An evening with old friends...

Rating: 9/10 (16 July 2010)

Toy Story 3 will go down in history as being one of the (very) rare sequels that genuinely builds on the story of its original.
The original Toy Story is an iconic movie, the way The Wizard of Oz was in the thirties. It took a medium that few of us had much faith in, and proved it could be used to tell a fun, involving story.
Toy Story 2 wound up taking an interesting turn, becoming a kind of contemplation on the difference between being loved and being revered. Fortunately, the characters stayed true, and the sense of fun remained.
While TS3 extends that sense of fun (particularly with new characters like the Ken doll), there is a mournful quality to it that adults will recognize as a sense of mortality. As the movie starts, the toys make an ingenious but ultimately pathetic bid for their owner's attention; they know they are being left behind and possibly discarded. The story is really driven by the toys' efforts to come to terms with that change.
It is, at times, fun, inventive, and even thrilling. It says something about the relationship we've had with these characters that when they face certain peril at the climax of the story, their simple response is surprisingly moving.
It's that relationship that makes this such a great sequel. Since the original Toy Story was released in 1995, CGI animation has become an important segment of the industry, and the source of some of my favourite films of the past 15 years. I left the theatre thinking about how far the medium has come in that time, and that this movie felt like an evening with old friends.
While Disney/Pixar hasn't declared this to be the "last" of the series, the story arc closes so gracefully that you'd hate to see it embellished simply for the sake of box-office receipts.