Toy Story

This month is going to be very exciting because I will be looking at movies done by “Pixar Animation Studios,” which I have been wanting to look at for a long time now. So for this year’s “Disney Month,” we will be calling it, “Disney’s Pixar Month.” Let’s take a look at the first movie done by the company, “Toy Story,” released in 1995.

“Toy Story” creates a setting in a few of kid’s bedrooms, a gas station, and a long suburban highway. The protagonists are toys, who come to life when the kids are not in the rooms. The fight is between a cowboy who has always been the boy’s favorite toy, and the new space fighter who may be the new favorite. The villain is the next door neighbor bully who takes toys apart and puts them back together again in horrid combinations. Roger Ebert said in his review, “And the result is a visionary roller-coaster ride of a movie.”

For the children watching the movie, this will work because it tells a fun story, has so much humor, and is exciting to watch. Ebert said, “Older viewers may be even more absorbed, because "Toy Story," the first feature made entirely by computer, achieves a three-dimensional reality and freedom of movement that is liberating and new.” The more you know about how the movie was made, the more you respect it.

Ebert mentioned, “Imagine the spectacular animation of the ballroom sequence in "Beauty and the Beast" at feature length and you'll get the idea. The movie doesn't simply animate characters in front of painted backdrops; it fully animates the characters and the space they occupy, and allows its point of view to move freely around them. Computer animation has grown so skillful that sometimes you don't even notice it (the launching in "Apollo 13" took place largely within a computer). Here, you do notice it, because you're careening through space with a new sense of freedom.”

Look at the part when Buzz Lightyear, the new space toy, jumps off a bed, bounces off a ball, speeds off of the ceiling, spins around on a hanging toy helicopter and zooms into a series of loops on a model car race track. Watch Buzz, the background, and the viewpoint – which expands and shrinks to manipulate the ability of speed. It’s just enjoyment.

Ebert said, “I learn from the current Wired magazine that the movie occupied the attention of a bank of 300 powerful Sun microprocessors, the fastest models around, which took about 800,000 hours of computing time to achieve this and other scenes -- at 2 to 15 hours per frame. Each frame required as much as 300 MBs of information, which means that on my one-gigabyte hard disk, I have room for about three frames, or an eighth of a second. Of course computers are as dumb as a box of bricks if they're not well-programmed, and director John Lasseter, a pioneer in computer animation, has used offbeat imagination and high energy to program his.”

Enough of all that, let’s talk about the movie. John Lasseter and his team start the film in a kid’s bedroom, where the toys come to life when the kid leaves the room. The leader of the toys is Woody, a cowboy voiced by Tom Hanks. His friends include Mr. Potato Head (Don Rickles), Slinky Dog (the late Jim Varney), Hamm the Pig (John Ratzenberger), Rex the T-Rex (Wallace Shawn) and Bo Peep (Annie Potts). Ebert said, “The playroom ingeniously features famous toys from real life toys (which may be product placement, but who cares), including a spelling slate that does a running commentary on key developments (when Mr. Potato Head finally achieves his dream of Mrs. Potato Head, the message is "Hubba! Hubba!).”

One day there’s a new entry in the toy room. The toy owner, named Andy, voiced by John Morris, has a birthday, Woody takes out all of the troops in a Bucket of Soldiers to look at what is going on downstairs, and they use a Playskool walkie-talkie to communicate the events. The most shocking: The arrival in the room of Buzz Lightyear, voiced by Tim Allen, a space ranger.

Buzz is the most engaging toy in the movie, because he’s not in on the joke. He thinks he’s a real space ranger, only stuck shortly while on a critical mission, and he goes straight to work trying to repair his space ship – the cardboard box he came in. There’s real sadness later in the film when he sees a TV commercial for himself, and finds out that he’s just a toy.

The story gets critical when Andy, his sister (Hannah Unkrich) and mom (Laurie Metcalf) decide to move, and Woody and Buzz are left stranded in a gas station with no idea how to get back to Andy. (Ebert said, “It puts a whole new spin on the situation when a toy itself says, "I'm a lost toy!"”) Later, there’s a scary break in the bedroom of Sid, the bully next door, played by Erik von Detten, who takes toys apart and puts them back together like things you see in your nightmare. (His poor little sister, voiced by Sarah Freeman, is forced to have a tea party with headless dolls.)

Ebert admitted, “Seeing "Toy Story," I felt some of the same exhilaration I felt during "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." Both movies take apart the universe of cinematic visuals, and put it back together again, allowing us to see in a new way. "Toy Story" is not as inventive in its plotting or as clever in its wit as "Rabbit" or such Disney animated films as "Beauty and the Beast"; it's pretty much a buddy movie transplanted to new terrain. Its best pleasures are for the eyes. But what pleasures they are! Watching the film, I felt I was in at the dawn of a new era of movie animation, which draws on the best of cartoons and reality, creating a world somewhere in between, where space not only bends but snaps, crackles and pops.”

I remember seeing this movie as a child, I think in school. But I couldn't hear much of what was going on either because the volume was too low, I was sitting far back, or because the room was noisy. Then, I checked it out again as an adult. Hands down, this is one of my favorite “Pixar” movies ever. I don’t know if this is the first movie to ever showcase toys coming to life after kids leave their room, but if it is, they did a fantastic job. I love the animation, the settings, the design, the toys, the voice acting, everything about this movie is just pitch perfect. If you haven’t seen it, you shouldn’t even be reading this review. Go out and see it if you haven’t, I promise you’ll love it.

As all of you probably already know, this movie was successful that it was turned into a trilogy, with a planned fourth movie on the way. I will be looking at the other two movies later in the month, so watch out for those. Check in tomorrow for the next entry in “Disney’s Pixar Month.”