A huge disappointment - a very overrated movie

Rating: 6/10 (9 April 2015)

The first Toy Story left me totally delighted, and Toy Story 2 is, in my opinion, the greatest film possible, so flawless that nothing can be done to improve it. And that is why Toy Story 3 is, for me, such a huge disappointment. I cannot understand how so many people can praise this movie to such extreme levels. To me, this movie gets a very large number of things wrong, to the point where I can't even watch it anymore. I've tried to let it grow on me, but each viewing only makes me hate it even more.
First of all, let's look at the positives. The animation is great, the voice acting works fine, a couple of early scenes are fun and enjoyable, Lotso's a rather good villain, and the other main characters are also witty in short bursts. However, this is all faint praise, and none of it makes up for the movie's many immense failings. The bad aspects of the movie, unfortunately, are so glaring that they are simply unforgivable. The film's most prominent flaw is this: it's way too dark for its own good. Whereas the first two Toy Story films were able to balance the dark and the light satisfactorily, Toy Story 3 is a depressing, maddening, constantly gloomy bore.
Instead of being a varied and joyful movie, Toy Story 3 frequently shoves ugly and often painful images - such as destructive, screaming toddlers, a very creepy baby doll, a depressed clown doll and an extremely obnoxious, sociopathic cymbal-banging monkey toy - right into your face. The movie seems to have just two colour schemes - saccharine rainbow colours during the daytime scenes and cold, shadowy blues and blacks during night-time ones. As you watch the film, you too fill trapped in Sunnyside, the film's tedious and ugly central location which I wanted to leave almost as soon as its inner hellishness is revealed. It's a prison escape movie with toys, and it just doesn't work in my book. And when it tries to not be a prison escape movie, it comes across as dishonest and inconsistent.
Indeed, the movie frequently tries - and fails - to lighten up the proceedings with a few sporadic jokes. However, almost every joke in this movie hits a brick wall. Watching the toys get battered by Sunnyside's manic toddlers was not like a circus of slapstick comedy, but an excruciating experience that resembles an uncomfortable mixture of child abuse and sexual fetishes. Any wisecracks from the toys as they discuss what they can do to escape feel half-baked and completely out-of-place. Even "Spanish Buzz", one of the funnier aspects of the movie, does very little to make the movie any more charming. The film also suffers from disconcerting jumps in tone; one minute, we are at Bonnie's house where the film is sickly-sweet and syrupy, the next, we're once again drowned in Sunnyside's morose atmosphere and have to look at more scenes of toys being treated like prison inmates.
And when the movie isn't overwhelming the audience with images like these, it recycles previous Toy Story quotes and themes ad nauseum. Hearing a few lines from the first two movies is amusing it first, but it starts to come off as condescending and frivolous, inserted into the movie merely to remind the audience that they are indeed watching a Toy Story movie. And as for the themes in Toy Story 3? They were already explored 100% better in Toy Story 1 and of course the solid-gold opus Toy Story 2. For example, I found Lotso's miserable back-story far less affecting than Jessie's enchantingly poignant one. Toy Story 1 and 2 were constantly intriguing and involving and had plenty of lessons to teach without whacking you over the head with them. Toy Story 3 reuses these lessons and shoves them down your throat like a strict old schoolteacher setting her class an excessive amount of homework. The many side-characters, such as Lotso's goons and Bonnie's toys, are also totally forgettable, with little personality or interesting lines; it's very hard to care about any of them. There's just so little to take away from this movie. It's so overly pretentious and self-serious that it comes off as impassive and reluctant to take the audience on an actual adventure.
And just when the film can't get any more shamelessly pompous, we get treated to a spectacularly overblown climax, one which many fans adore, but I personally detest. It's a scene where the toys are nearly melted in an incinerator, but the film milks it for all it is worth despite the fact that it's utterly self-evident that they are going to survive their supposed doom. It's a repulsively manipulative scene that tests the audience's connection to these characters. And yes, the scene shortly afterwards where the toys are given to Bonnie? I'll admit it's kind of sweet and nice. But it's also cheesy and, much like the incinerator scene, only put in the movie to manipulate the emotions of nostalgic adults who miss their childhood toys and regret throwing or giving them away.
I'm sorry guys, but I just cannot enjoy this movie. It's dark, hideous, icy, limited in its goals, constantly pretentious and just not fun. It's a dull, slow-paced movie about toys trapped and tortured in a dystopian daycare centre. Toy Story 1 and 2 were imbued with copious amounts of joy, wit, intelligence, humour, charm, innovation, messages and memorable scenes. Toy Story 3 makes a few weak attempts at being like its predecessors, and at least in my opinion, doesn't get at all close to being even half as good as them. Toy Story 3 may be considered a masterpiece to some, but to me, it's a largely heartless, lazy, slipshod product with hardly anything captivating, inventive or original in it.