Movie Review: Toy Story 3

I’ll admit that I had reservations when I first soaked in the first full-length trailer for Toy Story 3. Besides a brief mention of Andy growing up and going to college, the trailer never hinted at the wider story or emotional core that I look for in Pixar films.  Instead, the trailer was filled with pop culture jokes, some funny and… well, some startlingly Dreamworks-esque in approach.  My initial disappointment with the trailer made me cap my anticipation early on, and I found myself terrified that another beloved franchise would fall victim to the curse of the mediocre-third-installment.

Now I understand.  Pixar’s advertising campaigns are infamously secretive and rarely reveal anything outside of the first act.  If the ads had shown anything more, some of the dark turns would have been revealed and I wouldn’t have been as surprised to go on the roller coaster ride I did.

Toy Story movies, as well as Pixar films in general, are exciting for a great reason: an increasing sense of conflict with every scene.  As soon as our characters emerge from a situation unscathed, the rug is pulled out and the stakes double.  Then the stakes double again.  Then they double again.  Near the end of Toy Story 3, the stakes reach heights that the previous two chapters never got close to.  And what is this – a climatic scene in an animated film that’s actually frightening and contains real despair?  These moments feel dangerous and aren’t milked for cheap comic relief.  I found myself briefly asking a question I’ve rarely asked a family film: is this going to have a happy ending?

All that uncertainty and excitement can be attributed to the Pixar model for storytelling.  I would consider Toy Story 3’s screenplay a lock for an Oscar nomination.  The writing is so well balanced between genres, between action set pieces and unashamed emotion, between crowd-pleasing comedy and character development.  The balancing act should seem miraculous, but the finished product comes off effortlessly and it’s easy to forget that this movie could have failed at any one point in lesser hands.

Toy Story 3 is also very funny.  There is probably more overt humor in this installment than the others, but thankfully the range of humor included is wide appealing and mostly avoids cheap gags for the smaller kids.  The packed audience of college kids I saw it with laughed uproariously throughout, especially at the introduction of a toy named Chuckles the Clown.

The emotional core that I mentioned earlier is certainly present and anyone who has grown up with these characters will be deeply affected by this movie.  If you’re watching the movie with a packed house, it’s a guarantee that as the story draws to a close, grown adults will struggle to stifle those tears and hide them under those graciously large 3-D glasses.

Toy Story 3 is a genre-bending, crowd-pleasing, thrilling, and satisfying ride.  It joins the ranks of instant classics that Pixar seems to churn out every year.  Also, it might be the very best second sequel to a series ever.