Decent enough but no milestone

Rating: 7/10 (25 September 1999)

Think of momentous years in Hollywood's history like 1927 (the year of the first talkie), 1932 (the first use of three-colour technicolor), 1935 (the first feature in full colour), and 1937 (the first animated feature). I kept telling myself, in 1995, that I was witnessing something equally ground-breaking and historically important. And who knows, maybe I was. The four historic films I alluded to above were `The Jazz Singer', `Flowers and Trees', `Becky Sharp' and `Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs', only the last of which has any claim to being a classic. `Toy Story' has no great claim, either. In retrospect it was nothing new, just another instance of Hollywood's current infatuation with computer-generated images: pleasant, light and unremarkable.
Computer animation is really a soulless device and, although I found it enjoyable, this is a soulless movie. To begin with the animation wasn't quite ripe. Toys, I suppose, are easy to animate: but when the flesh-and-blood children start to look as if they're also made of plastic, when the whole world seems to be made of plastic, the eye longs in vain for something else.
Perhaps including children at all was a mistake. A Hans Andersen toy story, a story that concerned toys and only toys, would have been more fun (and more moving). The film betrays itself when it starts to think of the children. The two central characters, after all, are BAD toys - horribly gimmicky devices that children very sensibly lose interest in after not so sensibly getting their parents to buy them some other worthless gimcrack. When Woody gave his speech about how important they really were in servicing a child's dreams and wishes and whatnot ... did anyone really fall for it? It would have been much more honest if he'd said, every toy for himself, kids be damned.
I'm sorry if I sound overly critical - as I said, I liked it, so for me at least the slightly sour taste wasn't strong enough to ruin the film. John Lasseter deserves credit for taking a formulaic buddy tale and breathing genuine life into it. (All the more credit with a medium as unyielding as computer animation.) `Toy Story' is pleasant and fun. But frankly, every single traditionally animated film Disney has made from 1989 on, with the possible exception of `The Hunchback of Notre Dame', is better. And - sorry to close with a carp - did Randy Newman really have to break into song so often? Wasn't it enough for him to write the score, without croaking his songs out over it?