Toy Story 3

Toy Story 3 is the new installment in Disney/Pixar's Toy Story series.

This one comes to us 11 years after the last movie. Andy, the little boy from the first two movies, is no longer a little boy. Instead, he's 17 years old and on the verge of leaving for college. His toys are hidden away in his old toybox, unplayed with for years. When cleaning his room out, his mom asks him what he intends to do with all of the toys. After some debate, he packs them up in a garbage bag, intending to store them in the attic. Unfortunately, signals get crossed and the bag winds up out on the curb with the trash. After a daring escape, the toys wind up in another precarious predicament when they get donated to a daycare center. How will they fare amongst the toys there?

As regular readers of this blog will know, I am typically not a fan of family oriented movies. While there are some I enjoy, I find most of them to be overly preachy and in the case of the animated ones, too reliant on gimmicky voice casting. Nothing annoys me more than when I spend 90 minutes picturing an actor doing voiceovers instead of being able to focus on the stuff onscreen. In the case of this movie, I barely gave it any thought at all.

This movie was just excellent. Granted, I wasn't expecting a lot from it going in but I was very pleasantly surprised. The story was engaging enough to almost make me forget that I was watching an animated feature. The movie has a lot of heart, actually making me emotional fairly often. There were also a few scenes that elicited genuine laughter from me, particularly one involving Mister Potatohead. The actors do their thing without overshadowing what's happening on the screen. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen are really good as Woody and Buzz. Other voice talent includes Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Estelle Harris and Michael Keaton.

Overall, Toy Story 3 is really a wonderful movie that is well worth seeing. Folks are predicting it to be the first big hit of the summer movie season and I can honestly say that it truly deserves to be.