Toy Story 3 offers as clean a high as can be got at the movies these days. Obviously it pains me to say this. It's deeply embarrassing and runs counter to every narrative we've been taught. I know we're all supposed to be down in the dumps, and staulk around town with a permanent sneer on our faces bemoaning the end of cinema, the dearth of imagination in Hollywood and the soulless purgatory that is franchise filmmaking. I know how disappointing it is to ruin a really good sulk with good news. But what are you going to do? This film completes one of the finest trilogies in the history of movies, one which clicks together, lego-fashion to form a single bright, shiny, plastic-empathic epic about loveable junk. I thought Toy Story 2 was good too — deeply satisfying in the way it teased out implications in the first movie (namely, the stuff about toy longevity) and pushed into into places it turned out we wanted to go all along. You felt freewheeling, improvisatory intelligence that felt ready to go in any direction, whose products nevertheless felt instantly inevitable. That's some trick to pull off — more than a trick. It's the unfakeable sign of a great imagination, or set of imaginations, at work. I felt the same sigh of satisfaction at the news that the new movie was basically Coll Hand Luke set in a daycare centre, at first a very heaven — the longevity problem solved by each fresh year of kids — only to turn into a fresh hell: the kids are toddlers, not age-appropriate, thrashing the toys within an inch of their life. Even more so than in the first two movies, the toys crave being played with properly more than anything — it's their crack, their communion. A large part of the pathos of their position is that they can never communicate with Andy — they can never ask for his love directly. It's not like one of those movies like E.T. or Lassie, where two species communicate. Andy can never know of their secret life.The irony, of course — or logical flaw, depending on your point of view — is that if they ever revealed themselves to him he would probably lay with them non-stop, but that would not suit the Jeevesian stoicism of the series. If he ever gives them the praise they so crave they must accept it mutely, eyes lolling lifelessly. The emotional temperature of the movies is more Brief Encounter than Lassie. It may be why adults like them so much: because they dramatise the distance between the toys' life of thankless service and their hidden world of hurt and longing, between their selfless devotion and their Feudal resentments, as exemplified in this movie a purple bear called Lotso Huggin' Bear, voiced by Ned Beatty. He's one of those genial tyrants from an old Southern prison drama, whose purgatorial backstory is one of the great narrative-within-the-narrative gems of the movie, rivalling the ten-minute opening of Up. Woody meanwhile, finds himself stranded in a new house, with a new owner: a girl. "We do a lot of improvisation here," he is told by a pink tricerotops. "Stay loose and you'll be fine." I laughed out loud at the accuracy of that observation. If you'd asked me, going into the movie whether boys and girls played with toys differently I would probably have just shrugged, and yet the moment it was pointed out to me, I felt that deep chiropractic click that tells you when something is true. How come nobody else has pointed that out? It's hardly uncovered ground, or unimportant. How come this brightly-colored 3-d movie about plastic toys got there first? But then that's the genius of the
Toy Story movies, to fasten onto particulars that feel so universal, to point their plots down avenues that feel so grooved with inevitability. Nobody who has ever felt the pleasure of a bright idea can fail to be moved by them. They discard all the hoary myths about childhood that usually get the movies drooling — innocence, cuteness, all that rot — and single out the one thing that is worth something: the playfulness. That's hard to beat.
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