Toy Story 3 Review

I’ll be honest. In the past the very mention of Toy Story made my blood freeze. It triggered a ghastly train of associations that went something like this: Toy Story, toy shop, retail outlet, shopping mall, Bluewater, suburban sprawl, ecological tipping point, global apocalypse. The series that, back in 1995, ushered Pixar’s reign as purveyors of some of the smartest, most loved and certainly most profitable films of recent years, seemed to me vastly inferior to the same studio’s Ratatouille or Up, little more than extended plugs for kiddie merchandise.

Toy Story 3, what seems certain to be the final installment in the series, is a different matter altogether. Directed by Lee Unkrich and written by Michael Arndt, it has all the usual ingredients — squeaky toys, happy anticry, high-octane “To infinity and beyond” set-pieces and escapades — but something new too: a heart, a huge beating heart. It’s a film that moves as much as it entertains, that will make adults cry as much as — perhaps even more than — younger children.

What gives it its emotional heft is the sense of expiry and mortality that hangs over it almost from the outset. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), Jessie (Joan Cusack) and the rest of the motley crew are on the brink of being separated from their owner Andy (John Morris). He’s older now, about to leave for college, and even though he decides to take Woody with him for sentiment’s sake, the game seems to be up: barely managing to escape being carted off on a rubbish truck, they wind up in a day centre for toddlers.

At first the place seems like paradise regained, a happy-slappy utopia. New toys to pal around with! New children with whom they can have funny-fits and giggles! But those children, it turns out, are brats who whack, batter and abuse them as — well, children tend to do. As for the other toys being kindred souls who might protect their backs — that’s a joke. Bossed about by Lots-o’-Huggin (Ned Beatty), a superficially-kindly bear nurses untold bitterness and against the world after being lost — worse: replaced – by his beloved owner, they shackle Buzz and pals in cages each night.

They have to escape. But to where? Their owner no longer wants them. Their future is seemingly lonely and Sisyphean. And if that seems a lofty frame of reference, I can only say that it barely touches the epochal grandeur of a scene in which the toys, faced with what appears to be certain death as they sink inexorably towards an incinerator, whose roaring light is itself redolent of a Dantean inferno, hold each others’ hands in a gesture of collectivity and mutual love.

Waste, trash, leftovers. Toy Story 3, like WALL-E, Ratatouille and even Cars, attempts a juggling act: redefining digital technology in the service of stories that hanker back to an earlier, analogue era. It doesn’t always pull it off: too often the film’s colours recall those of a gaudy confectionery stand or are over-lit like a boring vision of heaven, and sometimes there’s not enough depth of field (the 3D version doesn’t fully remedy this).

Still, by the end, these are minor caveats. The toys make the biggest transition of their lives. And we are reminded, beautifully and rather agonisingly, about how it’s both possible — and sometimes vital — to let go of those whom we most love.