Those three words from Peter Debruge’s Variety review of next weekend’s Toy Story 3, called out by Peter Chattaway in blogging the review, perfectly encapsulate what I’ve thought had to be the case about this film since I first heard of it. More broadly, as Peter suggests, it seems a harbinger of things to come from this “third phase” in Pixar history that this film is ushering in.
Nonessential. It seems virtually impossible for Toy Story 3 to be anything else, simply because 1999’s Toy Story 2 is so definitive, so authoritative and final in its delineation of these characters, of their purpose and destiny, that nothing more needs to be said. The first Toy Story established that toys exist for one purpose, to be played with and loved by children, and that in this is their fulfillment and the meaning of their existence. In Toy Story 2, faced with the specter of being put on a shelf, abandoned or even given away, even destroyed, Woody’s commitment to this principle was shaken. In the end, though, he reaffirmed his original commitment and beliefs. Through his experiences and encounters with Jessie and the Prospector, Woody has already emotionally faced and accepted the idea of Andy growing up—going to college, getting married— and in one way or another leaving beyond the life that he and Woody once shared. “I can’t stop Andy from growing up,” Woody said, “but I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Toy Story 3 will continue this trajectory; I have a hard time imagining it advancing it in any significant way, or taking it to another level the way that Toy Story 2 took Toy Story to a new level. In the same way, where Pixar’s recent “phase 2” films—Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up—pushed the boundaries of the Hollywood animated family film into uncharted territory, making them “essential viewing” of a sort, Toy Story 3 seems destined to be nonessential.
Yet it’s also likely to be welcome. It might be second-string Pixar, but given Pixar’s overall track record of excellence even second-string Pixar is likely to equal, and probably to surpass, the very best the competition has to offer, from How to Train Your Dragon and Kung Fu Panda to Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who! and Bolt. That’s especially the case this summer, with family audiences faced with both a live-action version of the “Marmaduke” comic strip and a sequel to the okay Cats and Dogs. (What else is there? This weekend’s Karate Kid remake; a Nanny McPhee sequel; M. Night Shyamalan’s Last Airbender adaptation; a brand-new studio’s computer animated supervillain comedy Despicable Me; Disney’s live-action update of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice starring Nic Cage. It’s possible two or three of these could turn out to be worth seeing, but nothing screams “must see.”)
Will “welcome yet nonessential” cover Pixar’s other coming sequels, Cars 2 and Monsters Inc. 2? I’ll be surprised if Cars 2 is either much better or much worse than that. Monsters Inc. 2 could also easily fit the bill, although with Up director Pete Docter again taking the reins I wouldn’t discount the possibility that this sequel could go farther than the others.
The real question mark, of course, is Pixar’s next original film, Brave, formerly known as The Bow and the Bear. (Another project in development, Newt, has been shelved.) Will it fit comfortably alongside other “third phase” Pixar films, or will it press on to some fourth phase, possibly inviting comparisons to one of the first two phases? Time will tell.
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The Big question for me is: Will this “Welcome Yet Nonessential” Pixar film still end up being the best animated film of the year? Without Miyazaki to contend with, it seems quite likely!
“The Big question for me is: Will this “Welcome Yet Nonessential” Pixar film still end up being the best animated film of the year? Without Miyazaki to contend with, it seems quite likely!”
Probably so, Ben, although technically there is a Miyazaki to contend with ... it just isn’t Hayao. :-) Tales From Earthsea hasn’t gotten such good reviews, but I’m still looking forward to it. At least it will be a welcome respite from the frantic dullness of most American family entertainment.
What on earth is the point of this article? What’s with the idle speculation? Why don’t you view it first and then tell us how it affected you?
I’m more disappointed in the previews to see Disney returning to the innuendo and low brow humor I thought had gone out with the 90’s. “I love your as..cot” says Barbie, and the “I don’t think those were Lincoln logs” reference to a sandbox. Ken doll as a metrosexual. The Potato Head couple ogling other toys.
I think this article does serve a purpose in terms of addressing what many see to be a distressing potential (but not necessarily absolute) turn in Pixar’s trajectory: from brilliant makers of wonderment to sequel factory.
In terms of the 3 “Toy Story” movies, I can’t help but think about how each one has come at a different stage of my life: the first appealed to the computer-animation junkie in me (the one who all through High School would pay money to go to the “Computer Animation Festivals” they’d hold at the Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor,; most of the shorts seemed to have been animated on an Amiga 500), the second appealed to me as the recent college grad (OMG! You really DO have to put away childish things. WTF!?!), and now as a parent with small children, “Toy Story 3” looks to be perfect: something I can watch with my kids, and a sure-fire way of knowing what toys to buy them for their birthdays and Christmas this year (giant robot Buzz Lightyear, anyone).
“What on earth is the point of this article? What’s with the idle speculation? Why don’t you view it first and then tell us how it affected you?”
Follow any sports, Steve? Ever heard sports fans or commentators discussing how draft picks and such are likely to affect the team’s performance in the upcoming season? Fans care about trends and outlooks, not just individual performances. I’ll review Toy Story 3 next week, when it comes out, but I’m also interested in trends—past trends, present trends and what they may suggest about future trends.
Maybe this blog post is nonessential. I think it will still be welcome to some. :-)
Much ado about nothing. One lukewarm review by Variety and the sky is falling, when in fact the Hollywood Reporter article was far more flattering, and a Time magazine piece on it called TS3 an “instant classic.” I’d hold off calling this the downfall of Pixar until you actually see it, or more people than three critics have reviewed it. Everyone wants to be the first one to call the end of Pixar’s great run, I just don’t see why we can’t just cherish what the studio is, a producer of great films.
“The sky is falling”? “The downfall of Pixar”? Rick, I’m not sure you read my post carefully. I think Pixar is far and away the best thing in Hollywood family entertainment today, and I don’t look for that to change for a very long time. Nobody “cherishes” Pixar more than I do.
That doesn’t change the fact that there seem to be historical reasons why their last three films (Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up) were achievements of a kind that stands apart from their previous fare, as excellent as it also was—and why a number of their coming projects don’t seem to be shooting for this kind of achievement. If you haven’t read that earlier post on the “three phases” of Pixar history, you might find it interesting. Cheers.
I just looked up the new version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and found that it actually is not a retelling of the Fantasia sequence concerning Mickey’s misadventures with an army of walking brooms. That’s good to know. The movie’s website describes it as an “epic comedy” - not sure how that works, but okay.
Anyway, I also find special interest in the Toy Story movies relative to my stage in life, but in a different way than Victor, since I was and am almost the same age as Andy when each movie comes out. I hope TS3 will engage some challenging questions that TS2 skirted, such as: What good is a toy after its owner is too old for it? When Andy takes Woody to college, what good is he hoping to get out of him there? Presumably not, or at least not primarily, so he can play cowboys with his friends or girlfriend. Whatever his reasons, presumably sentimental, are they really a better use of a toy than donating it to a daycare or something where it will still be played with? And the same question would go for his attempt to put the rest of the toys in the attic.
One possibility, of course, is that Andy will keep the toys until he can give them to his own kids (and Woody, remember, is “an old family toy” who probably belonged to Andy’s father and grandfather). This would certainly be a more meaningful scenario than putting them in a daycare center where they would be played with by children who don’t care about them until they finally get destroyed. It might even be an opportunity to criticize the whole system by which large numbers of kids are subjected to such things as “daycare” at all - essentially, however we might dress it up, an abandonment by their parents which may be crueler to them than a child’s abandonment of his old toys, and which leads to such creatures as Sid (oh, wow, I wonder if we’ll see him again), who act cruel to toys, and later everyone and everything else, because of the pain and fear resulting from such abandonment that is implanted in them at a deeper level than they themselves ever realize - as opposed to traditional family structures, in which both toys and values are passed down from generation to generation: values that recognize the importance of spiritual over material goods and that “what cannot be seen is most important”, as Sid, and possibly his parents, do not (remember that the only line we ever hear from his mother is “Sid! Your poptarts are ready!”). Ye gods, what a sentence.
Yes, I’m being unfair to working parents, and yes, my reading of Sid’s character is not very well supported by the movie. But still. The folks at Pixar have, thank goodness, more subtlety than I do; I could see them taking ideas along those lines and coming up with something even more challenging to modern audiences than the broad satire of Wall-E. I know, I know, a pipe dream. But still. I’m looking forward to Toy Story 3. I want to see what happens to Andy; I hope he finds a good woman and settles down.
Another thing - won’t it be great, every time we rewatch Toy Story 2, to respond to the Prospector’s rhetorical question “Do you think Andy’s going to take you to college?”: “Well, actually…”
The Pachyderminator - I read an early version of the “Toy Story 3” script and in it you learn that actually Andy never had a room full of toys: all of the toys in the first two movies were really abstract manifestations of all of the people Andy had known and loved throughout his life, everyone was really in Purgatory, and Andy is dead.
Pachyderminator,
You have a good point. All the toys are all about Andy in the first two films, Andy himself was never much of a character—certainly not compared to Sid. If the third one has the potential to go somewhere new, it is with Andy himself becoming more than just “the kid who plays with toys.”
Steven, I appreciate your comments and went back and read your “three phase” argument for Pixar. While it’s certainly possible that the studio’s trajectory has been paved by it’s relationship with Disney (that’s almost a given considering they pay the bills), it’s hard for me to believe their greenlighting process has been influenced much by what Disney says. All their films seem to come internally; ‘Up’ came from the director of Monsters, Inc., Wall-e came from the director of Bug’s Life and Nemo, and ‘Cars’ came from the guy who started it all. Pixar has always said they don’t care whether they make original movies or sequels so long as they have a good story to tell with their characters, and Toy Story 3 has been in the works for a long time. I don’t read much into them following Toy Story 3 with Cars 2, because nothing in their history suggests they’ve ever made a film with the intention of releasing it before they have a good story in place. If they follow up Brave and Monsters Inc. 2 with 3 more original, envelope pushing movies, what would that mean to your three phases argument?
Rick N, thanks for your comments. To clarify, I don’t necessarily suppose that “what Disney says” necessarily had an effect on Pixar’s “greenlighting process.” The relationship may be more subtle than that. I suspect that as Pixar prepared to part ways with Disney, they may have begun “thinking outside the Disney box.” Perhaps they wanted to prove that they didn’t need Disney, to redefine themselves in a new way out from under the Disney umbrella.
Now that they’re owned by Disney, it’s harder to know what’s happening. It’s possible that the urgency and need to prove themselves that produced Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up isn’t as much of a factor. It’s also possible that the corporate culture at Pixar has changed in other ways due to the merger. It’s even possible that Disney corporate culture concerns have impinged on creative choices at Pixar.
I have no doubt that Pixar will continue to produce films with well-crafted and polished stories. They’ve proved themselves masters of story, even in somewhat lesser films like Cars, and that’s unlikely to change.
Will they continue to press the boundaries of family film expectations in counter-intuitive ways? I certainly hope so. I would hate to think that that creative daring had spent itself, even though I love films like The Incredibles and Finding Nemo and will gladly take them for the next fifteen years if I can get them. My hope would be that, having seen what could be done by creating Ratatouille, WALL-E and Up, they won’t be satisfied doing only more conventional fare, and will continue trying to outdo themselves with more envelope-pushing films.
Incidentally, it is of course possible that the whole argument is wrong and that the pattern Peter and I have proposed is not related to Pixar’s corporate history in the way we suppose it could be. Pixar’s history to come might further illuminate the matter in one way or another, or it might not. We can only wait and see.
I look forward to anything Pixar has to offer, but with the knack they have for really effective, touching, family-friendly, and even profound originality, I doubt any sequel could compare.
Thanks for the reply Steve. I’ll be interested to hear your thoughts of the movie after you’ve seen it for yourself. If anything, the “Welcome, Yet Nonessential” review from Variety appears to be an outlier so far, since the vast majority of the reviews (23 so far on rottentomatoes, all fresh) are pretty gushing in their praise for the release. In one way, doing unique new stories like Ratatouille and Up are challenging, but in many other ways trying to do a threequel the right way (see Shrek the Third, Godfather III) is the most challenging thing a filmmaker can do. And I think they’ve probably hit this one out of the park as well.
Saw it last night. No official comment yet obviously. :)
Rick N, I agree that doing a threequel the right way might be even more challenging than creating an original film—but one thing you need is the right kind of sequel to set it up. Return of the Jedi might have stumbled somewhat, but not because The Empire Strikes Back didn’t give them a golden opportunity to do the trilogy right. Whereas The Godfather III never had a chance, because The Godfather II really ended the story and left them nowhere to go.
Pixar is too savvy to fall into that trap, but the fact is that Toy Story 2 is so definitive that the sequel can’t really tell us anything fundamentally new about Woody and Buzz. They do have one more trick up their sleeve, though ... and that’s all I’ll say for now. :)
No official comment yet, of course…but I suppose we can take those smiley-face emoticons as a good sign?
“The world must construe according to its wits.” :)
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