Toy Story 3

Contains mild spoilers and, in an attempt to avoid more mild spoilers, treats the reader as if they’ve seen the film and know what I’m talking about. See the film!

I never know whether to review modern films or not. They’re a part, albeit a small part, of my film-viewing experience, and therefor theoretically grist to the mill of Shadowplay. Too much of current releases would erode what’s individual about this place, I feel, but there’s little danger of me seeing enough modern films for that to happen. Unless you think even one a month is too many?

TOY STORY 3 seemed to me just as good as its predecessors, which I like a whole bunch — I can’t really see any aesthetic standard by which the best modern CGI toons can be considered much inferior to their Golden Age predecessors from the Disney stable. But I’m not an animator, of course. (I’ve dabbled, but so half-heartedly I’d be ashamed to enumerate my experiences.) It’s pretty unusual for a series to spin to three installments without losing quality, and perhaps the fact that this edition feels very much like a final chapter is part of the secret: they’ve thrown everything at it, on the assumption that they might not be doing this again.

The humans are still the only weak point: remember how clunky Andy and his Mom are in the first film? And the Toy Collector in II was grossly overdetailed and unpleasant. Andy is now a teenager (seeing him and his sister and dog age in approximately real time between films is one of the strange pleasures afforded by the films’ long schedules) and rather a bland figure, like a junior Ken doll himself, although to compensate there’s a very nicely observed little girl.

I was entertained but not blown away for the film’s first half, but once the toys get separated and we meet a new batch of characters, things brightened up. For one thing, I could appreciate how insanely off-base this article in the Independent newspaper is, which was diverting. The movie actually has a rich and affectionately observed range of female characters, and the jokes about Ken seeming a bit gay are pretty far from homophobic. For one thing, Ken (spoiler alert) turns from villain to hero, his love of fashion unchanged. He’s not gay, anyway, just unconventional, a male who doesn’t conform to gender expectations, and the film says that’s OK.

I don’t really think the toys have sexuality anyway, as we know it. They draw their consciousness from human kids, is the way I see it, so they have a child’s idea of relationships and can form into couples, like Mr and Mrs Potato Head or, in a Han-and-Leia twist, Buzz Lightyear and Jessie. But we know what Ken and Barbie look like naked, and conventional sex doesn’t look to be on the cards for them. (That said, the heartrending “When She Loved Me,” in TOY STORY 2 is the most moving same-sex expression of love you’re likely to find in a kids’ film.)

(But it really needs the image track in order to fully rip your heart out.)

The most striking thing for me in this one was the very dark, very distressing scene of group jeopardy at the city dump, where the heroes find themselves on a conveyor belt towards incineration. This gives us one of the great conflicted-response gags I’ve always enjoyed in this series (see also: Buzz’s discovery that he’s a toy in part 1: heartbreaking AND cruelly hilarious). The line “I can see daylight!” delivers just the right kind of laugh-before-the-storm. The apocalyptic, indeed positively holocaustic threat our plastic pals face next seems to me the closest scrape with convincing extinction a cartoon character has faced since Bambi’s mom. Does the film earn such strong stuff? It’s hard to summon up a cogent argument in the face of something so powerful, either for or against — I found it powerful and deeply distressing, and very moving, taking the series’ ongoing theme of the value of friendship all the way to the end of the line…

Interestingly, there were no screams and tears from the little kids attending, which one might have expected. My theory to account for this is that kids are fundamentally selfish, so the things that upset them in movies are not those which menace the characters, but those which seem to menace THEM — Cruella DeVille coming out of the screen to take their puppies away, for instance. Despite the immersive, 3D nature of TOY STORY 3, the kind of empathic response evoked by the furnace of doom scene are inherently more upsetting to adults, who not only care more about the characters, they get the reference.