Toy Story 3

Woody the cowboy and Buzz Lightyear and all the other toys have been hanging out for years in Andy’s room waiting to get played with again. He’s about to go to college so his mom makes him box up his old stuff. He puts Woody in the box marked “College”. With Andy’s tousled hair and boyish good looks I’m guessing Woody is due to see some bras coming off in the next year or so.

I took a Jimmy Buffett album with me to my college dorm. Hung it up on the wall like it was art. I can’t stand Jimmy Buffett, but my high school girlfriend had loved him and another girl I had a crush on quoted him all the time, so his mustachioed face beamed down drunkenly on me every night. One night I woke up and was talking in my sleep, yelling at my stereo. “I know who you are!” I was yelling at the speakers. This is what happens when Mr.changes-in-latitudes-changes-in-attitudes presides over your dreams.

But then all the toys get thrown out in the trash and end up at Sunnyside Daycare center where toddlers drool on their heads all day and a big pink bear named Lotso runs the place like a prison. If I had been a toddler watching this movie I would have been offended. I never got crayon or spit on my toys. In fact I took them into the bathtub with me so they were probably super clean. Then I’d arrange my stuffed animals around my pillow in the order in which I believed they’d be most capable of protecting me from attackers in the night.

Toy Story 3 is an excellent prison escape movie. Toys climbing in and out of vents, avoiding guards, escaping from bone chilling baby dolls. The Bone Chilling Baby Dolls. Sounds like a goth burlesque show. Because that’s what I like to be reminded of as a lady takes off her clothes. THE GRAVE.

The only thing I didn’t like about Toy Story 3, in that otherwise I enjoyed it the most out of all the Toy Story movies, was that Buzz Lightyear spent a lot of time being someone else. Lotso finds Buzz’s instruction manual and resets him to his factory settings. Now Buzz thinks he’s a space man again and doesn’t recognize his friends. It felt like they took Buzz Lightyear’s (hard-won) personality out of the story for a good chunk of the movie.

Spoiler Alert

I’ll tell you what made up for that, though. The incinerator scene. I thought those toys were going to die for real. I asked myself, “Is Pixar going to kill Woody and Buzz in front of this theater full of children?” Those toys were done for and all they had in the end was each other. I like that Pixar respected kids enough to let them see their heroes almost die. What seemed important was not whether they survived but that they loved and were loved in return by one another.

I went to see Toy Story 3 in 3D, but I would have been fine watching it in regular movie vision. I am looking forward to when stuff is in 3D without the glasses. Last night I dreamed I had a pair of glasses that revealed how good or evil people were.

Good and evil were represented by icons and lines and glyphs all over a person’s body, with the dividing line going down the center of their chest. If the evil lines and symbols were encroaching over the middle onto the good side, that person was evil and vice versa.

Then again, when I came back to edit this review, I had woken up from another dream where Kristen Stewart from the Twilight movies was trying to steal my girlfriend on a beach with enormous waves. Good luck, Bella Swan! I’m too pretty to cheat on.

Tagged Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story 3, Woody