Brilliant

Rating: 9/10 (20 June 2010)

Good news: the new Toy Story movie is a sweet, charming coda to a endlessly endearing series. The dialog still crackles, the animation still sparkles, and the voice work still resonates. Well done all around.
It's been 15 years since the original feature, and in movie time that means that little Andy is about all grown up. Well, headed off to college, anyway. As the movie begins, he'll be leaving for higher education in a few days and needs to figure out what to do with his Woody and Buzz and Jessie and Hamm toys, and others - does he donate them to the local daycare center, or does he put them up in the attic for safekeeping? That's really the question at the heart of the movie. Are the toys better off with Andy, in college - or somewhere else? They realize he's growing up, but surely he hasn't forgotten them entirely. And sure enough, we come to learn just how much these toys mean to Andy. It's a coming-of-age movie disguised as a Playskool parable.
The gang's adventures lead them to the daycare center, where they meet up with a vast array of other toys, such as a Care Bear clone voiced by Ned Beatty, a Ken doll, and a Fisher-Price talking phone. One of the many hallmarks of this trilogy has been how well represented toys have been; obviously, Pixar (and Disney) spared no expense in getting the rights to some of these toys, which you have to admit is much better than the alternative: made-up toys no one cares about. That's a big reason the Toy Story movies work, of course, because they resonate with everyone. Each of us can see a piece of our childhood in the movie. That's why it bugs us when the evil neighbor kid or the evil toy collector do things to the toys, because they're not just toys to us - they're our toys, our lives, ourselves. To lay it on thickly.
Anyway, what this one's all about is togetherness. Should Woody go with Andy to college while the others go to the attic, or wherever? Or should they stick together? The humor from the first two movies doesn't slow a bit, with wickedly whip-fast banter from Don Rickles as Mr. Potato Head and John Ratzenberger as Hamm slicing the air with their barbs and trivia. There's even some mild character development - is that love I see between Buzz and Jessie? Another recurring theme in the series is that of abandonment. In TS2, Andy mistakenly put Woody in the family yard sale; here, the toys feel like they're similarly being put aside "for later," knowing that there won't be a later with Andy all but grown up. There are also repeated friends-abandoning-friends scenes as well. And, it seems, each toy in these movies - well, the lead toys - has some kind of story about how their old owner loved them to pieces and then one day just abandoned them. That feeling of abandonment plays a huge part in this movie.
There's just so much to like about this. It's simply great to hear Tom Hanks and Tim Allen playing their famous characters again. In fact, there really are no slackers in the entire bunch of voice actors, especially Joan Cusack as Jessie. (And, thank goodness, we get only a couple of snippets of Randy Newman's "You Got a Friend in Me.") There are some sad scenes, but for the most part they're obscured by some really fantastic 3D action scenes (see Woody escape daycare! See the rest of the gang elude the trash truck! Thrill to everyone avoiding the incinerator!). In fact, the only really sad scene, the one that'll be sure to yank the heart out of all adults and no kids, is the one in which Andy's mom sees her son off to college. She cries, and so will you. It's not only the end of Andy's childhood, it's the end to all our Toy Story laughs.
The third Toy Story movie is warm hearted and elegant, a end to the trilogy that will really make your heart soar. It's a beautiful, hilarious movie that should be required viewing for kids of all ages.