If You Saw This As a Kid and Haven't Seen It Since, Feeling You Have Outgrown It, You Must Revisit It, For You WIll Discover Quite the Contrary.

Rating: 10/10 (22 October 2008)

Toy Story fashions an existence as its characters know it out of a couple of young kids' bedrooms, a gas station, and an expanse of suburban freeway. It also enters an arcade- restaurant that recaptures that consumerist wonder of being a kid surrounded by video games and pizza. Its heroes are toys, which come to life when nobody is watching. Its conflict is between an old-fashioned cowboy doll who has always been an 8-year-old boy's favorite toy, the effective leader of the kid's toys as a collective community, and the new action figure who is starting to take his place. The villain is the grungy kid next door who takes toys apart and puts them back together again in morbid mishmashes, that is when he's not blowing them with fireworks. And the result is an emotional roller-coaster of a movie experience that does not diminish with age.
For kids, a movie like this works immaculately because it tells a fun story that presumably exists already somewhere in their minds when they are playing with their own toys. They can relate very deeply to these toy characters because of the role toys play in their lives. Older viewers can be even more immersed, because you find that after all these years, you still have such emotion invested in these toys. When Woody peeks from the toy chest at his boy, Andy, sleeping with Buzz Lightyear in his arms, I am truly touched. If you saw this as a kid and haven't seen it since, feeling you have outgrown it, you must revisit it, for you will discover quite the contrary.
In a way, it could have been even more interesting and rewarding to have been your parents' age in 1995 when the film emerged as the first film animated entirely by computer. To us as kids, visual nuance was the last thing on our minds. The most rudimentary elements of the cinematic experience were all that mattered to us, and we were transported. Now, we are completely accustomed to Pixar's series of family films that transcend what one normally perceives as the cornball throwaway inanity of so many of them.
John Lasseter opens the film in the---let's face it---spoiled 8-year-old's bedroom, where the toys come to life when their owner is gone. Each of the toy characters is rich and detailed. The playroom cunningly figures in well-known toys from real life, which may be product placement, but who cares when it functions as a great way for us to relate that much more with these characters by means of direct familiarity.