combination of animators and actors endow these characters with souls. I cried at a scene where they reached out their hands to each other not because it was a moving gesture, but because I have had fifteen years with these characters and I was invested in them. That is the magic of great fiction.
If I were to rank the trilogy, I would probably put this one first. It’s too wonderfully animated, too full of life, warmth, wit, love, loss and excitement not to be first. This has truly entered the running for greatest movie trilogy of all time. And why not? It tells just as heroic a story as The Lord of the Rings, but on a much smaller scale. Instead of a heroic journey, these characters take on the noble enterprise of self-less love, of knowing that there is limited time to engage and share that love but they still dive-in feet first. It is filled with as much visual eye-candy, but this is aimed more at humor than at awe-inspiring battle sequences. Although that trash compacter sequence was harrowing, and I’m an adult. But the heart, warmth and tears at the end can’t be faked. So it began with a shot of clouds in 1995, so it ends with a shot of clouds in 2010. A perfect conclusion to a perfect franchise.
