Toy Story 3 (2010)
Directed by Lee Unkrich
Woody, Buzz, and the rest of Andy's toys haven't been played with in years. With Andy about to go to college, the gang find themselves accidentally left at a nefarious day care center. The toys must band together to escape and return home to Andy.
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26 films that influenced Toy Story 3
What critics say influenced Toy Story 3
The situation offers an opportunity for a few movie jokes, a Pixar favorite (expect lots of “Cool Hand Luke” references).
At least this one is wrapped in a fun "Great Escape"-flavored prison-break story, which features nods to "Cool Hand Luke" and "Escape From Alcatraz."
It becomes a straight-up prison-camp escape picture -- modeled very consciously on classic films like "Stalag 17," "The Great Escape" and "Cool Hand Luke," right down to the music -- with the evil warden taking the form of a good-ol'-boy stuffed animal named Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear (voiced to perfection by Ned Beatty).
(The film has all kinds of subtle Cool Hand Luke moments, with Lotso playing Strother Martin to everyone else.)
The toys' breakout from the day-care center winds up being the ballast of "Toy Story 3," which takes its cues from "Cool Hand Luke" and assorted prison-break flicks, and culminates in a scene of near-death, which, after several episodes of darkness and peril, seems gratuitously excessive.
The best of these is Mr. Lotso Huggin Bear, a lavender plush teddy who “smells like strawberries” and, as ingeniously voiced by Ned Beatty, behaves like a deranged hybrid of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof's Big Daddy and the warden from Cool Hand Luke.
The toys want out, and the movie promptly becomes an homage to escape films like "The Great Escape."
The film’s most inspired section is a brilliant, thrilling Woody-led version of “The Great Escape,” with a junkyard climax that may actually be too scary for sensitive little ones.
How does a G-rated family film become a sophisticated combination of “The Great Escape” and “Animal Farm” without going over young people’s heads?
What follows is a massively complicated, and ever escalating escape attempt (with nods to classics like The Great Escape), which culminates in an extraordinary sequence inside a giant trash disposal device.
It becomes a straight-up prison-camp escape picture -- modeled very consciously on classic films like "Stalag 17," "The Great Escape" and "Cool Hand Luke," right down to the music -- with the evil warden taking the form of a good-ol'-boy stuffed animal named Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear (voiced to perfection by Ned Beatty).
Better to enjoy Toy Story 3 as a well-executed action yarn, a sort of cartoon version of The Great Escape , even if the film’s admittedly thrilling set pieces—like the opening, which features Woody and Buzz chasing a thieving Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head and trying to save a runaway train filled with hilariously squealing toy trolls—are more referential than satiric, feeling as if they’ve sprung less from the imagination of a young boy than from the minds of grown men with much affection for the collected works of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Michael Bay, and Peter Jackson.
Joe Morgenstern, the film critic for the Wall Street Journal, has compared Beatty’s performance to Andy Griffith’s in “A Face in the Crowd,” and the comparison is apt: a folksy facade masking instinctive ruthlessness.
Chief among them is Lotso (Ned Beatty), a plush, strawberry-scented huggie-bear who’s a little too reminiscent of Andy Griffith in “A Face in the Crowd.’’
"Toy Story 2" took the concept further, exploring themes of friendship and betrayal (real or imagined; when you feel betrayed it doesn't really matter which).
The conceptual genius of 1999’s Toy Story 2 was that it took the idea behind The Velveteen Rabbit to its logical end: A child’s love can bring a toy to life, but children grow up and leave their toys behind, which is a form of death for a toy.
3 1/2 Stars (out of 4) Tweet State of Play By Jeffrey M. Anderson The geniuses at Pixar haven't necessarily improved upon Toy Story 2 (1999), but more than ten years later they have effectively repeated its themes and provided a terrific and funny summer adventure.
Director Lee Unkrich — who worked on the first “Toy Story” and co-directed “Toy Story 2” — and scriptwriter Michael Arndt (a Pixar outsider who won a best original screenplay Oscar for “Little Miss Sunshine”) have done a good job of combining the classic (and much-loved) characters of “Toy Story” with new toys that quickly establish their own personalities.
The mournful message of Jessie's song, which takes up only a few minutes of screen time in the otherwise boisterous adventure that is Toy Story 2, makes up the entire theme of Toy Story 3.
It's a theme that was explored in Toy Story 2 and is continued here.
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Just off the top of my head, you could also cite Margery Williams’ “The Velveteen Rabbit,” Russell Hoban’s “The Mouse and His Child” and Kate DiCamillo’s “The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane” among the children’s literature faintly echoed in “Toy Story 3.” But I’ll just invite you to consider the scope and extent of “Toaster” influence herein and then come back and talk about it.
It even — or so some critics more imaginative than I have suggested — channels bits of minimalist French director Robert Bresson’s “A Man Escaped.”
Pixar likely borrowed the premise from Thomas M. Disch’s The Brave Little Toaster: Objects once prized lose their newness and become disposable.
I guess it’s a good thing that “The Brave Little Toaster” was also a Disney film (and one made more than 20 years ago), because for anybody who happens to have dragged that VHS tape out of storage recently, the plot of “Toy Story 3? might seem a tad familiar.
With shades of “Winnie the Pooh,” the folks at Pixar have also narrowly avoided the fact that their trilogy is a more advanced version of “The Brave Little Toaster.”
Your heart pounds as Woody and his friends face what feels like certain death inside an incinerator while your mind goes, “Didn’t I see this already in The Brave Little Toaster ?”
“Toy Story 3’’ hits a high point of comic surrealism when Mr. Potato Head is forced to reinvent himself as Mr. Pita Bread Head — it’s harder than it looks, especially when a pigeon turns up — and Buzz goes through more personalities than Joanne Woodward in “The Three Faces of Eve.’’
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Buzz, once again, gets plunged into delusion and strangeness (in a device similar to one Danny Kaye mined for comedic gold in 1955's " The Court Jester ," this time around) by his very nature as a toy.
It becomes a straight-up prison-camp escape picture -- modeled very consciously on classic films like "Stalag 17," "The Great Escape" and "Cool Hand Luke," right down to the music -- with the evil warden taking the form of a good-ol'-boy stuffed animal named Lots-o'-Huggin' Bear (voiced to perfection by Ned Beatty).
The movie nimbly alludes to prison-escape films — "Stalag 17," "The Great Escape" — but it also mimics the tropes of those movies and all sorts of action pictures, making "Toy Story 3" often ordinary and, at its lowest, ho-hum.