Paint-by-numbers Di$ney animation product.

Rating: 5/10 (5 December 2011)

With their human going off to a noticeably generically-referred to "college", the now-idle toys mistakenly get shipped to a "Cool Hand Luke" prison-camp like daycare center. Hilarity generally does not ensue. A Big Wheel-sized amount of suspension-of-disbelief is needed to accept that somehow the Ned Beatty-voiced strawberry-scented Care Bear runs the prison, er, daycare, such that Woody & Co. are trapped in the toddlers room where they are tortured, er, played with. Since it was hard to accept the idea that the human day care mavens somehow couldn't simply put the toys into whatever room they wanted, I spent the time in the theater's darkness trying to develop a theory that the film was a veiled protest against secret CIA black-ops prisons. Given that the Patriot Act is still in effect, I will refrain from relating my ruminations on the subject. Anyway, the film has an intriguing voice cast such that it is populated deep into the character list with former actors who could open a film in their time. Also Don Rickles is in it. The script is passable with a reasonable amount of pathos for the younger target demographic but it lacks the winking adult-targeted asides such as those found in "Monsters, Inc." There is an attempt at this with the Ken doll trying to defend against charges of being a girl's toy but it never goes anywhere. This being Pixar, the animation is technically top-notch, however, since the toys-coming-to-life thrill is now some 15 years old, Disney must rely on the audience being too young to have encountered the conceit before. In short, this one goes into the over-rated Pixar films bin next to "Finding Nemo", and "Ratatouille" rather than into the Pixar classics bin which includes in this order: "Wall-E", "Monsters, Inc", "The Incredibles", "Cars" and "Up".