We don't want the story of "Toy Story" to end, but we also don't want it to become a plaything taken down from the shelf out of obligation rather than excitement. If the makers of "Toy Story 4" shared these anxieties, they've merged them into plot of this movie. but an expression of the fact that Forky is, after all, a utensil, and feels most comfortable in the trash, secure in the knowledge that he fulfilled his purpose.īut "I Can't Let You Throw Yourself Away" also expresses the audience's feelings for this beloved series, which has continued over nearly a quarter century, producing four installments that run the gamut from excellent to perfect. Typical of " Toy Story," a series where inanimate objects don't merely have personalities but existential crises, Forky keeps breaking away from Bonnie and Woody and trying to hurl himself into the nearest trash receptacle. This is not a comment on his own feelings of worthiness. Hardly a sequence goes by without something that delights, or exhilarates, or amuses."I Can't Let You Throw Yourself Away," sings Randy Newman, Pixar's bard, in a montage from "Toy Story 4." The song's title is aimed at Woody ( Tom Hanks), a friend to his original owner, Andy, and later to Bonnie, a five-year old who inherited Andy's toys at the end of " Toy Story 3" and is shown refining her own playtime rituals that don't always include Woody. Secondarily, the song is officially aimed at a new character, Forky ( Tony Hale), a plastic spork with popsicle-stick feet and pipe cleaner arms, created by Bonnie with material supplied by Woody during orientation day at kindergarten. And I sniggered at the scene in which Woody, trapped in a toilet cubicle, puts a square of bog roll on the seat before he climbs on to it and makes good his escape through the window. I loved the moment Buzz, anticipating the stampede of terrible tots, smoothly flips up his spaceman visor for protection. The drollery is in the detail, which sometimes comes so fast it's gone before you have time to chortle. But he also has fun with new characters such as preening clothes-horse Ken (voiced by Michael Keaton) and his Barbie Lotso's prison enforcer Big Baby (with a sinister eye droop) a Monkey watchguard with clashing cymbals and a hedgehog, Mr Pricklepants, who fancies himself a thespian. The scriptwriter Michael Arndt (who wrote Little Miss Sunshine) gets full value from the old favourites, turning Buzz at one stage back into a deluded martinet and later into a flamenco-dancing Latin lothario with the hots for cowgirl Jessie. Too late do they twig that they're locked up in a place of "ruin and despair" – the toytown equivalent of Alcatraz. After various misadventures the toys fetch up in Sunnyside, a children's day-care centre, where a huggy bear named Lotso (voiced by Ned Beatty) is the apparently benign steward: "No owners means no heartbreak," he says, though he omits to mention the marauding toddlers that will kick, chew and drool over them. "Oh, this is just sad," says Mr Potato Head, and you'd have to agree. Will they be packed off to the limbo of the attic or, worse, flung into a black bin bag for the trash collection? (The toy soldiers have already scarpered). With more than a decade gone since Toy Story 2, the filmmakers (John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton and the director Lee Unkrich) have pushed cowboy Woody, space ranger Buzz and the rest of the toys towards a crisis of transition: their owner, Andy, has outgrown them, and is now about to leave home for college. Yet it's also a dizzyingly funny romp that honours and extends the glorious invention of the first two films. Its U certificate belies the fact that Toy Story 3 is a meditation on ageing, impermanence and mortality. It is the film of this summer – of any summer. But that doesn't take account of its star player, Toy Story, spearhead and prince among movies, returning here for a third and probably final go-round.
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