By Michelle Klein-Häss
Director: John Lassiter
Story by John Lassiter, Peter Docter, Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft
Screenplay by Joss Whedon, Andrew Stanton, Joel Cohen and Alex Sokolow
Producers: Ralph Guggenheim and Bonnie Arnold
Executive Producers: Stephen P. Jobs and Dr. Edmund E. Catmull
Voice Cast: Tim Allen, Tom Hanks, Don Rickles, Jim Varney,John Ratzenburger, Annie Potts and Wallace Shawn
I thought that Toy Story was going to be all hype and no delivery. Really. I was expecting to sit through this like I have sat through most Disney movies, cringing at the saccharine and trying not to get so annoyed at the sappiness that I want to just bolt out of the theatre screaming and have to watch hours of Beavis and Butt-Head to snap out of the sugar-sickness.
But no. Despite the after-the-fact credit that Disney has taken for this movie, this is not a Disney film. This is a PIXAR film. Get it through your heads...that computer nerd John Lassiter has shown up the entire Disney formula. There are no toys bursting out into song here. There are no "Disney Deaths" here. This is not a musical comedy/melodrama. This is a new ballgame, gentle readers. A whole new ballgame.
And no, it's not just the awesome technical wizardry on display. I can see technical wizardry in computer animated commercials, for crying out loud. Two words: Polar Bears. Been there, done that. This movie breaks all the rules that have straightjacketed feature animation for decades. I cannot stress this enough: there are a few songs by Randy Newman in this movie which kinda nudge the story arc along, but none of the toys, I repeat, none of the toys sing, or goddess forbid do production numbers in this picture. The music never gets in the way of the story.
The story isn't great, though...in a lot of respects it's a redux of The Brave Little Toaster. Boy moves away, beloved inanimate objects go on an incredible journey to find him. Yeah, yeah. You can trace it back to The Nutcracker. It's so old it's got dust on it. But Lassiter and his Pixar buddies shake off the dust with a complete attitude transplant. This is no sentimental fossil. The telling of the story moves with a snap that's as glossy and bright as the bubble-top on Buzz Lightyear's spacesuit. The closest thing to a melodramatic villain is Sid, a pre-teen Butt-Head type who likes to mutilate toys. He's not bad, he's just brainsick. Hey, how many of you out there have decapitated Barbie(tm) dolls in your day? I thought so.
The movie suffers a little because you have the wildly real/surreal toys having to interact with computer-animated humans. The lines between toy and human tend to visually blur. Perhaps this would have been a mite more effective if Pixar really took advantage of the Disney connection and did this like Who Framed Roger Rabbit with live-action humans interacting with computer-animated toys. I suppose it all has to do with the prestige of being the first entirely computer animated feature...no cheating with live-action, boys! Let's show them that the San Fernando Valley has got nothing on Silicon Valley! But the contrast between the animation and reality would have been greater.
In the long run, however, this is just a minor picking of a small, anemic nit. This movie is a freakin' miracle, not just for the mind blowing visual punch that leaves you stumbling out of the theatre not knowing what's real and what's Terabytes-worth of computer generated eye candy. It's miraculous because it's a change of attitude in American feature animation. One has to look to Japan to find anything that compares to this.
If Michael Eisner, The Dream(works) Team or anyone else with any sort of power in feature animation finds this while trendily surfing the Internet, get real close to your CRT, because I wanna burn this message on your retinas. TOY STORY VIOLATED ALL THE FORMULAS, AND IS DOING MONSTER BOX OFFICE IN SPITE OF IT. No cutesy-wootsy, no talking down to the perceived kiddie audience, no big production numbers, no sugar-coating.
This is not extended kidvid...this is a movie made for adults, but one which they would not be afraid to take the kids to. I mean really...does anyone really believe that little boys still want to be cowboys? Woody, the protagonist of the movie, is a toy that feels like something straight out of the 1950s. This was made for adults, people. Adults who remember Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers and Bonanza every Sunday night. The kids can tag along, but it's the adults who are really at play here. Adults who refuse to grow up. Isn't that what the animation biz is really made up of?
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