John Lasseter is the new Hitchcock: smuggling disturbing ideas into mass-market movies.

Rating: 9/10 (16 February 2000)

Sometimes you beg for an epiphany and it doesn't quite come. TOY STORY 2 is easily the best film of the year so far, funnier, richer, more inventive, frightening and emotional than anything else, because animation can do everything live action can do, and so much more. Even the songs this time round are enjoyable (except, maybe, Jessie's lachrymose lament). It deals with unbearably complex dilemmas with a maturity untapped by the likes of AMERICAN BEAUTY. This should surely be enough - maybe I expect too much.
It's been peculiar in reviews to see critics' astonishment that a mere cartoon could actually carry so much weighty baggage. They mustn't watch too many cartoons, because films from PINOCCHIO to THE THREE CABALLEROS to THE LION KING offer a similar assortment of riches. Maybe they're secretly afraid that their precious actors will be made redundant.
2 works on many different levels. Most immediately satisfying is the Hawksian romantic-comedy action movie, in which we watch men in action , at work, facing dark realities, positing loyalty and friendship as shores against the ruins. This strand has a sublime emotional ambiguity, as on one level Buzz and friends repeatedly risk their lives to save a friend (Buzz is the Hawksian hero who must redeem himself after the first movie), while Woody (who also must redeem himself) at last finds a family, somewhere to belong just as he seemed outmoded and unloved.
This difficult choice between friendship proven in action and mere family ties is brilliantly, painfully revealed, and there are no easy answers. For the benefit of resolution, the family is not a love interest, which could have made things more awkward, and one member is made villainous for convenience, but the questions raised are still valid.
The film also works as an essay in making strange and unreliable the domestic and conservative. On the one hand, there is something satisfyingly Surrealist about a house in which objects have more life than its human inhabitants - the different strands of reality set up by Buzz's opening adventures suggest that this may be the dream of an over-imaginative boy. There is a lack of fixity and control in having objects, bought by you to do your bidding, acting independently; it makes the solidity of the home unstable and unpredictable.
Yet, on the other hand, this alternative community is itself ordered in its seeming chaos, with almost military precision, and even before its terrifying adventures, its threats ARE the domestic, the fickleness of a child, the thoughtlessness of a mother, the vulnerability that privileges menacing villains.
2's great brilliance, though, lies in its expressing an awareness of its status as a sequal with the existential crises of its two heroes. Woody starts the film with a lost hat (traditional emblem of masculine wholeness, virility, sexual prowess etc); he damages, then loses an arm; is abandoned and has a sublimely terrifying nightmare where the solidity of his existence crumbles, and he imagines the abyss of death.
Already shaken in identity, he is kidnapped, wrenched from familiar bearings, while performing a heroic act, and finds out that he is not a single, whole Woody, but part of a vast Woody legend, connected (as is this film) to a venerable tradition, repeated and reproduced ad nauseum, through merchandise. His sense of wholeness destroyed, he accepts his fate, his destiny away from the world of life that is Andy's bedroom, to the sterile immortality of the museum.
In TOY STORY, Buzz already came to an awareness of his own limited masculinity. But, in the film's most astonishing conceit, he faces a catacomb of Buzz Lightyears, and is forced to confront not only his lack of uniqueness, and not only the deluded image of his former past, but a new improved model; like Woody, Buzz becomes aware of the transience of life. The film opens with Buzz as intrepid action hero, only to be shockingly destroyed and shown to be a puppet in a computer game.
The image of two Buzzes and their evil father point to an awareness of the ambiguity of being a sequel (as a son is to a father), but also the powerlessness of anything in a postmodern world; there is no such thing as the film as unit - it is splintered outwards through merchandise, sequels, promotion etc.
Of course, 2 is most cherishable for being an incredible work of animation. So we're a bit jaded after STORY, but the CITIZEN KANE-like depth of field, the unheard of cinematic fluidity (which is not just trickery, but emotionally charged), the vibrant suburban colours, the ingenious characterisation (love Newman as, well, Newman), the awesome set-pieces (my favourite? Either Woody's dream or Buzz and friends crossing the road) and exciting action, the musical-like freedom and audacity, the ingenious compositions, the very tangibility of the characters unavailable to live action, are all breathtaking. In the end, I think I prefer the classical simplicity of STORY to this film's more varied daring, but who cares? This is the greatest sequel since THE GODFATHER, PART TWO, and it's a pretty good world that can find space for both these films AND a bolshy Hawksian heroine. Magnificent.