Toy Story 3 Critical Reviews

Sheriff_Woody_Pride · June 23, 2010, 4:53pm

Actually, he didn’t seem to love the film, he thought it was just “good” and too dramatic.

Also, Slinky’s voice sounded almost identical to Jim Varney’s, he probably said it sounded different just to draw attention to the change of the voice actor.

Is it strange that I like him a little bit less now that he didn’t fully appreciate the movie?

Rac_Rules · June 23, 2010, 4:58pm

He didn’t say it was TOO dramatic, just that it was very dramatic and a huge jump from the tone of the last two films.

Sheriff_Woody_Pride · June 23, 2010, 6:21pm

In his words: “JEEZ, LIGHTEN UP!” He did say this while in character, but still, you can see what he means.

thedriveintheatre · June 24, 2010, 9:20am

At the risk of using cliched hyperbole, Australian critics are raving about Toy Story 3!

Leigh Paatsch of The Daily Telegraph gave it 4 1/2 stars out of 5, and had much praise for it:

He also complimented the preceding short film:

Paul Brynes of Sydney Morning Herald’s review can be read online, but here are some choice quotes:

The series has always transcended its own technological originality. These are great movies, not just great animated movies. John Lasseter, the creative force behind Pixar, has made a series that rivals Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings for its quality and ambition across three films. Few directors have done that, but Lasseter has enlarged his ambition with each film, raising up a new team of animators in his own image.

The Toy Story films are about many things - the incredible energy and ingenuity of childhood, the importance of friendship, and the need to look after the slower ones, to have compassion and faith. There’s a strong sense of liberal rectitude in these films, albeit concealed, so that it’s hard to spot how reforming they are. This is certainly one of the films of the year and a crowning achievement for Pixar.

He also made an interesting comparison between Pixar and ‘the rest of the Western animated studios’.

Good on ya, Pixar!

animagusurreal · June 24, 2010, 11:23am

My review for a local paper (I'm Brent):

Pixar Animation Studios presents another look into the secret lives of the toys in Andy’s room, including vintage toy sheriff Woody (Tom Hanks) and his best friend, space ranger action figure Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen). Years have passed since the end of the last film and now Andy is leaving for college. He decides to take Woody with him, while the other toys (through a series of mishaps) get donated to a daycare center where all is not what it seems.

Brent: I’m relieved that this beloved franchise managed to avoid the threequel issues that plagued Spider-man, the X-men, and the Godfather. Toy Story was a revolution in both technology and storytelling (breaking from the then-everywhere Disney fairy tale formula); and Toy Story 2 was the rare sequel that actually topped the original. I don’t think this threequel is quite as much of a landmark as those were, but it is a worthy conclusion for these characters, continuing concepts set up in the previous films. Unlike the cheapie direct-to-video sequels to many of Disney’s animated classics, I actually believe that this is what happened to them next.

Roberta: Toy Story 3 is wonderful. We recommend seeing it in 3-D. The story is touching. They should keep it to these three movies and not try to make another one because it’s such a perfect trilogy. The whole thing comes together.

Brent: Pixar continues to excel at making us see things from our everyday lives in new and unexpected ways. Sunnyside Daycare first resembles a cozy toy retirement home, but then turns into the toy equivalent of Alcatraz. And now I’d like to warn you of something we usually try to avoid: SPOILERS. This is now the third time that Pixar has done a kindly old man who surprisingly turns out to be evil. They’re each distinctive enough, but as soon as I saw the trailer for Toy Story 3— with Lots-o-Huggin’ Bear giving Andy’s toys a warm welcome—I was like, “Yeah, he’s gonna be the bad guy.” It turns out that this strawberry-scented teddy bear operates like a corrupt warden. His main enforcer is an eerie life-size baby doll known only as “Big Baby.” Meanwhile, Barbie (Jodi Benson, the voice of The Little Mermaid) strikes up a romance with a metrosexual Ken doll (Michael Keaton), whose passion for fashion rivals the S and the City ladies(though unlike in those films, it’s played mostly for laughs).

Roberta: The scenes with Barbie and Ken are hysterically funny.

Brent: Pixar really gives this world of toys a remarkable feeling of authenticity. For example, the way Woody flails his stitched-and-stuffed limbs when he runs, or how the plastic elevator on the side of Ken’s Dream House sticks slightly on it’s way down. The daycare setting gives the animators the opportunity to bring to life dozens of toys, both real and imagined, from several different decades. Pixar tries to give all of the characters something memorable to do, but there are soooooooo many—all of Andy’s toys, plus the daycare crew, plus even more—that some don’t get a chance to develop as much as others.

Roberta: I love all the characters; even the bad guy. He was bad, but you loved to hate him. It’s adventurous when the toys are trying to escape and find their way back to Andy, and I was rooting for them the whole time. The bad guys reset Buzz and when his friends are trying to change him back, they accidentally set him to Spanish mode. Boy, does Buzz become charming, and Jessie (the cowgirl toy voiced by Joan Cusack) is impressed with him. It’s funny and romantic.

Brent: The movie has a lot of fun and bright colors, but it also has a darker side that could frighten some small children, especially during the climactic action sequence. And now I’m going to try to talk about the ending without revealing any of it. You know how last year, all the critics were raving about the first 20 minutes of Up, and the year before that it was the first 20 minutes of Wall-E? Well this year, I believe it will be the last 10 minutes of Toy Story 3 that get lauded. Anyone who has ever played with a toy will be misty eyed at this sequence.

Roberta: It gets very emotional; it’s so poignant.

Brent: And one of the greatest treats of each new Pixar release is that it’s accompanied by a new Pixar short.

Roberta: The animated short film Day & Night that plays before the movie is wonderful. The personalities of Day & Night are cleverly shown through the characters see-through bodies, which reveal beautiful scenes of what each one likes. It’s very, very creative. We loved it!

Brent: It was an incredibly original idea and a brilliant use of 3-D that was unlike anything I’ve seen before. I don’t think it would have quite the same impact without 3-D.

(Cut by my editor, not appearing in the actual review: It wasn’t necessary to spell out its beautiful message, which it does briefly near the end, but that’s forgivable considering the rest is pure genius.)

Getting back to the feature presentation, Pixar is the only studio I know of that regularly produces films that inspire multiplex audiences to applaud at the end. At the showing we attended, there was a second round of applause after the scenes that played alongside the end credits. I can definitely relate to Andy’s sentimental feelings for things from his youth. I was 14 when I saw the first Toy Story film in theaters, and I just turned 29 earlier this month … yet I’m still going to animated movies with my mommy.

Brent M. Parker is a writer, artist, and aspiring animated filmmaker. Roberta Slutske is his proud mother who taught him everything he knows. Contact them at mail@santamariasun.com.

CLICK HERE TO READ ON THE PAPER’S WEBSITE:
santamariasun.com/film/

Ding · June 27, 2010, 2:58am

Haha, that was hilarious! Who is this guy? I laughed so hard, I need to watch more of him! And the evil monkey part was just… pure epicness.

Within_A_Nutshell · June 27, 2010, 6:44pm

[spoil]" “I don’t ever want to grow up!” But then college is like, “We got girls!” “Oh, hell with these.” [/spoil] (spoliers just in case you want to watch the review with a fresh outtake.)

Pixar_Builder · June 28, 2010, 7:42am

Yeah, the Nostalgia Critic is awesome! I love his reviews for bad movies, but I do wish that he did one for Toy Story (he notes that it is one of his favorite films).

Sheriff_Woody_Pride · June 29, 2010, 6:17pm

Toy Story 3 is back to 99% on Rotten Tomatoes!

nathan · July 1, 2010, 7:33am

AWESOME! I was hoping it would get back up to that, that’s the highest you can get with bad reviews.

Chopperface · July 1, 2010, 6:04pm

Hey. uh, here’s a review from my local news station. Makes me wish all reviewers thought like this guy with this movie.

Watch the video on the page. wfaa.com/news/entertainment/ … 84619.html

pixarfan9099 · July 8, 2010, 2:59am

This guy reviews Armond White’s review of TS3: slantmagazine.com/house/2010 … ta-review/

Pieman411 · July 8, 2010, 3:05am

Interesting, also love your sig XD.

thedriveintheatre · July 12, 2010, 2:03am

Interesting article. As the author proves, it’s more fun to pick holes in a bad review than to take its message at face value.

ilovef4g1ts · February 4, 2011, 10:19pm

In my opinion i think Toy Story 3 was an excellent movee. It made me think that they should make a 4th one but i highly doubt that they will.]

Reaper052 · February 4, 2011, 10:24pm

This is in the wrong thread. This thread is for reviews by actual film critics. Your personal reviews of the movie should go here. [url]Your Toy Story 3 Reviews - Toy Story / Lightyear - Pixar Planet Forums

krissgale · March 31, 2011, 8:52am

Nice Thread about Toy story review. I love all movies and have review all three movies, when i had heard about their telecast. But here i also would like to say thanks for providing good sources to have a review of Toy story movies.

Sandycohen · July 27, 2011, 12:38pm

its better in all !

Dinoco · June 7, 2014, 9:25pm

Gonna bump this one after three years. Lee Unkrich retweeted this little nugget:
cine-file.info/list-archive/2014/JUN-14-2.html
(scroll down to Toy Story 3)

To presume ignorance of TOY STORY 3 is to effectively admit that you hate classical Hollywood cinema: unfettered by any coherent and/or crude ideological ambition, this film is a legitimately relentless puree of stereotyped genres, and a rarity in that it only gets better with the more old movies you’ve seen; in fact, it’s quite possible that it’s a total bore for those who are actually in kindergarten. Lifting discursive patterns, gestures, soundtrack cues, and other mise-en-scène from a wide variety of narrative classics, at its high midpoint TOY STORY 3 can be comically shifting from mimicking melodrama, Westerns, prison dramas, capers, gothic horror, and even Mexican 1940s caballero films over the course of just a few minutes. This disturbingly informed and reflexive scriptwriting is, however, likely conceptually overshadowed by Pixar’s flashy surface role as both the apotheosis of engineering in aesthetic manufacture and as a fully-formed NorCal simulacral apparatus of SoCal cinematic production: a 218,000 square-foot involute eye, a 1.5- megawatt shrine to the optics of the camera lens. Perhaps the intermittent, clever noir homages in the screenplay are of secondary interest to the likely fact that multiple PhDs slaved away for a year to produce a relatively photorealistic black garbage bag for a single onscreen sequence. And perhaps that significant history-of- technology datum should be in turn dismissed, with a consideration of the studio’s typically dreary heteronormative politics (for a company based in the East Bay, the repeated homophobic reaction shots to the antics of Mattel’s metrosexualized Ken (Michael Keaton) are specifically reprehensible); the inescapable reproduction of globalized commodity fetishism underlying the trilogy’s very premise; and of the remarkable inaccessibility to humanity which necessarily pervades any endeavor constructed primarily by hundreds of unrefined CGI savants who have seem to have never grown out of the idea that STAR WARS is a fundamental cornerstone of civilization. That is to say: a movie ostensibly about growing up and leaving your toys behind, produced by an assembly line of grown men with toys adorning every corner of their cubes. (2010, 103 min, 35mm

mintinthebox · June 12, 2014, 10:50pm

HA!