I wouldn't recommend this dark, joyless, product-placing, fantasy/horror film

Rating: 4/10 (24 June 2010)

Fantastic Elements: First of all, I am not particularly fond of the fantasy genre as a whole because of its tendency to be disconnected from reality. In the case of the Toy Story franchise, it is posited that toys can be brought to life.
So what is a toy? It seems that a toy could be practically anything that you like to play with, so it would then seem that anything could come to life in the Toy Story universe, which doesn't make much sense. Why do certain inanimate objects in the house become alive while the table doesn't? It seems completely arbitrary.
Additionally, how is it that these toys come to life even though their very own creators believe that they are merely inanimate objects? I simply don't see how they could unknowingly create these conscious beings.
How could the toys conceal that they are alive and why? Why would Woody for all of this time refuse to talk to Andy and then all of a sudden at the end decide to communicate to him by writing something down on a piece of paper?
Mrs. Potato head left her eye at Andy's house and she was still able to see with it? There is some kind of wireless transmission going on here? Why is it that Buzz Lightyear had his consciousness temporarily shut off by a process that was manufactured by humans that are presumably unaware of the toys supernatural intelligence? How exactly does this supernatural intelligence relate to the machinery that was manufactured?
How is it that the daycare center was able to be administered by toys like Lotso, with their surveillance footage of toys, the monkey with the security cameras, cars patrolling every night, toys constantly being moved around, toys having themselves filled with sand, and so on without being noticed by the humans??
There is simply too many things which don't make sense, but hey this is a fantasy film. Perhaps it is presumed that you will be incurious and mindlessly receptive to what is being presented here.
Plot: The plot essentially adopts a "prison break" style. Humans play little to no role in this film, so I think they could've just made the entire plot toy-centered, as the human-toy interactions are scarcely utilized in this movie. Instead they could've just made the film entirely centered upon humans, then it would've been considered to be a below-average prison escape film. However, they didn't do that, and people elevate this movie to a higher status because it has the toy story name and it uses the toy story characters. Personally I don't think that makes a movie good, I don't think you can just take some plot and substitute the characters for Toy Story characters and somehow come out with something that is a "masterpiece" as many people are claiming.
In the beginning of the film the toys are in the comfort of Andy's home. Then at about 15:00 in the toys are mistaken for trash and thrown away. They feel rejected and they lose the comfort of their home. They then begin on a joyless and unentertaining quest to find a home that just gets darker and darker as the film goes on.
After leaving Andy's house they go to sunny-side daycare and at 32:00, the toys are thrown around and treated like trash by the children at the daycare, it is at this point that the film takes on its horror character and prison escape focus. The toys are put into awful and dark conditions, sometimes compared to hell and the holocaust, certainly not something young children should be exposed to.
At about 75:00 they decide to throw Lotso out of the daycare when they escape, and suddenly the daycare is turned into a toy utopia and suddenly all the toys are free and well off. Its not as if such changes can happen so quickly in the real world, progress is always gradual. Some people have even proposed that the toys died in the incinerator scene only to go to heaven which would explain these changes.
Finally, when they are free, Andy decides to give away all his toys. So what?!? If Woody really wanted to he could maintain a conversation with Andy when he is in college as his already showed that he is proficient with computers and phones, so he could just call Andy or talk to him over the internet. However, for some unexplained reason they can't converse with one another. In that case Andy can just buy new copies of those toys just as Lotso's owner replaced him so that no big deal on his part, and if Woody doesn't want to maintain a conversation with Andy that is his loss.
Product Placement: It just so happens that the computer Woody uses to search for his home is an Apple. We get to see many advertisements for Apple products, and there is even an iPod in there, courtesy of Pixar studios. Other products such as Mattel's Barbie & Ken dolls are advertised, and most importantly Disney has rolled out its own line of merchandise based upon the main toy story characters that will certainly be a very profitable business for them. It should be pretty clear why Disney chose to use toys in this movie when they could've just used people, they make lots of money from selling those toys. And this is not the last you are going to see of them, Disney holds the copyright on them for the foreseeable future and they will continue to sell them and build films around them, so as to maintain their profitable business.
Conclusion: If you actually cried over this movie, save your tears for a REAL tragedy, the real tragedy is that the Chinese workers who are actually creating these toys are treated like slaves. (See the documentary - {Santa's Workshop: Inside China's Slave Labour Toy Factories})