Toy Story 3

It’s Toy Story. Again. In 2010. The last Toy Story was all the way back in 1999. People loved the first two Toy Story movies. They still do. It’s a memory that they keep revisiting again and again. So here we are, ten years later, doing Toy Story all over again for all the little boys and girls who grew up watching it.

It’s 2010. Andy, the little boy we know and love, has grown into a teenager whose interests have changed and who doesn’t really play with his old toys anymore. He’s outgrown them, but he’s still attached to them to the point where he doesn’t want to give them away like all his other old things. However, Andy is going off to college very soon, and his mother is pressuring him to put everything in his room away; either it goes to the attic, or it goes to the trash. [She’s obviously not expecting him to return home from college. The times were getting dark, but we still had a shred of optimism for our futures back then]. Andy is still attached enough to Woody to consider taking him to college with him, but a tragic misunderstanding causes the other toys to nearly get taken away with the garbage instead of going into storage like Andy intended. Feeling abandoned, the toys decide their best solution is to donate themselves to a daycare center to avoid the garbage truck.

The previous two Toy Story films showed that toys usually have loyalty to an owner who loves them, and when that owner grows up and abandons them, it’s heartbreaking. Things at the daycare center are different; the daycare toys have all been abandoned and donated at some point and instead of being loyal to one owner, when one class of kids grows up and leaves another group of kids comes in to take their places. Ideally, this means that the toys will be played with every day and never be outgrown.

Sunnyside daycare accepts lots of secondhand toys. They need them, because they certainly go through a lot of them. The older children in the butterfly room usually play nice, but the toddlers in the caterpillar room play really rough and destroy toys because they’re too young to know any better. You’d think that the daycare teachers would carefully organize the toys so that only age-appropriate toys would be available in each room, but if that were the case, we wouldn’t have a movie. A friendly-looking plush toy named Lotso Hugging Bear welcomes all the new toys that come in, and then exiles them into the caterpillar room to be utterly destroyed by the toddlers. By night, Sunnyside is essentially a high-security prison for toys, complete with locked doors, holding cells, security cameras in every room and tall concrete walls. No toy escapes from Sunnyside, and no toy leaves unless it’s broken and it’s going to be thrown in the garbage.

On the flipside, before Woody discovers that Sunnyside is not what it seems, he takes a detour on his journey back to Andy’s house in the custody of a kindly, imaginative little girl named Bonnie. Even though Bonnie is a girl and most of her toys are girl toys [who, comedically, behave as if they’re serious stage actors and not just a child’s playthings], she takes a liking to Woody immediately, and Woody is so happy to be played with again. He learns from a rescued clown doll that his fellow toy Lotso was once beloved by his owner until the day they were accidentally left behind. Lotso was so loyal to his owner that he did everything to return to her, only to find that he’d been replaced by another identical toy. Ever since then he had become mean and cruel toward toys, not allowing any of them to ever be loved.

Toy Story 3 is essentially a prison escape film, except the main characters are toys, and once again the movie relies on clever and resourceful toy-based solutions that are analogous to real-world problems. One of the cleverer toy solutions in this film involve the Potato Heads’ detachable parts: Mrs. Potato Head has lost one of her eyes under Andy’s bed, and even while the rest of her is at Sunnyside she can still see key moments involving Andy getting mad at his mother for accidentally throwing his old toys away. Mr. Potato Head also can move through some rather tight spaces when he discards all his accessories and reattaches them to a new host body [incidentally, this is how Mr. Potato Head toys historically used to work; the child provided his own potato and stuck the accessories onto it]. Every Toy Story movie is much sadder than you’d expect a movie about toys to be, and every Toy Story movie is filled with tense, nail-biting action. Toy Story 3 definitely delivers in both departments, not just imprisoned at daycare but when they are sent into a garbage truck to a landfill, facing permanent destruction in a garbage incinerator. Thankfully, experience from old memories and running gags rescue them all before they meet their end.

Woody later directs Andy to give all his old toys to Bonnie. Even though Andy is all grown up, he still remembers how he used to play with his toys and talks about them as if they’re alive, with all the personalities he used to assign them back during his play sessions. As Andy passes his toys onto Bonnie, he trusts her to take very good care of them. Perhaps we’re being sentimental, but for some of us a well-loved toy is more than just a piece of plastic destined for a trash heap; it’s a friend you’ve made who will never give up on you. And even though we all have to grow up sometime, we’re not so grown-up that we won’t enjoy playing around every once and again.

Ten years of CGI development really shows in this movie. Back in 1999, the CGI was still so primitive that everything looked like it was made of unpainted plastic. By 2010, the shapes of the objects look so much more detailed, and you can really see the improvement on the hair and cloth renderings, not just on the humans but when Barbie and Ken are modeling outfits. Even the plastic skin on the toys is textured and lighted in a way that makes you feel like you can hold them in your hands.

Toy Story 3, like the first two Toy Story movies, is really an economical movie that tells a big story contained within in a few very small spaces. One thing that I notice is how much more cluttered the interiors look now. I tend to focus on details, and when I see rooms filled with posters, drawings, and shelves filled with all sorts of objects, I can’t help but think that every object you see in a CGI feature had to be individually designed, modeled and painted by an animator who rendered it, placed it in the scene, and made it move when it needed to. If I see a room with too many objects lying around on the floor, too many things piled up on shelves or too many posters on the walls, I start wondering how they got there and what they’re all for. [This is also the reason I don’t like to walk into cluttered places in real life, either].

There’s only one possible point of woke contention: A Ken doll inhabits a large dreamhouse, and he has an entire room full of vintage clothes to wear. The other toys mock him for being a “girls’ toy” because of his effeminate nature and his obsession with clothes, which he denies. Once he meets his counterpart Barbie, he spends all his time playing around with her so they can be cutesy together.