I can acknowledge that TS3 is clearly designed to be a crowd pleaser, ok? I get it. After two other wildly popular installments that we all grew up with, this third one about going off to college and passing on your childhood best friends to someone new is clearly aiming to get the grown-ups in the audience to pull out their hankies, pretty much the whole way through.
However, while I’m not opposed to silver lining nostalgia, especially when delivered in Pixar style, I still just did not enjoy the film. I think that the pace felt rushed and stilted from the beginning. Maybe it was the excess of action scenes. I don’t know. These days I’m pretty much just shut down and bored by tons of stuff constantly going on onscreen, and TS3 was essentially a parade of too much empty drama for my taste. I lost interest probably three minutes into the movie.
There were also some questionably horrifying scenes in there. Mostly I’m thinking about the trash incinerator scene, which was pretty dreadful. While I would definitely not argue that this type of serious content should be excluded from children’s film altogether, I did feel that it was kind of jarring for me personally in this particular one. However, I was a fan of the character “Big Baby”. That freakish toy represents exactly the kind of nameless yet utterly identifiable creepiness that I think Pixar has done very well in the past and will probably continue to excel at in the future.
All in all I guess there were some clever lines and smart humor, which I appreciated. However overall, I was just OK with this movie. I will look forward to whatever new storyline Pixar comes up with next.
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I thought it was as great of a "part 3" as you could possible have for the Toy Story franchise. It was definitely capitalizing on the narrative familiarity we already had with the characters. I don't think this film could possibly stand on its own without our knowledge of Woody, Buzz, and all the other characters. As someone who loved the original Toy Story, I feel like I needed this sense of closure about the toys' future once Andy grew up. Highly, highly unrealistic closure, but a satisfying one nonetheless, and not one that came without a price.
ReplyDeleteI also loved Big Baby and all of the other new characters, except maybe for the weird Barby/Ken relationship.
But I think what really made this film stand out for me IS the absolutely horrifying incinerator scene. At first I would say that this isn't a scene for children, but I don't think children would feel the same type of horror and terrifying WWII connotations as I felt while watching this scene. Even though we get a sugary ending to the film, the incinerator is so traumatic that you can't help but realize that it DOES mark the end for a lot of toys -- maybe not these toys, but other toys, every day.
Definitely something the Brave Little Toaster does with more subtlety and finesse, but still very compelling for me in this film.