Books and TV shows depend upon the series. The bottomless pit of plots and whodunit this time have a history in serialized Dickens novels, radio shows, and Keystone-cop nickelodeons. When the summer movie season rolls around, though, we bemoan the dearth of originality. The barrage of numerals after titles can make a ticket buyer feel he's trapped in some sort of time warp: a radio station stuck in the nineties.
The trilogy has become the most stable form of movie sequel-dom, if you're in the superhero or science fiction business. Properties like the original Star Wars films, Indiana Jones, and more recently The Lord of the Rings have fused in our cultural psyche into one entity. The Ewok battle may not be a cinematic high-point, but that third installment rounds out the series efficiently. After The Empire Strikes Back, all moviegoers and filmmakers surely could hope was that the third didn't sabotage the rest. Remember the dwindling cultural opinion of The Matrix.
All of this build-up is my way of giving Pixar credit where it's due. Toy Story 3, presumably the final chapter in the Woody-Buzz Lightyear saga, doesn't try to aim for infinity and beyond. The film is content to remind us how much we'd missed those gosh-darn-lovable toys. The first film hit theaters in 1995, when I was still in single digits. In the time since, we've been at war, waited in line for iEverything, started blogs, forgotten about Tim Allen... and gone to college.
Though Andy (the kid who owns these toys, now a college student) is moving on, the movie remains deliberately old-fashioned. Sure, there's the 3-D version, for those who want to shell out next week's lunch money. But Pixar's great innovation even at the dawn of computer-animated movies was its storytelling. No matter the voice casting, no other animation studio has churned out a film as great as Toy Story yet, with the possible exception of the first Shrek.
Toy Story 3 works well as part of a package. If I hadn't grown up with these characters, I might have wanted more of a character arc. Wall-E and Up may best it for the audacity of their imagined worlds, sure, but Toy Story 3 is a delightful piece of familiarity. And who would have imagined such an emotional ending to the saga fifteen years ago? Like Andy, we've grown up since the first film, and all it heralded for movies. Sit back and watch as Pixar passes on its patented brand of wonder to a new generation.
2 comments:
Agreed on all accounts. Although I shelled out my lunch money for 3D, I don't think it added all that much to the experience. The colors and animation do the heavy lifting.
So, question is, what did they do with the Spanish Buzz sequences when the movie was shown in the Spanish speaking countries?
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