We've faced replacement and we've faced neglect--now on to death

Rating: 10/10 (9 July 2010)

This is now officially one of the most qualitative franchises I can think of, and a Toy Story 4 of even half the quality would send this right to the top past the Alien Quadrilogy. The storytelling is brisk, the animation is beautiful, the scenes range from funny to disturbing to terrifying to heartwarming to outright tear-inducing. The garbage combustion scene alone is bound to give children nightmares, but Buzz bustin' out the flamenco is more than enough to keep this one fun for the whole family. What I like best is that they manage to keep to the spirit, look, and characters of the other movies while still amping up showmanship and surprises, storytelling and subthemes.
That said, this movie follows the same essentail formula as Toy Story 2, including having a roughly similar turn-out for the villain of the picture, and the ending pretty much sets us back at point one so that this can just continue on and on. These movies are, essentially, all about limited time and limited life, these characters all know one day the end will come, but of course the audience knows that it won't, at least during the movie that they're watching. So even though I trust Pixar enough to go to see Toy Story 4, if it ever exists, right here would be a very good place to end. After all, the first is about surviving replacement, the second about surviving aging, and the third about surviving the afterlife (I would say that the daycare center stands in for Purgatory and, well, the inferno for Inferno quite well), so any more existential worries about the end of the toys given time would probably be repetitive--best to start thinking about other adventures they could possibly go on, or settling on the score while it's still high.
--PolarisDiB