Other Reviews in this Series.
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Director: John Lasseter
Writers: John Lasseter, Pete Docter, Andrew Stanton, Joe Ranft, Joss Whedon, Joel Cohen, Alec Sokolow
Cast: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Don Rickles, Jim Varney, Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Annie Potts, John Morris, Erik von Detten
Runtime: 81 mins.
1995
My mom tells the story of the first time I ever watched Toy Story. She had gotten a handful of free tickets to see the movie through work, so decided to make it a family outing. My dad certainly had no interest in the movie, but he was a good sport about it. My older brother required a great deal of coaxing to see a little kids' rated G film called Toy Story, but parents can be convincing. So the four of us took a trip to the theater. I was two and a half years old. This was my first movie on the big screen. I sat on my mother's lap. I remember none of this.
The movie started, and my mom had no idea what was going on. Imagine growing up with two separate categories in your head: animation and live action. Then suddenly, you're watching toys zoom about the screen in what looks like a real physical child's bedroom... but the toys are alive. Imagine not following the promotion of the film, and not knowing that computer animation was a thing, or what it could look like. Imagine the uncanny wonder of that opening sequence: Andy's bank robbery melodrama.
Of course, she eventually adjusted to the medium shock and discovered the great substance behind it. The whole family laughed throughout the film, and little toddler Ryan sat silent and enraptured throughout its entire runtime.
Months later we were apparently in a Wal-Mart or some such establishment, and I caught sight of Toy Story on VHS. I latched onto a copy, brought it home, and watched it. Then watched it again. Every day. I had the movie memorized. I would quote it. Even when my vocabulary didn't contain the proper words, I would make some up and substitute them. It was just as entertaining to me either way.
Even in my earliest memories, Toy Story was an integral part of my life. It's on the very short list of properties that I am certain had a colossal formative impact on my development.
The Simpsons. The 90's animated Spider-Man show. Toy Story.
That's my Toy Story story. A lot of people have one. It is one of the most influential films that have been released in our lifetime, changing lives and altering the entire trajectory of animation as a storytelling form. All this issued from the woefully troubled production of a movie that was originally meant to be a six minute short.
In the late eighties the Steve Jobs-guided computer animation start-up Pixar cranked out a handful of experimental short films. One of these was a 1988 short called Tin Toy, which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Pixar was tasked with developing a sequel to this short, which then grew into a thirty minute Christmas special, which then transformed into a feature length film. The original treatment had the tin toy pairing with a ventriloquist dummy. Many treatments later that tin toy was to become Buzz Lightyear and that dummy was to become Woody. Along the way the creators faced much studio interference, legal roadblocks, and even a complete shutdown of production. But the visionaries at Pixar pushed forward and eventually their vision took permanent, corporeal form in the film we know as Toy Story.
Thus we have one of the greats in the entire history of storytelling, and let me immediately tell you why I make that absurd claim. Storytelling is constantly evolving and changing. Mediums are invented and mediums are laid to rest. Very seldom, though, is a medium trailblazed with perfection. The first films were treated like plays, with no knowledge of the vast opportunities that experimentation with editing would allow. Early talkies were stilted in their performance and presentation, with rough sound quality. Early comics were melodramatic, early video games were unplayable, early websites alienating. But the team at Pixar somehow managed to perfect the medium of 3-D computer animation on their very first try. The only example that comes to my mind that is somewhat comparable is Nintendo's own foray into 3-D with the great Super Mario 64, and even that is difficult to return to in 2015. Meanwhile, Toy Story might look a little simple to modern eyes, but it plays just as perfectly as it ever did. Toy Story holds up.
Pixar managed to accomplish this because they didn't treat their new toy as a gimmick. Instead, they crafted a story that could not have been told in any other medium, and they married the visuals to the narrative. There's no way for traditional animation to achieve the eeriness and excitement of seeing these plastic toys suddenly come to life. Stop animation couldn't have supplied the smoothness or sense of magical realism. Live action people with CGI toys would have looked awkward and corny. Pixar's new medium let the characters be fantastic and imaginative, yet still feel like they had real weight. If Buzz falls from a banister, we need to feel like he will break, and we need to understand the consequences of that. Since this is a story about the love between children and toys, we need to feel the weight of that too. We need to believe that the Woody doll we bought at Toys R Us could come to life, because it looks just like its character did in the movie.
The settings take full advantage of the 3-D animation, incorporating reflections and all manner of dynamic lighting. The kids' rooms are scuffed, battered, lived in. They evoke childhood in a far more direct way than the extensive visual symbolism of traditional animation. We feel at home in Andy's room, and we feel a great aversion to Sid's. The attention to detail is incredible, and it's the groundwork for what would become a hallmark of Pixar's filmography: a glut of worldbuilding information and sight gags in every scene.
The main characters are perhaps the most iconic buddies in contemporary cinema, and they could not have existed outside this medium.* Woody and Buzz together are adept at physical comedy. Buzz is sleek, futuristic, smooth, and constantly intentional. Woody is gangly, awkward, bumbling, and constantly beat up. These qualities could be conveyed in traditional animation, but not as convincingly. The film is absolutely packed with gags and character moments that go from funny to transcendent thanks to the specificity of these characters' movement sets. As a bonus, the way they move is directly related to their personalities, and their movements change as their self-understanding and their relationship to each other grows. It's perfect comedic-dramatic character work, buoyed by the ideal casting of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen.
*They tried. Buzz Lightyear of Star Command was a spinoff TV show and movie that used traditional animation to tell the story of the real space ranger Buzz Lightyear. It was decent. Not terribly interesting.
The rest of the characters don't have nearly as much to do, but they become memorable thanks to fantastic character design and a brilliant screenplay. The economy with which Toy Story establishes each of its major players should be studied by every wannabe screenwriter. After the aforementioned opening sequence with Andy playing around, we get the revelation that the toys are alive with a close-up of Woody's face. After that the room soon becomes a bustling metropolis, and an inciting incident is immediately established. Woody learns that Andy's birthday party has been moved to today, and he sets about gathering the rest of the toys for a staff meeting. Woody finds a character, engages them in a brief interaction that clearly establishes that character, and lets us know about the character's rules and roles (i.e. what sorts of jokes we can expect from them throughout the movie). It all happens so fast, and within the span of a minute we feel like we're buddies with the entire ensemble. We also are cued into the status quo, which is what makes the injection of Buzz into the dynamic so startling. There's a reason Toy Story was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Oscar.
The structure of the screenplay isn't its only value. Nor the crisp, original dialogue. The screenplay also has deep tissue thematic issues that the audience can choose to gloss over, or engage with on a heavy philosophical level. Feeling overlooked, unloved, or forgotten is universal human stuff, and there's a lot of meat there. On my most recent viewing, however, I noticed the surplus of religious themes and iconography sprinkled through the story. The toys' whole society is an incredibly religious one. You could think of Andy as their god, sure, a god who they want to please. As such, Woody is their prophet, one who is subverted by the appearance of a new oracle, Buzz (who calls Andy their "chief"). But the reading can go deeper than that. The toys are obsessed with the distinction between the sacred and the profane. At one point Woody is accidentally knocked from his holy pedestal on top of the bed. When he crawls out from underneath, the rest of the toys are taken aback, and you can see their respect for him eking away. Their postures become stiff and their words guarded. Woody has been reduced to an under-the-bed toy. Woody is dirty. Woody is profane.*
*Not to mention that the central characters' oppositional genres--Western and Sci-fi--gets played for comedy, but their respective association with the ground and the sky fit here thematically too.
Meanwhile, we have Buzz, a toy who claims he can fly. Flying is even more sacred than being on top of the bed! Woody can only fly with the help of Andy, so Buzz's self-reliance is grating to him. Of course, Buzz's leap of faith goes off without a hitch... until later in the movie, when Woody instills the seed of doubt in him. There is repeated imagery suggesting the sky is salvation, and the floor is damnation, a theme made more obvious by the little green aliens and their myopic worship of the Claw. This theme of flight versus falling comes to a head in the climactic sequence, which sees Buzz rejecting the rocket's flight into oblivion for what he calls "falling with style." It's inspiring and iconic. Sure, a flying plastic toy is nonsensical, but it doesn't matter. This is a moment built on a bond of friendship and trust so strong that it allows these two toys to transcend their circumstances, thus literally fulfilling the dreamlike first image of the movie, a shot of Andy's blue sky white clouds wallpaper.
I'm not the one to objectively review Toy Story. Every frame of this film is burned into my memory, and I love it more than I will love most things I encounter in my life. That being said, I pride myself on being able to separate subjective preferences from more tangible critiques, and I sincerely believe everything I wrote in this review is as true as true can be in a movie review. I found myself repeatedly using the word "perfect," which is something I try not to do, because no movie is perfect, nor will ever be. However, if you forced me to pick a movie that gets as close as close can be, I would be tempted to choose Pixar's original opus.
5 / 5 BLOBS
The Short: Tin Toy
Toy Story is Pixar's only film to not be theatrically released with a short film in front of it, so instead of reviewing a gaping void I'll talk about the short that inspired Toy Story. Tin Toy is hard to watch now because, frankly, it is butt ugly. It stars a violent baby and a scared little drummer toy. Imagine the baby from Toy Story but younger, unsupervised, and far deeper down the uncanny valley.
The narrative is a simple one. The toy wants to be played with until it sees that the baby doesn't treat its toys very well. Then it flees the eager child, only to feel bad when the baby falls and hurts itself. The toy offers itself up to be played with, but when it is discarded it feels jealous of the other objects that capture the baby's attention.
The short is simple, innovative, and communicates the emotions of its characters clearly and succinctly without any dialogue or exposition. It functions, has a few reversals, and plays with new technology. I'm sure I'm being reductive here, but Tin Toy is not terribly fun to watch.
2.5/5
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