Toy Story 3
Directed by Lee Unkrich
Runtime: 103 min.
Pixar has now made three movies explicitly about
toys, yet the best movie depiction of how toys express human experience remains
Whit Stillman’s 1990 Metropolitan. As
class-conscious Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) tries fitting in with East Side
debutantes, he discovers his toy cowboy pistol in his estranged father’s trash.
Without specifying the model, Stillman evokes past childhood, lost innocence
and Townsend’s longing for even imagined potency. But Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement
that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination—the usefulness
of toys—and strictly celebrates consumerism.
I feel like a 6-year-old having to report how in Toy Story 3 two dolls—Sheriff Woody (Tom
Hanks) and Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen)—try to save a toy box of childhood
playthings from either disuse or imprisonment as donations to a daycare center
because their human owner, 17-year-old Andy, packs them up as he heads off to
college. The toys wage battle with the daycare center’s cynical veteran
cast-offs: Hamm the Piggy Bank pig, Lotsa Hugs and Big Baby. But none of these
digital-cartoon characters reflect human experience; it’s essentially a bored
game that only the brainwashed will buy into. Besides, Transformers 2 already explored the same plot to greater thrill and
opulence.
While Toy Story 3’s various hazards and
cliffhangers evidence more creativity than typical Pixar product (an inferno
scene was promising, Lotsa Hugs’ cannily evokes mundane insensitivity), I admit
to simply not digging the toys-come-to-life fantasy (I don’t babysit children,
so I don’t have to) nor their inevitable repetition of narrative formula: the
gang of animated, talking objects journey from one place to another and back—again
and again. It recalls how Tim Burton’s atrocious Alice in Wonderland repeated narrative stasis without exercising
the famous line: “It takes all the running you can do just to stay in the same
place.” Burton’s omission of that legendary, therapeutic slogan parallels how Toy Story 3 suckers fans to think they
can accept this drivel without paying for it politically, aesthetically or
spiritually.
Look at the Barbie and Ken sequence where the
sexually dubious male doll struts a chick-flick fashion show. Since it serves
the same time-keeping purpose as a chick-flick digression, it’s not satirical.
We’re meant to enjoy our susceptibility, not question it, as in Joe Dante’s
more challenging Small Soldiers. Have
shill-critics forgotten that movie? Do they mistake Toy Story 3’s opening day for 4th of July patriotism?
When Toy
Story 3 emulates the suspense of prison break and horror films, it becomes
fitfully amusing (more than can be said for Wall-E or Up) but this humor
depends on the recognition of worn-out toys which is no different from those
lousy Shrek gags. Only Big Baby, with one Keane eye and one lazy eye, and Mr.
Potato Head’s deconstruction into Dali’s slip-sliding “Persistence of Memory”
are worthy of mature delectation. But these references don’t meaningfully
expand even when the story gets weepy. The Toy
Story franchise isn’t for children and adults, it’s for non-thinking
children and adults. When a movie is this formulaic, it’s no longer a toy
because it does all the work for you. It’s a sap’s story.
