Toy Story 3

In Toy Story 3, Woody and Buzz remain unchanged, as good as new in fact, but Andy is 17 now and moving on to college. His mom wants his room cleared, and a misunderstanding consigns the toys to Sunnyside Daycare. Initially the idea of all-day play seems too good to be true, but Sunnyside has a dark side: it’s “a place of ruin and despair”, a pre-kindie pastel-colored gulag presided over by Lotso (Ned Beatty), an avuncular pink teddy bear who smells of strawberries.

Obsolescence. It’s always been the deep dark dread underpinning the Toy Story movies. Remember how in the first one, Woody, was terrified that he had been supplanted as Andy’s favourite by the spanking new space ranger toy, Buzz Lightyear? And in the second film, how Woody was briefly seduced into considering life in a Japanese display case over neglect and dust mites in Andy’s bedroom?

What obsolescence really means in this case is emotional withdrawal – the fear that you are no longer loved and appreciated. That’s also the prime motivator for Toy Story 3, the darkest and most frightening of the series, and a film that will likely speak as loudly to parents as to children. After all, we’re the ones who will be left behind, home alone, when our kids pack up and take off for college, as Andy does here. And later, won’t we be the ones who are consigned to a care home, just like Buzz and his buddies (day care – nursing home, what’s the difference?).

That may make the movie sound heavy and depressing, but Pixar has a knack of handling these serious themes with a very light touch ,and it soon develops into a hugely satisfying, multi-levelled horror-comedy. Director Lee Unkrich (who codirected the second Toy Story) fashions a brilliantly inventive and surprisingly suspenseful escape movie from these pre-school components, funneling the series’ abiding separation anxiety into a succession of ingenious feints and evasions, climaxing in an apocalyptic vision of the gaping inferno.

It’s a film that moves as much as it entertains, that will make adults cry as much as — perhaps even more than — younger children.

Sukhdev Sandhu, Daily Telegraph

Some toys — and Toy Storys — are to be treasured forever.

Richard Corliss, TIME magazine

Incredibly emotional.

Indiewire

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