Review:Toy Story 2

As I'm sure many of you know I'm a big Computer Animation nut. And when pixar dusts off the gloves and releases a movie, I really have no option but to be there opening night. This time it proved to be very worth skipping out a half hour early to catch one of the best movies of the year. Click below to read the review.

Ok Toy Story was good. From its ground breaking animation, to its story, it was quite simply a wonderful movie. Real solid funny jokes for adults. Great jokes for kids. A lesson worth teaching. And all the while it remained visually amazing: when we finally got to the breathtaking crescendo of the final sequence with the toys chasing the truck, not only was it the most beautiful CGI ever seen, but we believed in the little charachters. They weren't pixels dancing before our eyes, they were a talking dinosaur and a Mr. Potato Head. Woody and Buzz were real.

Its the goal of animation to take still objects and convince an audience that they think, breath and exist outside of the screen. And Toy Story did it as well as it had ever been done in the past.

So we've got a pair of big shoes to fill for Toy Story 2. Everyone knows that sequels traditionally suck, and this sequel was originally destined by Disney to be a straight-to-video release (Ala the Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin cheeseball videos designed to milk a few bucks out of a franchise by bastardizing the charachters that captured our hearts just a few years earlier.

But let me say that Toy Story 2 pulls it off. Its a wonderful movie. And it does what few sequels have done: it surpases its original. This is one of the most entertaining films I've seen this year.

The Plot? Turns out Woody is a rare collectible toy. He's stolen by a toy collector and whisked off to be sold to collectors in Japan. The gang must rescue our fearless cowpoke leader, all while Woody wrestles with his destiny: A few short years left with an aging Andy, or a lifetime of being admired by children throughout the world.

All the charachters are back, with a few new ones to boot. Among the best of the new toys are Zurg (a quite funny Darth Vader parody that the film wastes no chance to exploit) Woody's female toy counterpart (expertly voiced by Joan Cusack) and a pengiun named weezy (who really shines at the end with one of the films best gags).

And as pixar likes to do, this is a kids movies, with references for the adults to get a big grin from. Witness a surprise Pixar cameo, numerous hilarious Star Wars references, and even a shot lifted directly from Jurassic Park. Each time you feel Lassater winking at you.

My complaints? The film breaks a rule set forth in the first movie by showing the adults faces. Part of the magic of the original was that it followed the longstanding tradition of representing authority figures below the neck. Presumably this was because rendering a human face was a challange that the animators weren't up to last time around: the childrens faces were mostly pretty weak. But this time around we see everything. On one hand, seeing Al's face is pretty impressive, and probably quite necessary for the way the story is laid out, but I still miss just seeing a pair of feet.

So if you aren't to old and caloused to tolerate seeing a children's movie, or if you enjoy computer animation, or if you just want to see the original 'Luxo' on the big screen, or if you just want to sit back for an hour and a half and enjoy good entertaining story telling, go see this now.

Comments

Great movies v. great animated movies

[Spire]

I'm always disheartened when I hear someone praise a wonderful movie like Toy Story solely for its technical merits. Toy Story was an astounding technical achievement, to be sure, but what really impressed me about it was that it was simply a great movie, period. I went in to the theater expecting forgettable eye candy, and I came out an hour and a half later having witnessed true movie magic. Toy Story manages to be both riotously funny and deeply moving, and is easily one of the best movies (if not the best movie) released by Disney in the 1990s.

Similarly, whenever I mention to someone how much I liked the movie Antz, the invariable response is to ask me what I thought of A Bug's Life. I bristle at the automatic lumping together of these two movies into some imagined category merely due to some unfortunate superficial similarities, namely that they're both computer-animated, and that they're both about insects.

It's a pity that Antz is doomed forever to be compared to the immeasurably inferior A Bug's Life (and let's not get into the infamous behind-the-scenes politics about the making of these two movies). While Antz was smart, relentlessly witty, and darkly funny, A Bug's Life was distressingly shallow, antiseptic, and soulless -- especially considering that many of the people behind it were responsible for the great Toy Story.

I went into Toy Story 2 on Thanksgiving Day with giddy anticipation tempered with a healthy measure of trepidation due to my previous disappointing experience with A Bug's Life.

I am happy to report that I needn't have worried. Toy Story 2 is a terrific movie. I sat through almost the entire film with a goofy grin that lasted well after I left the theater. While not as technically groundbreaking as the original Toy Story was (the improvements are more evolutionary than revolutionary), Toy Story 2 nevertheless packs quite a punch. It's certainly more ambitious in its story and action sequences -- almost to a fault (the action becomes perhaps a little too frenetic towards the end). It also manages to explore deep existential issues just like the first movie, although some of the emotional wallop has diminished and occasionally seems forced.

Which of the Toy Story movies did I prefer? It's a very tough call. While the sequel wildly exceeded my very high expectations -- which is saying quite a bit -- if forced to choose, I'd have to go with the original.

I believe that the greatness of a movie should be judged for the totality of the experience, and not merely a single facet. You may have noticed that in my evaluations of the various computer-animated movies of recent years, animation quality hardly figured in at all (especially since they were all excellently animated, albeit with different degrees of excellence).

Here's to great movies, computer-animated or not.

TS2 renderfarm specs

[kinura]

Surprisingly enough, most of TS2 was rendered on a network of 4096 iMacs. We had the Blueberry Cluster, the Strawberry Cluster, etc. You could get a tan in the machine room from all the CRT radiation!

Seriously, the renderfarm this time around consisted of around eight dozen 14-processor Sun Ultra boxes each with 8 Gb of memory and about 36 Gb of disk. Rendering times (using Renderman) ranged from 2 to around 20 hours per frame.

Sorry, Linux was really not used at all on TS2. Pixar managers use Macs and animation/technical people use SGIs, mostly Octanes these days. Suns are used only for the fileservers and renderfarm.

BTW here are the theaters showing TS2 in digital projection. It looks absolutely stunning and, because of the digital transfer from the original image files, it blows away 35mm film. You owe it to yourself to make the trip.

AMC 1000- Theater 2
1000 Van Ness Avenue at O'Farrell
San Francisco, CA 94109
(415) 922-4262

El Capitan
6838 Hollywood Boulevard
Hollywood, CA 90028
(800) 347-6396 or www.elcapitantickets.com

Media Center North-AMC Burbank
201 East Magnolia Boulevard
Burbank, CA 91502
(818) 953-9800

Edwards Irvine Spectrum 21
65 Fortune Drive
Irvine, CA 32718
(949) 450-4900

Pleasure Island AMC 24
1500 Buena Vista Drive
Lake Buena Vista, FL 32830
(407) 298-4488

Legacy Cinemark 24
7201 Central Expressway
Plano, TX 75025
(972) 517-2444