CINEMATIC Review

TOY STORY 3   ***1/2

Lee Unkrich

2010

IDEA:   As Andy gets ready to head off for college, Woody and the other toys find themselves in a daycare center heading towards a perilous, uncertain fate.

BLURB:   There are 15 years separating the releases of the first and last films in the Toy Story franchise. 15 years of innocent play, carefree fun, recklessness, happiness, warmth, discovery, reminiscence, and change. 15 years in which Andy, our protagonist, and his beloved toys, have grown together as a part of our collective cultural consciousness. That’s 15 years since I have grown, quite literally, with them all. Toy Story 3 arrives as the tremendously moving coda to childhood’s sweet unbridled joys, memories that span the spectrum of recollection and enter themselves into the most cherished moments of a lifetime. PIXAR’s genius is that they can craft a series of movies about inanimate objects and then have them serve as serious stand-ins for humanity’s most difficult transitions. The story of this final chapter, then, offers that rare and perfect concurrence of tone and subject, a grandly thematic and beautiful progression of the series’ themes brought to its mature culmination. It teaches us that while a phase may come to an end, it will live on indefinitely in the hearts of others.