Toy Story 3

[cinemabon]

Toy Story 3 (2010) – directed by Lee Unkrich


When we leave our home, our things, our world behind and go away to attend college, we transition from dependent children into adults. We put away the things that attach us to that world we once knew. Our parents enter our bedroom and usually throw out everything in the room or sell it. Hence the accusatory phrase, “My mother threw out my [valuable] comic books!” Mothers have a penchant for cleaning and organizing. This is the premise of the third “Toy Story 3” installment directed by Lee Unkrich (director of Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., and Finding Nemo). Andy is grown and headed to college. The toys know and fear they will be stored in the attic or worse, discarded.

The storyline follows other Toy Story scripts in that the toys come to life when adults or children cannot see them and act on impulses they feel. In this case, the toys are familiar to us: Woody (Tom Hanks) is the practical lawman with a sense of fairness, Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) is the hero and a bit stuffy, Mr. Potato Head (Don Rickles) cracks oneliners, Rex (Wallace Shawn) is the timid T-Rex, Hamm (John Ratzenberger) is also full of jokes, and more recently added Jessie (Joan Cusack) the female opposite of Woody. The reoccurring group present in all three films (except Jessie) have been lost, stolen, and run around the town only to end back up in the safety of Andy’s bedroom. This time however, they face extinction. The mother accidentally takes the toys to a day care and the film changes to a darker side (similar to what happened in the first film with the demented neighbor). Determined to stay one of Andy’s toys, Woody sets out on his own. However, when he discovers the fate of the other toys from the original group, he sets out to rescue them. The film has wonderful twists and turns along with some very funny moments as filmmakers put the characters through their paces.

The most poignant moment in the film comes when Andy realizes he cannot keep the toys forever and makes a bold decision. That moment and others comes not so much as a surprise to us, but more as relief. For we cannot cling to our past, as beings we can only grow if we constantly embrace our future and change. That is why our species evolved and continues its forward progress. Few movies simply express this sentiment in such a beautiful and straightforward way as “Toy Story 3.” I attended the showing with a packed house just a few minutes ago. We saw the 3-D version with the “dark sunglasses” which worked well. I did not notice any overt attempts by filmmakers to throw things at the screen. However, the short before the movie called “Day and Night” was expressly made for 3-D and showed off the contrast between three dimensional scenes and two-dimensional scenes purposely laid over the top of each other in an extremely clever way that smacks of Oscar all over it. What did I find wrong with “Toy Story 3”? Absolutely nothing. Probably one of the best movies, if not the best film I’ve seen this year because simply put, it expresses what we feel about the toys we cling to as children and why some of us prize them into adulthood, and finally because they also connect us to that wonderful world of imagination that is full of love, forgiveness, and friendship. “Toy Story 3” is not so much a goodbye to our beloved characters we’ve grown so accustomed to but an embrace of all that is beautiful about being a child.

[Chris Knipp]

We saw the 3-D version with the “dark sunglasses” which worked well. I did not notice any overt attempts by filmmakers to throw things at the screen.

Didn't you mean you didn't see any overt attempts of the filmmakers to throw things at us -- from the screen? That is what primitive 3-D did (to good effect, I might add; I have yet to see its other advantages). I hope this can be watched in non-3-D, because I'm not comfortable with 3-D and I know this is an important film even though I don't like animations, I don't like the look of Pixar films, and I did not like UP, which everybody raves about. I did like THE INCREDIBLES, I kind of liked RATATOUILLE, and I loved WALL*E, or at least the first half. WALL*E shows the Pixar Studio (which is just a few miles from where I live) not only have skills but imagination and heart. WALL*E was in my annual Best List. UP wasn't though.

[oscar jubis]

Thanks for the post bon. The summer season has been a near-disaster for Hollywood, so far, but here comes Pixar to save Hollywood and to save us. I have not felt a need to watch any of the "commercial" movies that have come out in past months. Finally, here comes a movie that serves as a proper respite to the wonderful, old Japanese movies that preoccupy me now (along with the Cup, go USA!!!).

I just watched Bruce Springsteen amazing concert film London Calling. One other movie I can recommend to everyone is CYRUS, with Marisa Tomei, Jonah Hill and John C. Reilly. I am sure Chris will be reviewing it soon. I am not a fan of the writer/directors, the Duplass brothers, so I wasn't expecting much. I was very pleasantly surprised by this film, the kind that makes you care about the characters and leaves you with the feeling you really got to know them a bit. Probaby not as good as TOY STORY 3 though, which I get to watch this week. Can't wait!

[Chris Knipp]

CYRUS not here in the Bay Area yet but I'll keep your recommendation in mind. Can I guess you have a weakness for Marisa Tomei? I will see TOY STORY 3 when time allows, did not mean to imply I won't. It's something I "have to know about" whether I like it or not, but judging from its ratings both critical and commercial, I may like it. Though I officially don't like animations, I also did cover the San Francisco Animation Festival (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2684-SFFS-4th-Annual-Animation-Festival) last year.

Other good current movie news: the return in some functioning form of New Yorker Films (http://www.indiewire.com/article/the_return_of_new_yorker_films/) after being shuttered one year upon Dan Talbot's retirement.

The best new film I have seen lately is definitely I AM LOVE (Io sono l'amore, Luca Guadagnino), with Tilda Swinton, acting in Italian. Limited release coming, lots of festival exposure. I hope somebody will take a look at my review (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2857-I-AM-LOVE-%28Luca-Guadagnino-2009%29) -- or any of the others. Also watch for (higher critical rating) WINTER'S BONE. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2823-San-Francisco-International-Film-Festival-2010&p=24294#post24294)

[cinemabon]

I read your review, Chris and "I love you" sounds intriguing. Tilda Swinton of course won the Best Supporting nod for her work in "Michael Clayton" (2007) the so called business curse (winners careers tend to die off after they win). I hope both of you, whom I admire greatly, enjoy this latest Pixar release. While the formula for sequels is usually mundane, the twist on this film is both adult and child-like in its universal appeal. In other words, Chris, keep an open mind. Have a great summer guys... sweltering in NC... bon.

[Chris Knipp]

Correction: I AM LOVE not I LOVE YOU. It's a silly title either way but a good film.

TOY STORY 3 was fascinating, most of the way through; overly sentimental, but quite successfully so: the passing-on-of-the-toys jerked my tears. But I think this movie is merely competent, not great. Competence may look awfully good at this dumb season though and I'm guessing some grownups may already be sold on the franchise from the Nineties when the first two happened. I did not see them, but that may make me like a kid, who may not have seen the earlier ones? I don't think you have to, though it may theoretically enrich the experience of course to have seen the characters and heard the same voices before.

[Chris Knipp]

Lee Unkrich: Toy Story 3 (2010)

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/640x480q90/673/5OppNz.jpg
BUZZ LIGHTYEAR AND WOODY: NOTE THE BLURRED CAR --PRETTY COOL

Review by Chris Knipp

Hogging the stage in a dry season

Toy Story 3 is the shot-in-the-arm big success of the lackluster Hollywood box office summer of 2010. The Pixar team is an impressive combination of computerized animation and storytelling talents. The Toy Story franchise is one that makes the most of the limitations of the format, which, however tweaked with computers and CGI, still makes "living" things look like objects, generally shiny and pristine ones. Despite new tricks such as a swoosh effect like a camera panning swiftly and blurry backgrounds, surface details like bruises and dirt tend to look added-on. So, logically, the main characters in the film are a child's collection of favorite plastic playthings; a Ken and a Barbie doll, a Slinky toy dog, a talking cowboy and cowgirl, a mechanical spaceman, he and she potato figures with pop-on facial features. If the comic is in Bergson's definition "the mechanical encrusted on the living," Toy Story isn't the first animated film to present the living encrusted on the mechanical.

Last year my favorite animated feature was not the overpraised and sentimental Up (another Pixar cash cow) but Wes Anderson's stop-motion film from a Raold Dahl book, Fabulous Mr. Fox. Still more stimulating to the imagination, really, were the experimental short films from Annency shown at the 2009 SFFS Animated Film Festival. A feature in the festival along with Mr. Fox was the Belgians Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar's Town Called Panic (Panique au village), a lower-budget stop-motion animation. They didn't have the likes of George Clooney and Meryl Streep to do the voices. Panic actually uses mock-ups of simple little stand-up toys -- Coyboy, Indian, Horse, etc. It's totally wacko. It also evokes the feel of inanimate objects coming to life better than Pixar's infinitely more fluent creations, which are based on real toys but, being computer animations, can do anything, make any moves the Pixar people want, and hence quickly make you forget that they're based on inanimate objects. A Town Called Panic is boldly artificial and crude. The story is twisty and hard to follow, seemingly improvised like a surrealist "exquisite corpse" drawing, with one part folded over so the artists don't see what they're connecting to.

Toy Story 3 is doggedly faithful to its theme, and it begins with a lot of talk as the toys natter on about what on earth they should do. Andy, the toy's owner, is now seventeen and is going off to college. It's time for him to put away childish things. He has a sentimental attachment to them. They evoke nostalgia for his childhood. You'd think he might have gotten over that, like, when he was about twelve, but the sentimentality of the film is undeniably valid: people do cling to or long for their youth. This is touchingly illustrated when, after many vicissitudes, Andy (spoiler alert!) turns over the little group of his favorite toy-personalities (they are, in effect, marketable characters, which you will find for sale, part of the franchise of the megabucks film) to a little girl who he has heard is "good with toys" (as if they were animal pets and not plastic). Before climbing into his VW bug and driving off to school, Andy pauses and takes the time to introduce the girl to his toys one by one, to make sure they'll have a good "home." It's a rather odd notion, but in his ability to play with the little girl, Andy seems somehow more gentle and more grownup than the usual college freshman; he's still in touch with his inner child in a way that may make him a good father. On the other hand when he is standing next to his mother earlier, due to Pixar's inability to "do" aging with subtlety, she looks more like his sister. Perhaps, like Lewis Carroll and other great writers of books for super-intelligent children, the Pixar people are essentially adults whose love of childhood verges on the perverse.

Toy Story 3 has moments of considerable ingenuity (not only technical ones), which are deceptive because it is fundamentally simple. It may seem like a thought-provoking meditation on themes of growth, abandonment, and loss; somewhere inside the film there surely is the ghost of such a meditation screeching be let out. But while its overriding flaw -- as well, of course, as its most successful commercial hook -- is its sentimentality, it is primarily nothing more more than an action film about escape, with cruel oppressors posing as cuddly critters, and a small loyal band uncertain where to turn.

The now (more or less) grown up boy, Andy (John Morris), sentimentally chooses to take Woody (Tom Hanks), the cowboy doll and his apparent chief childhood toy "friend," along with him to college as a talisman, and would leave the rest in a bag to go in the attic; he does not want them thrown away or passed on to others. Like so many of us, he can neither keep his past in front of him nor wholly sever his ties with it. By accident the toys get rerouted to the Sunshine daycare center. They are greeted by the jovial Lotso (Ned Beatty), a worse-for-wear teddy bear that turns out to rule the center's toys like the head of a penitentiary. (Beaty just appeared in the grisly thriller The Killer Inside Me.) Believing himself to have been rejected by his little girl owner (who in fact only lost, not abandoned, him), Lotso takes out his bitterness on the world. In all this, and a moment when the little band of brothers is threatened with near-infernal annihilation, Toy Story 3, though ostensibly made for the very young, moves into areas that are perhaps not so child-friendly.

Woody is a brave and upright leader who sets out to save the other toys. It's appropriate that this toy is voiced by Tom Hanks, an actor associated with simplistic American heroes like those of Saving Private Ryan and Forrest Gump. Woody seems to do more than his fair share of dithering, but he is always doing the right thing in his own eyes, and, in the end, despite terrible missteps, he proves devious or intrepid at just the right moments.

There is not as much complexity to Toy Story 3's action as to its implications. Like most animations from their beginnings, it's a lot of chasing around and being smashed up. (That the worst smashing is done by very small children, and Lotso's most evil enforcer is a large Baby doll, are creepy notes.) It's a stretch, but a necessary one for a franchise, to string this out to 103 minutes. Typically, it has gotten pushed more each time: number 1 was 80 minutes, number 2 a little over 90, now this.

A sly irony is that the toys only move around and talk to each other when alone, and quickly snap back to "pretending" to be inanimate whenever people are around. Another child's toys are impressed by the skill of Andy's at "playing dead" and, in a witty touch, asks, "are you classically trained?" Some running time is added with a flashback to the sad story of Lotso and a funny interlude when Ken (whose potential gay overtones are not touched) gives a fashion show to Barbie (whom he's just met), doing campy disco turns from a wardrobe of hundreds of outfits. Someone trashes Ken by yelling, "He's not a toy, he's an accessory!" Likewise the space man toy Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) adds amusing padding to the film when he's switched back to "demo" mode by Lotso's henchmen so he can be used as a prison guard; then, jolted, reveals a sexy Hispanic program, prancing and dancing and talking in deep-throated Spanish.

All this adds layers, but doesn't change the movie's basically simple trajectory. People who herald Toy Story 3 as a masterpiece are desperate in the middle of a dead Hollywood season. It is nothing more than merely competent, and I'd rather watch real actors on screen or, if forced, stop-motion, which has richer ironies and distracts less with its technical pretensions. I think Walt Disney had the right idea with Fantasia, an omnibus of seven separate movements or stories, each with a completely different mood set by a strong piece of music. Fantasia is two hours long and still delights, but it's a dubious pursuit to stretch out an animated film that tells only one story to an hour and a half. There comes a point midway through Toy Story 3 when you realize it's done what it's got to do, and, like every franchise, it's turned into a player greedy for attention who has used up his time but refuses to leave the stage.

[cinemabon]

I thought your conclusions rather harsh in your last paragraph, Chris. Although you've a right to compare Toy Story 3 to other modern fair, the idea it somehow is comparable to "Fantasia" is preposterous. First of all, "Fantasia" is a class unto itself. Disney envisioned a program of animation meant to run with a live orchestra and wanted it performed as such at the Hollywood Bowl. Instead, he created and produced the film through his own distribution company and not through RKO Studios which handled all of his distribution to that date. The idea that music tells a story and put some ideas on how to do that through inspiration was a stroke of genius for its time and even the remake a decade ago when nephew Roy duplicated the effort with the Chicago Symphony and James Levine.

As to Toy Story 3, I thought the film started to loose its luster when the toys escaped the day care and headed back to Andy's house. However, when they ended up in the dumpster and then, through a series of accidents, headed for the incinerator, the scene where they reached out for one another's hand moved everyone in the house (except you, as you failed to mention it). Instead, you gave away the ending (slightly callous?), although you did preface your remarks with the all inclusive phrase, "spoiler alert." I'm certain everyone paid attention to that.

I found Toy Story 3 touched on so many things on so many different levels that I consider that effort grand, both in sentimentality and in life's lessons in which we, the audience, need to be repeatedly reminded (such as Pixar's effort a few years ago "Wall-e" which reminded us to keep up our environmental efforts to clean up our world). The Pixar team has consistently produced one gem after another. While the term masterpiece is yet to be defined past this viewing, I did find this film stands out among a very lackluster year. Being as such does not detract from the competition, only heightens it.

[Chris Knipp]

If it's "harsh" to compare TOY STORY 3 with FANTASIA that's because FANTASIA is a really fine film, as well as an independently produced one and not a factory product. I referred to FANTASIA to show how a feature animation in unrelated segments works better because stretching one story out into a feature-length animation can seem pushed, as it does here. I gave some examples of stuff used to stretch out what is really a very limited story.

I don't buy into the widespread notion that Pixar "has consistently produced one gem after another" -- in other words that they can do no wrong. My esteemed neighbors in Emeryville sometimes turn out less-than-brilliant efforts and TOY STORY 3 is an example.

I was being kind in not referring to the tear-jerker hand-holding on the way to the incinerator, a crude Perils of Pauline teaser and an example of the kind of sentimentality that too often (but fortunately not always) prevails in Pixar films. Why should such a moment redeem a plot that "has started to lose its luster"? I do not buy the idea that sentimentality + technology = art.

My saying "spoiler alert" was a joke. Andy's solving the problem of how to dispose nicely of his toys by giving them to a suitable child is no surprise to anybody; and an opportunity for more weepy-ness. Yes, TOY STORY 3 is certainly "grand" in "sentimentality." You got that right. But its sentimentality is far from being its strong point.

I'm less sure about the "life lessons." Growing up -- but not abandoning the fresh outlook of one's youth -- is a perfectly worthwhile theme, but illustrating it by a college freshman who has trouble giving up toys designed for six- or eight-year-olds creates a metaphor that's more creepy, or at best irrelevant, than edifying. Yes, TOY STORY 3 strives to touch on "many things on so many different levels." The "effort" is "grand," but the success, not so "grand."

[cinemabon]

I don't mean to beleaguer the point, but in this instance, you're wrong, Chris... and you're so far off the mark, it isn't funny. I've never seen so many disparate critics line up behind this film and use far fewer euphemisms in their rhetoric when they pick apart the movie's plot.

I don't regard giving away the emotional impact of the film as a joke. So I will disregard that comment as a throw away. I sense hostility on your part against this film and I'm not certain why. Did your mother take away toys from you as a child? The appeal here is so universal that everyone seems to be feeling it except you. I won't go on to dispute every point. I will let the entire realm of critics do that for me.

I'm sorry you don't like the film... but unless you start to quote some homespun critic in some far off review, you won't find anyone to back your argument.

While everyone is entitled to an opinion, and in every other case, I have consistantly respected yours. This is one case where we differ.

Metascore 91 - the highest of the year: http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/toystory3

Cream of the crop score 100% - highest of the year: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/toy_story_3/?critic=creamcrop

[Chris Knipp]

I don't feel I've erred here. Sometimes everybody is wrong. It's very well done. I have not trashed it. But you should never think that you will agree with me just because you read and appreciate my reviews. I would lose my credibility if I just agreed with the Metacritic majority. I also found AVATAR very overrated. I sometimes like a movie mainstream critics trash, or dislike one they adore. This is why I like to consult people like Walter Chaw of Film Freak Central and Armond Whitle of The New York Press, both maverick critics. They are often way off the charts. They know much more than I do about film, they are both very smart. They may be too angry. Sometimes they ramble or go off topic. White's writing can be ungraceful or even ungrammatical. But they think independently. They inspire me because I aspire to that, while in general I am far nicer than either of them. I am not so angry as they are.

Apropos of which, I do not feel hostility toward TOY STORY 3 as you surmise. I am simply annoyed when something that's only average good comes in for Universal Acclaim. I rely on Metacritic too but it's not scientific. Sometimes the gnomes behind the site ove-r or understate the critical consensus. But apart from that, the critics sometimes get on a bandwagon they should not have joined. You can find them echoing each other even.

If I loved animations above all other forms of cinema I might rate this film higher. But as a corrective to the excessive raves, I give it a 7/10. If I really hated it as you suppose, I'd obviously give it a 3/10 or a 5/10, not a gentleman's C. Heck,I'd even bend over and give it a 7.5. I don't like animated films much; this should be clear by now but I don't harp on it; I try to be fair.

And I can have fun with animations. I was fascinated by the darker sort of Japan anime at one point, and then got tired of it. I'll never forget the dark, creepy, mind-bending 1989 stop-motion Japanese animation TETSUO, THE IRON MAN (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096251/). I did enjoy the SFFS Animation Festival films last year, and its centerpiece especially, Wes Anderson's FABULOUS MR. FOX. But I do not like Pixar products particularly; I don't like the look of them. Everybody looks like a hard shiny plastic toy, even the supposed humans. Of course that is somewhat the way with animations. Hand-drawn ones avoid that, and so does stop-motion.

This said, I did find the first half of WALL*E poetic and beautiful (the last half less memorable and more tedious, though at least it has a point rather than just sentimentality). I could see the point of FINDING NEMO but that's a kid's story, isn't it? I'm not a child. I also liked THE INCREDIBLES. I thought that was fresh and intelligent. I could see the point of RATATOUILLE, which was a critical hit in France. I'd rather watch French people sitting around talking to each other than toys running around dodging trash compactors or malevolent teddy bears. I definitely did not like UP. Again, my animation feature of 2009 was MR FOX, which was sophisticated and beautiful and was not a factory product. Pixar is out to make money. Hence their alarcrity in cranking out sequels sooner or later of anything that does well. Their formulas work and they don't need my approval, nor should you.

[cinemabon]

"Assuredly, I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18:3)

Many years ago in film school, someone produced the print of a Russian feature called "The Snow Queen." It was in Russian with English subtitles and the animation was not Disney but darker. The above quote is taken from the last line of the Han Christian Andersen story. Unfortunately, someone took the film and changed it with a completely different soundtrack and added music by Frank Skinner. Down through the years, my tastes, just as anyone's tastes, have changed. I find the animation by Hayao Miyazaki far more satisfying than most American fair simply because of its complexity and appeal to adults in ways American films do not attempt.

However, in the case of "Toy Story 3" I find elements not present in others of the series, and those elements are not so easily dismissed by the parts of the film you found contemptable. I also find your comment that surmises all the critics somehow rush to support one another feelings in some regard as strange. Tony Scott most certainly doesn't call Richard Corliss on the phone and say: "Hey! Did you like Toy Story 3? You did? Well, I'll write a good review, too!" Some how all of these people agree, and I would say the vast majority of those who have seen the film, that "Toy Story 3" has the right combination of elements to make the film-going-experience a joyful one with a great message to boot.

I would also recommend "How to Train your Dragon" from this year's list of animated films. If you did not at least shudder slightly at its surprise ending, then animation is not your bag... and perhaps you should review other venues for which you are most certainly qualified.

[Chris Knipp]

So are you saying I'll go to hell if I don't convert and love TOY STORY 3? Then hell it is, I fear. But we'll leave that for the powers above to decide. Down here on earth, you keep getting me wrong. I have not expressed contempt. I reserve contempt for films that are bad or despicable.

There are bandwagons. Phonecalls aren't necessary. But even if the universal acclaim is spontaneous the film is being ovrerpraised. That's not because it's without value.

Above I cited (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2860-Toy-Story-3&p=24556#post24556)two maverick critics I admire, Walter Chaw and Armond White. Actually Chaw, who is contemptuous and angry about so many films, very much likes (http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/toystory3.htm)TOY STORY 3. He finds it less successful than #2 but is nonetheless extravagant in his praise (he admires the series very much): he calls the second part "flat out brilliant." This is not one of Chaw's rants; it's a serious and admiring assessment. This might be a good moment to sample Chaw's smart and original writing.

However the dependably contrarian Armond White has no use for (http://www.nypress.com/article-21357-bored-game.html) TOY STORY 3 -- as last year with DISTRICT 9, whose universal praise I also resisted. A Wall Street Journal online blog discusses (http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/toystory3.htm) how this new dissent by White, again dependably, enrages "fanboys" (the blogger's word, not mine). The blogger concludes:

"It’s been a mostly crummy summer for movies, with only a couple notable releases and precious few worthwhile movies in the pipeline. Readers may not agree with White, but in general it’s good to have someone who breaks out of the mass culture groupthink."

The word is fare, not fair.

[Chris Knipp]

A Rotten Tomatoes piece (http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2010/06/armond-white-rotten-tomatoes-and.html) cited by the WSJ blogger is worth reading for its comments about how participants in universal acclaim seem to feel insecure. The main thing is that White, and sometimes Chaw, stimulates thought by coming from a different place. Film criticism should be all about thinking independently. But it's not, because that's too hard for most of us, most of the time.

Chaw's and White's backgrounds and personal makeup allow them to stand out from the crowd--yet command respect; as the Rotten Tomatoes piece notes, White "obviously knows a lot about movies." Chaw tells in an interview (http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2006/05/keep-up-or-get-out-of-the-way-an-interview-with-film-critic-walter-chaw/)how when he grew up he was one of three Asians in school in a little town in Colorado. Maybe the grew up as outsiders and learned to survive that way. Being an admired film critic (warmly invited to screenings, not threatened with being barred from them) means belonging to a clique, being an insider, and that carries the dangers of chumminess, cosy-ness, groupthink, in however sophisticated a form.

[cinemabon]

I'm not so sure about this clique thing. The girls over at Salon may tend to disagree. Also, the Village Voice often bucks the trend (both sets of critics hated "the blue people" of Avatar). The Bible quote is taken from the story, "The Snow Queen." It's the last line in the book/story.

And since when do you edit my work? Oh, I could point out a few mistakes, too... but I won't. Anyway, I"m glad you like the film (with reservations). Oscar is sitting on the sidelines. He must be writing a sequel to his last book. Have a great summer. Hey, speaking of editing, I have a saga to work on... currently, Book IX in edit. Slog, slog. My son is reading book III this week. He likes it, which is a lot to ask for a fifteen year old.

Hollywood is about to flood us with CGI eye poppers (Twilight, Air Bender, etc). Lots of fluff coming down the pipe this week. The gulf and theaters full of gunk. I ordered up seven French films in my Netflix queue because my son is taking French II this fall. I'll let you know how the French film festival goes. See you in the dark...

[oscar jubis]

[QUOTE=cinemabon;24577] Oscar is sitting on the sidelines. He must be writing a sequel to his last book. Have a great summer.
Hey guys, I am following this discussion with great interest. I am a Pixar fan and I will watch this movie and comment. The World Cup and my job at the Cinema have kept me from seeing it.I am also writing a Mizoguchi paper. And, like you say bon, jotting down ideas and thoughts for a 2013 dissertation/2nd book project. You have a great summer,man.

[Chris Knipp]

Sorry if my correction offended you, cinemabon. You are welcome to point out my errors of any kind. Obvious typos not included.
I am sure Oscar will defend PIXAR 11--sorry TOY STORY 3. That's the name of the game. I'm in the minority on this. Again I have to keep repeating, I am not saying this is a crap movie, it's a movie of high competence and ingenuity, I'm only saying that the raves are exaggerated.

[cinemabon]

More bemused... I'm off to the fair, after I pay the cab fare for my bill of fare. Is that fair?

[Chris Knipp]

Now I feel better.

[cinemabon]

Chris, this is for you... I have to see this after reading your comments and his...

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100623/REVIEWS/100629992


http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11080

[Chris Knipp]

The previous post belongs on the I AM LOVE thread: here. (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?2857-I-AM-LOVE-%28Luca-Guadagnino-2009%29)

[oscar jubis]

Just came out of the theater. TOY STORY 3 is irresistible! Or so I thought, until I attempted to get through CK's review. Bon was quite diplomatic, choosing to characterize "the conclusions of the last paragraph as rather harsh". I think there is a cynical vein running through the whole piece. A long, second paragraph of the review, after a most obvious introductory one, deals with other animated movies. One gets the impression CK doesn't really want to write about this one. The third paragraph ends with: "the Pixar people are essentially adults whose love of childhood verges on the perverse." It gets to a point when one senses such a gap between one's sensibilities and the author's that it is quite an ordeal to keep reading. I personally feel indebted to the Pixar people for creating inspiring movies enjoyed by everyone, from toddlers to the very old. I apologize for the criticism, CK, but it is motivated by passion and gratitude.
Talk about being in the minority: the worst of the 33 reviews compiled at metacritic give the film a "70" and the film is rated as the 10th best movie ALL TIME by IMdb users.

[Chris Knipp]

Then you can imagine then how painful it is for me to read your rave.

It's quite the fashion nowadays, in America, anyway, for adults to love children's stories on film. Toy stories, video games turned into films, comic strips turned into films. Not my taste. I prefer European cinema and Jane Austen. Even as a child I strongly doubt that I would have liked TOY STORY 3. I abhored the sentimental BAMBI kind of thing and my early favorites were what later came to be called Film Noir. I did recently like the first half of WALL-E, however. And that I think was a Pixar product. Pixar is near the studio in Emeryville, California where I've worked as a printmaker for many years. Yesterday I talked to a friend there whose husband works at another animation studio, the one that produces the SHREK series. . She commented that Pixar spends a lot of timer on their stories. And they do, one can see.

I suppose the main thing that turns me off, among others, is the sentimentality; and it's there in WALL-E and other Pixar films too. Animated films of old have habitually been an uneasy mixture of super-caffeinated sado-masochistic action and sentimentality. One may wince at the S&M, while preferring it to the sentimentality.

I do acknowledge the skill in my review above. But with what should be light material, there may be too much of a team exhausting too many hours of labor to bring to light what is assumed or at least fondly hoped will be received by multitudes as a masterpiece and a delight. I think one of the fundamental problems is the commercially-motivated urge to make animation feature films, when most of the material of animated films for children is better treated in a short film. But that doesn't make the big bucks.

I still find it contrived and odd for a 17-year-old to be represented as concerned about the fate of his childhood toys when on his way to college. However, it may be that childhood is just extended longer and longer in America.

I have mentioned, but repeat, that I reviewed the films of the Fourth San Francisco Animation Festival late last year, and enjoyed the great variety of the offerings, many without the pre-fab slickness of Pxar's TOY STORY. Some of the Best of Annency films were particularly inventive. I enjoyed FABULOUS MR. FOX. That is my favorite recent animated film. But it's true that I don't rush out normally to see animated films and often just go to them because they're so popular I feel obliged to acquaint myself with them. But since your comment here is just a rave, an expression of lack of sympathy for my point of view, and a gesture toward majority rule in matters of cinematic taste, we don't have to debate this. You may think we have absolutely no common ground, and you don't make any specific points for me to reply to. De gustibus...

We always cite Metacritic when it agrees with our response. But I see that at certain key moments the majority and I are out of sync, and I'm glad to see that. It makes it worthwhile writing reviews. There are certain films I will not include in my Best Lists, no matter what the majority of newspaper and magazine critics says. When I feel out of touch with the mainstream critics I take refuge in the contrarians, mosy notably Armond White and Walter Chaw. But I have to admit that Walter Chaw liked TOY STORY 3 quite a lot, and only the loonier of the two, Mr. White, condemns (http://www.nypress.com/article-21357-bored-game.html) it. I don't ask you to take White seriously, since so few people do, but he does begin with something interesting:
Pixar has now made three movies explicitly about toys, yet the best movie depiction of how toys express human experience remains Whit Stillman’s 1990 Metropolitan. As class-conscious Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) tries fitting in with East Side debutantes, he discovers his toy cowboy pistol in his estranged father’s trash. Without specifying the model, Stillman evokes past childhood, lost innocence and Townsend’s longing for even imagined potency. But Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination—the usefulness of toys—and strictly celebrates consumerism. I don't remember this passage. One of White's maddening traits., for his enemies, is his remarkable memory and capacity for surprise comparisons. I do share White's typically unexpected liking for Whit Stillman. What I can vouch for is that Whit Stillman's look at toys is from a truly adult and sophisticated point of view, and with no intent at the kind of big box office success the Pixar studios plan for and assume as their due.

One of the departed arsaib's comments that stuck with me is the perhaps obvious one that what counted to him was not what films anyone liked or disliked but their reasons for doing so. I don't urge reading Armond White's review, but you might find Walter Chaw's is more on your wavelength. Chaw's review (http://filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/toystory3.htm)is not simply a debunking or a hymn of praise but a serious discussion. He gives TOY STORY 3 3 1/2 stars out of four, but he does say "Whatever the case, Toy Story 3 is more ambitious than Toy Story 2 yet less successful as well, mainly because the first half of it seems uncharacteristically uncertain of itself."

[cinemabon]

I am sitting in my bedroom of this beautiful three story mansion owned by a friend of mine... I can't tell you where I am but this is nice. For the first time in days I logged into his wireless network, only to find Chris trying to defend his lone position by using a quote from an obscure critic.

Ok, first let me say that "TS3" is the biggest selling animated movie of all time. Next, let me attack... and I mean, attack Mr. White's premise of product placement... because I know exactly what he refers to when he says "placement." He is speaking of Ken and Barbie, Mr. Potato Head, etc. No Buzz Lightyear or Woody characters existed until the first film.

The film is entitled, "TOY STORY!!!!!" It is a story told from the point of view of the toys. Every child dreams his toys come to life after midnight, etc. This is an old story animated years ago in the 1930's by Leon Schlesinger's gang over at Warner Brothers, whose singing toys used to emerge from toy boxes and had romances, chases, and fights... just like people do. Pixar breathed new life into the old story and put a new twist by using toys that current chldren could identify. Could they create made up toys? I suppose... just to please curmudgeons like White. Really.... if he hated product placement so much, why hasn't he complained about it before this? Think certain kinds of cars are used because the rental agency had that one available? Think again. I say, put a sock in it. That's a dumb excuse not to like this film. His argument is weak and flimsy. If you don't like animation (and stop quoting about the artsy film festival... commercial films have art potential too, Chris), don't go.

I would say you are hopelessly out of touch with today's children, Chris. While two of mine have grown and flown, my current 15-year-old cannot put down the XBOX 360 joystick. When I suggested we throw out his Star Wars toys, he bit my head off. I had to carefully package them and put them in storage, along with Harry Potter and the Toy Story toys. Do they come to life when we leave? Sometimes, I wish they did.

[Chris Knipp]

Welcome! I thought you were far away.

I'm not so out of touch with today's youth. I said, "However, it may be that childhood is just extended longer and longer in America," and I knew that it is.

They are not obscure critics. Both Amond White and Walter Chaw are famous independent, outspoken voices of dissent. White the more notorious.

[oscar jubis]

[QUOTE=Chris Knipp;24833]There are certain films I will not include in my Best Lists, no matter what the majority of newspaper and magazine critics says.
Of course, you have an independent criterion.

*I am quite sensitive to the glorification of consumerism, the kind you find in Nicole Holofcener's Friends with Money and Please Give. Armond White does not offer any evidence of that kind of thing in Toy Story 3.

*The first movies I remember seeing are Bambi and Dumbo. I loved them. That's where my movie love originated. Obviously I come from a different planet than someone who prefers the cynicism and nihilism of the average film noir to classic Disney.
*I feel that people should behave more like children and give free rein to the imagination. I believe that many adults need to relearn all those basic, wholesome lessons we were taught in pre-school. Things like sharing and fair play. Adults should never forget how to play.

[Chris Knipp]

Different generations, more than different planets. I saw and enjoyed the Disney classics--when they were new! My grandmother took me to some Sat. morn. movies for kids when I was very young. Lots of Abbot and Costello, some W.C. Fields, I think. Remember back in those days, no rating system. My father took me to some adult movies, and -- this is true -- the first one I remember arousing an enthusiasm for film was a crime movie. I don't know the name of it, but I do remember liking THE LADY IN THE LAKE, with its point-of-view gimmick (fun for a nine-year-old); I liked the private eye theme too. I should not have said "film noir." It wasn't that, and I didn't really see any till much later when it was a retro thing. Then in the following years, age ten and up, I was taken to many foreign films, Ealing comedies, anything with Alec Guiness, Cocteau. FORBIDDEN GAMES and Renoir's The RIVER deeply impressed me. TALES OF HOFFMAN. THE THIRD MAN. MIRACLE IN MILAN. I liked old Sherlock Holmes movies.

We did not have a TV. On Monday mornings at one point I felt left out when kids waiting for the school bus talked about the weekend shows they'd watched. I glimpsed a couple of them at friends' houses but we didn't sit around watching TV. These were also the days when boys could play outside and disappear for hours and hours and their parents didn't worry. They'd come out and yell for us at dinner time. When very young, 8-10, I had enjoyed radio very much: radio was a rich world then for a boy.

My mother got a TV when I went away to college. I joked that she got it to replace me. When I was young animated cartoons were run before feature films. I saw them as a quaint annoyance, more something to be gotten through; but i did like it when new art houses ran sophisticated Canadian cartoons. I certainly was entranced by FANTASIA. I liked it because of the separate sequences and music; I liked having the conductor, Leopold Stowkowski, as a character, who encounters an animated character on screen.

I never liked popular music; I actively disliked listening to it, though some songs you couldn't get out of your head because they were so often repeated and so catchy. I liked exotic music very early, Japanese, Indian, African drums, Balinese gamelan orchrestra music, and western classical. I didn't mind swing and Benny Goodman, but was more delighted when I discovered bebop. Jazz was a love of mine as a preteen and teen. As a 5-6-7-year-old I loved to look at Matisse, Arp, Picasso. I was not a normal kid but like any kid I spent my time in play and imagining things. And crabbing on the creek with an older boy and running in the woods.

Sharing and fair play indeed, and as an artist I agree it is unfortunate people stifle the child in themselves. I have tended to find the childishness in Disney classics otherwise somewhat packaged. When I was a child there were lots of children's books in my life. My grandmother, who was born in 1870, read to me from books she had read to my father, Booth Tarkington, and Rudyard Kipling. Kipling's Jungle Book is a wonderful book for a little boy My father read Tom Sawyer and Hucklebury Finn to me, and Greek legends, later on Conan Doyle. I read Robinson Crusoe on my own when I was very young.

[oscar jubis]

Thank you so much for sharing about your experience with art and culture. I was born in '61 so it's not surprising that the first music I loved was The Beatles and the magnificent top-40 music of the 60s and 70s. At the same time, I listened to a lot of classical music and attended classical music concerts before my first rock show: Santana. In my late teens, I made a switch from classical to jazz as the alternative to all kinds of rock music I liked. I read some old Classics (Dante, Homer, "Don Quijote") along with Garcia Marquez and Borges, with Agatha Christie and Herge's The Adventures of Tintin on the lowbrow side. Was Herge as popular in the US as he was in Europe and Latin America? As far as film it was Disney then American musicals (Oliver!, Fiddler on the Roof, Cabaret) then everything else. Foreign movies made a great impact on me beginning in the first half of the 70s (I loved Truffaut at the time). But it wasn't until vhs was popularized at the end of the 70s that I started watching Classic Hollywood and world cinema. My mother was an artist (mostly fairly realistic portraits and landscapes) so we were exposed to art when we were young. I used to paint and play guitar but I gave them up when I entered my teens. Then I got involved in the school's cine-club and wrote a couple of film reviews for the school paper. So here I am. We had a TV all along. It's hard to understand why it had minimal impact on me.

Hey, since this is the TS3 thread, did you guys like the short Night & Day played before the feature? I thought it was really good. And what about the other animated film in theaters, DESPICABLE ME? Steve Carell did a magnificent job of voice acting in it.

[cinemabon]

Just got off the plane... briefly logged on and here's Chris and Oscar spilling their guts about their childhood. What? If I leave for ten days, everyone resorts to their childhood?

I grew up in the midwest, where I played kick the can with the neighborhood boys. Some of us had TV's... some didn't. On Saturdays, the local cinema, run by a large Italian family, showed four hours of cartoons and short subjects. For a buck we also got a bag of homemade candy, some of it good... some crap. While we enjoyed the variety of offerings, the whole theater used to stand up on their seats and cheer (every parent in town dropped their kid off and left them for four hours!) when Bugs Bunny's face came on at the beginning of his WB shorts. We all loved Bugs. What's not to like? It wasn't Mickey Mouse who brought down the house. It was Bugs. While our parents dragged us off to see the "classics" and I mean the first ten or so Disney full length animated features (until "Fox and Hound" a real stupid maudlin film), inside we all wanted Daffy, or Sam, or Sylvester... not Beethoven and mystic clouds (Fantasia). In fact, the WB send up of that movie is a hoot.

However, Saturdays, the kids ruled the roost and we wanted more Bugs and had to settle for less (we usually got three or four in that four hours). Seeing him projected through 35mm film on a big screen makes him larger than life. His irreverence to authority appealed to every kid who hated his parent when they made him eat lima beans.

How old am I? Shit... try to guess, baby.

[Chris Knipp]

I don't think we're spilling our guts, cinemabon: that would be something completely different. I was only trying to show why and how I did not start out with BAMBI and DUMBO, how both my early film and other arts exposure might be different and that difference would help explain my failure to respond with enthusiasm to TOY STORY 3. Even so, I still find it hard do make the leap from saying that one loved such animated films as a child to claiming it's logical to consider the Pixar films perfect for adults. But in any individual case, obviously it's a mater of personality and personal taste (see below). Of course, anyway Oscar, as you show, you had a rich cultural background yourself, and I'm sure you know I was not implying otherwise. But I would still say that my background was less mainstream, evidenced by your fondness for top 40 and rock and childhood of TV, which was in your head even if you say it didn't affect you. If you are saying you sort of dropped classical for jazz, that's not me. I have always focused primarily on classical and jazz, as well as world music. My relative lack of interest in the top 40 or most rock cuts me out of the mainstream pretty decisively. I plead guilty to much involvement at one time in disco, but that was more a gay and San Francisco thing, not a mainstream thing exactly. And I'm not a mainstream gay person either. I don't like campy Hollywood dominant females or opera, or listen to disco any more. Of course "mainstream" is always an abstraction anyway, but the predictability of responses at the cineplex accounts for large profits, some of which Pixars clearly shares in.

I also just never seem to have liked movies made for young people, even when I was a child. That was my point: that my taste from the beginning was not for kiddie stuff, and not very mainstream. Probably film noir is the antithesis of all things Pixar, but really my liking was more for French filmnoir and neo-noir and for crime or action films, not US B-picture noir. John Dahl and Jean-Pierre Melville.

Again, in response to cinemabon's post, somewhat like him I went to some Saturday morning movie shows for children. But that did not mean I ever liked Bugs Bunny or the like. I saw them -- who could avoid it? -- but I did not enjoy them. I responded to more exotic and arty animations like FANTASIA, and many others later, such as for instance MISTER MAGOO and the National Film Board of Canada animation releases.

I must have had rather dark tastes for a 7-9 year old, because when I inherited a big pile of comic books from the 12-year-old neighbor boy I went crabbing on the creek with, my favorites were not the ones about geeky young people or super-this or super-that male and female, but Crime Does Not Pay, about gangland and the Mafia.

I love Borges but did not discover his writing till I was in graduate school (Marquez, no). There also I saw some old films. Tom Luddy was the F.W. Murnau Film Society at Berkeley. Yes, of course when VCRs arrived I also caught up on a wide range of films, if not very systematically. Tintin, I would say, in the US is a very gentrified (or francophile) taste. Not widespread. I was very much an artist when I was in my teens. In fact high school classmates all thought I was going to be a famous artist, or so they said in the yearbook.

I know the night and day preface to TOY STORY 3 is much admired; I found it a little too intricate and fast to take in there right at the outset, when I wasn't prepared for it, and it seemed more of an exercise than anything else. I haven't seen DESPICABLE ME. Steve Carrell, who rivals Ben Stiller of a few years ago for most overexposed comic actor, is also in DINNER FOR SCHMUCKS.

[oscar jubis]

I am enjoying these posts, fellas.
Chris, you are right to say that I had a more mainstream cultural upbringing.At least until senior year in high school. That's when the pop music audience became fragmented into four basic groups: punk, disco, rap, and metal/hard rock. I embraced punk (and reggae) towards the end of '78 and stopped listening to top-40 radio.Indeed, around the time I would play jazz rather than classical when I needed an alternative. You are also right when you state that TV was in my head even if I'm not conscious of it. However, the only shows I remember watching regularly (though not enthusiastically) are The Three Stooges and The Partridge Family. Thanks for your answer re:Herge.
Of course I was exposed to WB cartoons like you,cinemabon. Thinking about this made me remember that a great number of shorts and features starring the great Hollywood comics of the silent era were shown to me and my peers in school (I think they owned a decent-sized film collection). I mean Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel & Hardy, Keystone Kops, etc. I also remember being confused by 2001 and loving the shit out of every Planet of the Apes movie. When did you find out how much you loved sci-fi, bon?

[cinemabon]

I had this incredible librarian when I was a boy. She saw something in me and directed me to gravitate in a certain direction. It all started with listening to my first classical record when I was 8 - Brahms Symphony No 1 in C minor, Leonard Bernstein and New York Philharmonic (this will definitely date me, as this was a relatively new recording). I remember my reaction distinctly, as if it happened only moments ago. At that instant, I made the transition from a boy with a vivid imagination to one who expressed his interests through art. I had never heard such music (as my mother and father listened to big band era music).

From classical music, she steered me toward fiction. That first novel was "Dandelion Wine" by Ray Bradbury. I read the novel in two days. Shortly thereafter, I read everything Bradbury published to date... my favorite being "The Illustrated Man" (whose film version barely covers the depth of book, although as a teen, I fell in love with Claire Bloom). I vacillated between light fiction (I read all the Ian Fleming novels, for example, and my friend's Annotated Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) to more serious bill of fare such as "Great Expectations" and "Elective Affinities." In high school, I read "Stand on Zanzibar" and "Giles Goat Boy," "Death in Venice," "Magic Mountain" and many, many others. (My website has a list of what I considerto be the greatest science fiction novelists of all time... although it probably needs to be updated as the saga absorbs much of my free time).

In college, I began to study animation closely and gravitated to films made by National Film Board of Canada and the like. We film college students tend to be snobs that way, I admit. When I lived in LA, I attended a few animation premieres, such as "Metamorphosis," and others. Ralph Bakshi was considered by "serious" filmmakers as a rip-off artists with his extensive use of rotoscoping. However, his film "Heavy Metal" represented an enormous leap in animation subjects. Japanese "anime" began to invade around the same time. Devoted fans of that genre boast of old VHS film copies no longer in circulation and many clubs of devotees exist.

Disney finally returned to its roots after it produced several disasters that included "The Black Cauldron." The best of these second generation films include "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King." In my mind, Pixar represented the most exciting breathrough in animation since Walt first made "Snow White" (which I confess is one of my all time favorites, especially when the witch so dastardly kicks away the drinking cup of a prisoner who starved to death and laughs! I mean, this was not a "kiddy" film the way "Cinderella" is). The Pixar legacy is not that they capitalized on a technology, but that these inspired young animators built on a solid past of classic animation and decided to tell stories that appeal both emotionally and intellectually to most of us.

[Chris Knipp]

Stop worrying about revealing your age. I'm way older than you or anybody else in this room. It's great to have mentors. I had important ones all my life, and have one (younger) even now. For me they were especially in art. I grew up in a house full of books and I read them myself. No sci-fi but when I was a kid I had an enthusiasm for Robert A. Heinlein (I think he's a rightwinger, but I didn't now that then) and subscribed to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. However this taste did not survive into adulthood, except for movies, unless you count Kurt Vonnegut.