Godot with toys

Rating: 3/10 (15 July 2010)

Anyone wondering what Schindler's List might have looked like if performed by toys need look no further than "Toy Story 3." An ugly, dark, joyless movie, "Toy Story 3" will frighten children and send adults into therapy.
The first "Toy Story" was a delight, capped off with a fun and exciting chase sequence, in which Buzz and Woody attempted to catch up to the moving van that held all of their friends. Sure, if they hadn't made it, it would have been sad. But the chase and the movie as a whole was a lot of fun, capped off by some fun Randy Newman songs.
"Toy Story 2" was an even better movie, because it added an interesting ingredient to the soup: An acknowledgment of death. The sequence where Jessie laments how her life lost its meaning when her owner grew up is truly heart breaking. And the final spoken lines of dialogue, referencing Buzz's catch phrase "To infinity and beyond," but placing the phrase in the context of death itself was a masterstroke. Adding these dark elements in select moments elevated the movie into something special.
"Toy Story 3" makes the mistake of taking those select moments and turning them into the WHOLE MOVIE. The stink of death, loss and alienation is as prevalent here as a Beckett play. The story of Lotso's grim rejection by his owner and his subsequent change to a dark, Nazi-like dictator poisons the fun. (What, no up tempo Randy Newman song about that?) And the depiction of Ken as a gay stereotype was offensive, and future generations will squirm at those moments, like they do today over the racist depiction of Asians in "Breakfast at Tiffanies." (The Pixar films would never take a black or Jewish toy and make them act in a stereotypical fashion, but I guess gays are fair game.) As with most sequels, character growth is mostly zero. The characters have done all their growing in the earlier segments, and so they spend the movie mostly running around, learning nothing, never growing. Woody comes off as absurdly delusional in his belief that the best thing for him and the others is to sit in a plastic bag in an attic for decades until such time as maybe Andy wants his children to play with them.
But life at the daycare center is another form of hell. The film strives to depict the toy's plight as a parody of a prison film, but ends up evoking the holocaust and Nazi concentration camps. The tyranny, torture (yes, torture) and betrayals the toys face in the day care center are dark and awful, but still pale in comparison to the act three climax. Here, we have the pleasure of watching our heroes in a trash compactor, facing an almost certain death in an oven, to be burned alive. Again, one can't help but think of the holocaust and how the victims there were burned in ovens.
But it all ends happily. The characters are saved and live happily ever after.
Or do they? For a film that shows such craft in its writing and such subtlety in its characterizations, the final fifteen minutes of the film are mind boggling inconsistent with what has come before. It begins with the claw, that rescues its characters, God-like, from their peril. Up until now, God-like interventions had been non-existent. These characters always had the ingenuity to get themselves out of jams, but suddenly not here.
In the scenes that follow, Andy suddenly loves his toys. And life at the daycare is a toy utopia. (Remember that the only change is that Lotso is gone. I guess he took all the evil with him when he left.) The final image of the film is the sky, with a series of similar looking clouds. Seem familiar? It's the same clouds as the wallpaper in Andy's room. The characters have found themselves, post-fire, in a happy but manufactured world. Conclusion: They died in the fire and this is heaven. I'm happy for them, because sitting through this movie, I felt like I was in hell.