Toy Slavery

Rating: 9/10 (28 December 2010)

I've finally watched the 3 (so far) excellent Toy Story Pixar Disney films after hearing Mark Kermode recommend them on UK BBC as the BEST trilogy ever made, including the Godfathers. Well, who am I to argue with such a cinema expert? But he obviously doesn't remember the dashing Dick Barton!
#1 has the main toy characters of Woody and Buzz overcoming impossible odds to escape from the clutches of psychotic child toy killer Sid, #2 Woody from the clutches of psychotic toy collector Al, #3 Buzz and the gang from the clutches of psychotic toy Lotso. Throughout the individual films and the series as a continuous whole the characters, the character development, the cgi cartoonery, the comedy and the story are uniformly elegant and almost perfect. This is fast paced logically progressed stuff for kids to enjoy and adults to appreciate, and hopefully most of the relational morals will be taken on board by most people – apart from whether or not it's OK for someone to be portrayed as owning apparently live human beings and using them as toys of course! Do you empathise more with Andy the caring Owner or Woody the faithful Slave, or neither like me?
A personal yardstick I use for cartoons is Does the film look like the people who made the film had fun making it? With Toy Story 123 the answer is a resounding Yes – they were so full of fun and confident that even a cod Spanish reprise of Randy Newman's main song was included in 3. And that came after some surprising scenes of heartbreaking poignancy – containing Tom Hanks' finest ever performance. In an ever more populated genre getting ever more technologically advanced and intelligent this series remains magically simple, and simply the best of its kind. Great fun and very re-watchable.