Toy Story 3

I went to see Toy Story 3 last weekend and it was (surprisingly) the most touching theatre experience I've had this year. I didn't think any movie could top the first scenes in Up for sheer devastating poignancy, but damn was I ever wrong. The last ten minutes of Toy Story 3 are an ongoing emotional sucker punch that will make you beg the movie to stop if only to save you the indignity of publicly weeping like an infant. What makes this experience unique and wonderful is that for all the choked-back tears Toy Story 3 just feels... right.

Toy Story 3 is about growing up. That's technically true of both the previous films in the series, but never so much as in this final entry. Andy, the owner of the featured toys, is ready to go off to college and needs to decide which of his possessions to bring, store, or throw away. This puts the toys in obvious jeopardy, especially given that they've been largely abandoned during Andy's adolescence. Some begin to devise means of escape to avoid becoming garbage while others steadfastly maintain that their role is to support Andy, whatever that means. The nostalgic bond between toys and their owners has always figured prominently into the Toy Story movies, and that trend continues here with both parties trying to decide whether to hold on to each other or move on. Of course the toys have an incredible adventure that provides the bulk of the excitement, and it's great, but the transition towards maturity is the real heart of the story. I won't spoil anything here, but trust that Toy Story 3 nails the perfect balance of painful relinquishment and knowing acceptance in a powerful coming-of-age tale.

While glorious overall, the movie is not without its flaws. The pace seems rushed, and at times it feels like the filmmakers tried to fit a bit too much into the story. New characters are underdeveloped and the major talents voicing them are all but wasted (Timothy Dalton and Kristin Schaal have tragically minuscule roles). But all such issues pale in comparison to the overall quality and power of the narrative. Toy Story 3 is a busy, exciting film that will leave you simultaneously fulfilled and wanting more, and its few problems are easily forgivable.

Despite my fears that the movie would prove unnecessary and overly-indulgent, Toy Story 3 is both the perfect close to a fantastic trilogy and also a great film in its own right. You don't have to see the preceding films to enjoy it, though doing so would certainly give some additional context. This movie is about the experience of growing up and letting go of the past, something we all experience in our lives, and should speak to every viewer on at least some level. Pixar has truly outdone themselves (once again) with Toy Story 3, and in my mind it tops all that came before it. Not to be missed at any age.

From Around the Web - 11/11/09

Today is Remembrance Day, in case you forgot

I will for sure be picking up the 'Up' Blu-Ray as soon as possible, that movie was awesome

An interview with Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated

Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry rip into Catholics in an awesome 5-part video

A Salon.com article that is one of the most in-depth analyses of a film I have ever seen, and might completely change my appreciation of 'Donnie Darko'

Did you make a wish at 11:11 on 11/11?

Some reviewing over the next day or so

So I've been seeing a bunch of movies recently, and now I'm spending the next day or so sitting at home due to my impending root canal operation. I had a failed attempt at the operation this morning, and I've been sitting at home without feeling the left side of my face ever since. I'm finishing up a documentary on Arnold Schwarzenegger and his campaign to become governor of California, and then I'm going to go rent Robocop, and maybe Spaced, Simon Pegg's TV series, and potentially a few Woody Allen movies, like Deconstructing Harry. Oh, and maybe Time Crimes too!

In any case, while I'm not doing much I figure that I'll write a few responses and keep the review ball rolling. Transformers 2 and Moon got me started, and so I want to talk about what I'm watching and also a few things I've seen recently that I have yet to talk about in any formal way.



To start off, I want to discuss Up. Kat and I saw it a while back with Morgon and Nick and Katrina and co., and so far I think it was probably the best movie I've seen in 2009. Of all the bigwigs over at Pixar, Pete Docter has always interested me the least. I've never been huge on the Toy Story movies, and I felt Monsters Inc. was boring and failed to draw me in emotionally. In general I always found Pixar movies to be interesting but generally not my thing, with the slight exception of The Incredibles.

That was until I saw WALL-E.

That movie changed everything, and completely sold me on the company and their films. It ended up being one of my top four films of 2008, along with The Dark Knight, Funny Games, and Rip: A Remix Manifesto, strange company for a Pixar film but certainly evident of my esteem for the story of the near-speechless little robot that could. The range of emotions Andrew Stanton and John Lasseter et al were able to evoke using a pair of binoculars attached to a box with wheels amazes me still. The film was actually stronger in the opening 45 minutes when there is no dialogue, particularly when WALL-E takes care of the in-stasis EVE and when he flies through space hanging onto her transport vehicle. The film reaches these heights again later on when it again returns to emotions instead of dialogue, showing us EVE's reaction to the video playback from her time in stasis, and her desperate efforts to revive WALL-E at the finale. In these sequences, and in general, the film tapped into something profoundly human through the story of two robots with the capacity for emotion.

As much as I loved WALL-E, I have to admit that Up does all of that even better in its first fifteen minutes alone.

The opening montage of Carl and Ellie Fredrickson meeting, falling in love, getting married, and living an entire life together is at once uplifting, inspiring, and crushing, and it brings tears to your eyes via the entire spectrum of empathetic sentiments. It's also completely devoid of dialogue. It lets the audience experience Carl's entire life with Ellie, and then grounds us in the time after her death when the story really begins. It's some of the most powerful film making I've ever seen, and following it we are shown an incredible adventure story that is effectively tied to the opening sequence such that it's poignancy elevates the entire narrative.

The first ten minutes are almost a film in their own right, expressing a story about life that is at once celebratory and aware of the harshness of reality. By extending the emotional arc of this sequence into the movie as a whole, Pixar enables us to really care about Carl, know him intimately without ever really hearing him speak, and in that way let us share his learning experience. It's almost like a really great sequel, but to the beginning of the movie.

There's also the curious interplay between reality and fantasy within the film. The story of an old man flying his house to South America via balloons is certainly rooted in the fantastic, but before we see this the film firmly roots its narrative in reality. Carl's life as the true story of the film begins is semi-tragic, his enthusiasm for life dead and gone along with the woman of his dreams, his late wife, Ellie. We are literally beaten over the head with this harsh reality as Carl, in a moment of blind, human frustration, hits a man with his cane and draws blood. In a Pixar film. It's almost uncanny to see on the screen, and it assures us, along with the subsequent legal proceedings, that we are watching a film in which the often unfair nature of reality is at play.

Then he takes off with his balloon-lifted house to a Conan Doyle-esque lost world inhabited by talking dogs, nigh sentient birds, and a crazed explorer who is remarkably spry for someone certainly pushing 80 or 90.

The contrast is effective because the film is, at its core, about the human experience, which itself is both fantastic and tragic simultaneously. Carl's adventure shows us that anything is possible, but the circumstances surrounding it remind us of the permanence of time and age, as well as the cruel side of love. The lessons Carl learns while trying to save a female bird named Kevin and a father-less boyscout are applicable to us all, just as the morals in the best of fairy tales transcend their circumstances. This could largely be said of most Pixar films, and indeed most films, but the maturity with which Carl's story is treated, and with which the audience is treated by having it told so unabashedly, make Up something more.

WALL-E is a film that I will buy when I finally get a Blu-Ray player, and I will enjoy its poignancy, beauty, and charm for years to come. I love its story, I love its constant and reverent nods to the sci-fi genre, and it will always hold a special place in my heart. But Up is without a doubt the best film Pixar has ever produced. It's a true fairytale, and a film that I will show my children (god I feel old typing that) in the hopes that it will encourage in them both good moral sense and an apreciation of film.

Alright, so that's a bit of a rant off my back. Been meaning to get around to that for a while now. As I said earlier, I'm spending a few days just sitting and watching movies, so I'm off to start that. First up is Robocop. Can't believe I've never seen that. Afterwards I have Crimes and Misdemeanors (Jo's recommendation), Before Sunset, and Spirited Away. Should be a good day or two, despite the tooth surgery and pain.

Maybe later I'll write one myself, though the topic seems a little beaten to death at this point...

Because it's just easier to post this instead of attempt to link to it, Ron Silliman's review of Up:

Monday, June 01, 2009

Up is the finest American full-length cartoon feature I have ever seen, and the first one that approaches the best work of Hayao Miyazaki, whose influence is palpable in this extraordinary project even more than those of Disney or Pixar, the two companies that combined to bring it to fruition. Both have a long and serious commitment to the cartoon form. Disney virtually invented it, as the conglomerate ghost of Uncle Walt loves to remind consumers everywhere. Disney even became Miyazaki’s American distributor principally so that it wouldn’t be threatened by his inventiveness. And Pixar has been, along with Miyazaki, a primary source of innovation in animated film over the past 15 years. Indeed, Bob Peterson, who wrote Up, got his start as a layout artist on Toy Story, Pixar’s break-through feature. His one previous feature-length screenwriter credit was for Finding Nemo in 2003, although he contributed material to Ratatouille & Monsters, Inc. and has served as a voice actor in many animated projects. In addition to writing Up, Peterson voices Dug, the mongrel who decides that elderly Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner) is his master. Peterson also serves as co-director with Pete Docter, another director with more than a few writing credits – Wall-E, and the original stories for Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and Monster’s Inc. Like Peterson, Docter has done pretty much everything one could do in an animated film, and was a dialog director for the English version of Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, another tale about a building on the move.

I’m focusing here on the directors as writers because I think the writing is crucial to Up’s success. Watching the film – the first cartoon I’ve found myself tearing up over (more than once) since I first saw Bambi as a boy – I thought of the first paragraph of my review of Watchmen this past March:

This is the golden age of movie effects, or at least it should be. Computer graphics have been enhanced to the level that anything is possible, anything you can dream of can be presented as a plausible physical reality on film, a phenomenon that leaves directors, screenwriters & stuntmen drunk with the potential. Yet the problem remains that for the golden age to actually exist, these same individuals have to envision it, have to make it happen. Just as early motion pictures owe a great deal of their narrative structures to the imaginations of D.W. Griffith & Sergei Eisenstein, men who figured out how to transform a story into the new medium, the potential of today’s film technology is just waiting for someone to come along and imagine what it truly might be.

Up demonstrates what can be done when that imagination is in play. It doesn’t look all that much different technically than any of the other recent Pixar projects, because its core isn’t technological. This is really a tale about dignity, something all but a couple of the villains have to spare. And about love, loss & dreaming. Like Miyazaki, this film pairs a young person, rotund Wilderness Explorer Russell, with an elder, and like Miyazaki, this film takes a fundamentally surrealist trope – the old man tethered to his house & all it represents – and makes it seem only the slightest bit strange.

The key lies in the director’s taking the time to tell Fredricksen’s back story, from his days as a child when he first met Ellie, the neighborhood Tomboy, with whom he had a long & loving marriage, although not without its problems & even heartbreak, even though they never got to take the great adventure they’d always imagined. This part of the film takes at least a half hour and it motivates the entire picture, which doesn’t really begin until after Ellie’s funeral. The ways in which the old house – it’s in the Oakland/Piedmont area, tho we don’t find this out until very late in the going – becomes Ellie once she’s gone are manifest and handled with utter confidence and balance.

I could tell you what happens next, but I won’t. I’ve raved enough to set expectations unnaturally high as it is. I’m not alone. As I write, Up has a 98 rating (out of 100) at Rotten Tomatoes. The only films with higher ratings there ever have ten or fewer reviews. IMDB currently rates it as a 9.1 (out of 10), a score that ties it with Godfather and The Shawshank Redemption. I actually expect these ratings to generally stay high, even tho it doesn’t really qualify as the best movie ever made. (At IMDB, the highest rated animated film is Wall-E at 8.5). Since IMDB breaks its ratings down by demographics, it is also possible to see just who doesn’t like this film: older women. Women over the age of 45 rate Up at just 4.6. When I mentioned that to Krishna, who loved the film, she complained, “But Ellie motivates everything, this movie is about how somebody gone stays alive in your thoughts & your heart.” Fredricksen & the “short postman” (as the evil jungle dogs call him) Russell bond because they have parallel wounds, the boy with an absent father who “travels a lot.”

One thing that did surprise me in the film is a Pixar in-joke: Russell’s love of the ice cream parlor Fenton’s. As everyone in Oakland & Piedmont already knows, the creamery next to the Piedmont Theater is a local institution. Now I’m afraid that it’s about to be inundated. I can’t imagine how anybody who sees the film at the Piedmont (or at the Grand Lake, or anywhere in Berkeley or Emeryville) will be able to resist going to Fenton’s after the show. And I can imagine it suddenly becoming a stop on the Oakland tour for people in Paris, Brussels, Tokyo, and of course Venezuela. While it was a great joke to see it pop up incongruously in the film, I wish the folks at Pixar had remembered Yogi Berra’s comment about a restaurant that became impossible to get into: “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too popular.”




As an append to Ron's review, I saw the film in 3D, and maybe a little later I'll talk about how it adds to what I said about Coraline, but in a different way... More to come, this movie was incredible