Toy Story (1995): Favourite Films Series

Toy Story (1995): Favourite Films Series

 

There is a very good chance the original Toy Story was one of the first movies I ever watched that I actually comprehended as a movie-watching experience. It wasn’t my first movie, but it was among my first movies, and as a kid, I loved it, just like, well, pretty much every kid I knew. I won a Woody toy as a prize for one of the first colouring contests I ever entered, I got a Buzz Lightyear action figure for Christmas when I was five, and I always wanted to play with the big Rex at preschool, complete with roars and quotes from the movie. There was something intuitive about the synergy of playing with toys which came alive with my imagination that also came directly from a movie where the toys were actually alive, yet weren’t real, but felt real in spite of their animated forms. I never gave any thought initially as to why the toys in Toy Story looked a little different than all the other animated movies I grew up loving—at least, not until I was a bit older and seeing the newest Pixar animated film in the theatre became standard practice.

It's hard not to talk about the subsequent Pixar films when explaining why the very first one they released is still among my all-time favourites, but as Pixar came up with ever more original and entertaining tales of anthropomorphic insects, fish, and monsters, I never completely forgot about Toy Story. I didn’t like Toy Story 2 nearly as much, and by the time Ratatouille came out in 2007, I was starting to feel a little too old for animated kids’ movies—not definitely too old, just a little uncertain if I still liked them as much. I passed on WALL-E and Up when they first came out (only to see them later when I was more grown up and regret it in retrospect), but when Toy Story 3 was announced, a unique opportunity presented itself: the chance to see both Toy Story and Toy Story 2 back-to-back in theatres, re-released in Real D 3D! This was in 2009, so I was fifteen. I was in high school, but my best friend and I decided we weren’t too cool to see a childhood favourite again after a very long time, and in a new way we had never seen it before. So, we went, and had no regrets.

I will never forget both of us remarking afterward how the part with Sid’s duck toy swinging straight toward the screen as it tries to ring the doorbell made it worth the 3D experience alone. The 3D hype at the time was just beginning; Avatar was only a couple months away, and animated films seemed to lend well to the gimmick. Beyond just the immersive return to a world of talking toys, I discovered in that rewatch with my more developed brain and budding cinema obsession that Toy Story was more than just an animated movie from my childhood. There was something in the screenplay that I had completely missed before: a really good, original story, that couldn’t be told any other way except with computer animation. I would later study the screenplay in a university course on scriptwriting, and make further discoveries about just how good the writing was. Is it still the best Pixar movie of them all? Maybe not in all ways, but I’ll explain why it’s still one of my favourites, and a unique benchmark that is unlikely to be surpassed ever again.

Before I get too far long, I’ll conclude my anecdotes of rediscovering Toy Story. After our nostalgic double feature in 2009, my best friend and I decided we had to see Toy Story 3 as soon as it came out in 3D, and we were a bit apprehensive when we went into the movie theatre in the summer of 2010, only to discover dozens of crying children with their struggling families. Had we made a mistake by coming to this sequel for little kids? Our worries soon went away as the third film took us on an unexpectedly emotional journey and, by some miracle, made us care even more about the original because of how good the conclusion to the trilogy was (oh how I wish it had stayed that way!) and how it was really more of a story for us, the ones who had outgrown our toys somewhere in the recent past, around the time we started to think we were too cool to see Pixar movies in the theatre.

That Christmas, I got the Toy Story trilogy on Blu-ray in an epic collector’s box shaped like Andy’s toybox, and over the years, I rewatched all of them a few times, finding the third one held up as a heartfelt ending, and the second one…well, I still don’t really like the second, but it’s fine, I guess. The first movie, though? Obviously, the animation is not as good, but even for all its plastic textures and the sometimes-disconcerting expressions of some of the toys, the animation isn’t horribly dated, in my opinion—certainly not to the point that it’s hard to watch. The animation at the time was astounding, but even now that the novelty of its status as the first feature length computer animated film has worn off, it still holds up, because there is so much greatness beyond just the medium in which the story is told.

Toy Story is still really, really funny. It hits that sweet spot of packing in humour kids will find amusing (but adults won’t be annoyed by) and slipping in some lines and visuals adults will laugh at, but kids won’t notice or won’t get. What works in its favour is handing so many memorable jokes, bits, and lines to a variety of colourful characters that all look and sound totally unique. I would argue that Toy Story has one of the best voice casts of any animated film, computer generated or otherwise. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen sound like they are acting on stage together at points, their back and forth as Woody and Buzz respectively is so convincing. Some of my favourite lines now come from Buzz, and they completely went over my head when all I could process as a kid were the fast-moving images and exciting (though sometimes sad/contemplative/quirky) music by Randy Newman. Buzz trying to fix his spaceship (the box he came in) and asking for a “bonding strip” (piece of tape) is exemplary of something simple but crucial to what makes Toy Story work so well: the delusion of this toy not knowing how he really fits into this world.

I’m a big fan of adventure movies, and Toy Story is a great example of one. We spend relatively little time in Andy’s room seeing the normal lives of the toys before Buzz enters the fray, and within a half hour Buzz and Woody are at the Pizza Planet (side note, I absolutely loved realizing as an adult that the kid is playing a whack-a-mole-like game but with chest bursters from Alien!) then it’s not long before they are in the clutches of Sid: a perfect villain for the story, because he is the classic archetype of the kid we all knew growing up who was, for whatever reason, incredibly destructive and unhinged. The comeuppance he gets when the toys get him back at the end before Woody and Buzz’s final pursuit of the moving truck is just so satisfying, in addition to being a little bit horrific. The way the aged animation works best now, I think, is how it makes Sid and his mutant toys look even more uncannily creepy. Last note on the ending: Buzz finally accepting he can’t fly (it’s just “falling with style”—it’s all just so darn quotable!) as they are gliding after the moving van to ensure they make it to Andy’s new house is one of the most thrilling and satisfying animated finales I’ve ever seen.

Toy Story is one of very few movies from my childhood that were always intended for a family audience with kids particularly in mind that holds up as an enduring, lifelong favourite. Even though it is dated compared to the majority of Pixar films, what will never go out of date are the lovable characters, their impeccable comedic antics, and a story that balances heart, humour, and adventure. They’ll probably keep making Toy Story sequels until I’m as old as Geri, and after the third one, I think it’s clear none of them will be able to replicate how special the first one was, is, and always will be.

Oh, who is Geri, you ask? He’s the old man playing Chess with himself in the 1997 Pixar short Geri’s Game who later appears as “The Cleaner” in Toy Story 2!