Toy Story 3

You wont be alone if you see Toy Story 3. After 15 years, the original Toy Story Pixar films. its menagerie of innocently devoted, jabbering bedroom toys has become a part of the American pop culture family the Seven Dwarfs. Walking into this second sequel, I knew what I wanted: to be carried away, yet again, by the antic charm of Woody the noble, common-sense cowboy the irresistibly self-adoring action figure Buzz Lightyear the squeaky-cool alien LGMs, and the rest of the gang. I yearned to be dazzled and touched by the speed and repartee, and by action scenes that have a kiddie Indiana Jones ingenuity. I wasn't disappointed. Yet even with the bar raised high, Toy Story 3 enchanted and moved me so deeply I was flabbergasted that a digitally animated comedy about plastic playthings could have this effect.

Andy, the boy owner of our toy pals, is now all grown up and about to head off to college, which leaves the toys feeling like relics. All they want is to be played with; that's how they're made. Will they now be stowed in the attic a slightly depressing if still acceptable fate? Or will they carted off to a day-care center.

Upon arrival, they meet a new batch of playthings, who look like they belong on the Island of Misfit Toys. They also meet the stuffed animal who runs the place, a drawling Lots o' Huggin' Bear named Lotso every day by an eager crop of kids. It sounds a little too good to be true and it is. Besides, they'll no longer be Andy's toys. They know, in their synthetic joints, that they are being put out to pasture, and the awareness that they are not wanted creeps up on them, and us, like a giant swelling teardrop. All of a sudden, a Pixar movie has the poignance of a Tennessee Williams play, and that sense of fragility of once-loved, now outdated toys fighting for dignity and survival haunts the entire movie.

Yet Toy Story3 isn't soggy. It's as madly mischievous and inventive as Toy Story and its sequel, from the mushroom cloud of a Barrel of Monkeys that caps the film's Wild West fantasy prelude to the brilliantly skewed suspense sequences that transform the day care center into the set for an elaborate, child's-play version of a prison-escape thriller. Toy Story3 represents a virtuoso performance by the Pixar team, led by director Lee Unkrich. I think it's the studio's greatest achievement since The Incredibles, and just may be since the original Toy Story. The beauty of the Toy Story films is their special, two tiered vantage. We experience most of the action from a toy's eye view. But we're always reminded that they're living in a much bigger universe than they know that they're characters and objects at the same time. That's why they're never more winning, or psychologically rich, than when they flaunt their egos. Buzz gets so full of himself this time that he turns into a Latin lover, literally speaking Spanish when he's reprogrammed. Woody's tug of valor and vulnerability has never been more affecting, and Lotso makes a memorable heavy: exquisitely devious, with a Dixie-senator courtliness and a backstory worthy of the Phantom of the Opera. If you're wondering where the fresh jokes are, fear not. The movie has delirious fun with Big Baby, a damaged infant doll who's a rubbery, droopy-eyed zombie. And then there's Ken yes, the Ken, who's a different sort of zombie, a polyester brained dandy who lives in a dollhouse and wishes that it were still hip to be square. Like every other toy in the film, he comes with his own hilariously specific mental universe.